The evolution of networks resources will be linear: more fibers, particularly in metropolitan and distribution networks, deployed according to economic parameters, hence sensitive to regulatory framework evolution; more wireless bandwidth provided by more spectrum availability, better utilization (both of these factors are real but not revolutionary, given the intrinsic limitation of the available spectrum and of the high efficiency already reached in spectrum optimization), and more importantly by the use of unregulated spectrum, low power impulse radio communications, cognitive radio, device based cells dynamically meshed.

Autonomic Systems taking the upper hand

The tremendous increase in smart devices will expand the number of autonomous networks at the edges and these networks will have globally more processing power, more data storage capacity and more communications bandwidth than todays Operators owned networks.

As already pointed out by Antonio in some of these posts, the Cloud is moving from big data centers to myriads of devices transforming itself into a “fog”.
This fog is going to be an integral part of the communications fabric, acting a a bit like the serotonin and dopamine in the brain, as already pointed out in the previous post.

Any new product produced n the fourth decade of this century, as well as any new born human being, will become an integral part of the communications fabric extending it so that we won’t have a communications shortage due to new users. Every user is at the same time also a network provider.

Like in nature’s ecosystem communications become an emerging property of the ecosystem itself. In the savanna there are no trails as long as there are only few animals. But as the number of animals grow, some cluster into herds and communications trails start to emerge and these change the ecosystem communications infrastructure attracting other kind of animals and changing the vegetation. It just takes volumes and then it all falls into place.

I see a similar evolution in the telecommunications fabric.

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.

Ettore Majorana was an Italian theoretic physicist and one of the fathers of quantum and nuclear physics. He is well known for his mysterious disappearance. What is often unknown about Ettore, is his interest in economy and mainly social behaviour. In his last article, “The value of Statistical Laws in Physics and in Social Sciences”, he argued an interpretation of every phenomenon, natural and social, as governed by the fundamental laws of Quantum Mechanics.

He stressed the inappropriateness of classical attitude in considering Nature governed by deterministic laws. He argued that Quantum Mechanics suggests that there is an “essential analogy between physics and the social sciences”. In other words, he prospected an investigation of social behaviour with the Quantum formalism. But then he mysteriously disappeared and nobody has followed this avenue, at least until recently.

Some of his ideas are being recovered today in different fields such as economy (e.g. econo-physics) and neurobiology:  “previously I never could see the point of introducing quantum mechanics into discussions of consciousness. But here at least is a strict argument requiring the introduction of quantum indeterminateness”, said biologist John Searle.

I wonder whether Majorana’s take can be extended to emerging behaviours in complex dynamical systems, ranging from ecosystems to financial markets and future networks. I have in mind a specific example: can we early detect tipping points at which sudden shifts of the a system’s behaviour to a contrasting dynamical regime may occur ? Predicting such critical points might be very advantageous.

The growth of storage and processing capacity in many objects, cell phones and media servers but also digital cameras, game stations, white goods and, soon, product labels, is creating a completely new scenario thanks to the seamless connectivity that these objects can have. It is no longer an isolated improvement here and there: connectivity transforms local enhancement into a global growth and, according to several scientists this is going to bring us beyond the thresholds of passive objects, into a sentient world.
The distance between an object and the reactivity, understanding and serendipitous behavior of living beings has always seemed so immense to be beyond any possibility of bridging. But now most scientists are talking about gaps between these two worlds and gaps that are getting narrower and seeing tiny bridges built across. Someone is going even further saying that the distance will be overcome by the next decade and people will get used to perceive an object as today it perceives a dog: I know it is different from me but it understand, has its whims, can partner with me, even feel something about me.

Even if we dismiss this scenario, and we can do this for at least this decade, we have to confront a changing reality, something that is emerging from the connection of information, something that a paper I read recently calls”Collective Memory”.

Collective Memory clustering our scattered information

In the paper there is an explicit reference to cell phones and other portable devices and it makes sense since these are the ones having embedded connectivity, storage and processing as core functions. But I believe that the reasoning will have to expand and include many others in the coming years.

An interesting point, in line with some discussion I posted in the last weeks, is that this is bound to change radically communications networks. A point being made is that current communications networks are designed to serve a quite stable environment. Actually the advent of mobile communications with cell phones moving around, now being under coverage, now disappearing, has led to a quite dynamic environment and the higher routing complexity in a wireless network is there to prove it. By the way, this complexity, thanks to the increased processing power of chips is completely masked to us, the users, and also to the wallet of Operators that can manage it at a lower cost.

However, it is true, that the changing nature of these devices, now used to talk, then to exchange tiny transactions, then to send images and then to receive a data stream, is putting a strain on classical network traffic management. In the article the author suggests that a different protocol suite may be needed to support effectively these new demands.

