Robots, aged care, and emotional bonding with machines

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Newsday has an interesting article out titled Independent at any age, examining how the elderly now have increased options to lead independent lives rather than being shunted off into homes. While most of the article deals with the issues such as occupational therapy and visiting programs, the final section moves on to how robots can assist senior citizens to live independently. I was interviewed on how robots are being used in health care generally, particularly in Japan, and quoted in the last section of the article:

“Most of the seniors live alone or are lonely,” said Teruo Sasaki, director of the Chicago trade office of the city of Osaka, which is a robotics hub. “They start to not say anything. If robots can speak to them, they will start answering. ”

Sasaki watched a video of how one robot, stationed at hospital doors, caught a patient wandering out. When told by the robot that she wasn’t supposed the leave, the patient went back in.

Japan’s robotics investment has been driven in large part by the numbers of seniors. The 60-plus segment is projected to go from 26 percent of the population now to 33 percent by 2025. Compare this to the United States, with about 17 percent now and an estimated 24 percent in 2025.

Many Japanese feel that their nation should be self-sufficient in caring for the elderly.

“Rather than having a very large influx of immigrants, they prefer to have robots in their environment,” said Ross Dawson, chairman of Future Exploration Network, which follows the future of technology in society, from headquarters in Sydney, Australia, and San Francisco.

But Japan’s high-speed investment into made-for-seniors robots has raised some debates, including how much human-ness we can take from machines before it’s too creepy.

Dawson said, “You can hire some of these robots and put them in your stall or exhibition stand or something,” he said. “But in terms of looking at age care … to try to pretend that the robot is a person doesn’t help.”

I have written before about robots in aged care in Japan, therapeutic robots such as Paro the seal, Japanese robot otaku, and other similar examples. The point I was making in my interview for this article was that the primary role of robots in aged care – at this stage in any case – is practical, such as dispensing drugs, finding lost objects, calling for help, assisting people to move around, and so on. Many people think of robots as humanoid, but in fact most robots have no need to look like humans, and it is usually not functional to try to do so. There is an entirely distinct application for robots, which is emotional bonding. In this case again, trying to make robots look human makes the task far harder. We find it difficult to build emotional ties with something we can distinguish as a machine, which is trying to look and act human, and failing. However we can definitely build emotional bonds with furry toys, especially if they respond to our stroking and voices in ways similar to small animals. Many people love R2D2 from Star Wars, which is distinctly uncuddly, certainly not humanoid, but endearing in its behaviors and interaction. The whole space of emotional robotics will rapidly evolve, driven initially by the value for the elderly, and soon after in child care and the family home. Clearly robots are not substitutes for humans. Yet before long we will consider it commonplace for people to have emotional bonds with robots.

Real estate and the power of mashups

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You’ve got to love this. For those who doubt the power and value of the internet, have a look at the map below, which shows the density of single women across San Francisco, together with their earnings. For example, in Pacific Heights near Alta Plaza Park, more than a third of the residents are single women, with average incomes of over $80,000. Or if you’re looking for eligible husbands, go to Property Shark where this map was taken from, and click over to find the distribution of single men and their earning capacity across the city. There are any number of other choices available on the web site to gain insights into where you want to live in any city across the US.

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Source: PropertyShark.com

The first famous locational mashup was of course Chicago Crime, which in 2005 started using Google Maps to create maps showing where crime was occurring across the city. Not surprisingly, among the first users were those selecting where to live in the city. In our Future of Media Report 2006 we showed that 47% of mashups were based on mapping, indicating the power of location in bringing together disparate data sets. Google Maps unleashed the domain, and now it has spread far beyond. Almost all real estate websites now use mapping mashups – this is something of great value available online that high street real estate agents don’t offer (though they’d better get access to something quick if they want to continue to get people coming in off the street). Zillow has quickly become one of the top property sites by providing estimated valuations, Trulia has some great heat maps of recent property sales activity, RealEstateFu shows trends in Bay Area housing prices over a number of years, and many others explore different facets of how to decide where we want to live.

Web 2.0 in the enterprise is far more than just talk

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Two pieces of research just out show that the implementation of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is far more than just heady talk – there is already solid investment, and the intention of doing more with these technologies. In via Read/Write Web, Forrester has released the results of a survey of 119 CIOs on their use of Web 2.0 technologies. The headline results are that CIOs want to deal with the big boys. As IBM, Microsoft, Sun, BEA and their ilk release full suites of Web 2.0 tools, the CIOs are getting comfortable and buying. I wrote earlier in the year about how IBM’s releases of social media for the enterprise was driving acceptance in the corporate world. It seems this is indeed a key driver of uptake.

