Posted on May 2nd, 2008 by Atif
I attended the Web 2.0 Expo last week, where Jonathan Zittrain spoke about his latest book – The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. It’s a big idea about the future of tech with constitutional implications.
The book is focused on the form the web takes as a computing platform with increasingly centralized characteristics. Zittrain believes the current trajectory of the web has the potential to spawn a network of control that has major societal and political impact. He believes centralization in the form of cloud computing is a natural outgrowth of increased human reliance on computing coupled with the risk of things like viruses and security threats. Centralized services clearly help users protect themselves in the wild world of “tethered” computing. Users will prefer the benefits centralized information services against having to manage these services on their own, which would be required under “localized” (client-based) approaches. To simplify the point, think about installing anti-virus software on computers. If your services are in the cloud, then securing those services becomes someone else’s problem. The pull to tether every variant of computing is so significant, that people will crave the stability of centralization. This entrusts the livelihoods of users to the giant e-sponge in the sky that someone else controls.
Reliance carries two principal implications. First, it furthers lock-down potential, which is the ability of a service provider to dictate rules of engagement for users and the technology ecosystem. That in turn stymies innovation. Second, lock down introduces opportunity for regulation that favors government over the individual. This introduces the potential for violations of privacy and liberty. Zittrain provides several current examples of these violations. Read more »
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Posted on January 10th, 2008 by Atif
The new year brings some management changes at Cisco. Charlie Giancarlo recently retired from the company to join tech buyout firm, Silver Lake Partners. Charlie spent 14 years at Cisco and was most recently the Chief Development Officer, effectively the #2 executive and possible successor to CEO, John Chambers.
I had the pleasure of meeting Charlie for the first time during his going-away event, where he chatted openly and generously with the rank-and-file. A Cisco employee carrying an iPhone was kind enough to snap a picture for me.
From the Cisco press release:
“After joining Cisco through the acquisition of Kalpana, a pioneer in ethernet switching, Giancarlo started Cisco’s business development organization and developed Cisco’s successful M&A strategy. He initiated and then led Cisco’s Small and Medium business activities including contributing to the development of Cisco’s channel strategy. Giancarlo also initiated and led a large number of Cisco’s advanced and emerging technologies including Unified Communications, home networking, wireless networking, security, video, and TelePresence among many others.”
I’ve been at Cisco for a few months, working as a consultant and advising on new market strategy. We’re looking at whitespaces that might be considered non-traditional for the company but which leverage my background in the web, software and digital media.
Another senior executive, Dave Leonard, also transitioned recently (to start a clean-tech business). Dave has been the General Manager and top dog running the company’s $5bn cash cow switching business unit. I’ve been working for Dave and his group. It goes without saying that Cisco’s ability to branch out and experiment into new markets is in part due to domination in switching. So, new things you find the company successful with (TelePresence, etc.) are tied to this core even while there remains lots of potential for these existing businesses to pioneer new spaces too.
This is my third large company experience (AOL and Goldman Sachs are the other two places I’ve spent time). I’ve always found it somewhat impossible for a big company to send off a long-time employee or major contributor (such as a senior executive) in the right way despite their best attempts. The farewells, thank you’s and recognition don’t quite reflect the humanity of what is essentially a parting of ways between people. Life meets reality. Read more »
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Posted on July 14th, 2007 by Atif
Fortune held its high-profile iMeme conference last week, which is billed as venue to bring together the “Thinkers of Tech.”
I found the substance of the conference lived up to its aspirational billing. Many factors influence the utility of an event including the speaker line-up, topics, format and quality of the audience. This event rated highly among those criteria. One additional consideration was the moderation style, lead by Fortune reporters, who often didn’t refrain from asking tough questions and probing into sensitive but relevant issues. Fortune played to its strength by leveraging the journalistic voices of its staff to drive meaningful dialogue amongst panelists.
This approach made for a very lively session on the search business, where rival companies were assembled to speak about business strategy. The search panel included Sheryl Sandberg (Vice President, Global Online Sales and Operations) from Google, Jeff Weiner (Executive Vice President) from Yahoo, Yusuf Mehdi (Senior Vice President and Chief Advertising Strategist) from Microsoft and Jim Lanzone (CEO) from Ask. Herding the first three companies onto the same stage in the current market environment is as close as you can come in business to pure theater. While these executives are too polished and experienced to draw direct comparisons to each other’s businesses, it’s not too difficult to read between the lines and get a glimpse into how these companies are framing high-stakes competitive dynamics.
Each company discussed current initiatives. Google didn’t share much new perspective, except to say that users still only receive a small portion of their daily information from Google despite it’s dominance, meaning more of the world’s information needs to be brought onto the web. “We think there is a long way for us to go,” said Sheryl Sandberg.
