When Humans are Removed

Ars Technica has an interesting report on a recent music industry conference. What struck me as interesting was an exec of a music label on a panel justifying their existence of labels by the work of "finding" music. To quote:

"anyone who has spent an hour or a day listening to demos understands the labels' place in the food chain"

The iLike CEO pointed out that this is no longer the case. That a label only need to look for musicians with 50,000 friends on MySpace.

What is interesting is how MySpace, iLike et al have turned finding new music from a costly human based activity to a software program. I'm not sure many people in the industry (whether the labels or companies like iLike) realise what is happening. The best analog is what Google did with advertising as Chris Anderson pointed out in his recent article in Wired:

"When Google turned advertising into a software application, a classic services business formerly based on human economics (things get more expensive each year) switched to software economics (things get cheaper)"

Did Google realise what would happen by turning advertising in a software application? Probably not. Just as Google unleashed value that was otherwise tied up as costs, so to will a software application(s) for finding new music unleash value otherwise tied up as costs. Music is going to shift back from being a package product to being an experience.

Tags: freenomics, Google, disruption, economics, iLike, chris+anderson, music

Use a Time Slot Method for Train Travel

News comes today about First Great Western agreeing to a remedial plan to, well, operate a dependable train service. Rail franchises create a government granted monopoly on a rail line in exchange for meeting certain conditions. It is how the UK government decide to privatise rail travel.

I think rail franchises are the wrong way to organise the delivery of train services. Instead rail lines should be divided into time slots that a company bid for. Obviously lucrative spots would be bid higher and less lucrative spots would be less expensive. The idea is to create system like landing slots at airports. This would allow various train companies to compete on the same line which would drive prices lower and also increase the number of services.

Part of rail franchises sometimes includes revamping railway stations. This could still be done using with time slots by directing the money from the auction of the slots into track and station improvements and/or also charge a "standing fee" for each train.

Monopolies are a bad way to deliver a service. Competition will do more to improve train service particularly if the slots are auction for periods of between 1 to 5 years and any single company cannot by two (three?) consecutive slots so that a user has a choice of waiting for the next train.

The main hurdle to slot base method is the management of arrivals. Systems will need to be in place for dealing with late trains - perhaps by moving them off into holding points until a slot is free.

Tags: Rail Franchise, Rail, UK, Transport

Google's achillies heel - Customer Service

Google's rise and rise has created a continued air breathless wonder that can the company do no wrong? Google smacks the ball well and even if their products don't always rocket to a six they rarely have a dot ball. Microhoo! is a reactive move against Google's strength.

But is that really necessary. Time and again customer service keeps coming back to haunt Google. Take Christopher Dawson's attempts to reactive his Gmail account. The action was neither prompt nor informative as to what happened. Nor was Google forth coming about providing basic information on the Christopher's account usage. Information provided by many other service providers.

So is this Google's Achillies heel? It could be. Customer service is going to be more and more important as Google's products move beyond mainstream. So too will be letting users access their own service and usage information. Of course both issues are fixable. The question is will Google put the effort into backing up their services with proper conversation with their users and decent customer service or will the continue to use a man behind a curtin and hope no one pulls the curtin back?

Tags: Google, Gmail

Using transparency to regulate business

For a while I've regarded the use of transparency as a better way to regulate than brute force of law. In an interesting piece on lateral thinking in economics Ross Gittins, discusses the work of Dr Guren of Lateral Economics.

Many of the ideas proposed by Dr. Guren are not really new or innovative, if you've been following economics and the open movement. Taxing "bads" as opposed to "goods" are known as Pigovian Taxes. What I did find interesting was Dr. Guren's idea around improving health & safety in the workplace by this method:

Most workers care about workplace safety, but typically lack information about it when applying for a job. Yet the workers' compensation premiums paid by firms provide a good proxy for their past occupational health and safety performance.

We should publish them, Dr Gruen says, and require that existing and prospective employees are provided with information on how they compare with economy-wide and industry-wide average performance.