One way yo tackle this challenge, lack of network stability, proposed by a group of researchers in a paper on this month issue of Distributed Computing, http://www.springerlink.com/content/1508374317858254/fulltext.pdf , would be to associate a shared memory to the network. The idea, that stems from a study to provide high reliable access to information to soldier on a battle field, is that information gets stored in many places and continuously updated. The retrieval of information occurs by polling many places and comparing results. Majority wins. It has been demonstrated that this approach works well under critical conditions. Take a look at this review of that paper:

http://www.kurzweilai.net/collective-memory?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=0c686aa2e3-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email

What intrigues me most, however, it is not the use of strange exotic network architectures on combat field, rather the fact that the increased capacity of the infrastructure and the availability of plenty of storage at the edges make new management of information possible in our everyday life.

What happens is that local enhancements, once coupled with pervasive connectivity, transform the whole communication infrastructure into an ecosystem. And ecosystems, by definition, have no lawyers, no contractual obligations…A scary thing for us who have been used to touch base with the legal department even before starting to dream!

The Japanese symbol for

I am here in Tokyo at the Future Centre Alliance yearly meeting, hosted for the first time in Japan, and it is quite an experience since there are many Japanese representatives of several Japanese companies that have an interest in understanding how can future visions produced by Future Centres be exploited.

The theme of the meeting is BA, which is not the shorthand for British airways but an important concept in Japanese culture. Actually, it is so important that can be associated to almost anything, including Future Centres. Apparently BA stands t indicate a physical place, but also an atmosphere, a situation a given moment in time, a scene and a stage, the stock exchange, a market value and a field in physics.

What is of interest to me is the kind of trigger in thoughts that the discussion generated inside my BA Brain…

Indeed, communications (and telecommunications) are extending the physical place one can denote with BA to a connectivity space, made possible by telecommunications. Internet, in particular, has delocalized anything, whatever is on Internet is just a click away (in Web 1.0) or can be aggregated (in web 2.0) or can be part of a meaning (in Web 3.0).

If I look at our Telecom Italia Future Centre I see that what we wanted and still want to do, is to create a BA with people and institutions sharing a passion for reshaping and understanding possible futures. At the same time, we are not just operating in a BA made possible by communications, by sharing ideas and involving more and more players we are also creating new BA, what we call ecosystems.

This, I feel is interesting. By sharing ideas and acting on them, mostly independently of one another, we are effectively creating new spaces, BA, that include cooperation spaces, knowledge spaces and also market spaces.

Wikipedia is an example of a knowledge space but in a way it is a old way for a knowledge BA. It is out there, it is not part of my knowledge. By interweaving Wikipedia with my communications tools and working tools I can get much closer to that knowledge, since it starts to be accessible as I do things. Still it remains out there.
Will it ever become part of myself? There are technologies, on the edge of science fiction, that would allow, in thirty years time may be, to plug in my (your) brain to the internet and to have it taking decision based on what is out there as well as on what is in there.

This third step mixing outside reality with internal perception is closer to the Japanese philosophy of BA (as I understood it) since it moves the interaction between a subject (me) and an object (that is out there) to the level of “experience” something that is based on the outside, on the interaction with me (my inside) and that is creating something new and specific for each person. This reflect the philosophical idea that BA emerges and is characteristics of creation (again, this is what I understood, it is my BA! You may want to go and look for your BA starting with reading The concept of “BA”: building a foundation for knowledge creation by Ikujiro Nonaka and Noburo Konno printed in the California Management Review Vol 40, No 3).

In the enterprise domain I can imagine that some sort of BA representing the know how of that enterprise may be possible and can be integrated in any day decision of people operating in that organization (including those that are not that enterprise employees but happen to work in that environment). This is an exciting area we are planning to explore at the Future Centre in 2011. And, of course, we would welcome all of you to become part of this BA!

Less than two years ago EveryTrail, www.everytrail.com, set up a nice application, first running onto the iPhone, that took advantage of the GPS embedded in the cell phone to record the trail as you walked it. It could have been a hike in the mountainside or a leisure stroll on a beach or a shopping spree. Whatever. You decided to record your whereabouts and then you posted it on their website. You could use that record for future travel and you could share it with some friends or with the world. Actually, that is what most people did: “I was there! Take a look!”

Of course you had the opportunity to annotate the trail with photos and comments: Was here, did this, it was worth it…”

Tracking a Christmas Shopping Spree in Turin

As of last week the Everytrail data base contained over 300,000 trips distributed over 160 countries (and yes, there was also one I posted, to show the Christmas shopping path I was led through by my sweet wife…).

