Author of machiavelli.net, proud father of three, interested in shaping network society. Welcome to my blog.leapfrogging the banking system
I just came back from Kenya, where I was consulting with the transport ministry. It was an interesting time, especially because we can see in countries like Kenya (with a GDP per capita of around 600 Dollars) the nuances of globalization:
(a) even the kids of my taxi drivers were in school from very early on. The daughter of my driver in Nairobi was able to read and count to 50 at age three (and he was very casual about this).
(b) Robert Lawrence from the Kennedy School has argued for a while that global growth will come from South-South trade. However, it is also South-South consulting (India, South Africa), and South-South investments that will transform this continent.
(c) Not having a fiber-optic link to the global evernet is painful. The permanent secretary promised me that they are building one (with Lucent for 80 Million Dollars), but until that is ready do not count on too much.
(d) Safaricom, the local cellular carrier has an ingenious system called m-pesa (mobile money, pesa being slang for money) that allows anybody with a cellphone in Kenya to transfer money to any other cellphone in Kenya. It is widely used and people were really excited. In a country where most people in the cities still have parents in very small villages this is changing the political economy of rural Kenya.
the economics of free
for about a year now Chris Anderson has promised us his followup to the Longtail, Free. Here it is as the cover story of next months Wired. A must read for anyone who wants to understand the instituitional ecology of the networked political economy.
excerpt:
(…) But free is not quite as simple — or as stupid — as it sounds. Just because products are free doesn’t mean that someone, somewhere, isn’t making huge gobs of money. Google is the prime example of this. The monetary benefits of craigslist are enormous as well, but they’re distributed among its tens of thousands of users rather than funneled straight to Craig Newmark Inc. To follow the money, you have to shift from a basic view of a market as a matching of two parties — buyers and sellers — to a broader sense of an ecosystem with many parties, only some of which exchange cash.
The most common of the economies built around free is the three-party system. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties. Sound complicated? You’re probably experiencing it right now. It’s the basis of virtually all media. (…)
Larry Lessig for Congress
Larry Lessig is thinking about running for office (Tom Lantos open seat) in April. This is relevant even outside of the United States, because it will bring the the battle for the institutional ecology of our networked world into parliament.
Check out his site. And do watch his final speech on “Free Culture.”
The Finance Minister and the Third Way 2.0
Yesterday, we had the German finance minister at the Erfurt School of Public Policy. He was asking how we can achieve societal cohesion in a transforming world? He criticized the missing loyalty of the disembedded, globally networked [class], but also pleaded for a faster-moving, leaner, and network-literate Germany. His guiding ideas were that we need to foster the freedom to participate in the public sphere, achieve equality in access to education, increase social mobility, and maintain distributive justice. Do watch the very cool video (edited by Sven, I think – thanks to Kai for emailing the link).
Pleading for Cannibalism (in personalized computing)
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Since before the demise of the 12-inch G-4 Powerbook the Mac rumor sites have been discussing a potential Mac subnotebook as successor to the fabled Duo. Some expected a 10.3 inch companion computer based on the iphone OS X, with 16g of solid-state HD, others were hoping for a slimmer version of the Macbook consumer notebook. Not until a few days before Macworld were people suggesting anything like the Macbook Air. Therefore, mixed into the excitement of the announcement was disappointment of the people that had hoped for something with a smaller footprint and a lower price point. These disappointed potential customers now are looking at Linux-based alternatives, like the second iteration of the Asus eeepc or the Dell XPS.
Over-Engineered, Under-Powered and Over-Priced, but Somehow Sexy
The Macbook Air reminds us of the more general problem of the subnotebooks-category: Since the late 1990s the hypothesis was that subnotebooks will be the next big thing, however, it never materialized. The reason is that subnotebooks are over-engineered, underpowered, and overpriced.
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Because the are over-engineered we are confronted with first generations of products that do not live up to expectations and second generations that the producers do not invest enough into. The history of subnotebook computing is littered with one-shot experiments (OLPC), extinct subnotebook product lines (Fujitsu, Sony, etc.), and unsuccesful input devices (tablet-computing, origami, etc.).
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Subnotebooks are underpowered, because of the trade off between weight and power. This means that in side-by-side comparisons with normal notebooks, subnotebooks always loose.
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They are overpriced, in order to cover the development costs and because marketing assumes that senior executives are the most lucrative niche for the product.
As consumers we love the idea of an all-purpose, always-on, always-connected computing device. And we can imagine a world, where our data resides in the cloud, we use on-the-go computing devices for most of our computing tasks. So, clearly, there is money left on the table.
Growth Through Cannibalization
The full-size notebook market took off, when firms started to sell notebooks as desktop replacement to consumers at comparative prices. It is not that the cutthroat consumer market is the most lucrative or even the biggest market in computing, however, it is the market with the greatest mindshare and products positioned squarely into this hyper-competitive market generate the highest publicity possible.
So only when sub-notebooks will be priced in competition with the Dell-Inspiron line will the market take off, economies of scale and learning effects will kick in, and the transformational potential of personalized computing will be realized. This can be achieved, if we apply the logic of commodity-product engineering to the sub-notebook category and a laser-guided focus on that what is necessary. The killer-personal computing device of 2008 would have a 10.3 -12 inch screen (1200×800), a low-voltage 1.5 Ghz single-core processor, an 8-18 GB solid-state HD, a fairly useful keyboard, Wlan, an SD-card reader, and two USB-ports. It is not rocket-science. It would come with a standard flavor Linux distribution (Mint or Ubuntu), an adapted version of OS X, or Windows XP, a free one-year subscription to some type of cloud-computing services (hard-drive, syncing to home computer). An Ipod could always be used as a hard-drive, etc.
