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Conferences

Monday, September 15, 2008

DEMOfall 2008 in San Diego

Gadget DEMO continues to be my favorite conference -- the semi-annual event took place this past week in San Diego, California. It was an uneventful trip from Palo Alto, where I had visited Mediazone, and on to San Francisco for a flight with Southwest (possibly the best airline in operation in the states) to San Diego to join the DEMO opening reception.

There were some key trends that were reinforced at DEMO again this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. The term "cloud" is seeping into the vocabulary. Most companies were media related in some way or provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but DEMO confirmed their strategic importance and demonstrated significant implementations. I don't think any of them have cracked the code so to speak but there were many that had exciting visions and demos. I visited the ones in which I had the most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. (See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts). She talked about how the web has evolved from banking and buying things to a social web with a lot of user generated content to a web that will create real market value. Only a small percent of Internet users actually take advantage of the potential of the social web. This next phase will bring down the barriers: syndication, distribution, constant connectivity, on demand and lead to the distributed web. There will be new devices, new protocols beyond the desktop and mobile. Collaboration will become purposeful, not just "social". All this will be accompanied with advances in usability, security, and authentication.

The Demo conference allows entrepreneurs to show off new gadgets, software, hardware and business ideas and enables the press, analysts, investors, and technology enthusiasts to assess what they see. The product introductions that take place reveal key technology trends over the coming 12 to 18 months. This year there were 72 companies showing off -- each getting six minutes on stage to tell their story. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the audience. After the main tent sessions the attendees get to visit with the companies in the "Demo Hall". There isn't time to visit all of them so I try to be selective -- I visited 25 of the companies this time. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order.

If you asked me which of the 72 launches I found most interesting I would have to say Telnic, Ltd., the "dot tel" company. Having yourname.tel will allow you to store, update and publish all your contact information and web links directly on the Internet. This is not a web service -- the data is actually stored in the infrastructure of the Internet. The heart of the Internet is the DNS -- the Domain Name System. Among other tasks, the DNS translates humanly-meaningful domain names (like amazon.com) to the numerical address (like 72.21.210.11). The names and numbers are stored in special purpose computers that are scattered around the world. With dot tel, companies or individuals will be able to have their contact information stored there too. It will be the one official place to have directories for people and companies. You will be able to choose how much information you want public (maybe just your name and your web site or blog address) and which data you want to be private.The private information will be encrypted and can be selectively shared with people or organizations that you authorize. People will be able to reach you on their mobile with the touch of a button through the dot tel directory. No web site or hosting is involved. I think this will be a big deal.

Plastic Logic, Ltd. showed an e-book that can display full-sized documents. It is like an 8.5 x 11 Kindle and will replace a briefcase full of documents. It was sort of a computer but not really a computer. I am a bit skeptical on this one.

A number of companies showed how the web is gradually replacing television as we know it. Use your favorite search engine and take a look at Awind Inc., RealNetworks, Inc., beeTV, RemoTV, Inc., Invision TV, LLC, and ffwd.com, Inc. Or just revisit the DEMO Conference Agenda for links to what Chris and team thought about them.

A handful of companies showed products that make creating, sharing, and consuming digital bits more enjoyable. See UGA Digital, Inc., Trinity Convergence, Inc., Blue Lava Technologies, Inc., Kadoo Inc., MixMatchMusic, Ltd., Photrade, LLC, MeDeploy, and
The Echo Nest Corp. Photrade is yet another company in the digital photography space. They will allow you to share and protect photos you take, purchase photos that others have taken, and make money from your photos. With the plummeting of high quality digital cameras and the availability of software that can make an amateur photo look professional there is a growing market here.

Mobile will become a bigger and bigger part of our lives. Maverick Mobile Solutions, Pvt. Ltd. has a solution that protects your phone in case you lose it. It sets off various bells and whistles. Not a bad idea as we put more and more personal data on our phones. G.ho.st lets you put your PC on your mobile phone. You have to see it to believe it. WebDiet claims to make losing weight and getting healthy easy by using your mobile phone to enter everything you eat and get an analysis that optimizes your diet. If you want to chat and share more with your friends take a look at Xumii.

There were more than a half-dozen companies showing off new ideas for protecting and managing digital assets. As we move more and more of our pictures, conversations, movies, notes, documents, etc. to the digital world, the security of them becomes more and more important. One of the companies I found quite interesting in this area is Usable Security Systems, Inc. UsableLogin is their product and what they are trying to do is make passwords as we know them obsolete and give us secure access to any web site. All you have to do is recognize a picture you have chosen and remember one simple codeword to log in securely. Some of us have more than 100 login/password pairs. I think Usable may have a problem getting some banking sites to cooperate but even if just 80% of the sites you visit could be handled with a single password that would be a very good thing. The Founder & CEO, Rachna Dhamija, did her PhD in security at Berkely and she gave a very good demo. See it here.

As a security aside, if you use Gmail, I highly recommend selecting the https option in the settings. This doesn't guarantee security but it does insure that the data going back and forth between your computer and Google is encrypted.

There were many more great demos. Browse your way through the DEMO Conference Agenda and see what catches your eye.

The flight back to New York on American Airlines offered an unexpected surprise. GoGoInflight offered broadband Internet service. The price was $12.95 and the performance was excellent. I ran a speedtest and found the results to be better than what I get from Comcast Cable at home. The WiFi connection works with both laptops and any mobile phone that has WiFi (like the iPhone).

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Conferences, Internet Technology, Mobile, Travels, WiFi, iPhone September 15, 2008 06:20 PM

Sunday, September 14, 2008

Mediazone

Rugby The 4:45 AM departure from home last Sunday was not a barrel of fun but the flight to San Francisco was uneventful and was followed by a visit with Mediazone in Palo Alto where they were having a management conference.

Mediazone is an extremely interesting company that I was not previously familiar with. They are based in Palo Alto but are owned by a company called Naspers -- a $2.6 billion media giant in South Africa (a part of the world I had been fortunate enough to visit in March). Mediazone creates and operates a set of targeted social media destinations, centered on passionate audience interests that incorporate a rich set of video, audio, text, community and interactive user controls.

An example would be their RugbyZone -- if you like Rugby you would surely love RugbyZone. This is just one of Mediazone's highly targeted segments of content. They don't try to be all things to all people but they do go very deep in their specific "vertical" segments such as Rugby, Motorcross, Wimbledon Live, and IndyCar. I have always believed that other than perhaps Google, specialized web sites have the most to offer. Ten years ago I was an advisory board member at space.com and we found tremendous interest on the part of "space junkies". People who care about a narrow segment tend to be deeply interested. They are willing to register and participate in the community of users and generate content themselves. The challenge is how to make money at facilitating the community and providing high-value content.