I already think that salaries should be published by each company. Publishing the salaries and benefits across the organisation, will promote competition between companies for labour. One of the key problems with the labour market has moved beyond flexibility, to information asymmetry. A real market can't exist with this asymmetry whether a market is flexible or not.

But the idea of publishing H&S premiums has got me wondering what other internal information should be published to make companies more transparent and so reduce the amount of regulation and enforcement action needed in the economy?

Off the top of my head I can think of:

• Number of harassment claims filed
• Amount of energy KWh used by the company

The more simple and available the information the easier it is to counter arguments about cost and burden. The use of open information would have a profound effect on the economy and the regulation of business.

Tags: Open Source, Policy

What will be the effect of an Open Xohm platform?

Sprint has announced the opening of the Xohm as a platform through APIs and an SDK. Ostensibly it will allow device manufacturers, application developers and 3rd party service providers to build items which take advantage of the Xohm networks in ways that are difficult and expensive currently.

It is, perhaps, the first example of a telco taking advantage of it's relationship with it's customers or put another way following the Telco2 strategy. It will also allow applications and services to be developed that are mere dreams (if they have been drempt at all) currently. Think games or VoIP services that ask for better quality service for the duration of usage rather than all the time or buying or buying something by snapping a barcode where the bill is attached to your access bill and delivered to your address by Amazon's fulfilment service from an address supplied by Sprint.

It is the next logical step from Google's push for open access to devices and applications for 700Mhz. This could have a rather interesting effect on wireless/mobile market direction. It is hard to compete against open with closed.

I foresee this changing the dynamics of the 700Mhz spectrum usage as well. The 700Mhz was important as it was nationwide and provided better in-door coverage. The in-door coverage, I think, is really a non-starter as by the time the 700Mhz network is established, short range WiMax access points will be fairly well distributed and many in-door areas will be able to roam from WiFi to WiMax. Femtocells and devices that can roam across different wireless networks will also be in abundance.

Sprint's move has made it very likely that who ever the owner of the 700Mhz spectrum is, they are going to have to follow the open access provisions and even go the same distanced to providing an open platform. Now wouldn't it be interesting if Google has won and decided to use the 700Mhz for a WiMax network that follows the Sprint Xohm platform strategy? Makes Sprint a likely candidate for building out Google's network if they have won.

Tags: Sprint, Xohm, Google, 700Mhz, Wireless, WiMax, Disruption, Telco2

Meddling polies should focus on what matters

I understand the need for regulation and laws, but it annoys me when polies meddle in areas for the sake of being seen to do some thing. The UK government is threatening legislation to penalise ISPs for not blocking privacy. The really idiotic thing is the UK government has already said their idea falls afoul of UK and EU data privacy laws. So what's going to happen? The government will pass the law, the ISPs will challenge in the UK and EU and the law will be rule illegal. So back to drawing board with the only accomplished is a lot of money spent on lawyers and the government been seen to do something.

Beyond the technical hurdles, there is also the political fallout from the law being overturned plus the damage this will do to a government tettering on the brink. I wonder if this new push has arisen when someone pointed out wholesale kicking off of downloaders is likely to lose Labour votes.

To me, this is massive over-reaction to a relative minor problem. Stopping downloading of content is not going to be a saviour of society nor cure its ills. There are far more pressing problems in the economy that WILL do massive amount of damage to peoples lives - credit crisis, stagflation, deep recession - that the government should be worrying about. Protecting an outdated business model is NOT the governments job.

This legislation has the air of desperation. Of a government looking down a yawing canyon of irrelevance and trying deperately to be seen to be doing something, anything.

Fiddling while Rome(London) burns.

Tags: UK Government, UK, ISPs, Policy

Driving Real Change at Microsoft - Get Rid of Win32

Microsoft announced yesterday that it was releasing API and Client/Server interoperability details. Coming on the heals of the Microhoo! deal and Bill Gates publicly saying Microsoft is after the Yahoo engineers it must seem like Microsoft is going all open and friendly. But that misses a big point. Changing culture, particularly one ingrained and strong as Microsoft's, is not going to be as easy as publishing specs and adding a load of Yahoo engineers.

