It is well known that our capability to gauge numbers of objects, or people for that matter, is quite limited. Some psychologist claim that beyond 20 we are not able to tell the number of objects in any cluster with some accuracy. And, as the number gets bigger the error gets so big to make the assumption basically useless.

We have seen this at a recent political gathering in Italy where the organisers were claiming 1 million people attended, the opposition downplayed that to less that a hundred thousands and independent observers gauged it around 250,000.  Since we are unable to grasp these numbers anyone of them looks perfectly “credible”. It was curious, at least to me, to see experts debating on what the real number could have been. A potentially accurate estimate of the “maximum” number was given by considering that a very packed croud can push 4 peope per square metre, hence by knowing the surface of that specific square one could set a maximum number of “attendees” (that by the way was much lower than the most optimistic estimate).

Why do I say that was curious? Well because we could have provided not an estimate but an accurate figue with an error lower than 1/100,000. Through magic? NO, just by asking the four wireless telecom operators serving that square how many cell phones were there!

They have to know that, because they are required to hand over any incoming call to those people and in order to do that they have to know where they are.

Now, this is just an example, and a very trivial one indeed, on what an Information Society means: getting accurate date and being able to use them.

We have seen in my previous two posts on the growth of Information expected in this decade the implication on each of us and on the network. With this post I want to draw the implication on our Society. We need to find ways to leverage on this tremendous amount of data, from the most trivial (as I would consider this example) to the most important, like the studying of crowd behavious to create the righ infrastructures and the appropriate security.
in my opinion, Information can be the real seed for ecosystems. The trick is how to use it in a fair way.

Yesterday I shared some forecast on the growth of our Digital Universe and I looked at it from the point of view of how we, as human being, can tackle this ever growing information space.

Today I would like to look at that same forecast from the point of view of the network. For reference you can use the same pointer: www.emc.com/digital_universe

It is obvious that this amount of information will not just be created but it will be transferred from one point to another over a telecommuncation network(s). Actually, some estimates indicate that for any information created there are at least ten copies of it somewhere “out there”. That is why it is basically impossible to delete an information from the web. More than that: every time somebody is accessing an information that information is copied in other places (like the computer accessing the network and possibly in intermediate sites).

The traffic generated and the storage consumed increase much faster than the increase of information being created.

At a first glance it is easy to see that a big portion of this traffic is about video (it beats sound at least 10 to 1, and this ratio is going to increase to 100 to one in this decade as video gets more and more HD). This will require a “fast” network with a lot of capacity if we are going to provide a seamless experience to our customers. As Augmented Reality will become a normal way to interact with objects we will see more and more information attached to any single interaction, and most of it will involve video, images and sound.

A fast network is an optical network, since optical fibre can deliver immense amount of capacity. Besides, a pervasive optical infrastructure is crucial to provide dense wireless bandwidth.

We are not going to require any special intelligence to this optical infrastructure beyond the capability to self manage, self recover and self provision optical paths.

On the other hand, if we take a closer look at the quality of information that will be transported we discover something very interesting: The expected growth of information in this decade has a factor of 44: 44 times more inormation created in 2020 than what we are creating in 2010.  However, the number of packages of information (a package is a virtual container of a single piece of information, be it a movie, a newspaper, a blog post), is estimated to increase 67 folds. That means that on the average we are going to see much smaller packages than larger ones.

Now this may require a “quick” network, that is a network that in addition to provide very high capacity can provide reaction times (in enormous quantity) if it has to manage these packages.

Clearly, one can say that it is not a network biz to manage packages of information, that this is something that can easily be done at the edges of the network. The huge data bases being set up by the Googles and Apples out there is an indication of this approach.

I feel, however, that there is a possibility, and a business reason, for some Operators to become Information Network providers and to look at information management as their real core competence and asset.

Take a look at the latest report from IDC, “the Digital Universe Decade: are you ready?”, www.emc.com/digital_universe .

According to this report by 2020 we will have complete the shift from analogue to digital: by that time all the content being produced and exchanged will be digital, and that means 35 trillion on GB per year.