The answer is elusive and nobody has cracked the code just yet. The Wall Street Journal has a subscription model where subscribers pay $99 per year. They have unique content and a broad array of tools and content creditability. Most sites are not able to command such a fee. The dominant model today is advertising wherein sites are able to get a premium fee from the advertisers who want to reach a targeted audience. Someone selling rugby shoes is presumably willing to pay more for an ad at RugbyZone than for an ad at a "horizontal" site which may have more visitors but not the narrow interest. Another model is Weather Underground. For an annual fee of $10 you get a version of the site that has much less advertising. In other words you pay to not get advertising. I don't claim to have the answer but my advice on the topic is always the same -- offer great service and offer choices. A membership site might charge $69 per year for a standard subscription, $89, for an "ad free" version, and $29 for subscribers who are willing to accept unlimited advertising and provide profile information about their desires. When combined with great service, careful listening to the feedback, trying new models, and iterating quickly the result will be the highest possible odds of finding the right model.

On from Palo Alto to San Francisco on Southwest (possibly the best airline in operation in the states) to San Diego to join the opening reception at Demo.

Conferences, Internet Technology, Media, Travels September 14, 2008 06:52 PM

Saturday, August 16, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 6 (final)

Description of image

This will be my final comments about things I learned at Supernova 2008 in June. The prior comments are all in the conference section of patrickWeb. A "People" panel was moderated by BJ Fogg, whom I first met when he presented YackPack at Demo a few years ago. The research shows that people are endlessly creative, that the majority of most people's time is spent offline, and that there are very large differences between the skills people have in using the Internet. There is a correlation between skill level and willingness to share -- the more people know about the Internet the more likely they are to share what they know. Some argued that the skill level is a function of priority given. I am certain of that point. I know many people who could be web savvy if they wanted to be but they would rather play golf or work in the garden. Nothing wrong with that. There is a social technographics ladder that includes people who are inactive, spectators, joiners, collectors, critics, and creators. Some postulated that user background is related to digital media savvy but that it is not an age thing. Another study however showed a very strong correlation between age and these various categories. The study would suggest that at my age I should be technologically inactive! I guess I just don't fit the mold.

Social information discovery is a relatively new term but the phenomenon has been around from the beginnings of the Internet -- you can ask a question and get a lot of people to answer. Sharing today is still done mostly in email which puts high social activation energy on the sender but social networks are changing this. We will share a lot more in the future. Social sites are causing an evolution to the entire web becoming social. User generated content used to be something you go to a site to do like epinions.com or or ticketmaster to find out what people are saying. The problem is that you don't know the people who are making the comments. In the emerging social web you can see what your friends and colleagues think or what they are doing or what the friends of your friends think about restaurant, book, or movie. It is much more relevant.

There are a number of inhibitors to social networks reaching their potential. Our identity is too fragmented -- logins and passwords galore. We have profiles here, there, and everywhere. Applications are incompatible among the various social networks. I am optimistic that this will all come together in a way that meets our security and privacy expectations. The short answer to these concerns is the evolution of standards. OpenID is trying to create a single identification that you can use at any web site. Oauth is an emerging approach for authentication so that you can allow access for a web site to get information about you from another web site but only certain information you have authorized, not all the information. OpenSocial is developing an approach to allow a Facebook application to work at MySpace or any other social network. Google Friend Connect is attempting to bring all three of these together into a social web.

Although I remain optimistic about the concerns, a panel on "Privacy and Security in the Network Age" with Moderator Andrea Matwyshyn (Wharton), Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane), Fran Maier (TrustE), Gerard Lewis (Comcast), and Lauren Gelman (Stanford CIS) dug into some of the stark realities. They attempted to answer the question of whether we are entering an era where individuals gain new control over their public personas, and powerful means to leverage reputations or will we be forced to abandon any hope of protecting our privacy and trusting what we encounter online?

Although he claimed to be optimistic, Bruce Schneier, a world renowned expert on privacy, was actually quite gloomy. Everything we do creates a transaction record and the resulting data records have value to others. Storage costs online are now so cheap, nothing gets thrown away. Google, your wireless provider, your healthcare insurance company, etc. all save every piece of data about you and what you do or look for. The trend will accelerate. There are many invasive technologies out there -- surveillance video cameras will be so small in the future that we won't know they are there. Our every movement will be captured. Soon we will be living in a world where no conversation will be private. While some frame the debate as security vs privacy, Bruce framed it as liberty versus control and said that "data is the pollution of the information age". In spite of these pronouncements, the experts are short term pessimistic but long term optimistic. Me too. The government may be watching us but we can watch them too.

The final session I attended was about Broadband Policy. The United States now ranks 15th in the world in terms of availability of broadband to consumers. We had a discussion about what we would do about it if we became policy advisor to the new president. We came up with the following.

A lot of us suggested getting rid of the FCC. It's an ineffective political entity. Other suggestions were to map the gaps where infrastructure and users are and are not, take spectrum policy and flush it, take on universal service and revamp it to focus on broadband instead of pay phones, Un-ban municipal wireless broadband, and benchmark the US against other countries. There are some good things happening such as Verizon's deployment of optical fiber but overall there is not enough competition and there are too many lobbyists seeking protection for large telecommunications companies. When I spoke at the World Wide Web conference in Paris in 1994 the U.S. was the Internet leader. France was skeptical to be kind. Today France is enabling WiFi throughout the country and partnering with utility companies to offer broadband at 100 times the speed of what the U.S. telcos define as broadband. I would like to be more optimistic on this front but I do not know of another industry (telecommunications providers) that have so many lobbyists urging protection and so many customers who are locked into services that they don't like.

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Conferences, Internet Technology, People, Public Policy, WiFi August 16, 2008 11:15 AM

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 5

Description of image I learned a lot at Supernova as I do every year. It is difficult to explain the depth and breadth of what transpired at the conference, but hopefully I will hit some highlights and provide links where you can learn more. One of the many interesting topics was "networks" -- something that we take for granted. Three experts talked about the diversity of very large types of networks including baggage routing networks of an airline, electrical grid networks, natural gas distribution, the global aviation system, the Internet, and of course our social networks. The big picture is that social networks are evolving to the point that the entire World Wide Web is likely going to become the Social Web.

A social network is a structure consisting of nodes (people or organizations) that have a common interest or increasingly a dependency. The tie that binds us can be one or more of many things: values, visions, ideas, financial exchange, friendship, kinship, food likes or dislikes, buy or sell trading, links to each other's blogs, epidemiology, or airline routes. The resulting ontologies are very complex. Research in a number of academic fields has shown that social networks operate on many levels, from families to countries. The use of the networks is beginning to be a key tool in collaboration to solve problems, how people achieve their goals and even how organizations are run.