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Source: Forrester

Separately, Nick Carr writes that McKinsey & Co is releasing the results of a similar survey tomorrow, so presumably this is pre-release info. In this case 2,800 exeuctives around the world responded about their current and planned investment in Web 2.0 tools. While the figures are “only” a third or so of companies, this certainly contrasts with the same few examples of Enterprise 2.0 being trotted out time and again at conferences. There are many, many companies implementing these technologies while being very guarded in talking about it externally. While I haven’t seen the full Forrester data, apparently this contrasted with the McKinsey results in showing wikis and RSS as being more popular than social networking and blogs.

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While the two surveys are revealing different aspects of the situation, the unescapable conclusion is that there is a lot more happening in this space than is apparent to those reading the press and seeking specific examples. Many large corporates are implementing Web 2.0 tools, and this is a rapidly accelerating trend.

Museum 2.0: bringing our heritage to the people

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Last year Sebastian Chan, web services manager at the Powerhouse Museum, and I were interviewed together on ABC Radio about social media and its implications.

In the context of our Web 2.0 in Australia event, Sebastian just emailed me about what the Powerhouse Museum has been doing. He says:

Basically our collection database plays on the notion of serendipity and allows users to tag objects to help others find them more easily. Under the hood we also do a lot of search tracking which allows the collection database to make recommendations based on the search choices and search language used by others. For example, a search for ‘cricket’ now recommends other related ‘sport’ searches . . . something that is the result of user interactions with our site, not a centrally stored thesaurus. The new collection search has tripled web traffic to the museum in 10 months and now represents nearly 65% of our monthly site visitation.

We have been getting a *lot* of coverage in the cultural sector both locally and internationally and are being looked to as an example of a new approach to making museum and gallery content discoverable online. A lot of libraries are very interested as well. It continues to be built in house.

The only other museum tagging projects are STEVE.museum and that has not gone live with a ‘all of collection’ implementation and the Smithsonian’s photo collection which is in a very early stage. The value of it all, of course, is better public access to collections – using the langauge the general public uses (rather than specialist museum speak) etc.

Very nice stuff. It’s well worth checking out what the Powerhouse is doing here, as well as Sebastian’s blog. It’s important to remember that Web 2.0 isn’t only about start-ups. These technologies also can be valuable tools to help us engage as a community with our cultural heritage.

Update on Web 2.0 in Australia

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The Web 2.0 in Australia event announced a few weeks back, to be held 6 June, is shaping up to be an absolutely terrific event. BEA Systems is the Gold sponsor. BEA acquired the major content management system vendor Plumtree in October 2005, and has made a number of other related acquisitions since then, positioning the company in the content space in addition to its traditional middleware offerings. BEA is now readying an Enterprise 2.0-style suite of products, which it will providing a brief preview of at the event. KPMG has shown its thought leadership by taking on the role of Venue sponsor, providing their sleek conference site as space for the event.

The panelists will be absolutely awesome. I’m particularly excited that Richard MacManus, editor of Read/ Write Web, one of the top 10 technology blogs in the world, will fly in for the event. He knows the Web 2.0 space like almost no-one else. We also have Sheryle Moon, CEO of the Australian Information Industry Assocation (AIIA), the premier industry body in the country, Allan Aaron, General Partner of Technology Venture Partners, one of the top few technology venture capital firms in Australia, Brad Howarth, who I consider the journalist in Australia who understands this space the best, and a few more of similar calibre to be announced soon.

Event partners now include AIIA, Australian Private Equity & Venture Capital Association Limited, Smart Internet CRC, and Innovation Bay, with several more expected soon.

The showcase members won’t be announced for a while. Right now we’re looking at the more obvious examples. However we’re actively tyring to look beyond that, so please provide suggestions or put your hand up. I will be posting specific criteria on what we’re looking for shortly.

The Web 2.0 Strategic Framework will follow in the footsteps of the extremely popular Future of Media Strategic Framework (over 60,000 downloads) – I think this will help provide a useful map of the territory. It will be released before the event.

The major challenge we’re going to have with the event is that it is an invitation-only, closed door event with limited capacity, and we will have to turn away the vast majority of the many requests for invitations we’re receiving. The event is designed to be primarily for very senior executives to provide them with a pragmatic understand of the field and state of play.

So… we’ve decided we will also run an informal Web 2.0 in Australia drinks function that evening, including a little discussion, likely a broad-based showcase, and much conviviality, open to all. Details later, but you can put it in your diaries now.

Is Enterprise 2.0 easy or hard?