Such a disruptive personal computing device would not cost much both in development time and effort. If successful, it will be copied fairly quickly, a competitive market will be created, development cycles will speed up, and it will wipe out the existing luxury UMPC market. It will further the trend towards web-applications, put pressure on Microsoft Windows, and might give the idea of the desktop PC/Home Server second wind (as a companion to the more mobile devide). In the medium term it would greatly reduce the classical notebook market, but would tremendously increase the overall market… one step closer to living-network-society…
Ubiquitous Projecting
CES has always been a harbinger of things to come. Think of the introduction of the VCR at CES in 1970, the Laserdisc-Player 1974, Pong in 1975, the CD-Player and the Camcorder in 1981, Atari and Nintendo in 1985, the DVD in 1996, HD-TV in 1998, and the PVR in 1999. The challenge is to spot those winner’s that make it big. To make it big in the consumer sphere, means to transform the lifeworld (the daily life) of a significant group of people, so that self-reinforcing mechanisms (word-of-mouth-marketing, repeat-buying, etc.) kick in and an ecosystem emerges around the product that enhances the value proposition (and earning capacity) of the product.
Will it be the prezenter from E-Detail, a notebook that allows people to interact around a display from two sides? QFHD, the quadrupeling of pixels over HD-TV? The newest HD-TV/Blue Ray player? New LCD-screen dinosaurs? – Probably not. None of them have the lifeworld-transforming potential or an emerging ecosystem. So what are the candidates of this year’s CES? – I would argue for one technology: 3M’s and Microvision’s personal projectors.
As soon as the problems of miniaturization, cost, and energy usage are under control, personal projectors will become as ubiquitous as camera-lenses (and it seems as if 3M has come pretty far). They will be built into every notebook, cellphone, pda, etc. The price will drop very fast due to the large volume and of being included as extra features in subsidized handsets. If one assumes that projectors will be in 80% of all handheld computing devices in 2010, then several billion projecting devices will be on the market.
The projectors themselves will most probably become a commodity, however, the ecosystem built around them is where the action will be. However, if one (or several players) are able to put together a product that can capture consumer mindspace, it might make all the difference.
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If we think back to the early MP3-Player market, it was not clear if the product would become part of the commodified PC-Industry or develop into a stand-alone ecosystem, as it did when Apple entered the market.
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If we think back to the early digital camera market, it was not clear if the old players of analog photography had a chance to survive in the market.
In the case of the MP3-Player market it was the combination of pretty standard hardware (the ipod) and an amazing interface (the reinvention of the wheel plus itunes) that made all the difference. In the photography segment it was their knowledge of lenses and the strength of the stories older analog companies had to tell that carved out a market that transformed the lifeworld of consumers and created billion-dollar-ecosystems. So some of the questions to ask, for anyone interested in projectors are: Can we put together a piece of hardware that looks so compelling that consumers will want to carry it as a standalone device? What would the integration of hardware and interface (touch and feel, software) for a projector look like? Who should do it? What firms will profit indirectly from ubiquitous projecting? – youtube? facebook? google? your utility? What will a projecting lifeworld look like? What will people do? How will it transform them?
Sleepless in Magnolia: Web 2.0 and Self-Help
We have an ambivalent relationship to self-help. We celebrate it as civic engagement, but we are afraid of lynch-mobs and the tyranny of the majority.
The Seattle PI has an interesting story about how the people of Magnolia, a Seattle suburb are collecting and aggregating data, empathizing, and strategizing to deal with a string of burglaries in their neighborhood, by setting up a social network (sleepless-in-magnolia) on the social network meta-platform Ning.
Clearly, we will be confronted with interesting questions about all kinds of new forms of public action.
The Capetown Open Education Declaration
One of the potentially transformative movements of networked societies is the open education movement, exemplified by MIT OpenCourseWare, the OLPC-Project, Curriki, Nestor and Fernando’s project, etc. The Capetown Declaration pursues this through three strategies:
1. Educators and learners: First, we encourage educators and learners to actively participate in the emerging open education movement. Participating includes: creating, using, adapting and improving open educational resources; embracing educational practices built around collaboration, discovery and the creation of knowledge; and inviting peers and colleagues to get involved. Creating and using open resources should be considered integral to education and should be supported and rewarded accordingly.
2. Open educational resources: Second, we call on educators, authors, publishers and institutions to release their resources openly. These open educational resources should be freely shared through open
licences which facilitate use, revision, translation, improvement and sharing by anyone. Resources should be published in formats that facilitate both use and editing, and that accommodate a diversity of technical platforms. Whenever possible, they should also be available in formats that are accessible to people with disabilities and people who do not yet have access to the Internet.3. Open education policy: Third, governments, school boards, colleges and universities should make open education a high priority. Ideally, taxpayer-funded educational resources should be open educational resources. Accreditation and adoption processes should give preference to open educational resources. Educational resource repositories should actively include and highlight open educational resources within their collections.
If you agree and want to sign, then do so! I was number 705.
An Army of One and the Russian/Estonian Cyber War
we are still having a difficult time imagining what cyber-war really means. For the last nine month the example was the cyber conflict between Estonia and Russia. It now seems that it was not really an inter-state conflict but just one Estonian student, who was upset with his government. So what do we learn? – not sure. Maybe that revolutions in military affairs just do not play out as we expect them…
Living-Linux-Part-II
For the last three days, I have been using Mint Linux and suddenly it is all making sense. The look-and-feel are amazing, Flash, Java, etc. work and I am actually producing again. At this moment in time, it makes sense to do the move – I look forward to hearing from your experience!
…just don’t expect hibernate or sleep to work out of the box, your analog connection to th projector, or your newest ipod. :) … but apart from that…
… today dell started selling the relatively cool (not macbook-air-cool) xps with ubuntu.