In its simplest form, a social network is a map of all the relevant ties between the nodes (people). One of the first social networks was Linkedin and I have been a member of it from nearly the beginning. Hardly a day goes by when I don't get several invitations to become a "friend" or "colleague" with another Linkedin member (or Plaxo Pulse or Facebook). To gain the real "network effect" I recommend being selective in dealing with these invitations. Otherwise you end up connected to everybody which is as valuable as being connected to nobody. There are many people who are looking for people to send press releases to or to throw you into a recruitment pool or just be able to say they "know" someone or is their "friend" because they saw your name in the paper or saw you at a conference. The real power is not in the numbers per se but to really know someone who knows someone who knows someone and to have the credibility with the person you know such that they are willing to help you to connect to someone else. I have 178 trusted friends and colleagues in my Linkedin network. Two degrees away -- friends of friends; each connected to one of my connections -- there are more than 60,000 people. Three degrees away -- members who can be reached through a friend and one of their friends -- is 3,200,000 people. If you are discerning about it you can develop considerable social capital.

There are many issues in the social networking space. One of them is that there are so many networks. If you take a look at the end of this story you will see -- and if you like the story and click on the green icon, a dialogue box offers you three functions. You can send an email link to the story to friends. A second choice is that you can post the story to your own blog. Perhaps most important is the third choice which is to post the story at one or more of your favorite social networks. The dialogue box displays icons for the various social networks -- Facebook and thirty-nine other of the top forty networks! A few mouse clicks and you have the ultimate chain letter. I think ShareThis has great potential.

How many social networks should you belong to? Certainly not forty. I belong to Linkedin, Plaxo Pulse, Facebook, and MySpace. Four is enough for me. But is it? There are many niche networks -- such as A Small World -- that will be of interest to m any. But do you want to create a profile of your personal information at each of the networks you choose? And keep them up to date? And tell your connected friends what you are doing and exactly where you are (latitude and longitude) and what music you like or even what song you are listening to at the moment? To me the glass is half full. I am hopeful that protocols will emerge such as OAuth, OpenID, and OpenSocial that will level the playing field. We will be able to use one single "sign-on" for all our web sites and create *one* profile and have control over which networks and which parts of the profile it appear in. For example, it would be nice to create a comprehensive profile that is encrypted and totally under the user's control. You may choose to have your favorite songs be accessible through Facebook but not your medical records from Google Health and your Google Health electronic medical record to be accessible to your primary care physician and your hospital but nobody else. The application you create for your consulting business or a new game you created could be available through *all* the social networks.

Social networking is the next turn of the crank of the Internet. By combining networks, such as a mobile phone networks, mobile payment systems, the Internet and a network of people all sharing a common cause, a viral effect can take place resulting in a lot of money or assistance flowing to the need -- political, emergency response or (hopefully) humanitarian.

Security and privacy issues with social networking? Another story to come soon.

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Blogging, Conferences, Internet Technology, Public Policy July 23, 2008 09:35 PM

Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 4

The "Reconstructed media" session was about the future of TV. The panelists were from YouTube, Sevenload, and Current TV. All three see TV -- as we know it -- as a thing of the past. Current.tv is a bottoms up media approach where "you make the news" by voting on, commenting on, or submitting a story. Part of the business model change is being driven by the fact that TV today is very inefficient as an advertising channel. According to one of the speakers, 99% of advertising dollars are wasted because people either don't watch it or watch it but are not in the market for whatever is being advertised.All three are determined to "reconstruct" -- aka blow-up -- the current model of television.

I wrote a story here called "The Future of Advertising" in October 2006. I was pretty negative about TV advertising and now I am even more so. In theory you can just record everything but even then it is annoying to have to fast forward through the ads and sometimes have to backup and replay and then forward again to get what you want. The advertisements are mostly insulting to one's intelligence. There are no insights into anything and they grate on people's nerves. Honestly, I have to say that most of the ads are obnoxious -- as bad as spam. The shotgun blast ads aren't fraudulent but they add no value to our lives. Zero. Do we need broadcast television to tell us the latest interest rate at ditech.com or to be reminded four times per hour that Scottrade is "all about value" or to be constantly told to ask our doctor about this pill or that pill? The bottom line is that most of us don't rely on the TV as a source of ideas for things we need. There may be some people that actually enjoy advertisements. That is ok, but the rest of us want to "opt out".

When it comes to news, sometimes it is hard to get on TV. Odds are that you can flip through a half-dozen cable news channels and find no news. Just ads. TvNewsLies.org claims that CNN = “Contains No News”. After eliminating ads, ads about the news, tabloids, and other chaff, one hour of CNN "Yields Less Than 5 Minutes of News". My preferred news source is news.google.com which I have been using for years. It is ad supported but it is ads that don't get in your face. You can drill deeply into the news and if you don't like one source's point of view you can easily get another. This contrasts with "So and so made a statement today about the oil situation and you won't believe what he said". Parenthetically, and we are not going to tell you what he said until you listen to three minutes of irrelevant advertising. At this point in e-tirement I pretty much know what things I need or want and if I don't know then I know how to find things. Broadcast advertising is dead. They just have not admitted it yet. The next phase will be situational ads where the actors in movies will be extolling products and services. It will likely be transparent and I am not looking forward to it.

Many of the startup companies and large amounts of venture capital are focused on how to "reach" us. Their favorite word is CPM, the cost per thousand advertising page impressions. They truly want to intrude on us. They want us to watch a video clip before we can watch the video clip link we clicked on. Forbes magazine prints "Your statement of benefits" on envelopes. This is designed to make you think the envelope contains health insurance or mutual fund information. It actually includes a subscription statement so that you can get the benefit of paying for their magazine. They can't wait to strike deals with AT&T and Verizon to put ads on our cell phones.

Is there no end? The most optimistic sign lies in social networking. As much as I do not like advertising in my face, I would not mind seeing a link to a book that my friends have read, or learn about interesting places they have been, or wines, or concerts, and other favorites. Advertiser support of social networking has the potential to actually be of value. I hope so, because the tolerance level for traditional TV and Internet advertising is at the limit for many of us. More on social networking coming up.

Conferences, Favorites, Media July 1, 2008 03:19 PM

Friday, June 27, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 3

Discussion about the mobile Internet is taking an increasing amount of the agenda at technology conferences. The scope is increasing dramatically with not just 3-6 billion mobile phones but with more and more of them having GPS, cameras, accelerometers, and other kinds of sensors to come. Nokia described a research project in which 150 students have been driving around and providing anonymous information about where they are and how fast they are going. The result is a centrally integrated traffic prediction database available to everybody who is driving. Other possibilities include tracking of influenza and hypertension through personal health monitoring and real-time weather monitoring.

