The Logo of ADay.Org

It started many years ago when taking a picture was all about “film”. 100 photographers in the USA were asked to take pictures in each State during a week. That is why it was called USA 24/7: photos taken at any hour during 7 weeks.

Then Internet and digital photography became mass market and America 24/7 was opened up to the public. Anyone could take pictures over that specific week and send them to a central place where theory were analyzed and a few selected to be published in a book. In the week of May 12-18, 2003, tens of thousands of Americans took shots of what they considered highlights of daily life and generated some 2 TB of pictures. An amazing volume of storage at that time, and an amazing amount of transmission over the Internet.

Out of that a book was created and you can still get it on Amazon.

Now it is ADay in the world, a testimony of the spread of Internet and digital cameras all over the world.

Capture daily life on May 15th 2012

On this one single day we ask you to pick up your camera and help us photograph daily life. What is close to you? What matters to you? We will connect your images to images from all around the world, creating a unique online experience where photographs will be shared, compared and explored. Your view on life will be preserved to inspire generations to come.

On May 15th, as you see on the clip I cut from the ADay website, you can take a picture with your camera and send it to the organizers. How many people will do that? A million? I think it will be more, will see what the statistics will be on May 16th.
However, even a million snapshots makes for  some 5TB, considering a mix of photos taken with a reflex camera, more likely to be used by people that aim for nice pictures…, and pictures taken with cell phones. By the way, I hope the organizers will publish also the statistics about the “tool” chosen for taking the pictures.

What is of interest to me is the possibility to cluster and involve all people of the world in a task. Communications and the Web have changed our social relationships, as I mentioned two days ago they have warped space and time.

Studies on collective intelligence as well as those on autonomic systems are pointing to a yet to be explored wold of knowledge and possibilities. The GAIA paradigm so far applied to ecology will be extended to include the GAIA of minds and I find this particularly fascinating.

Some days ago I’ve found an interesting website called “M2M APPS” that is a platform for the global machine-to-machine communication value chain.

The goal is to aggregate companies in the M2M market and share info to create new ideas and business opportunities.

I knew other websites where companies inside the same market can register to promote themselves, for example the Green Economy Network website promoted by Assolombarda. In this case every company can declare their activities and business in the value chain but at the end it’s just a repository 1.0.

In the M2MAPPS portal, instead, I’ve found 2.0 concepts because there is also the opportunity to share ideas, to communicate and so to develop the borning business of M2M and related Applications and Services. Using social media channels and functionalities, blogs, and forums everyone can engage in professional discussions, Q&A sessions and polls, get in touch with leading M2M experts and keep ears to the ground of the global M2M industry.

Sharing info and ideas  is the best way to enhance and develop business.

Douglas Rushkoff, a theorist in media and new technologies,  in a recent interview with CNN stated:

“It’s not about jobs, he says, it’s about productivity. Technology lets us bypass corporations, make our own work — a new model. The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?”

Listening to this and remembering my post a few days ago discussing the announcement of Foxconn to introduce 3 million robots (to replace human workforce) I really start to wonder what the future enterprise can be like and whether we are going towards a jobless Society.

Decrease of jobs in agriculture in the US in the last 20 years

We have seen in the past significant changes in job typologies.

As an example look at the graph showing the decrease of jobs in agriculture in the last 20 years in the USA. This decrease started in the nineteen century when over 60% of people were working in agriculture. Today less than 4 percent works in agriculture but the yield has dramatically increased. Agriculture today, thanks to chemicals and better understanding of crops generates 10 times more harvest than hundred years ago. The productivity increase, therefore, is close to 150.

Jobs lost in agriculture have been absorbed by industry and more recently by the service area. New technologies leading to productivity increase are starting to slash jobs in these areas as well and contrary to the XVIII and XIX centuries we do not have anything in sight in terms of new job opportunities.

Are we really leading to a jobless Society? This looks like a paradox. You have so much productivity that you no longer need to employ people but if people are not employed they will not make money and hence they will not buy making the increase in productivity useless.

The problem is extremely complex and I do not pretend to understand it and thus to propose solutions. However, there are some considerations that can be made.

Productivity increase goes into two directions: decrease of cost in producing a single item and more production capacity. More production capacity requires more consumption capacity and this ties up with the economic sustainability. Clearly the decrease in cost (and price) makes goods more affordable, and this is a good news.

