What’s up with Google Talk

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When Google Talk was announced yesterday after months of swirling rumors, I decided not to blog about it, as I thought there would already be more than sufficient discussion on the topic. This blog is primarily intended to cover not-so-obvious yet deeply important developments. However a number of people have asked me for my opinion about the announcement, so here’s my take in a nutshell. The main response so far has been “So what?”, as on the face of it the instant messaging and voice capabilities of Google Talk don’t match the competition. However remember that Google’s free email service Gmail has been in Beta for 17 months, requiring a personal invitation to join, and has done well despite this pretty major constraint. Google wasn’t looking to take over the world on day one with free email. Same story with Google Talk. It doesn’t need to be whiz-bang for it to be positioned over time for synergies with other parts of their suite. Which is exactly the point in that Gmail is now open to the public, and having a Gmail account a requirement to use Google Talk. The bigger part of the story is that Google Talk is based on the open-source, open standard Jabber. The refusal of Yahoo, AOL, and MSN to allow interoperability of their instant messaging networks is one of the classic standards battle case studies. Of course, Google adopting an open standard and inviting the other players to interoperate doesn’t change the world. However it’s one of the more powerful single events that is likely to shift the status quo. If Google Talk gets traction, which as it adds features and integration into other Google tools it is very likely to do, the benefits of interoperability may finally shift the IM landscape. As a latecomer to the space, that’s exactly what Google wants.

The transformative power of e-paper

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Fuji Xerox has just announced a new ultra-thin electronic paper that doesn’t need electricity to maintain its display. Meanwhile, Sony recently announced flexible electronic paper that can be rolled up like a normal piece of paper. The leader in the electronic paper industry, E Ink, has already announced products that embody aspects of both of these innovations. The vision of e-paper technology is to create a low-cost, thin, flexible screen that has very high resolution and relies on ambient light (i.e. has the same readability as normal print on paper), feels good to the touch and does not require a current to maintain its display. In other words, just like paper, except you can change what’s printed on the paper at will. As a brief overview of the field indicates, this is still a technology of the future. Sony has launched its Librie ebook (which is only available in Japan) using current generation epaper, and has received great reviews for the epaper screen. As we all know, ebooks have not so far replaced the traditional paper variety we still find in bookstores. Yet at a certain point of technological development, epaper will become transformative. The reality is that real books and newspapers are currently far superior to the current digital versions. However when the paper feels, looks, and acts sufficiently like the tree-based material, everything changes. We can then tuck a newspaper under our arm, open it out to peruse in the subway, and when we get bored of the New York Times, turn it into the South China Morning Post. Similarly, we can carry around a book that is nothing like a laptop, but rather – if we choose – is indistinguishable from a contemporary hardcover, including the ability to scribble in the margins. The primary difference being that you can turn it into any book you happen to feel like reading. Another transformative application of e-paper is in large displays. As soon as it is cheap enough, there is no reason every square inch of visible space – table-tops, elevator walls, pavements and more – will not become a screen for news, advertising, and other distractions. No, the technology is not here now. However 10 years is a reasonable estimate these technologies to be commercially viable. At that point, they will completely transform media, publishing, and public-space advertising. More to the point, they will change how all of us interact with information and media.

Amateurs, professionals, and open source

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Paul Graham, author of Hackers and Painters, has written an interesting piece on What Business Can Learn From Open Source. He compares blogging to open source software, as bottom-up endeavors by people doing what they love. Most importantly, they are done by “amateurs” rather than professionals, almost by definition. It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, by the wise old Marshall McLuhan: “Professionalism merges the individual into patterns of total environment. Amateurism seeks the development of the total awareness of the individual and the critical awareness of the groundrules of society. The amateur can afford to lose. The professional tends to classify and specialize, to accept uncritically the groundrules of the environment. The groundrules provided by the mass response of his colleagues serve as a pervasive environment of which he is contentedly unaware. The ‘expert’ is the man who stays put.” Today this is more true than ever. Make sure that you’re an amateur at at least some of the things that you do!

Beam me up! Teleporting today

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You probably heard that Star Trek’s Scotty recently died, with his widow planning to shoot his remains into outer space. It’s an opportune time to review where we are with teleporting. Last year physicists successfully teleported quantum bits, allowing us to dream that one day science fiction may become science fact, and we will never have to eat airline food again.

On a more prosaic level, a company called Teleportec has for a few years been marketing a system that effectively projects a person to a different location, allowing a quasi-3D image and eye-to-eye contact between people. This has been used in many domains, most notably conferences. When I speak to financial services audiences, I often also note that another application is beaming financial advisors into any location, meaning even small regional bank branches or kiosks can provide customers access to experienced, trusted advisors. Teleportec says that a UK bank that has tested the system reports that 92% of customers are happy to buy from a teleported representative.

The most sophisticated way of teleporting ourselves is the Teleimmersion project, which uses the ultra-high-speed Internet 2 as its backbone. This not only allows people to interact at a distance as if they were present, but embeds a whole series of sub-projects, for example for immersive data visualization. Jaron Lanier, who invented the term “virtual reality”, has been a driving force behind this project. So, while today many of us are beginning to treat web video-conferencing as an everyday tool, the next generation of communicating at a distance – that we might call teleporting – may soon be part of our day-to-day lives.