Most of us in the U.S. grew up with the PC as our primary way to connect to the Internet. Mobile phones are already the primary networking device for hundreds of millions and soon billions of people. The mobile Internet will be a natural for many of those people and most of them will likely never own a PC. 80% of the world's population now has mobile coverage in 220 countries.

One major difference between the U.S. and developing countries is in the use of SMS text messaging. Africa, for example, is way ahead of us. They are using SMS as an integral part of their financial services infrastructure. At the end of the evening with Matimba Mbungela at Moyo's during a recent trip to South Africa, the server came to the table with a wireless credit card reader. After the card was swiped, Matimba's mobile phone received an SMS text message confirming that the charge had been made to his credit card account at the bank. South Africa has embraced mobile as a key part of their banking infrastructure. In fact any debit or credit to your bank account or credit card results in an SMS message. Not everyone in South Africa has an Internet connection but tens of millions have a mobile phone. The security is good because most people don't share their phone. In India, farmers use SMS to determine the market prices of various crops and weather information to assist in planning their activities. SMS has enormous potential for applications of all kinds. The New York Times, Fox News, and others are using SMS for news and election alerts but when it comes to SMS for data oriented applications, other countries are well ahead of the United States.

I envision SMS having broad applicability. There are so many places that people spend time waiting. At the hospital for an x-ray or blood sample, at restaurants, the auto garage, department of motor vehicles, and many others. A simple text messaging system could buzz your phone to let you know it is your turn. You could also be alerted about auctions that have been completed, checks that have cleared, stock prices that hit a target, a family member being discharged from the hospital, an elderly relative needing your assistance, and countless other applications. An SMS message from a service person that you requested to go to your house to fix the furnance could alert you that they have arrived and your reply could unlock the door to your house. SMS messages are "simple". They don't have the "baggage" of emails with all the headers and footers. They can contain text and data in an uncluttered way. There are many ways to send SMS messages from your PC also. I use ipipi.com which is an international Text Messaging Service that lets you send and receive SMS from your desktop.

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Conferences, Mobile June 27, 2008 11:32 AM

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 2

Description of image Supernova began last Monday morning at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center. There is no sign of recession in the Mission Bay area -- construction cranes everywhere. The 300 acre former rail yard was created in 1998 as a redevelopment project and seems to be flourishing. It has attracted a lot of biotechnology research and development and is the headquarters of the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. It also has fiber to the premises communications.

Kevin Werbach kicked off the conference with his view of the "Ten Challenges for the Network Age". If it wasn't already, Supernova made it clear that decentralization is happening and that there is an accelerating shift underway to network-based computing, services, business processes, marketing, entertainment, social relationships, connectivity, and culture. The shift is changing our assumptions about how the world works. There are big opportunities ahead for those who grasp the shift and peril ahead for those who don't.

A panel with Bob Iannucci from Nokia, Esther Dyson, and Clay Shirky (New York University) how the Internet is changing the way the world works -- especially how people are doing things differently. In Clay's new book "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, he tells a story of how a woman left her cell phone in a cab and someone stole it and started using it rather than trying to find out who owned it (which would have been easy). The woman's friend took the matter as "wrong" and launched a campaign on the Internet through blogs and social networks to get the thief to return the phone. Based on messages the person had sent from the phone it was determined who she was. Her MySpace profile led to where she lives. The police would not take the case. They said it was just lost, not stolen. The bloggers did not give up and eventually brought the NYPD around. The phone got back to the owner and the thief was arrested. More than one million people followed and/or participated in the effort. Talk about "Power to the People"! (which I have been writing about for fifteen years). ! highly recommend Clay's book.

In a similar manner, Facebook groups are providing valuable input to businesses and surely will cause them to change direction on some issues. Intel found this out years ago when they denied problems with the then new Pentium chip. They were forced to come clean. Collective opinions will be making more and more of a difference. Another emerging business tool is the the Virtual Company Project which is building online tools to provide governance for a virtual company. People with common interests and appropriate skills will be able to develop a business and collaborate online to provide products and services.

On the political scene the bloggers of America have been having a heyday for the last five years and are becoming more and more effective. In 1999 there was considerable strife in Kosovo. Part of the strategy by the government was to control information so that the people would not know exactly what was going on. Journalists were expelled from the country. The independent radio station, B92, in Belgrade was closed down. Local media was either shut down or censored. But the radio station set up a web site and began to publish text, audio and video. They reported when air raid sirens were going off. Up to the minute news was provided to the population. There was no way to shut down the Internet site because the government didn't’t know where the server was. If they had known and shut it down another server would have been put back online. From a coup in Thailand to London bombings, information becomes available and it becomes public. In Zimbabwe text messages went out to tell people where to vote as the government tried to keep it a secret. Governments can put people in jail but they will not be able to confiscate 3-5 billion cell phones. As long as there is information the Internet provides a way to share it. Power to the People.

One of the most subtle but most powerful capabilities of today's Web 2.0 that was not available ten years ago is tagging. People take pictures with their phone and upload them to Flickr. They then apply tags: London, bombing. Someone else finds the pcitures and adds their own tags: train, terrorism. As more people find, view, and tag, the pictures become more valuable -- they gain more context. This is a key element of social networking. Not only can people report something, but they can also join in a collaborative effort to find a criminal or a loved one. Awesome stuff and we have only seen the tip of the iceberg.

Blogging, Conferences, Internet Technology, People June 24, 2008 03:33 PM

Sunday, June 22, 2008

Supernova 2008 - Part 1

Ppeople at a conference Last Sunday evening was a bad night for air travel for most all of the United States. I happened to be in Albany and had a flight to Cleveland connecting to San Francisco. It is a long story but the net is that a 4:15 PM departure from Albany ended up taking me to Newark and then to California arriving to the hotel at 5:45 AM. The bad part is that stories like this are not that uncommon these days. Airlines can't control the weather and occasional maintenance issues are to be expected. The frustrating part is the lack of good communications on the ground at the airports and the lack of integrated systems resulting in getting different information -- kiosk, overhead displays, ticket counter, at the gate, airline lounges -- for the same flight. The gate display in Albany on Sunday at about 7:15 PM showed the 5:15 PM flight as being "On Time". Many of you have stories that can top this vignette -- there are a number of my airline stories here in the blog.

This was the seventh year for the Supernova conference -- I missed one of them a few years ago. The conference is run by Kevin Werbach who is a leading expert on the business, policy, and social implications of emerging Internet and communications technologies. Kevin has a good track record of anticipating key trends along the path to the Network Age. Supernova attracts CEOs, bloggers, entrepreneurs, academics, practitioners, visionaries, policy experts and industry thought leaders. Like all conferences, the best part is catching up with friends and colleagues and comparing points of view.

