Barry Smyth

Well I just spent a very interesting 90 minutes or so following the latest Apple announcement. Some years the reality kinda fall shrt of the expectation on Apple announcements but this did not disappoint. Looks like the iPad will genuinely introduce a new computing categor — and yes I know there were tablet PCs before, but there were also MP3 players long before the iPod. And then there is the $499 starting price!

Anyway, here’s my usual Wordle tag cloud of the twitter conversations (containing the #applelive hashtag) during the event. Enjoy!

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My usual (I should really find something more novel to do …) analysis of Twitter conversations, this time about the Apple Tablet. (See wordle.net for all your tag cloud needs.)

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I’m reading ‘Free‘ by Chris Anderson today. It makes for an interesting read and, while there are plenty of things to disagree with, it does provide a very thought-provoking framing of the novel economics of the information revolution.

One of the counter-intuitive economic models discussed in Free is, as VC Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures puts it, the “zero billion dollar business.” This refers to a new market entrant that, as a result of greatly improved efficiencies, is able to rely on a fraction of the revenues that the market leaders need to operate. Craiglist did this in the classifieds space and Microsoft, and then Wikipedia, did it to the encyclopdia markets.

For example, Craiglist has virtually wiped out the previously lucrative classifieds market in which the largest newspapers enjoyed dominant positions. Indeed the largely no-charge Craiglist service has been ‘blamed’ for sucking in the region of $30 billion out of newspaper stock-market valuations in the US, and yet Craiglist only generates a tiny fraction of this lost value in revenues, in the order of tens of millions of dollars per annum, to cover its own operational costs. Where did the missing money go to? It certainly didn’t remain in the marketplace — one of the reasons why the newspaper industry is on the verge of collapse today — but instead it has been re-distributed through the much larger ecosystem that Craiglist has created. The scale of Craiglist today (about 60m users per month) leads directly to greatly improved supply/demand matching and improved outcomes for the relevant parties. For example, home buyers enjoy a more complete real-estate picture while sellers benefit from a larger audience, and together this has the potntial to create a more efficient property market. Likewise, for Craiglist’s jobseekers and employers.

Something similar happened in the early 1990’s to the billion dolar encyclopedia market, dominated by Brittanica, when Microsoft launched their $99 Encarta as CD-ROM competition for the $1,000+ paper based Encyclopedia Brittanica. By the seond half of the 90’s, once Microfsoft had taken boosted Encarta’s quality, Britannica’s sales had been cut in half and about $600 million dollars had been taken out of the Encyclopedia market per annum. Meanwhile, Microsoft were generating revenues of about $100 million from Encarta sales.

Economists view these as examples of assymetric competition. In both cases new entrants make money by shrinking an existing market with a disruptive new proposition. In the case of Microsoft, for every dollar they earned, they shrunk the encyclopedia market by 6 dollars. And of course today we known that Wikipedia has further insulted the ecyclopedia market by shrinking the market even further. This year Microsoft discontinued Encarta and Wikipedia doesn’t make a penny as it takes millions of dollars away from Britanica.

Here’s a wonderful short presentation by Pattie’s group on their latest game-changing technology demonstrator - think mobile phone + camera + pico-projector - which is a real example of bridging the digital-physical divide.

Google announced its Power Meter project this week. It hints at some very interesting work by Google.org (Google’s philantropic arm). Simply put the basic idea is that it will allow us to benefit from up to the minute electricity consumption reports.

Under the heading “If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it” this is a great step forward when it comes to helping us all to improve our carbon footprint. The problem of course that there is nothing available as yet and Google cant build this themselves. They need yo work with an ecosystem of utilities, device makers and policies makers to allow consumers to have detailed access to their home energy use and make smarter energy decisions. But it is a step in the right direction!

There was a nice article in the Irish Times Innovation Supplement on what we are doing in the area of social search.

Briefly, HeyStaks is a new approach to social search that works with mainstream search engines and helps people to better organize and share their search experiences.

- Barry

There is an interesting paper in IEEE Computer (7-4 SI on UGC) on the creation of user generated street maps. I always thought this to be a great application for collaborative knowledge creation.

- B

There is an interesting piece in the November issue of Fast Company which discussed green tech and the ability of sensors to measure every aspect of what we consume.

The articles points to a range of new apps that will contribute to a more complete and integrated view of our consumption patterns with a view to more accurately measuing our environmental impact.

Companies profiled include IBM, Agilewaves, and Recyclebank.

The piece touches on the new types of biz models that might emerge, such as incentive based points schemes around our green credentials.

Clearly this is all very relevant to the carbon calculator project. We can use the sensor web to measure all of our inputs (resources consumed) and outputs (work or exercise performed) and convert this into a credit/debit.

-B

The idea is simple. People join Zopa online as either borrowers or
lenders. The lenders proffer money not to individuals but to a pool of
people grouped together because of similar creditworthiness. Zopa
assesses the credit risk of the borrowers, pools the capital, and
matches consumers who need money with consumers who want to lend it.
Since Zopa is not technically a bank and doesn’t lend money itself, the
capital requirements to run the business are relatively small.

http://money.cnn.com/2006/09/15/technology/disruptors_zopa.biz2/index.htm

- B

Paul Maritz (vmware; at web2.0 summit panel) spoke about how the cloud promises to allow us to store info in such a way that it can outlive any device or application.

The cloud is like an information bank. People don’t keep their money under the matress any more. They use banks for 3 reasons: 1) security; 2) ease of access; 3) to add value. And so it is with the cloud.

-B