While Yahoo and Microsoft may have conceded this round of the battle, they have several initiatives in the works, some of which were explained. Read more »
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Posted on June 22nd, 2007 by Atif
I was on-site at Supernova today. David Weinberger, author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and the recently published Everything is Miscellaneous, spoke during an afternoon panel. His new book is a thought-provoking work about how we need to get comfortable with the disorder of information spawned by the web. David covers a lot of ground in the book but I’d like to focus on the observation he makes about information overload. He says that the way to solve the overload problem (think 13bn web pages and growing) is to feed more information to the user. It’s a powerful, yet counter intuitive, idea to which I’d like to add a branch or extension.My extension is that users face a different kind of information selection problem depending upon where they stand in the consumption lifecycle. Specifically, that the overload problem is much more acute later on in the lifecycle than in the beginning.Since lifecycles have a front-end and a back-end, we’ll break down consumption into those two spaces, recognizing that gray area exists. By front-end, I mean the user’s objective starting from the “point of inspiration”. There’s always something that motivates a user to seek out information to begin with. This inspiration can be casual or deliberate. A casual intent includes the desire to kill time or have fun…info-snacking, as they say. Deliberate intent is usually task-oriented but as I’ll demonstrate later, the distinction may not matter when it comes to overload.You might ask why information management would more challenging for users in the midst of consumption (versus at the start) when they face the same problem scope on the front-end as they do on the back-end (13bn pages to wrestle with no matter which end you’re into). To answer that you’d have to look at the “what and how” of content consumption from the “point of inspiration” to the “point of resolution.” Let me break that down. Read more »
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Posted on May 31st, 2007 by Atif
Vertical search is not a new area of web apps but I learned something new about it recently. I attended a panel of CTO’s from the space yesterday at the Silicon Valley Web Builder event. Participating companies included Simply Hired, Spock, MEDgle and Riya. Each representative took a couple of minutes to conduct a product demonstration. Spock is still in a private beta, so it was neat to see it in action . My first impressions were very positive.
What’s interesting is that even though these are all search companies, none of the products are competitive. You might think this a very natural dynamic. After all, each vertical is necessarily focused on different slices of web content. But there’s more that makes search a different app as you move from vertical to vertical. It’s not simply a matter of different information. For me, the dividing line between these apps is rooted in how users interact with that information. The way the search process is organized to help users negotiate that interaction can vary widely from app to app. Read more »
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Posted on May 25th, 2007 by Atif
I attended The Semantic Conference this week in San Jose. One of the most interesting talks was given by Mills Davis, who is a recognized expert in this area. Mills spoke about his Semantic Wave project and research. One part of the research hypothesizes an adoption cycle for different phases of the web. In other words, different paradigms for the organization and use of web content. They shift over time as the industry and technology matures. I will post this slide of his presentation soon.
The framework looks at two dimensions for the advancement of the web. First, there is the strength of the semantics. That refers to the degree of knowledge representation in the way information is defined for computers. You can have weak or strong semantics surrounding the same given piece of data (say, my contact information). The other dimension is the degree of reasoning capability of tools and applications. This is a smart way of framing the opportunity because it highlights essential trade-offs. Read more »
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Posted on April 24th, 2007 by Atif
I’m onsite this week at ad tech (the well-known technology meets interatcive marketing conference). Roger McNamee of Elevation Partners moderated a panel here entitled “Internet Economy: Start-ups, Bubbles and Buyouts.” Roger is known as one of the most versatile technology investors around and that made him a really good choice to manage this discussion.
The very last question from audience related to possible alternatives to Google. Roger provided some of his own take on the matter. He appeared very resolute that better techniques for organizing web content will surface to challenge Google. They way he looked at it, Google falls short when it comes to handling any type of user needs that don’t involve keywords (to paraphrase, “Google doesn’t work well when you give it a few words or a sentence”). His takeaway — editorial is a really important layer which explains the value of Wikipedia and other forms of aggregation that will emerge based on wiki and collaboration tools. Read more »
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Posted on April 17th, 2007 by Atif
Eric Schmidt headlined the Web 2.0 Expo today in San Francisco. He was queried in a punchy and intimate manner by the moderator, John Battelle, in an on-stage interview. John is no stranger to Google, of course. Though several books have been written about the company, John’s is the definitive work. Not your run of the mill corporate biography, John’s account is a more ambitious effort to bubble-up a level and put the company within an industry and societal perspective. He also follows the company via Searchblog http://battellemedia.com/ and is a mainstay of the Google ecosystem through editorial events like the Expo where he is often paired with the Google triumvirate.
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