There are a couple of unique things about Supernova. It is the only conference that connects with one of the world’s foremost business schools -- the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The other unique feature is how "connected" the attendees can become with the speakers and each other. Supernova offers a live video stream, an IRC channel, a twitter feed, live blogging, interviews, and a Yahoo Pipe to enable attendees and remote participants from all over the world -- there were 400+ people from 15 countries in San Francisco -- to all jump into the conversation.

This paragraph summarizes some of the key things that I think are most important of the many things discussed at Supernova. The mobile Internet is gaining a head of steam. The new iPhone coming in a few weeks plus a slew of iPhone killers plus a big push by Microsoft will accelerate mobile even faster. Social computing is mushrooming. There are serious discussions going on in the development community about how (not whether) to standardize identity, authorization, and applications across the various social networks in some sensible way. Privacy has always been an issue but as storage cost approaches zero, everything we say or do will be saved. We have only seen the tip of the iceberg. The telecommunications operators continue to consolidate and continue to offer poor customer service and a lack of choice. More on each of these topics to follow over the days ahead.

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Conferences June 22, 2008 01:30 PM

Saturday, May 31, 2008

IBM Happenings: May 2008

The month started out with the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles and then was filled with a slew of announcements in hardware, software, services, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. The list of announcements made during the month is here. One of the most interesting things IBM did in May was to release a Global CEO Study. Being the largest information technology solutions provider in the world, it is imperative for IBM to have a keen understanding of the priorities of the top management of it's clients. The idea is to stay ahead of the curve and have the skills and resources in place to meet upcoming demand. IBM sent senior people to interview 1,130 CEO's from 40 countries to capture insights on how the challenges CEO's face today will impact the future of business.

It was the largest study of chief executives ever conducted -- spanning 32 industries. This was not SurveyMonkey -- it was face-to-face interviews. The study revealed that 83 percent of CEO's expect substantial change in the future, and are optimistic they can successfully manage change. The catch is that the CEO's report that their ability to effectively manage change is increasing at a far slower pace. The gap between the rate of change and the skills available is growing. This is bad news in some respects, but certainly good news for IBM which increasingly gains it's revenue and profits by filling skill gaps for clients.

A somewhat surprising insight from the study is that CEO's believe that the most important changes are occurring within their existing customer base. Two kinds of customers are emerging. First is the ‘information omnivore’ who craves knowing everything about everything and spends a good portion of their time (maybe most of their time) online. The other customer is the ‘socially-minded’ customer. This type of person can't get enough of providing and retrieving information about where they are, where their friends are, what they are doing, what their favorite things are, and arranging a rendezvous in both virtual and real world places. The CEO's plan substantial increases in investments to reach both of these customer types. This spells opportunity for IBM. Take a look at a video clip with more insight about the CEO Study.

Speaking of CEO's, two of the technology industry's finest got together on stage at the Business Partner Leadership Conference in Los Angeles. Eric Schmidt of Google and Sam Palmisano of IBM have more in common than you might think. Eric cut his teeth on IBM's largest scientific computers and has been a devotee of advanced computing architecture throughout his career. Sam has a conviction about the role of information omnivores and social computing. The common ground is cloud computing. The two companies announced an initiative to promote new software development methods which will help students and researchers address the challenges of Internet-scale applications in the future. The goal is to improve computer science students’ knowledge of highly parallel computing practices. IBM and Google are teaming up to provide hardware, software and services to augment university curricula and expand research horizons. The University of Washington was the first to join the initiative but the program is spreading to other leading schools around the world. The project combines IBM’s historic strengths in scientific, business and secure-transaction computing with Google’s complementary expertise in Web computing and massively scaled clusters. It seems very likely that the IBM-Google collaboration will change the way large-scale computing is exploited over the years ahead. Here is a video clip of what Eric Schmidt had to say at the Los Angeles meeting.

Complete index of IBM Happenings

Conferences, IBM, Internet Technology, People May 31, 2008 10:52 AM

Thursday, May 15, 2008

The World in 2050

Brain The flight to Los Angeles last week was long but on schedule and it provided some time to make a dent in reading World Without End (sequel to The Pillars of the Earth) by Ken Follett on the Kindle. Holding the 10-once e-reader is a joy and the battery lasted throughout the six hour flight. The physical book -- 1,024 pages -- would not be a joy to hold for hours.

The purpose of the trip was to attend IBM's Business Partner Leadership Conference. The event was attended by roughly 1,000 business partners, IBM executives, members of the press, and information technology analysts. See "IBM Happenings - May 2008" for a list of some of the announcements made by IBM during the meeting. At the end of the first day was a special event at the University of California School of Cinematic Arts. The invitation only event included 100 or so analysts, members of the press, faculty members and students. IBM and USC had been holding discussions to map out a collaboration between some of the most creative minds in Hollywood with some of IBM's top scientists. Having known some of them for years I was really pleased with they selected. The moderator was Dr. Bill Pulleyblank, mathematician, computer scientist and predictive analysis expert. Bill is known for having managed a project in which a supercomputer named Deep Blue beat Gary Kasparov in a six game rematch. The panelists were all quite distinguished. Don Eigler, IBM Fellow, was the first ever to precisely manipulate individual atoms and spelling the word "I B M". Jeff Jonas, IBM Distinguished Engineer, expert in security and privacy, created much of the technology used in capturing criminals in Vegas casinos. Sharon Nunes, Head of the Energy and Environment business at IBM is a research expert in materials science and is working on numerous projects to save the environment. Last but not least was Ajay Royyuru, who leads IBM Research's computational biology team and IBM's liaison to the National Geographic Genographic project. Ajay participated on a past panel which I had the honor to moderate at Demo.

The breadth and depth of the panel could have kept the audience spellbound for quite a few hours. Will the future be like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Back to the Future, Incredible Journey or Star Wars? How can scientists help filmmakers create prescient depictions of the future?

Much of the discussion revolved around the merger of biology and systems. Some of the breakthroughs discussed included using nanotechnology to assure the availability of clean drinking water everywhere on the planet, self-healing spinal cords, and life span stretching well past the century mark? The human genome has been mapped but that is just the beginning. In effect the mapping provides the parts list of the human bodies. The next phase of research is to figure out what all those parts do and how they fit together. Not only will regenerating entire body parts be possible but embedded processors under our skin will make it possible to gain significant human augmentation of our capabilities. A project in Europe called Blue Brain is using IBM supercomputing technology to built a simulation model of the human brain. This is a very big undertaking but someday it could lead to curing some of the most dreaded diseases that afflict our societies.