The decrease in the production cost is, in a growing number of sectors, not just the result of an increased productivity but also the consequence of an amazing decrease in the cost of production processes. The shift from hardware to software, the possibility of producing hardware through flexible production lines manned by robots inflate the gains of the economy of scale.

The side effect is that producing goods is becoming a commodity where what makes the difference is the creativity not the control or the ownership of the production infrastructure. Hence, every person having creativity and skill can produce goods. Capital is not the limiting factor.

I can imagine that in the future we are going to see large and sophisticated production, distribution and communications infrastructures (in some cases corresponding to few large enterprises controlling the market, in other the presence of a significant number of medium size enterprises providing alternative infrastructures) allowing a myriad of one man enterprises (just to emphasize the concept) to develop the business. In this sense I do not see a jobless Society rather a Society where jobs are significantly different from the one we are used today. The challenge is education and the transition.

Following up on yesterday post about the hiring of 3 million robots by Foxconn, I kept brooding on what the future may be like in terms of production plants.

One of the statements I proposed yesterday was that robotization of production, by substituting human workers, decrease the importance of the salary factor hence production is no longer attracted by those areas where the salary is lower. On the other hand, robotic production when on a scale like Foxconn where million of robots are involved is very much capital intensive and tends to create itself an infrastructure difficult to duplicate.

Global intermediation portal

Are we going to see the birth of infrastructure oligopoly smiler to what we had in the past in areas like car manufacturing?

In my opinion this is what may happen in the medium term but longer term evolution is possibly different. Production infrastructures may become clusters of lower capital intensive production areas linked by efficient logistics making it possible to increase competition among various production islands whilst keeping the advantage of scale.

To see what I mean think about Alibaba. It is the largest portal to access manufacturing capabilities in China. Wherever you are in the world you can use Alibaba to connect to manufacturers in China, without even knowing their names, place your RFQ and get an answer within a few days, sometimes within a few hours. You can ask for quotation to develop a custom chip sending the specs and you will receive quotations for a prototype and for the final product. It is like owning Intel without the capital needed for it and being able to produce your own chip.

Now, project this into a twenty years horizon (but I know that as Einstein once said the future comes sooner than you would expect…). You will have billion of robots clustered in many places in the world, highly flexible in terms of what they can do, and waiting to get specs on what to build. These specs may be fragmented into various parts, say one for the mechanical parts, one for the electronics, one for bioengineering and so on, and each part can be outsourced. An intermediator can take care of ensuring the end to end manufacturing to deliver the product.

I can see this happening, and I see that the Cloud (in the sense of a borderless coordination infrastructure virtualizing manufacturing capabilities and implementing the required logistics) can become an important piece of the worldwide manufacturing capability.

The interesting thought is that such an approach does not need to be designed top down, it can become reality through a number of bottom up innovations couched into a unity by some careful design of interfaces. Also, once you are moving manufacturing to the Cloud, you will find yourself in an environment where also customers are present with their data and their virtual ambient and therefore you will see a continuum between manufacturing, sales, customer care and customized evolution of the products.

Besides, the Clouds will become the natural economic ecosystems and marketplace. Quite a different situation from what we have today although the Apps world provides a clear indication of how this new manufacturing world may look like.

According to Xinhuanet Foxconn is planning to “hire” 1 million robots within the next three years to replace a significant part of its 1.2 million workers.

Currently Foxconn uses 10,000 robots in its production lines and plans to get 300,000 more by next year to reach 1 million by 2014. They will be working on components mounting, welding and varnishing, activities that today are performed by blue collar workers. Curiously, the announcement was made at a workers’ dance party.

Foxconn is a Taiwanese company with several plants in mainland China where it produces products for Apple, Sony and Nokia among others. In the recent years they have been harshly criticized for a string of suicides attributed to the harsh working conditions.

The announcement may be read as a step in the direction of moving to robots those activities that are more repetitive. There has been no statement on what will happen to workers that today are doing the activities that will be taken up by robots in the coming years.

Clearly, this is a much broader issue affecting many companies and many workers all around the world. In a way as robots will become more and more flexible (and thus their cost can be spread over longer periods of time and more products lines) many human activities in the factory will be taken over by them and this might have a greater impact on countries having absorbed most of the production jobs of the world.

Robots are making the labour cost an even field for every country so we might see by the end of this decade a reverse trend with manufacturing plants returning to today’s high labour cost countries. The robots will require highly skilled personnel and this will be a deciding factor on selecting a manufacturing plant location, no more the cost of salary.