Some statistics:

-         last year despite the global recession, the Digital Universe set a record. It grew by 62% to nearly 800 EB (800,000,000,000 GB). That is like a stack of DVD reaching from the Earth to the Moon and back.

-         In 2010, the Digital Universe will grow to almost 1.2 ZB (ZettaBytes), that is 1,200,000,000,000 GB

-         By 2020, our Digital Universe will be 44 times as big as it was in 2009. Our stack of DVD would reach half way to Mars.

This tremendous increase in the amount of information begs some questions, like:

-         How will we find the information we need when we need it?

-         How will we know what information we need to keep and how will we keep it?

-         How will we follow the growing number of government and industry rules about retaining records, tracking transactions and ensuring information privacy?

-         How will we protect the information we need to protect?

The report provides several possible answers to these questions and you can refer to it to look at them.

However, the reason for my posting, in addition to share with you this very recent report on our Digital Universe, is to engage you in reflecting on how this growing Digital Universe is impacting on our capacity of learning and how can we change, if needed, our current learning paradigm.

It is not just the growth of the information that is begging the question about learning, it is also the different tools that we are making available that may change the way we learn and the goal of learning.

It is obvious that already today there is no chance anybody can learn whatever is out there. Besides, even assuming one can, by the time she had learnt everything that everything will be but a small part of the information available since every two years we are doubling the available information.

We are condemned to have an outdated knowledge.

Probably, in the future we will need to focus learning on the tools that allow us to make sense of available information, rather than trying to capture as much information as possible into our brains.

Yes, I can hear a multitude of teachers telling me that we are going to create a humanity that does not know how to make 2+2 since they will resort to typing 2+2 onto a keyboard and read the answer. Still this is what we already do. I remember long time ago learning to use the calculating ruler to make multiplications. Nowadays most people wouldn’t know how to use it but today all of us get much more precise results by using a calculator.

What about learning languages? Using Google you can get now a pretty understandable translation of any foreign language (far from perfect, I know, but in ten years time it will be …perfect) and in a few years we can expect to get real time translation of what we say and what we hear. Shall we invest time in learning another language? I would say yes, but I am a guy born in a different era.

Understanding the functioning of brain network is one of the grand challenges of Science: many methods have been applied to analyze and study its structure and function. Interest is clearly motivated by the fact that the some general principles of brain functioning seem to govern also other complex networks, including social, biological and communications networks.

In principle, a brain network can be modelled as graph representing activities in the brain, where the vertices represent anatomical regions and the edges their functional connectivity. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has been used to extract data about how networks of neurons are performing tasks. In these experiments the activity of the brain is measured, in time steps of a few seconds, in data associated to a number of “voxels” of dimension of about 27 mm³. Data are organised in correlation matrices (also with Multidimensional Scaling techniques) to see where there is a correlation among the variables. A correlation matrix can describe correlation among M variables: it is a square symmetrical MxM matrix with the (ij)th element equal to the correlation coefficient r_ij between the (i)th and the (j)th variable.

Over the last two decades, said data analysis techniques have transformed neuroscience: some scientists are even claiming they can identify the brain regions responsible for musical ability, food preference, fairness and even skills by analysing and correlating voxels data.

Also the recent explosion in gene expression experiments has generated a large amount of data to be correlated: think about The Cancer Genome Anatomy Project (CGAP), a program of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) that is researching the molecular patterns changes occurring when a normal cell is transformed into a cancer cell or the relationships between the gene expression profile of a tissue and the pattern of its neighbours.

These are just two example where the capabilities of correlating data have an incredibly high impact value. Analysing interconnectivity is so fundamental to understanding the behaviour of any complex networks.

Also Telecom Operators have huge amount of data, still to be leveraged: in this sense, methods and techniques adopted by neuroscience and genomics can provide valuable lessons learnt.

Have you heard about Groupon, a Social Shopping Site?

Groupon(www.groupon.com), established in August 2008, has achieved an incredible performance in just one and a half years.