It is possible to change the culture for the better and the Yahoo engineers can play a big role, but they can't do it on their own.

The catalyst for the change is dropping the Win32 kernal and going with a Linux/BSD kernal. The Yahoo engineers then become evanglists and mentors for the adoption of the open-source kernal. The combination of the two provides a greater probability for success than either on its own. In a previous post I looked at why using a Linux/BSD kernal was a good idea so I won't go into the details. The difference between now and then is that having the Yahoo engineers makes the probabilty of sucess so much greater and faster.

Dropping the W32 kernal would be at least as radical shift in corporate strategy as Microsoft's turn around in the late 1990s to the web. We know the company can do radical strategy shifts and this would be the most radical and risky. But without doing something like this Microsoft is always going to struggle in a networked world.

I would honestly like to see this happen. It would be the single biggest threat to Google's dominance by stripping away the competitive advantage that open source provides the company.

Tags: Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, OS, Open Source, Strategy, Disruption

Fighting Inflation in Australia using Super

Australia is one of the few nations in the world where the interest rates are rising and rising hard. Commodities boom, over indulgent consumption and 35 year lows in employment have pushed the economy to the limits of capacity.

The debate in Australia is about how to fight the inflation and the recurrent need for the RBA to raise interest rates to combat inflation now outside its 2-3% band. The Rudd Government has brought back fiscal policy to try and help fight inflation by aiming for a surplus of 1.5 to 2% and avoid the RBA rasing interest rates further (unlikely). Although given that for the past 5 years or so the budget surplus has always come in higher that the forecasted 1% its hard to see how a measly 1.5 to 2% is going to make much of difference. It probably needs to be 2.5 to 3%.

The otherside of the debate is how raising interest rates is a blunt policy instrument for fighting inflation, only effects third of households etc. What is missing from the debate is discussion on what other levers that could be provided to the RBA to manage the economy. In many economies there probably aren't many other levers that central banks could use. But Australia has compulsory super for a majority of employed people. The issue is to remove spending from the economy or put another way to increase savings and reducing consumption. Giving the RBA the ability to manage the percentage of income that is paid into super would give the RBA another lever to pull.

The advantages I see in using super contributions this way are;

• It increases the savings rate across a very large majority of households
• It does not directly effect the price of business investment the way interest rates do
• It is spread more evenly across the economy rather than concetrated in the 1/3 of households with morgages
• Individuals don't lose the money, it is simply redistribute to return in the future

The biggest problem I see is the mechanics of actually performing the changes. However, this is a solvable problem as it could rolled into financial packages that most if not all businesses use.

Another possible lever is to allow the RBA to change tax percentages about a median point. But I see that being an even tougher operation and also more politically hazardous. It could be a rather useful tool to have in the back pocket though.

Tags: Superannuation, Inflation, Australia

Incentives cause the [financial] rot

Umair has a new post about the financial meltdown and in particular how the very people at the centre of the meltdown are walking away with massive payments. I think there is a lot about how the very incentive system used by financial institutions are at the very core of the problem.

The incentive systems are probably the single biggest cause of the problems. These systems are designed to maximise profit - which is not the same as wealth creation. The assumption that serves as the foundation of incentive systems is that the "agents" interests need to be aligned with the "owners". An assumption that I now believe is totally invalid.

The incentive systems need to promote wealth creation and not alignment of the interests. Otherwise why will an executive take a risk that has a long term payoff but will hit short-term profitability?

So how do you fix something so broken. The first is to ditch the assumption of aligning the "agents" interest with the "owners" interest. The second is to ditch the idea that a single person at the level of CEO has much effect on the overall profitability of a company. Suddenly it gets hard to justify paying ANYONE 100m salary. Indeed, CEOs make a mockery of their own job - if the share price goes down its due to the market, but if it goes up its due to the skill of the CEO. Spot the paradox?