Interestingly, the robots flexibility will also made possible to increase the customization and this in turn will change the relation between the point of sale and the manufacturing plant. And, what we have in between is telecommunications networks with the product becoming an integral part of the telecommunication infrastructure and pathway from the customer to the service.

Just read an interesting blog on Technology Review about the likely demise of the term Web 2.0 and I cannot help to wonder what will be next.

Occurrencies of the word Web 2.0 on ... the web

As shown in the graph the number of citation of the word Web 2.0 peaked in 2007 and it has been declining ever since.

Of course any fancy name gets dusty after a while and new ones are needed. So no surprise there. It was inevitable that the Web 2.0 would have been replaced, sooner or later but the Web 3.0.

On the other hand, Web 2.0 has not been just a name but a concept that we have seen put into practice. Nowadays most of the times we look for information we do that by using a service and the information is encapsulated into the service. Think about looking for the weather forecast ten years ago and remember yourself typing something like www.weatherchannel.com and what we are doing today: just click on a sun icons to get the info we are interested in, because the place we are interested is already memorized in the icon.

With the Web 3.0 we are moving a step forward embedding our context into the actions performed so that the results will fit the specific interest we have at this particular time, in this particle place.

So welcome Web 3.0.

Now, if I think about other names, copycat of the Web 2.0, like Enterprise 2.0 or Telco 2.0 I do not see we made some real “quantic” progress with what we had before (apart the name and the consultancy fees associated with it…). I guess part of the reason is that in the Web 2.0 the change was brought forward by the Web ecosystem through hundreds of thousands of players each one pigging back on the others creating a self sustaining stream of evolution.

With Telcos and Enterprises what happened was the attempt, sometimes successful, to create some new services or to change some tiny parts of the whole according to the 2.0 concept. But changing the whole of the enterprise to match that would have required reinventing the company and this was out of the question. You can probably create an Enterprise 2.0 from scratch but you cannot transform an existing, efficient company in something that is completely different.

Coming to the headline of this post: are we going to see Enterprise 2.0, Telco 2.0 fading away soon? I think so. We will be trying to ride the new wave of the 3.0 and the 2.0 simply will become too old to be pursued.

So, what could an Enterprise 3.0 be like? Personally I would connect that to the idea of a completely delocalized enterprise, no more having a physical location but only a connective fabric, a sort of Enterprise in the Cloud. An enterprise missing a strong centralized control creating its offer through the harmonized cooperation of independent groups of specialists, much more flexible to respond to market dynamics.

And what about a Telco 3.0? Again, picking my brain, I would say that a Telco 3.0 will be a Telco dealing with data connectivity, not with wire (less) connectivity; it will be much less tied up to what we consider today as infrastructures (although it will still have plenty of atoms to deal with, in form of data centers).

Both the Enterprise 3.0 and Telco 3.0 are such because they are focussing on semantics rather than on syntax. Syntax remains the asset that needs to be leveraged (infrastructures and processes) but the real competitive advantage will derive from the management of semantics, in particular that of their customers (and users). They will need to know what their customers context is, what their background is and also what their intentions are and deliver personalized services and products at mass market price.

I was reading an interview to Microsoft Chief Researchers, Craig Mundie, on the evolution of the office and I was struck by his prediction about tge future of computing devices. Now the focus is on tablet but by the end of the decade the room will become our computer.

Any surface is a window into the world of bits

What struck me is not the prediction per se, I started to voice the same vision in 1999, but the fact that Microsoft is approaching the point where they see the PC disappearing into a cloud. Their new Office 365 is clearly a step in this direction.

I have posted the nice video from Corning, A world made of glass, some time ago, and there you see exactly this same vision, an environment that becomes a seamless interface to information and services.

According to Mundle:

“We will see a lot more displays in the office, and they will be built into surfaces horizontally and also be on the walls or in the walls. I think that a kind of completely continuous model, where you are using speech, gesture, and touch in a more integrated way, will become more commonplace. There will be a subset of that fixed environment that you will want to take with you, called the portable office, and the evolution of the laptop will be that. And there will be a mobile environment, which is the phone and other devices [including] tablets of certain types.”

This is clearly a vision that extends to any ambient, including the home. There are still significant hurdles in creating an effective “ambient” interface. One thing is to have a screen on a surface (this is a technology challenge and we see how to tackle it), quite another is to transform a complete ambient into a “coherent” interface.