Fast growing Groupon, fresh off a $30 million round of financing that valued the company at around $250 million, is back raising new money. They have closed or are in the process of closing a new venture money at a $1.2 billion valuation, say multiple sources (one source says that’s not exactly correct, but close). 

“Groupon raised (or is raising) around $130 million, says a new source, and the valuation is $1.35 billion. Russian holding company and investment firm Digital Sky Technologies  is leading the round, and there’s participation from Battery Ventures  as well. All or nearly all of the round is being used to purchase stock from insiders to give them an early cash out in advance of an IPO.”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/15/the-rest-of-the-details-on-that-monster-groupon-financing/#ixzz0ovaJ6tJN

| So what is Groupon?

The company features a daily deal on the best stuff to do, see, eat, and buy in cities across the United States. By promising businesses a minimum number of customers, Groupon can offer deals that aren’t available elsewhere. For example, let see Recent Deals for New York. Here they propose 10 deals from 22^nd March to 4^th May. It means they lead customers to rush to making a deal in 4 days.

How does it work for you? Go to their website, log on and set your town (Multiple register): you can see Today’s Deal for your town. For example, Today’s Deal on 5^th May is Floral Arrangements, if 100 people buy this deal, you can get it with 35$, that is a 53% discount price but if it doesn’t reach a critical mass, you can’t. However, most of deals are matched in here.

“Groupon offers a daily deal in several cities every day, offering steep discounts up to 40 - 90% off a variety of services (i.e, spas, restaurants, etc.), if enough people buy the deal, everyone gets it, if it doesn’t reach a critical mass, no one gets the deal. The site has accummulated 3 million subscribers and currently manages roughly 40 markets. 3 million “groupons” have been purchased since November 2008, says the company.”

http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/13/groupon-raises-huge-new-round-at-1-2-billion-valuation/#ixzz0owi9eXGo

The important point is there are icons such as Facebook, Twitter and E-mail on the top of homepage and it is easy to spread the information to your friends. Because the success of joint purchase come from Viral marketing, people use the social networks to gather more people and to promote the deal. 

Note that Groupon has 3 million users and 40 types of products and 300 million deals have been made in the one and a half years since it was founded.

| Groupon, the Key of Success

Groupon’s business model is very simple but amazingly fast growing. Actually this area is not Social Commerce but Social Shopping, and there are not success stories in this area so far. 

In this field, there are Living social and Kaboodle which competitors of Groupon, and here is statistics of daily unique visitors, Google Trend.

 

2. Simple service
When you visit the website, you can see how simple it is. Checking Today’s deal for your town and if you want? Buy. You don’t need to get headache from a bunch of information.
Now in the over-information world, many people get headache by finding right information of them. – Some of people pay for filtering service.
This way makes people not worry and buy easily.
Also, Groupon selects product and service which customers want to buy and gives with discount price everyday. The opportunity would be disappeared if you don’t visit the website so that customers visit Groupon everyday. 

3. Using Social Media
In the real store, you could think it is same strategy with ‘Limited to some people’ but it is different. With limited strategy, you should ‘compete’ with others so that you would not tell others. However, with this strategy, makes people tell somebody to get incentive on online. If it happens everyday, it will be huge Viral Marketing.
Through Social Media? It must be much faster. 

Also, Groupon said they will launch Groupon Reward Point system. This is point system for people who apply to buy the products before reaching the minimum price. 1 point is same with 1 cent, and you can apply this point when you buy the product. This system would make people choose Groupon.

The Groupon service is very likely to be available not only the implement of internet web site but also in smartphone business.

If fast fashion brands apply this kind of system in their supply chain? For example, ordering on online(Groupon), making clothes, then sell in their store at appointment date. Do you think it is possible? I think it’s possible.