Can the market sort this out itself? Probably not. Too much self-interest. This leads to the requirement of regulation. The key is to regulate well but lightly. Some regulation will require the out-right banning of current practices, while others are about increasing transparancy and market efficiency.

Golden parachutes need to be banned. Why a CEO should receive money to leave a job is beyond me. The sub-prime crisis has shown this for the rort it is. Which does lead to the second requirement of having all senior management and possibly contracts above a certain value requiring the agreement of a quorum of shareholders. The current negogiation world is far to cosy.

In terms of increasing transparancy, the renumeration and contracts of senior management should be published. This works fine but it helps to have this put in perspective of the how well the company is paying its employees. So companies should be required to publish the various renumeration bands, the requirements for bonuses at these bands and the number of employees per band.

But perhaps the biggest change is to remove incentive schemes that promote short-term profit over long-term wealth creation. Most of the current methods can and are easily gamed. Whether it is EPS, dividends, profit, revenue or share price increase. Most of these items are reflective of things beyond the senior managements control. So the first step is to only use measures that are effected by senior management actions. More important is only use actions that promote wealth creation (as opposed to profit).

So what measures could be used?

• Employee productivity per unit cost
• Throughput per unit cost
• Employee statisfaction
• Revenue growth per unit of productivty
• Productivity growth per employee

And there are more. Most of these measures are harder to game but they are all measuring changes that change the long term wealth creation of the company. Funnily enough, most of these would reduce the awards of financial executives.

Incentive systems and the spiralling cost of financial executives is something that needs to be addressed. Otherwise you run the risk of societal unrest. Perhaps more importantly these spiralling costs are also a distortion of the market causing the mis-allocation of resources and dragging down GDP growth.

Throwing money at problems

One of my bug bears is people insisting that throwing money at a problem will solve it. Health is a big example. Well want to know what happens when you throw pots of cash at a problem? Just look at the outcomes of the NHS. Despite all the money thrown at the NHS in recent years there has not been a corresponding significant improvement in quality or delivery of care.

There is no point in throwing pots of money at a system until you know that its processes are correct. To steal Umair's terminology, the DNA of the system has to be right. In the case of the NHS, its not. Which simply results in the money going into the system going to waste. This is not an argument about whether health care should be funded publicly or privately, only in how health care is delivered. The processes required to deliver health care. How its funded is a very small secondary issue that is more philosophical than anything else.

You have to fix the fundamental processes, the DNA, of a system before there is any hope of making improvements. This goes for companies, software or government services. In fact every system. Throwing money does little to do this.

And in the case of health care, to re-write the DNA we have to question the basic principles of health care delivery. Is the concept of Doctors, Nurses and health centres really the best method for delivering health care? Do we need Doctors? What for? Should they be the only ones to do diagnosis? Should health care rely on God-like pronouncements of what is wrong. What about Nurses? Could paramedics be made more useful?

Everything we know about health care needs to be questioned. Only then can we begin to build the framework for the effective delivery of health care.

Tags: Health, Operations, Bubblegeneration

Risk modeling in Financial Markets

Bloomberg has an interesting article exploring how the banks are changing their risk models. Roger Ehrenberg adds some insight to the article. To me the most fundamental question that needs to be asked isn't what is the best model, but can risk even been modelled?

In all the discussion about risk and its modelling, there is always the underlying assumption that the risk can be modelled. I'm not so sure you can really model the risk. Time and again in financial markets past performance has been shown to not be a predictor of future performance (all the managed funds have that explicit on their brochures) and yet the assumption is that past risk can be used to model future risk. See the incongruence?

The market looks to be an indeterminate, chaotic system. Which to me makes the assumption of normal distribution of risk a little suspect. Being an indeterminate system, it may very well be impossible to model risk using the standard statistical methods.

Tags: Risk, Finance, Credit Crisis

EU energy plan aims to stop carbon exporting

The EU has announced its climate change policy. What struck me most is the move to stop the exporting of carbon production to other countries. As I have previously posted this is crucial requirement for carbon trading to actual work in reducing carbon emissions.