Review of Collaboration in Financial Services Europe

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A few weeks ago now I chaired the Collaboration in Financial Services Europe conference in London. The White Paper on How Collaborative Technologies are Transforming Financial Services is now available from my website. If you’re interested in the topic, the review of the original Collaboration in Financial Services conference in New York last September is also worth a look. Both in moving on nine months from the New York conference, and crossing the Atlantic, the shift in themes was striking. It was a great day, exploring in detail many of the fundamental issues the financial services industry faces in an economy increasingly centered on collaboration. The key sponsor of the Europe conference, Reuters, has played a significant role in the development of instant messaging in financial services since David Gurle left Microsoft to spearhead the company’s collaboration initiatives. Reuters has established interoperability with all the three public IM vendors. Now, companies like Facetime, Aconix, and IMLogic have provided the wraparounds to make public IM secure and compliant. At this point we can say that IM is pretty much a robust corporate tool, though the space will certainly evolve considerably in the next year or two. One of the most interesting aspects of Reuters’ positioning is its emphasis on chat and building communities. It wants its major financial institution clients to use chat as a primary medium for knowledge-sharing, and to create spaces that link buy-side and sell-side, for example for conversations around research issued by the firms. Intelligent agents will identify posts that are of particular interest to individuals, so they don’t need to trawl through everything themselves. In addition, they want IM to become embedded in workflow, for example automating trading and integrating into STP (straight-through processing). Another domain that was explored in detail at the conference was insurance. I moderated a panel with Christoph Harwood of Kinnect and Alex Letts of RI3K. Both are essentially new-breed B2B exchange for the insurance industry – Kinnect was set up by Lloyds of London for commercial risk, while RI3K is in the reinsurance space. Their challenges and progress over the last few years are great case studies for similar initiatives that can bring great benefits to an industry, but require collaboration between many players. Clifford Chance also presented on an advanced in-house system that provides partners and staff with a portal view of activity and communication around a particular client or matter, which is just being rolled out. As far as I’m aware, the system is more sophisticated than any of the investment banks have implemented for sharing information on complex transactions.

Dodgeball is acquired by Google

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The topic of the moment seems to be where Google is going, with many touting it as a Microsoft-killer. (See Robert Cringely’s recent article as an interesting take on this and broader issues…). Given my interests, it is particulary interesting to see that Google is buying Dodgeball. This very interesting social software company came out of a class run by Clay Shirky at New York University. Clay’s take on the deal is here. In short, Dodgeball is a mobile service that allows friends and friends of friends to meet up at bars and parties on the move, finding where the action is at any particular time. Google has already tried its hand in the social software space with Orkut. Now it is moving into the mobile social software (sometimes called MoSoSo) space, which is absolutely a step beyond its web-based core. On one level, Google clearly is not averse to picking up lots of interesting companies and ideas and seeing what happens with them, and Dodgeball is hardly a big acquisition for them. However if Google continues to develop these strands of its business, then its increasing propensity to social software and networks could represent the emergence of what may be something far beyond a glorified search engine

Blogging Goes Mainstream

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When I wrote Living Networks in 2002, opening with a description of how Macromedia was using blogs to disseminate information, blogging was to many a curiosity. Today almost everyone has heard of it, and it truly has become mainstream. Business Development Institute is running a Blogging Goes Mainstream conference in New York on May 3, featuring Microsoft star blogger Robert Scoble as keynote. I’ll be running a session at the conference on blogging and knowledge management.

The next phase of Social Network Analysis

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Rob Cross of University of Virginia, author of The Hidden Power of Social Networks, has formed the Network Roundtable, a consortium of at last count 40 leading organizations that are applying network approaches in areas including leadership, innovation, and client relationships. The kick-off meeting will be on April 27 in Boston. I will be presenting on our research project on enhancing client relationship teams. Applying network analysis promises to be one of the most powerful approaches to improving cross-selling capabilities and driving deeper, broader, more profitable client relationships. I am also beginning to delve into other applications of social networks, including industry associations, professional networks, and global industry networks. A lot more on this anon.

The Future of Customer Relationships

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I’ve just posted a new article on Creating the Future of Customer Relationships on my Advanced Human Technologies company website. The article supports the keynote speech I delivered recently at Customer Contact World 2004.

The article examines how to integrate the entire spectrum of relationship channels available in order to build true “knowledge-based” customer relationships. This is founded on understanding – and accentuating – the difference between what technology can do and people can do. Fast Company magazine’s blog wrote about and linked to the article, which has resulted in lots of attention and traffic for this.

The Metaweb

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Nova Spivack, the grandson of Peter Drucker, has a vision of the connected future that aligns very strongly with mine. He describes the emerging “Metaweb” as the result of the rapid increase in both information connectivity and social connectivity, leading to the emergence of the global brain. A diagram and overview is provided on his website – well worth a look. I agree wholeheartedly this is the way we’re going.