Last month, Groupon is expanding into Europe by buying Berlin-based City Deal GmbH. Can Groupon succeed in European country? I will vote “Yes”

Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704379004575248563606136520.html
http://www.bloter.net/archives/31242

Social networks are proliferating on the web as an answer to the needs of some communities: for instance that of Facebook of making our daily activities known to friends or that of Foursquare of sharing travel experiences. The one of Twitter of debating over anything and having a Forrest Gump to follow what inspires us, rather than the one of Venmo based on the idea of sharing money with friends by establishing trusted relationships. Or that of Linkedin of facilitating contacts among who does business, and many others.

In other words we are seeing the emergence of something like the kind of tools that helped us navigate the information glut in Web 1.0 and that now, in Web 2.0, has turned into the abundance of people that makes us taking the noise for signal.

So, even the time to turn purchases into conversations, comments and tips is arrived. And if you can additionally get special savings at your favorite online retailers and find the lowest prices in town… Les jeux sont faits! Well, Swipely, that according to what I understood is a direct competitor of Blippy, is still in private beta, so be patient!

Facebook has been under fire from US lawmakers, senators, consumer groups and the European Union over new features that they claim compromise the privacy of its users. The message is loud and clear: users desire to have precise and comprehensive controls and want them to be simpler and easier to use.
Last month Facebook introduced some features that include the ability for partner websites to incorporate Facebook data, expanding the social network’s presence on the Internet. US senators are worried that personal information about Facebook users is being made available to third party websites, advocating that sharing personal information should be an opt-in procedure in which a user specifically gives permission for data to be shared. Moreover, they underline how Facebook now obligates users to make publicly available certain parts of their profile that were previously private.
On Saturday, Facebook said it plans to simplify privacy controls at the popular social-networking service to appease critics. However, a shift to an opt-in model does not seem to be in Facebook’s projects.
The privacy issue is taking a toll and it could reopen the competition.

MySpace is trying to return to the limelight by announcing that online privacy is taken very seriously at the company, announcing that it’s planning the launch of a simplified privacy setting for its user profiles. It might be a good strategy to regain popularity over Facebook, seen that Myspace is seeking to differentiate itself from the rival that long since has definitely eclipsed the News Corp-owned social networking service with its more than 400 million members. And according to what Facebook announced at Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference a month ago, the company has gained more than 10 million active users in 3 weeks. A significant number? When compared to 2009, not really.
There is a two weeks ago article in which the author argues that looking at the past growing of Facebook, despite its optimism in announcing an ever increasing customer base, Facebook’s active user growth dropped 25% to 50%. The privacy issues might be hurting? Or simply Facebook’s growth just suddenly peaked, as it happened with other SNs?

The last decade has seen a continuous growth of screens, television ones for sure, but we have seen screen appearing in cars, in waiting halls, in shops, actually in any kind of objects.

New technologies have been created in labs all around the world but the winner so far are still LCD and Plasma, technologies invented many years ago. The problem with the new technologies is that although they provide better performance (resolution, brightness, contrast) their cost is prohibiting their success on the mass market.

One of these promising technologies is OLED, Organic Light Emitting Diode: it has better energy efficiency and provides a beautiful crisp image with fast refreshing time. Ideal, but costly. A 15” screen today may cost over 2,700$ versus a cost of 100$ for an LCD one.

Now Du Pont has developed a process to create OLED screen by printing them in large volume and size. The manufacturing would therefore decrease the cost per screen significantly.

OLED screen printed using the DuPont ink

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

According to the announcement made last week by DuPont it is possible to print a 50” television screen in under 2 minutes. Printing? Umh, is the print going to fade away as it is the case of other inks we use everyday? Well, yes, but DuPont says they have a life expectancy of about 15 years.

An OLED screen is made up of 12 to 15 layers of materials. Each of these layers has to be printed with extreme precision and the ink should not “bleed” during the printing process, it has to have the required electrical and optical properties and shall maintain them consistently over time.