Implementing carbon trading without something to address the issue of out-sourcing carbon, the price of goods and services in Europe would have gone up without the beneficial reduction in carbon. As many have pointed out, there is no way of making sure carbon stays on the other side of the planet.

This also changes the dynamics of the up-coming discussions on the next climate change treaty. For one, it does reduce the negotiating strength of the BRIC nations against mandatory caps. It also precedes an alliance of OECD nations which go it alone to implement mandatory emission caps and via the mechanism proposed by the EU in effect force mandatory caps on emissions on the rest of the world as the OECD still make up the bulk of the worlds affluent consumers.

I wonder if this announcement signals the tipping point to worldwide mandatory emissions caps whether BRIC nations want it or not.

Tags: Climate Change

Language and problem solving

In the most recent New Scientist (Vol 197 No 2637) there is an interesting article discussing the issue of language and how it frames problems. The perspective of the article was that English's newtonian way of describing the world failed to frame questions properly for quantum and other similar non-newtonian physics. The article even goes so far to say that the lack of progress in non-newtonian physics is because problems are framed via the language with a newtonian world view.

Does the same problem exist in the world of the internet? While I realise the Internet world is great at creating new words, these are still framed by the overall language. A language that is "newtonian". As Internet shifts to flows and systems as opposed to objects and links, do we need to look at how we frame the discussion via language to open up the problem solving juices of the internet community? New next wave of innovation will be less around nouns towards verbs, the doing rather than the being and yet we still primarily use nouns in discussing the web and its evolution. Should verbs that describe process, systems and flow be the primary descriptors of the next web?

The article describes an example of Montagnais phrase "Hipiskapigoka iagusit". It very, very roughly translates to "singing health", a process, within which a medicine man and sick person exist. However, a dictionary written in 1729 translated into something that emphasised the objects and not the process. The web is shifting to loosely coupled processes as opposed to objects. I wonder whether the discussion of Robert Scoble's recent tiff with Facebook, would have evolved differently if the language emphasised process (say maintaining contacts) as opposed to data (the contacts themselves). The discussion was about who owned what objects (the contact data) rather than what the ins and outs of maintaining contacts. Another example is the current discussion going on about whether data is a commodity or not. Again the language is of objects rather than flow. How would this discussion evolve if it was frame by a language of flow (verbs) as opposed to objects (nouns)?

The same questions can be asked of programming. Everyone expresses the need to ramp up parallel programming to take advantage of the distributed nature of the internet and multi-core processes. However, can any real problem be solve properly while the language used to frame the problem is based on objects rather than flow? Does the conceptual framework that underpins object orientated programming preclude successful problem solving in the parallel world? Yes there are languages that focus specifically on parallel programming but I am also talking about the language used to describe and communicate the problem. These will need to respond to the requirements of a parallel world for people to solve problems and communicate solutions.

A lot of questions asked. I don't have the answers and I expect no one will for a while. It is interesting to step away from objects and consider things from a flow perspective. I even think I need to re-visit my recent post of Data Ecosystems and look at it from the perspective of flow rather than objects

Tags: Data, Language, Programming, Internet, Physics, Data Ecosystems

YouTube on Vodafone

photo
Originally uploaded by Simon Cast

Hmmm...are you hurting Vodafone? Maybe there was value in the iPhone? Trying to play catchup?


Tags: Vodafone, iPhone

How not to force people to unsubscribe (This means you Spock)

Today I received an email from Spock for someone trying to add the company recruitment email to his "Web of Trust". Fine people harvest email address all the time. What annoyed me is that it required two entries of the email address and clicking on a link in an email.

Not good. Made the job of unsubscribing time consuming. And it wasn't like I was a registered and the email was from someone who had found me but rather spam contacts email. Long story short, do not use Spock. If this what the company puts you through just to unsubscribe from contact spam then I hate to think how annoying the service would be if you are a registered user.