Computer processing is already awesome but we haven't seen anything yet. A Mini Cooper has more computing power than Apollo 13 had. At the exponential pace of growth of computing capacity we may actually reach the Singularity in the next couple of decades.

Security and privacy are obviously crucial elements to the research agenda. We will be able to have an embedded super-PDA that can record every conversation you hear or say during a lifetime. Existing databases make it possible to specifically identify a person by only knowing their zip date of birth and gender. So much for witness protection programs. The good news is that ubiquitous sensors can make the world is less dangerous place. Yes, the government can watch the people, but the people can watch the government too.

I think we are very fortunate that IBM focuses vast sums of money and thousands of top notch people on solving some of the tougher global problems. There is money in some of it and long term business value is created but along the way societies around the world benefit greatly from IBM's work toward the greater good. Take a look at the most recent report on this to get an idea.

As for film making, I learned a lot in talking with some graduate students at the reception. They are all hoping to be as successful as Steven Spielberg, and no doubt some will. The surprising thing I learned is that the best quality movies are still captured on cellulose acetate based film. It is rare these days to see a professional photographer use anything other than a digital camera and apparently with wide angle, high contrast movie making, the industry is not quite there. Consensus was that it would be all digital within five years. Computers already play a huge role (no pun intended) in film making either for augmentation of scenes or for creating the very characters of the movie.

Conferences, IBM, Internet Technology, Media, People May 15, 2008 11:21 AM

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

SOA Las Vegas

The conference in Las Vegas this past week was not like the ones Thomas J. Watson used to hold in Endicott where all the blue suit white shirt male attendees would sing songs about IBM's future. The master of ceremonies for the opening morning was Drew Carey and the "dinner music" was by The B-52's -- the new wave rock band not the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress. I don't think anyone wore a blue suit or a white shirt.

What attracted the 6,300 people to fly to Las Vegas and fill every hall, ballroom, salon, patio, and restaurant at the MGM Grand? IBM calls it "Smart SOA". I call it The Application Web.

Only the most brilliant technical people could come up with SOA as a name for something. Let's see, is it safe operating area, School of the Americas, Skies of Arcadia (a Nintendo game), Society of Actuaries, state of the art, or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act? Nope. The SOA that brought all these people together stands for "service oriented architecture". It is really important. The wikipedia has a comprehensive definition of SOA but basically it represents a new way for companies -- and hospitals, schools, and governments -- to enable their customers -- and suppliers, business partners, and employees -- to get things done on the web. Actually it is isn't new -- the idea has been around for decades -- but now it is really happening. It is so much a part of the vernacular at IBM that they just matter of factly talk about "so a".

Web In a nutshell, SOA will allow web sites to do much more than “click here to buy”. In fact web sites built with SOA will result in us standing in fewer lines in the physical world and have to endure fewer telephone call centers that want to control us. Fulfillment models at our favorite retailer’s web site will result in the staple goods we need just showing up outside the garage door when we need them. If businesses have the right attitude, SOA will enable them to get closer to the ultimate Internet -- to build a people-oriented and user-friendly experience that is tightly integrated with all the appropriate business processes of the company.

Over the last fifty years there has been an explosion of computer applications, but many of them were built in silos and were highly inflexible. In some cases companies thought decentralization was the answer so they allowed divisions and departments to do their own thing. The result was that many have a hodgepodge of incompatible systems that nobody is happy with. The web took things a big leap forward. At last there was a common way (the browser) for accessing and displaying information, even though the applications that run on the server -- that do the pricing, inventory lookups, shipping estimates, invoicing, etc. -- are still proprietary and usually tied to one particular IT vendor or system. The applications have also been very monolithic; i.e. in order to fulfill the expectations of customers on the web the application has to do the whole job. Soup to nuts; present the right price, confirm if the item is in stock, calculate shipping, and confirm the status of the order. Increasingly, customers want to get access directly into the supply chain and see exactly where their order stands. In short, applications have gotten larger and more complicated -- harder, not easier.

SOA -- arguably the biggest change in information technology in decades -- is poised to change the way applications are created and how they interoperate. Instead of building a monolithic application that takes a customer order, does credit checks, checks inventory, looks through the supply chain, arranges for payment, charges the customer, clears credit card transactions, etc., with SOA these various functions are built as separate "pieces". Think Legos. The individual programs are called "services" and they are called upon as needed. A sales tax calculation "service", for example, could be used by many different divisions of a company thereby eliminating redundancy. IBM has been practicing what it preaches in this regard. It has reduced the number of programs it uses to run the company from 16,000 to just a few thousand -- and declining.

The SOA services do not all have to be developed or acquired internally. Thanks to the Internet, services can be "rented" from others. For example, suppose that a company called American Specialties Inc. (ASI) specializes in selling American goods for delivery mostly outside of America. They want to create an application to sell their products on the web. The trickiest part of the application is determining the best way to ship the product to ensure it gets there when the customer wants it and at the lowest cost. ASI doesn't’t have the skills to write this particular part of the application and they haven’t bee able to find a vendor with a software package that can do it and which is compatible with the rest of ASI’s software.

It turns out that there is another company called Rates and Costs Inc. (RCI), which specializes in the calculation of optimum routes and the associated costs for shipment to places anywhere in the world. RCI offers the calculation as a service on the web and it is the exact function ASI needs to incorporate into their web application. Since RCI follows the SOA standards, ASI is able to see the specifications for RCI’s service – what inputs are required and what output does it produce. RCI could have created their calculation service using any IT platform they choose -- the standards assure that things can work together.

The programmer at ASI likes RCI’s program because it performs exactly the right function that ASI needs and the software has already been written and tested! ASI follows the SOA standards to incorporate RCI’s service into their web application. Whenever a user goes to ASI’s web page and needs shipment route and cost information, a link is made behind the scenes to RCI’s web server to get the information. ASI’s customers don’t know, nor will they care, that part of the job is being done by RCI’s server; not ASI’s server. ASI makes an arrangement to pay RCI each time one of ASI’s customers uses the RCI web service.

Creating programs by linking to other programs without regard to what programming language was used to create the others’ programs represents a whole new paradigm. It is one of the information technology industry’s holy grails. Standards organizations, such as Oasis, have been attempting for years to create a “neutral” programming environment. The UNIX vendors – HP, DEC, Sun, IBM, Data General, and others – formed various organizations, councils and consortia over the years attempting to bring things together. Progress was made but none of these initiatives achieved real openness and true compatibility across the information technology industry -- until SOA. It is not really new but it is time. Open Internet standards and SOA tools are making it happen.