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Euan Semple, formerly head of knowledge management at the BBC, has written a blog post titled The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?. His answer (in summary) is:

DO NOTHING

GET OUT OF THE WAY

KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP

So is it that easy? Last week at Barcamp Sydney I bumped into James Robertson, who had recently been at FastForward conference (and been one of the writers on its the excellent conference blog). He told me that at the event there had been a fundamental disagreement between Euan and Andrew McAfee, the Harvard professor who has popularized the term Enterprise 2.0. Euan said that it was easy to make Enterprise 2.0 happen. Andrew said that it wasn’t. Andrew has written a great post about it that is well worth a read for the counterpoint. He says:

But it still felt as if most people weren’t with me — as if most participants in the round table felt that enterprise 2.0 was essentially a historical inevitability. So I asked for a show of hands. I asked “How many of us, when we look into the crystal ball that shows the organization of the near future — say 3 to 5 years from now — see widespread deployment of E2.0 technologies?”

Almost every hand in the room went up.

At this point I completely lost my poker face. I sputtered “You have got to be kidding me!!” or something equally profound as I stared around the room.

Very interestingly, Andrew brings up a analogy with the (lack of) success of knowledge management, a movement I was associated with back in the 1990s before I endeavored to distance myself from it (see my thoughts on the future of knowledge management written in 2004). Andrew says:

I reminded the audience that there were plenty of conferences devoted to knowledge management (KM) systems and approaches in past years, and that these events had almost certainly featured rooms full of enthusiasts wondering exactly what the future was going to look like, and probably paying very little attention to the possibility that the future would be KM-free. I asked the room how many people wanted to be remembered as this decade’s equivalents of KM enthusiasts and evangelists, and got a few chuckles.

James Dellow goes into this comparison in more depth, and seems to suggest that he’s prepared to back Enterprise 2.0 over knowledge management’s success.

I have to say that I’m on Andrew’s side on this one. I count myself as a true believer in Enterprise 2.0, but I’ve seen enough of organizations to know that the status quo has enormous power, and making good changes happen is never easy. In particular, unstructured implementation of social media tools in organizations will yield only a fraction of the value of a planned one. Yes I believe in emergence, but leadership is required to create fertile fields. If people try something once and it’s not useful, they won’t try it again. In particular, there are ways to structure how social media works so it creates valuable results in collaborative filtering and enabling useful connections. You don’t know what the results will be, but clear vision and specific planning and actions will make it far more likely to be valuable than just letting it happen.

Innovation Timeline 1900 – 2050: what we might invent in the next few decades

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Following the big success of the Trend Blend 2007+ trend map, Future Exploration Network partner organization Nowandnext.com has followed up with an Innovation Timeline 1900-2050. It represents visually (and as usual somewhat tongue in cheek) the development of innovation from 1900, starting with the tape recorder, safety razor, tabloid newspaper, aeroplane and cornflakes, and flowing up to 2050, before when we may see such fun, delightful, and useful things as baby exchanges, compulsory biometric ID, sleep surrogates, VR enhancing drugs, face recognition doors, robotic pest control, prison countries, 3D fax, gravity tube, self-repairing roads, reputation trading, individual pollution credits, digital mirrors, stress control clothing, and far, far more. Have a look and play with the ideas. It will be interesting to see whether this gets as much traction as the Trend Blend 2007+ trend map.

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Click here to download the full Innovation Timeline 1900 – 2050 (pdf).

Also see Richard Watson’s blog post on this.

New portable displays will transform mobile data and video

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I’ve been interviewed a number of times recently about the future of mobile devices, both for media and also in financial services. I always emphasize the importance of the new generation of displays that are going to make viewing and interacting with mobile devices a great experience. People go on about how no-one wants to watch video on the screen on a mobile phone. In general, that’s true. But as soon as you can get larger screen experiences, everything changes. I’ve written before about the transformative power of video glasses, which I believe will become big over the next five years, and the role of e-paper. However the most likely candidates for broad mobile use are rollable and foldable screens, once they are in affordable commercial forms. Up until now most of these types of screens have been prototypes. One of the most exciting releases at the massive 3GSM conference in Barcelona was a rollable display from Readius, a spin-off from Philips. It gives a 127mm diagonal display that rolls out from a pocket-sized case. It has a high-quality screen and 10-day battery life. It won’t be commercially available until later this year, but we can expect competitors to come to market at a similar time, finally beginning to open up the doors to a rich mobile experience for all. As I’ve written before, one of the implications is an extraordinary surge in demand for content. This really will be transformative.

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Source: Crave CNET.co.uk

Announcing: Web 2.0 in Australia

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[UPDATE 13 March:] Updated information on the Web 2.0 in Australia event is here.

Oh well, information sometimes flows a little more freely than intended… I wasn’t going to discuss this publicly until after the event, since it is invitation only, but since word is already out, I might as well start talking about it.