Point to all companies. Unsubsribe must be a single action on the part of the user. Double, triple, quadruple actions are a no-no. And it musn't take 10 days to filter through your system. That is a load bullshit. All it means is that you can't be arsed to fix you email marketing system and you are going to try to spam me as much as possible in that 10 days.

Tags: Spock, Email Marketing,, Email

Eclipse, Python & SAGE

Several fair comments on from my previous post on using Eclipse/Python so I think I should elaborate on what I see as problematic with Sage. Bearing in mind that I have used Matlab primarily and I am looking for a reasonably priced math program for non-technical users.

Lets first consider what Matlab and its ilk are. They are IDEs for development mathematical-based programs. Most include interactive UI for doing simple calculations. They also provide a large collection of common numerical computations that the user can string together into a larger program for completing analysis of information. So in all there are three elements: an IDE, a math engine and an interactive environment.

Sage is not a very good IDE (actually, I'll re-state that, it doesn't have an IDE). It strikes me as a good program for doing math but it really falls down without an IDE. Given how iuseful IDEs are for writing programs, this is surprising. Particularly when the program is pushed as an open-source replacement for Matlab et al., which do have useful IDEs.

One commentator asked what I found problematic. Well, you know the first one, No IDE. The second was after downloading SAGE, I found I then had to down VMWare, which I could only get after jumping through hoops at VMWare (not particularly happy about that). Third, the notebook interactive UI in the browser is a neat idea but ultimately, it left me underwhelmed.

Now I freely admit part of the problem was that I was expecting an IDE, with an interactive mode and a wonderful math engine. Unfortunately, that was not what I got but that was how it was marketed specifically "a viable open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB". It is not an alternative to those programs while it lacks an IDE. The reason people use Matlab is it is easy to use. I really think this is a case of failing to see the forest for the trees. Matlab et al provide more than simply a math engine.

My suggestion to the SAGE team is to ditch the current UI method and use Eclipse. Build a wonderful math engine that uses the Eclipse to provide both a wonderful IDE and an interactive UI. The advantage for the SAGE team is they get to focus on creating an excellent math engine that is open source, while leveraging the work of other teams making Eclipse the best IDE around. Isn't that one of the key advantages of Open Source?

Short term, make it easy or at least write a very good explanation of how to call the SAGE engine from Eclipse.

Granted, I may not understand what SAGE is for, but when presented with marketing "viable open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica, and MATLAB" I certainly expect something that matches Matlab, if not exceeds it. SAGE does not achieve this.

Tags: Matlab, Mathematica, Eclipse IDE, Open Source, Sage Math, Python

Matlab Competitor? How about Eclipse & Python

Recently Sage was release to compete against Matlab, Mathematica et al. I had a quick try of it but back out. It quickly became difficult to do much. While I am sure it is very powerful math program, its got a long, long way to go before it offers serious competition to Matlab.

I think a better Matlab-killer is the combination of Eclipse & Python. Eclipse provides the visual IDE of Matlab and Python is an excellent scripting language that can easily replace m.files. All that needs to be done is bundle plotting into Eclipse (something it should have anyway), toss in a large library of numerical and symbolic python functions (complied or C) and you have a program that can successfully compete against Matlab and Mathematica.

Having been essentially using Eclipse and Python this way for the last few days I am convinced it is a very workable solution. Why re-invent the wheel?

Tags: Matlab, Mathematica, Eclipse IDE, Open Source, Sage Math, Python

Web Next & Data Ecosystems

Web Next is not some quantum leap in reality but rather the culmination of several long term trends. Web 1.0 was the translation of real world services (e.g. Amazon) onto the Internet and Web 2.0 is Darwinian evolution of UI and social media tools and technologies. Web Next is exploiting of information to achieve new products and services with no direct analog in the real world. Some will call this Web 3.0 but I prefer the simpler moniker Web Next.