So far we have the User Generated Content, UGC. But now EveryTrail has announced a new feature that let users “sell” their micro tourist guides. All of a sudden, they have shifted gear and the ecosystem that was created through the aggregation of people content and enterprises wishing to point out their wares and services fitting that specific trail now can track and redistribute value to its constituency.

I’ve to admit I never thought of that. My impression was that EveryTrail was looking at making money out of ads customised on each trail. They went a bit farther and I think that this idea of harvesting value generated by users and redistributing it is going to become mainstream in the coming years. Kudos to EveryTrail to show us the … trail (or path).

The word ecosystems has become popular, both with reference to the environment and to the business and I like to think that the Future Centre share some of this responsibility.

There are several differences between natural and business ecosystems and many times I have had to respond  to challenge from people who are, usually correctly,  pointing out that it is improper to suggest an equivalence of the one to the other.  I have being doing so also through this blog, and will continue to do that to stimulate a debate.

First of all let me be blunt: there is no natural ecosystem, that is just a figment of our imagination, a way to model a set of relations that we perceive among (a subset of) constituencies. We talk about the dynamic balance among carnivores- herbivores-vegetation, about the delicate relations among a proud of lions but we forget that such an ecosystem comprises bugs of many sorts,  billions of billions of microbes, trillions of trillions of molecules.  Our concept of natural ecosystem is just a model, an abstraction of reality that is not even understood in its details. But it is a useful abstraction!

A lion when hungry chases a gazelle and provided it is fast enough (or the gazelle is not fast enough)  it will have dinner. That is a reasonable description that is statistically valid. But there have been cases of lions getting along with a gazelle and never looking at it as a meal. This does not invalidate the model … because it is just a model, it is not the reality. As far as it matches reality most of the time and what we want is a general understanding that is ok.

Same thing applies to business ecosystems, they are a model as well.

As for natural ecosystems it is difficult, correction, impossible, to exactly define the boundary. The savannah ecosystem embeds the lion / gazelle ecosystem and this embeds the proud of lions ecosystem. At the same time the proud of lions ecosystems is embedded in the forest ecosystem and the savannah ecosystems partly overlaps with river ecosystems and watering holes ecosystems.

When we talk about an ecosystem we need to define its boundary, not because there is a boundary but because we choose to fix our observation and reasoning within a certain domain. At the same time we have to realize that such a domain will have interactions with other neighboring or overlapping domains.

Given this fuzziness in ecosystems (we do not exactly defines their constituencies, we do not know exactly their boundaries,…) how can we define that that “something” is an ecosystem?

Well, my pick is as good as yours. Mine is: an ecosystem is a place where relationships among its (considered) constituency are not regulated by lawyers!

This does not mean that there is no rule. There are rules of the game, like lions do not eat salad, gazelles do. But that is just the way it is, there is no one checking that lions are not eating salad and gazelles are.

I was recently told, and that’s what prompted me to write this blog, that talking of standards in a business ecosystem is basically invalidating the very idea of ecosystem! I disagree. We have standards in natural ecosystems, stemming out of evolution and adaptation. Flowers with a long chalice match with birds with an appropriate bill. This is standardization, one fits the other. They were not imposed, they just came to be that way and we still see them because they happen to find a mutual match.

Apple has not imposed a standard to the induced Apps ecosystem. By providing certain APIs they have implicitly generated a compliant world of applications. Those enterprises that are quick to adapt to the business environment are more likely to succeed and in turns this reinforce that business environment. If there are no lawyers in place, according to my definition, I call these environment ecosystems.

Ecosystems are the result of managing complexity through simplicity. And this is happening because beyond a certain level the effort required to manage complexity becomes greater than the benefit deriving from the management.

Complexity is directly related to the number of players and interactions but this is true only if you are looking at management as a centralized activity.  If management is just a side effect of the interactions, e.g. there is no management in place, than everything becomes simple. Less efficient too, but if resources are not an issue because there is plenty of them and plenty may be disposed, who cares?

Engineers abhor from wasting resources, biology does not. As long as it is successful in passing on the genome that phenotype is ok.  

(more…)

I have been discussing this issue in the last few days with a number of people. Is this a result of the IP and digital communications that is turning everything into 0s and 1s? Clearly once you’ve got just 0s and 1s it is tempting to say that there is no difference whatsoever among them. To sort out the difference you need to get the semantics and this is up to the applications that transformed whatever into 0s/1s and will transform them back into a meaningful set.