Future Exploration Network is kicking off the Future Exploration Network Series, a series of focused events that bring together leading thinkers to examine key business and technology issues. They will be attended by senior executives in business, technology, media, and government, and top journalists, by invitation only. The intention is to bring to life our organization’s tagline: Connecting Ideas and People at the Edge of the Future. The events will be extremely participatory, creating focused, relevant conversations between the highly selected attendees.

The first event will be titled Web 2.0 in Australia, and will be held in Sydney on [UPDATED] 6 June, for just 2.5 hours over lunch. The preliminary information document, intended for sponsors and partners, was created this week, and given only to a very small group of potential sponsors. I also sent a copy to Brad Howarth, the journalist in Australia with probably the deepest understanding of this space. He posted the document on his website with some commentary, and as a result we’ve already had quite a bit of attention, including enquiries from additional potential sponsors. Since this is now in the public arena, here are more details.

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The event summary:

The set of technologies and innovations described as Web 2.0 have transformed the internet, triggered an array of new business models, shifted internal communication, and provided powerful new marketing opportunities. This invitation-only senior executives forum will examine the state of Web 2.0 in Australia, including:

* Frameworks for thinking about Web 2.0

* Why progress has been slow in Australia

* Current leading examples of Web 2.0 in Australia

* Implications and opportunities for corporates, start-ups, and marketing

There are in fact two good reasons to make the event public now:

Sponsors and partners

Let us know if you are a corporate, start-up, media organization, or association who would like to discuss getting involved. There is already strong interest in the two major roles, so sooner is better.

Showcase participants

Part of the event is a showcase of five of the best examples of Web 2.0 in Australia. We’ve already had quite a few suggestions, and of course are familiar with the more prominent examples. If you’d like to submit a company, technology, or implementation, please let us know. We will select what we believe are the best examples, which each will be showcased in a 5 minute presentation – there is no fee for participation. We are only interest in examples that are truly Web 2.0. A key element is that broad participation results in collective outcomes. We are keen to include enterprise applications as well as consumer and new media sites. We will create and launch a strategic framework for Web 2.0 in the lead-up to the event, which will clarify what we think is exciting in the space (or you can look at my thoughts on the Web 2.0 Revolution) . All suggestions and submissions welcome.

Search is the interface, but who controls the relationship?

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An article in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph says that a consortium of major mobile phone companies – Vodafone, France Telecom, Telefonica, Deutsche Telekom, Hutchison Whampoa, Telecom Italia, and Cingular – are planning to meet in secret to discuss creating a mobile phone search engine. The last five years have shown that one of the most powerful places in the online space is search – that is many people’s primary interface to the wonderful world of the web. And you can make very good money from it (Google’s most recent quarterly operating income was $1.06 billion on revenues of $3.21 billion). So as attention shifts to the mobile world, there should be no shortage of players keen to challenge Google’s intentions of transferring its dominance in the internet into the mobile space.

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A framework that I described in my book Living Networks, and have applied in numerous strategy consulting engagements, is highly relevant here. In short, there are six key elements to the “flow economy” based on the flow of information and ideas. Any customer offering needs all elements. These elements are usually provided by different companies, though some companies may provide several of them, or work in alliances to provide them seamlessly to customers. The heart of strategy in the flow economy is leveraging your existing positioning to move into other elements of the flow economy. A great example is how Apple, through the success of the iPod, controlled people’s Interface to music. This enabled them to shift to delivering Content through iTunes, and thus to build Relationships with consumers (which is usually not possible through the sale of devices).

In this case, the mobile phone companies provide Connectivity, and have been striving to leverage that into Relationships, Content, and Services, with highly varied success. If they can use their existing positioning across the landscape to control the Interface, they can get far greater revenues. Standards are the foundation of the flow economy, and Relationships are where most of the value can be extracted. Yet Interfaces (and also Content) have proven to be the most powerful leverage points to create Relationships. So the mobile phone consortium, Google, and other players are all trying to get to the same place, but starting from different positions on the strategic landscape. It will be a very interesting battle. This paragraph is of course an extremely simplistic analysis, but the framework can be used to go into far more depth in developing effective strategies. I’ll post some more detailed examples of using the flow economy framework at a later date.

In other commentary, PaidContent calls the Telegraph’s story “very speculative,” bringing up the highly relevant issue of EU anti-competition laws, while SMS Text News doesn’t believe the mobile companies can create a search engine good enough to rival Google. This post’s title is “European Mobile Companies don’t understand they’re just data pipes.” That’s exactly my point above, however there exists a strategic possibility to shift beyond being just pipes to doing more, and they’d be very foolish if they didn’t make a good attempt to do so.