Another point in his interview is the way he refers to the cloud: as an infrastructure and as a commodity. You don’t even realize it is there, as you no longer pay attention to the wires providing energy to your lamps. Now this is something that I resonate with but it is not something that would create a significant business for the “Manager of the Cloud”. I think that Operators, as they embark on providing Cloud related biz, need to create a portfolio of services that are much more data related and less infrastructure related.

A new approach to working space designed by Steelcase

Personally, I stay in the office very little time, most of my time is spent in other places and even when I am at the office I am more likely to hob-nob with other colleagues in open spaces or other people’s office. Still, I am always on the job, regardless of the time zone I am in or the time of the day (what time am I talking about anyhow?). Internet and devices able to connect from everywhere keep me in the loop all the time.

It is good to know that I am not alone, although I have to say many of my colleague are still under the impression that if you are not at your desk, 8 to 5, you are not really working: in a recent article published by Technology Review it is noted that the concept of working space is changing and it has actually already changed in some industries.

The uptake f tablets makes people even more detachable from the dest. Unlike the laptop that you often leave on the desk when going to talk with someone else, you are likely to take the tablet along with you and the tablet hence becomes “your” office, independently of where you are.

Cisco has undertaken an experiment, the Collaborative Connected Workplace environment, where workers no longer have  desk but get whatever is available, sharing the space with others. There are rooms around for privacy when you need to make a call or have a sensitive discussion but most of the time is spent on shared tables like the one in the picture.

Interestingly, the Cisco experiment was prompted by the discovery that desks where empty 3 days a week. The outcome is not just a 37% saving in office space but better working environment and more effective communications.

I foresee a time, within this decade, where many companies will have a mail box address and will exist as connected communities with their nodes (employees) dynamically stationed wherever it is most efficient to be, and that will rarely be at what we consider today as the office.

This is also good news for Telecom Operators and for the Cloud 2.0, the one that will virtualize enterprise processes and value chains.

The amount of information being created, transmitted, processed and consumed is getting so large that it is ever more difficult to have an idea of its dimensions. So it is no wonder that some researchers try to match it with planetary distances, like years ago we were saying that the information produced in 2002 were it printed would have produced a pile of papers reaching the Moon, and 3 years later reaching the Sun…

The arrow points to Alpha Centauri

Now the new estimate from the University of California in San Diego indicated that enterprises world servers are processing 9.57 Zettabytes (thousand billions of billions) of information that would be equivalent to the 5.6 billion mile high stack of books that can reach Neptune and back repeated 20 times!

The consumer market in the US has consumed 3.6 ZB in 2008, which at the rate of growth we have seen should equal to something like 12 ZB this year (and just in the USA).

Interestingly, the forecast for information processed by enterprise servers by 2024 (assuming the present pace of growth) should reach 1.2 Yottabyte (million of billion of billion) that printed on paper would let us create a “bean stalk” reaching the Alpha Centauri, the closest star (close but still pretty far away!).

Of course these kind of predictions are more fun than anything else. By 2024 the Moore’s law will be history and some profound change can be expected in the structure of the market. Anyhow, it is sure that enterprises will be based even more on data than today and the whole value chain will be significantly different from the ones we have now.

At the Future Centre we have a project focussing on exploring the changes that may affect the enterprise clockwork once Social Networks will find a way to become part of the enterprise processes.

As usual, we are also challenging our ideas with a set of meetings/conferences involving friends in Venice. One of this conferences will be (in June) about the future of Social Networks and biz. As I am preparing for that I run into Whereberry.

My first "I would like to ..."

At first sight, this might seem to have little to share with our goal. It is a new service, that piggy back on Facebook, aiming at creating communities to discuss what we want to do in the future.

Do you fancy a restaurant with Indian food. Say that on Whereberry and some of your friends or friends of friends may come up with information, suggestions or even the proposal to join forces and wish to fulfill them together.

That trigger me into thinking that, maybe, a sort of service like this, customized for an enterprise may prove valuable.

We receive every year “our goals” and by analyzing them and sharing part of them within the enterprise we might be able to generate a community focussing on their achievement.

I really feel that once the new generation will be hired in our companies we will see a different way to tackle objectives and a different way to achieve them. Crowd-sourcing and social networks are likely to play a significant role, particularly in the innovation area. Don’t you think so?