SOA will make it possible for the web to evolve from a web of content to a web of content and applications. SOA will enable server-to-server interaction in addition to browser to server interactions. Servers will negotiate with other servers and even complete transactions by themselves with no direct human intervention. These interactions will replace the paper forms and faxes that flow back and forth from company to company today.

E-business evolved to on demand and on demand has evolved to business and IT "alignment". At this stage many enterprises have bought in to the concept but are struggling with how to get there. This is why many web sites don't fully meet our needs -- they are dependent on many independent applications that the enterprise has had for decades and so far have been unable to integrate them. SOA is the new model -- it offers the first comprehensive, standards based way to get the job done. Adoption of SOA will enable the interoperability within the many functions and departments of enterprises and between enterprises that has been a decades long dream. History has shown that adoption of standards leads to an explosion of usage and that will surely be the case with SOA. The SOA standards will enable entire industries to be brought together. Virtual corporations comprised of a federation of smaller ones will enable “hyper competition” on a global scale.

How does "Web 2.0" fit into all this? Like a ball and glove. Quite the hot topic in tech circles and among venture capitalists, Web 2.0 is basically a style, a model, an approach, and a philosophy wrapped together. It includes a "lightweight" programming model that is more like web page development than traditional programming. A key element of 2.0 is the blog feed -- a way to allow people to look at a web page but also subscribe to it. Another element is AJAX, a technique built on a collection of Internet standards that produces a rich user experience -- kayak.com is a good example -- with pages that don't "reload", they just change while you are looking at them. Another characteristic of Web 2.0 is that it is a perpetual beta -- users are treated as co-developers. At the conference, IBM announced WebSphere sMash which may turn out to be a really key tool for the evolution toward Web 3.0. Jerry Cuomo, IBM Fellow and CTO for IBM WebSphere, described a broad vision for how "smashups" will extend the web in a major way. The idea is to make it simple to combine content from multiple web sites. For example a travel agency may want to combine the best deals from airlines and hotels along with comments and discussion from tourists all in one "seamless" site. The smashup tool is based on a community project called "Project Zero" that has been underway for a number of months and is now ready to go mainstream.

All things considered, IBM really has it's act together with regard to SOA. Every software and services executive at the company is well versed on it and has it baked into their business and development plans. The promise is great and with tens of thousands of software engineers and top management support I think it is fair to expect IBM to continue to deliver on their vision. They have already made dozens of acquisitions to fill in the white spaces and customers are signing up and getting results. There were hundreds of customers and business partners there in Las Vegas to tell their success stories. Nothing is more creditable than having someone else tell your story for you.

great summary of IBM’s “Smart SOA” vision

Conferences, IBM, Internet Technology, On Demand, Travels, e-Business April 15, 2008 08:25 PM

Saturday, April 5, 2008

patrickWeb Blogroll

patrickWeb Blogroll

The patrickWeb blogroll has been around for more than ten years. A blogroll is basically a list of blogs of other people. In my case, it is a list of blogs of people who are either good friends, people whose opinion I respect, or blogs I have found useful. I learned about blogrolling from my friend Joi Ito and then learned how to actually do it from blogrolling.com.

Now that we all live in a world of social networking, there are many ways to share not only links to your favorite blogs, but links to your favorite anything. (There are also numerous specialized ways to "tag" stories, pictures, songs and videos). At sites such as del.icio.us you can put all your bookmarks in one place and share them with anyone and everyone. But, it is still ok to have a good old fashioned blogroll.

One of the entries in the patrickWeb blogroll is The Guidewire. Guidewire Group is a market intelligence firm that is focused on technology entrepreneurship, early-stage companies, and emerging technology markets. The insight they have developed over the years is quite valuable to their clients and the community that has built up around them. The Guidewire Group analysts meet with hundreds of innovative companies each year and a subset of the companies ends up launching their product or service at a DEMO conference.

There are a number of stories about the DEMO conferences here in this blog but over at the The Guidewire blog there is quite a buzz going on. There are always debates about the future of emerging technology and whether we are living in a post-bubble or pre-bubble period . Now there is a debate about the future of the emerging technology conferences. The latest story is called Let's Get Real: Business is Not Personal.

patrickWeb blogroll
patrickWeb stories about conferences

Blogging, Conferences April 5, 2008 04:31 PM

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

South Africa 2008 - Johannesburg

The South African Airways flight to Dakar, Senegal on the northwest coast of Africa was approximately 4.000 miles and took about seven and a half hours. It was the half-way point on the journey to Johannesburg. From door to door it took just about 24 hours to get to the D'Oreale Grande at Emperors Palace at Kempton Park in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. South Africa borders the Atlantic and Indian oceans. Visiting this beautiful country is quite a geography lesson.

On the arrival night, it was a pleasure to meet Matimba Mbungela, a managing executive at Vodacom South Africa, in person after having exchanged email and phone calls during the prior week. Matimba introduced me to his colleague Chris Ross, the senior sales executive for Vodacom South Africa, who would be host of the conference taking place the next day. Vodacom is a Pan-African cellular communications company providing world class GSM services to more than 30 million customers in South Africa, Tanzania, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique. More than 500 Vodacom business partners attended The Future of Technology conference to get an update on the various Vodacom offerings. My keynote at the end of the day offered a view of The Future of the Internet. That evening a delightful gala was held to recognize the sales achievements of the top Vodacom partners and dealers.

Like most conferences, there was an exhibition area where dozens of hardware, software, and services companies showed off their latest offerings. One of the most interesting one was the Firefly, from Grapevine Interactive. The Firefly is a parent-friendly mobile phone for young children. The tiny colorful phone has three prominent buttons on it. One to call Mom, one to call Dad, and one to place an emergency call. The phone can also store twenty parent-approved phone numbers.

Another conference took place later in the week in Midrand at Vodaworld, the company headquarters. The top 200 senior level executives of Vodacom came together as part of their professional development and to network with one another. The first part of the morning focused on The Future of the Internet and the second half we discussed innovation and how to nurture big ideas. The latter session was based on a class I led at MIT in September.

During the second half of the first week we stayed at the Intercontinental in Sandton, just a few blocks from Nelson Mandela Square. The giant statue of the former President of South Africa is impressive as is the life of the man who was first to be elected in a fully representative democratic election in the country. Mandela had led the anti-apartheid movement. We could see Robben Island, where Mandela spent 27 years in prison, from the waterfront the following week in Cape Town. We also visited his former home in Soweto. The respect for Nelson Mandela is universal regardless of ethnicity or political leaning. He will be 90 in July.