Web Next is about the creation of value not through the control of information but via the creation of synergies and knowledge through combining information and functionality. There already exists the primitive examples in the Web2 world, those such as the map-based mash-ups. Essentially value is derived via the showing a spatial relationship between data. However, these mash-ups are relatively primitive. They rely on a users existing knowledge of the spatial area in question. I personally have no appreciation of the real layout of New York City having never been there. Consequently, the value I gain from viewing or using a mash-up consisting of crime statistics plotted on a map of NYC is less than someone who has visited which will be less than a resident of NYC.

The synergy of information and functionality is created through Data Ecosystems.

Data Ecosystems

A Data Ecosystem is two or more different data sets that when combined with complementary functionality produce multiplicative effect in usefulness. Or put another way, a Data Ecosystem contains more than one source of data (a data set) (e.g. temperatures and rainfall) that can be combined, analysed and processed with the overall Data Ecosystem being more valuable than data or functionality on its own. Importantly, having more than one data set is not sufficient on its own. Rather you need various tools and functions that allow the user to act on the data. An example will help to clarify.

Take an individual piece of data, say a series of temperatures measurements. On its own you can't do much with those temperature measurements but combined with rainfall measures, annual growth rates and a map, those temperature measurements suddenly have a lot of value. Now a farmer can research and plan when to plant his crops or adjust his crop forecasts based on historical growth rates versus temperature and rainfall. To be able to make the forecast of crop tonnage the farmer needs a series of tools that allow him to find correlation factors and extrapolate the growth trends based on rainfall and temperatures. Without those functions having the data is not particularly useful. There is no use in having gobs and gobs of data if there is poor functionality in the Data Ecosystem.

Data Ecosystems highlight a very interesting point about data. One that I find is continually ignored or not understood by most data companies (including web companies). Data on its own has little intrinsic value. Data only has value with what you can do with it and what you can do with it is determined by what other data you have along with the functionality you can apply to the data.

Like a biological ecosystem, a data ecosystem must mesh together. A Data Ecosystem needs to be internally consistent. If a Data Ecosystem is not consistent then it will not generate value for the user. There is no point in trying to create a Data Ecosystem that has rainfall patterns from Australia and crime statistics in New York City. Designers of Data Ecosystems must not design the systems so they become inconsistent. Consistency is crucial. But given human nature I fully expect consistency will be ignored.

"And there's the sign, Ridcully," said the Dean. "You have read it, I assume. You know? The sign which says 'Do not, under any circumstances, open this door'?"
"Of course I've read it," said Ridcully. "Why d'yer think I want it opened?"
"Er...why?" said the Lecturer in Recent Runes.
"To see why they wanted it shut, of course."
-Terry Pratchett, Hogfather

At this point I expect some readers will be thinking that Data Ecosystems is simply the Semantic Web. Data Ecosystems is not the Semantic Web. Semantic Web technologies will be a part of Data Ecosystems, but Semantic Web is neither a precondition for nor sufficient on its own in order to build Data Ecosystems. Semantic Web helps by automating building the relationships between bits of information. In the temperature example above Semantic Web would have provide information such as the lat/long of the measurements, how it was measured, the accuracy of the measurement, the date and times of the measurement etc. This would then allow a computer to match the data automatically with rainfall data from the same location and time and plot together on a map. Semantic Web makes building Data Ecosystems easier and like objects in programming will allow Data Ecosystem platforms to increase the ease the deployment of Data Ecosystems.

Data Ecosystems can also be built of other Data Ecosystems. The output of several Data Ecosystems can be used as the sources for another Data Ecosystem and so on. Each step creating more value by allowing an individual to achieve more. Data Ecosystems will in effect create an L-space

Why are Data Ecosystems Important?

Data Ecosystems are important for one very, very crucial reason. Data Ecosystems allow people to achieve things effectively. Unlike Web 1.0 which was essentially removing transaction costs from existing real-world processes, Data Ecosystems unlock the potential for new services that are impossible in the real world.

Consider a Data Ecosystem based travel service. Such a service will allow you to research a holiday; book all transport, accommodation and activities; create a comprehensive itinerary of the holiday, send alerts at key points along the trip; calculate how much money you'll spend on the holiday; help you automatically tag video, audio and photos from the holiday and create holiday memorabilia from the items you have uploaded. All through a single Data Ecosystem.