To achieve this DuPont is using active molecules specific to each layer and that is not soluble with respect to neighbour layers. It has therefore required not just one “invention” but 15: one chemical composition for each layer.
Of course the ink is just the start. The next step was to develop a multi-nozzle printer that can make production efficient. To that effect the usual inkjet technology was not appropriate and DuPont turned to Dainippon Screen and co-developed a printer working like a garden hose. It creates a continuous seamless stream of ink (the inkjet printer creates single droplets) that moves over the surface at a speed of four to five metres per second.

http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/25337/?nlid=2990&a=f

As the television screen market reaches the point of a complete substitution of the CRT television the television manufacturers will be looking at a convincing proposition to convince the market to move on and substitute what they have. OLED screens may be a good one.

Other technologies, like the increasing performance of eInk display and the smart material based display, are likely to attract the market interest in this decade. One thing is for sure: our world is visual and technology will help to take advantage of that.

To tell the truth, this sentence does not belong to Google, but was stated by Steve Jobs years ago, when he thought that applications could be delivered through a new generation of incredibly powerful browsers. However, events led him to believe that “there’s an app for that”, rather than a URL, and “Build for the Web” is now the leitmotiv behind Google’s philosophy. Sure, we must agree on the meaning of “building”…

Google’s overall mission was clear in my mind since 2006 when they acquired YouTube. Was it a technological problem? Absolutely not. Google already had a superior in-house technology, named Google Video. But Google’s goal was not to beat YouTube with a competitive technology, even if they could be stronger. What they aimed was simply the web user acquisition, buying a service platform that was becoming increasingly popular. In 2007 Google decided to get into the display advertising business buying Double Click, with an all-cash deal that was almost twice what they paid for YouTube. If I look, as a matter of fact, at the trends in Google’s acquisition strategy, I see they started buying companies mainly to get more technology and data useful to their core business, while in most of their recent acquisitions the focus is more on the grabbing of communities to enlarge their user base. Google jumps on the online bookstore bandwagon with Google Editions and enters the Smart Grid arena, organizing smart meter energy data. Google jumps into smartphone business with Nexus One. Google Jumps into social business with the Gmail-based entry Buzz and acquiring the social search start-up Aardvark, deepening the commitment to social networking. Google jumps into website traffic comparison game with Google Trends for websites. Google jumps into social bookmarking, radio advertising, and casual gaming market by acquiring Labpixies (the development company that has produced a plethora of casual games and applications/gadgets for Facebook, Android, the iPhone OS, and more). Google jumps into photosharing acquiring Picnik, one of the first sites to bring photo editing to the cloud. It could seem difficult to understand why Google didn’t develop an online extension of Picasa, but it’s just the same YouTube story: Google buys companies that bring communities, no matter if they have no technology. I can complain that Facebook has bad design and I’d make it nicer, but surely it has enough design to work for its users. Google jumps into advertising market in a big way acquiring Admob, the mobile ad platform that has been especially popular on the iPhone: the purchase is the third largest buy Google has made in its history, following only the purchases of DoubleClick and YouTube. Last month, Bloomberg’s Businessweek has reported that Google is in talks to purchase ITA Software Inc., the travel industry software company that acts behind travel sites such as Orbitz, Kayak, TripAdvisor Flights, CheapTickets, and many of the U.S. and international airlines. Will Google challange Expedia with their own travel agency?

From a little time now the list of acquisitions made by Google is so long that trying to remind it is a great mnemonic exercise. Now is the norm to see Google bite each kind of market, following the megalomaniac project of transforming the Internet into their Orwellian Ginternet. But there was still an important part of the puzzle still missing: applications. Three days ago began a new battle in the long war between Google and Apple. At the annual Google’s conference for developers, in fact, the Big G announced with pleasure their own open marketplace for web apps that will be available to the impending lightweight web-based Google Chrome OS. The official launch of Chrome Web Store is planned for later this year and for the Linux, Mac and Windows browser. Some features are borrowed from the Android Market, as the payout structure, while the revenue sharing between the service provider and the third party developer seems to follow a 30/70 ratio, in full Apple style! The war with Apple is getting harder and this is just the beginning…

Visit the Chrome Web Store for more info, there is an interesting Developer’s Guide, a preliminary documentation on how to create and load web apps for the store.

Start watching the video from 3:25 to go straight to the point!