We have invented a new concept (deep packet inspection) to make sense from a network point of view of these 0s/1s, and we are also trying to convince ourselves we need to do this for the global good of network’s users. I have to say that a number of people (bad guys indeed) have told me that rather than investing in deep packet inspection to increase the perceived quality it would be better to invest in expanding capacity to avoid shortage of resources…

Anyhow, the commoditisation brought forward by the digital view of the traffic can be a reason for the increasing flatness of the network. There are, in my view, even stronger reasons.

One is the fact that the less pieces you have the less gets broken. The drive towards simplicity (and low operation cost) is steering towards a flat network. The increasing intelligence available, at a very low cost (actually at zero cost)in the devices connecting to the network is no match for any sort of intelligence in the network. A network intelligence has to compete against the intelligence of billion of smart devices that are getting smarter by the day.

What would you think would be a better solution if you have a network of waterways: to create some sophisticated system to create narrow streams guiding small boats to the appropriate mooring or to let each individual boats navigate the waterways?

If you lean on the latter remember that the overall traffic would be much more efficient if you route the boats after having inspected what is their load and decided how to route them accordingly.

In fact, if your waterways are narrow you will probably be forced to do that. Would you do that if the waterway is the Ocean?

Our telecommunications’ networks are getting more and more similar to oceans and, indeed, it may be better to fix existing narrows than to regulate the overall flow.

Clearly the situation is complex, the network today is not an Ocean, yet. Investing in expanding bottlenecks is not bringing in revenues, limiting the offer might (assuming competition is not going to provide an alternative…).

I am convinced that telecommunications in the future will indeed exceed our transport expectation. However, the connectivity problem, solved at the physical level, will come back with a vengeance at the semantic level, that is the connectivity among information, services, processes, experiences and so on.

It is a new area where several actors may play an important role but where Telecom Operators can also have their saying.

Incidentally, as telecommunications networks are getting flat they are also creating ecosystems of connected objects, services, players.

The “Tragedy of the Commons” was elaborated by Garrett Hardin and published, for the first time, in the journal Science in 1968. The article described a dilemma in which multiple individuals, acting independently according to their self-interest, ultimately destroy a shared limited resource (commons) even when it is clear that it is not in anyone’s long term interest for this to happen. However, when the economist began to look at ecosystems of commonly managed resources, he discovered that often they work quite well. At the end, Hardin admitted he should have called his article “The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons”.

Now we have a new way to approach this problem.

Professor Elinor Ostrom, who teaches at Indiana University, was awarded with the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (which she shared with Oliver E. Williamson) for the results she achieved in analysing how communities managed commons like grazing lands, pastures and similar natural resources to their advantage.

http://www.cogs.indiana.edu/people/homepages/ostrom.html

Her question was: in a world of depletable resources, where individuals have incentives for survival (that would undermine the long-term viability of such resources) how does coordination and cooperation emerge ?

E. Ostrom argued that, with the right information, productive discussion and trust-based institutions, communities can come up with win-win ways to manage commons, without being government-regulated or privatized (the other two former solutions).

Interestingly, the theory emphasizes how humans and ecosystems can interact to provide for long run sustainability and highlights how diverse arrangements (over resources) can prevent ecosystem collapse.

Does this “third way” apply also to future Internet ecosystems ? 

Prize lecture at:

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/ostrom-lecture-slides.pdf

Just joking.  Actually, not really. I read this article on Twilio, a start up that is offering easy ways to customize your telecommunications services.

They are delivering their offer through Amazon computer cloud.

Here you can find the complete article.

This is the text from that article:

Twilio is a web-service API that allows businesses to build their own customizable phones services and communications apps. Hosted on Amazon Web Services, Twilio’s infrastructure grows depending on customer demand. The company’s per-call pricing model is affordable and after watching CEO Jeff Lawson demo the service, we were surprised to see how user-friendly it truly is. At this week’sSF New Tech Event, Lawson was given 5 minutes to set up a conference call. After 10 lines of code he had a call-in number, mute settings, admin prompts and more than 50 members of the audience calling in during his live demo. After seeing the audience respond to the service, we realized that Twilio would be a great for putting your company on holiday autopilot.

Call set up using Twilio and the cloud

Twilio offers a variety of usages including notifications, phone polls, call forwarding, voice transcription and triaging. If a client needs a reminder during the holidays you can automate a message and pre-program it to call them on a specific date. If you want to remain available in case of an emergency, you can forward a list of pre-determined numbers to your mobile while leaving the rest in voicemail. And if you’re looking to create a simple directory, you can use Twilio to create a list of people, options or customer service contacts.

Twilio offers easy ways to customise the access through the web to your environment, controlling doors, the buzzer and much more.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/readwritestart/2009/09/filter-your-front-door-buzzero.php

It is really amazing what is becoming possible, exploiting cheap cloud services and open interfaces. This is something Telecom Operators have to reflect on.