And there are hundreds, thousands, millions of probable Data Ecosystems that have no analog in today's web.

How Things are Already Changing

To close out I want to consider something that has been banging its way around the blog-sphere and offline world: the fate of journalism. Without re-hashing the debate you can read Bill Keller's speech with Jeff Jarvis's responses here and here as background.

If everyone is a citizen journalist, then what is the point of professional journalist? A seemingly valid question but one that has the implicit assumption that both are or will be doing the same process. From the perspective of Data Ecosystems the job of a professional journalist becomes very different from a citizen journalist. The citizen journalist is a source of data. They will most likely only provide a very narrow bit of data on any particular story. Put another way, the citizen journalist becomes a source like the news wires.

The professional journalist moves on from being the source of the story to gathering all the disparate bits of information about a story and then assembling into a consistent and cohesive context around the core story. Professional journalists go form being the gate keepers to information to value builders by creating context to stories. The role of a newspaper/media company is to provide or create a Data Ecosystem within which the professional journalist can assemble, create and publish the context to stories. Within Data Ecosystems, professional journalists, news agencies and citizen journalists will co-exist and combine to produce a more valuable service than either would on their own or exists today.

The media world is already going through pain as it is forced to adjust to the realities of an information economy. Data Ecosystems provide a means to effectively adapt to the information economy. But Data Ecosystems are not limited to media. Data Ecosystems will exist right across the information world. In fact they will reach into material world as L-space is linked into materials at the molecular level. This is the true revolution of Data Ecosystems, they facilitate the merger of L-space and Real Space.

Tags: Web Next, Data Ecosystems, Web 3.0, Web Services, Semantic Web, Web 2.0, L-Space

A mandate for change or steady as she goes?

Reading the recent commentary in the Australian newspapers about the results of the recent election, I am struck by how many of the journalists and opinion columns along with a majority of the ALP and unions believe they have been handed a mandate for change.

But has Kevin Rudd* really receive a mandate for change?

Remember that Rudd campaigned on being just as safe as the Howard government. That does not speak to me as a mandate for change but rather a steady as she goes. The Australian population expect that employment will remain at 30+ year lows, that inflation won't get out of hand and in general things will keep ticking over nicely forever. Rudd will need to be extremely wary about making and changes that upset the apple cart. The voters are going to hold him to the being fiscally conservative.

This includes WorkChoices.

What the voters voted for is more of the same but with a spit and polish of the government. They did not vote for radically change.

The advantage is Kevin Rudd does have the personal power having dragged the ALP into the centre and one an eletion to resist the more strident and economically irresponsible ideas of the unions.

* Yes Australian electorate voted for Kevin Rudd and not the ALP.

Update: Paul Sheehan of the SMH has in interesting article that supports my point although he goes into more depth and draws a longer bow than I am willing.

While Google passes USD600 could its market cap be higher?

Google has passed USD600 overnight. Various analysts are predicting higher. Paul Kedrosky has predicted USD1000 by the end of the year. Which at this time is not as far fetched as many think. What interests me is a USD600 per share gives Google a market cap of USD190.28bn, but with a USD29.84 per share provides a market cap of USD280.55bn. Almost USD90bn more in market cap.

This leads to the question. If Google split its stock, how fast would the share price then rise and what would the market cap become? Could it pass Microsoft. Splitting the stock would initial reduce the share price and make more shares available for trading.

My guess is that the increase in share price after the split would be very rapid as many traders increase their existing holding and new traders create a holding. All in all an interesting thought experiment.

Update: Quick thought. Given that stock options are one of the key parts of Google compensation, I would think that as the stock price rises closer to USD1000 it will make these options less attractive for new employees. One way to address the issue would be to split the stock and give more room for faster growth for new employees. Nor would this harm existing employees. In fact it would allow them to realise some of their "wealth" without massively changing their share ownership.