Nearby in Soweto is Orlando West stands the Hector Pieterson memorial square. Pieterson was killed at the age of twelve when police opened fire on protesting students in 1976. More than five-hundred were killed in the struggle. Soweto, which stands for townships southwest of Johannesburg, consists of dozens of townships and represents more than a third of the population of the city. The poverty is incredible. Some progress is being made but the results of decades of repression are obvious. The sights are breathtaking and not in a positive way. Hard to imagine that a government rationalized the extreme segmentation and discrimination. After a half day touring Soweto we had lunch in the Dube section of Soweto at Wandies Place. I could not identify most of the food in the buffet but it was very tasty.

Another half-day educational visit was to the Cradle of Humankind. It was well worth the one hour ride north of Johannesburg into the Gauteng province to see the Sterkfontein Caves where the 2.3-million year-old fossil Australopithecus africanus (nicknamed "Mrs. Ples"), an early hominid, was found in 1947. We literally had to crawl on hands and knees to get to the bottom of the enormous limestone cave hundreds of feet below ground. Although there was not much light, we could see huge stalactites and stalagmites and an underground lake that is fed from more than fifty miles away. Excavation at the site continues. In case you did not know it, we all came from Africa. The guide said "welcome back". If you are interested in finding the path taken by your ancestors to get from Africa to whatever part of the world you live in, take a look at the human genographic project.

Index of stories and pictures from South Africa 2008

Conferences, Internet Technology, People, Travels March 4, 2008 03:17 PM

Wednesday, February 6, 2008

DEMO in Palm Desert

Gadget Demo continues to be my favorite conference -- the semi-annual event took place this past week in Palm Desert, California. There were many new people in attendance but also some friends from many Demos past -- Amy Wohl, Shel Israel, John Landry, and Steve Larsen. While there were many attendees in their mid-twenties, the five of us joked how we had logged 200+ years in technology.

Whenever possible I try to start an out of town visit with a hunt for a benchmark or geocache. The nearest benchmark was along a railroad bed across the Interstate several miles away so I decided to look for three geocaches. The first two turned out to be more than challenging and after miles of walking and searching with ten feet of each I had to give up. At least the weather was great and I got some exercise. During a break before dinner the next day I went back out and looked for "Between Rock & a Hard Place". After reaching the latitude/longitude and looking for ten minutes or so I thought I would be zero for three but then as I thought about the comments made in the log at geocaching.com, it suddenly came to me and I found it. It was one of the most cleverly hidden caches I have seen in years.

There were some key trends that emerged from Demo this year. Many companies in some way talked about mobile. Most companies either provide a web service or use web services as their platform. Most companies were media related in some way provided or used social networking. None of these things are new, by any means, but Demo confirmed their strategic importance and significant implementations. I don't think any of them have cracked the code so to speak but there were many that had exciting visions and demos. visited the ones in which I had most interest. Chris Shipley kicked off the conference with insightful comments about the industry. See the Demo blog for more on her thoughts. Chris screens the companies and introduces them to the stage. After the main tent sessions the attendees got to visit with the companies in the "Demo Hall". There isn't time to visit all of them so I tried to be selective. Some of the ones I found interesting follow. They are in no particular order. (Read more)

Conferences February 6, 2008 03:22 PM

Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Back To DACS

Presentation On December 4th, the Danbury Area Computer Society will hold it's monthly meeting and it will be my honor to give a talk (at 7:45PM) about The Future of the Internet. (This will be the sixteenth year in a row that I have done this). The meeting will be open to the public and will take place in the auditorium at Danbury Hospital. The talk will be an update on how the next generation of the Internet is unfolding and how it will affect our personal and professional lives. I will discuss recent developments that are fueling the rapid evolution of the Internet and enabling more than a billion people to experience a Net that is fast, always on, everywhere, natural, intelligent, easy, and trusted. The potential for information technology to improve healthcare will also be discussed. See this link for comments made about prior DACS presentations.

Conferences November 28, 2007 09:12 PM

Friday, October 26, 2007

Governance

Doctor and Patient It was an educational week at the Leadership Conference for Trustees, Physicians, Executives, & Nurse Executives at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. The conference, which focused on the subject of governance, was organized by The Governance Institute. Although not a new term, governance has taken a much higher profile in both for profit and not for profit organizations. At a very high level governance aims to assure that an organization produces a pattern of good results while avoiding an undesirable pattern of bad circumstances. The Governance Institute focuses on helping hospitals achieve best practices among the leading healthcare boards across the country.

The conference included three days of speeches, Q&A, and breakout sessions that covered many topics including clarification of a hospital board's basic fiduciary duties and core responsibilities, exploration of "best practices" of high-performing boards, understanding of various hospital-physican relationships and complexities of physician credentialing and privileging, approaches to hospital financial planning and capital allocation, and an analysis of the healthcare reform (and cost) being advocated by the various political candidates.

Governance can be a complex topic but at a high level it is mostly common sense. The way I think about it, good governance means being financially efficient but not pushing so hard on the numbers as to cause people to do unnatural things in order to "make" the numbers, focusing on how the leadership of the organization is selected and how they are paid, being transparent with the various stakeholders so they understand the decisions that are made and the rationale behind them, and insuring personal accountability is in place at all levels.

Although governance was the main focus of the conference, all of the speakers had some predictions about where things are headed with American healthcare. It was not a pretty picture. Costs are going to cointinue to escalate to the point where they are a huge part of the economy and exceed the cost of primary and secondary education at the state level. As costs rise they will be pushed toward hospitals and pressures will continue between payers (insurers) and providers. Primary care physicians, already in short supply in many areas, will be in even shorter supply as new graduates seek out speciality areas with more economic potential. As the cost of running a medical practice continues to increase many doctors will choose to become employees of hospitals. Hospitals will consolidate and as they gain economy of scale they will implement electronic medical records and become highly efficient providers of high quality care. Although America does not today offer the highest quality health care in the world, there is significant progress being made toward curing cancer and heart disease. The glass is half full, not half empty.

There was not a lot of spare time but enough to get in a look around the Greenbrier's spectacular 3,500+ acres, have a good hike up Kates Mountain Road, and also locate a benchmark near the old White Sulphur Springs train station (a few pictures in the photo gallery). That brings cumulative benchmarks found to eighty-eight. Some of my colleagues took a tour of the Bunker but we had been there before.

Other patrickWeb stories about healthcare
Pictures from 2002 trip to the Bunker

Conferences, Healthcare, Hiking, Travels October 26, 2007 04:19 PM

Saturday, September 29, 2007

Demo in San Diego

Gadget Demo continues to be my favorite conference -- the semi-annual event took place this past week in San Diego. There were some outdoor tables at the opening reception and I joined one with three friends from many Demos past -- Amy Wohl, Shel Israel, and Steve Larsen. While there were many attendees in their mid-twenties, the four of us joked how we had 150+ years in technology around the table.