Cisco’s futurist discusses “The Internet of Things”
by Eric Garland
I remember forecasts back as far as 1999 that by 2015 or 2020, the biggest user of the Internet by far would be other machines. Medical diagnostics, vending machines, cars – they numbered in the billions and all would have great reasons to share information – to say “I’m broken,” “I’m out of soda” or “Hey, you have early signs of cancer – go to the doctor.”
Now that we have WiFi throughout the industrialized world and emergent adoption of IPv6 (offering unlimited discrete IP addresses) this future Internet of Things could be right on schedule. Cisco’s chief futurist discusses this in a recent live broadcast, in addition to some basic ideas for how innovative companies use futurists to drive growth and profit.
Exhumation and Maradona: Antics and rotten fruit of the Bolivarian Revolution
Venezuela has become something between a Kundera power struggle with subjective jurisprudence and lack of freedom of speech and a Garcia novel where everything is unbelievable anywhere except for in the state of magical realism. As food shortages in Venezuela are aggravated by rotten food on the Colombian-Venezuelan border—a major blemish on Chavez’s ability to provide rations to the poor even if he had the oil money of the 2005 era—his saber-rattling begins once again. Chavez, with Argentine futbol superstar Diego Maradona at his side, has now severed relations with Colombia after Colombian President Uribe asked the OAS to look into Chavez’s relationship with the infamous left-wing narco-terrorists FARC and ELN. Although out-going President Uribe’s demands overstep his sovereignty, Chavez is not as innocent as he wants to be. He claims that the FARC and ELN should not be defined as terrorist organizations while there are links between Miraflores and FARC rebels. This is all happening as the Venezuelan economy is crumbling on top of the weak foundation on which it is based. In the midst of this, Chavez has exhumed the body of national independence leader, Simon Bolivar (who was more akin to Napolean than to Chavez), due to a Chavez-created conspiracy of a capitalist assassination of the Venezuelan idol 180 years ago.
The absurdity of farce and fiction in Caracas brings way too many questions as to the future stability of Venezuela. Reality has become subjective to the caprice of an authoritarian who has lost his ability to buy his political power. While Chavez’s friends (Morales in Bolivia, Correa in Ecuador, Ortega in Nicaragua, and to an extent the Kirchners in Argentina) may empower some of the poor, Chavez is leading Venezuela—and its poor and its rich—to the slaughter. For this egotistical bullishness, he will become a hero in the quixotic stylings of Ernesto Guevara, who is better remembered for an amorphous philosophy, a motorcycle bildungsroman, and mythical tattoos on Hollywood starlets, rather than the reality of suppression and corruption that appears to have been forgotten by history.
Interview with Michel Dumais on “Citoyen Numerique”
I am very excited to have discovered a new group of future-focused intellects in Quebec. I was recently invited by Michel Dumais, a venerable media figure in Montreal who deals with technological trends from a social perspective, eschewing gadgetry in favor of a wise, humanistic view of where the world is going. We’re going to have many more dialogues where this one came from.
The following excerpt is from our discussion this past week in which I explain the basics of “la prospective” how it’s used in organizations, and how it differs from classical, 20th century, technophilic futurism.
Have a listen, though I warn you in advance that this is the genuine article, 200 proof Canadian French accents, right from my homeland of northern Vermont and southern Quebec.
Enjoy.
This social media is nothing but trouble
Well, social media isn’t the problem – but social media DOES disrupt what passes for authoritative information, and that concerns us as intelligence professionals and as leaders.
These slides are from my Pecha Kucha style presentation for the Intelligence Collaborative, a group that considers such issues.
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More trends and analysis to follow in 2010.
Apple’s true killer app: disruptive business models
Great analysis from Paul Denlinger at The China Vortex about the upcoming Apple Tablet, and what its real impact will be on the market.
As Denlinger points out, most people assume that the secret of Apple’s success is their reliably sexy user interface. Sure, that’s a critical factor in its dominance of the premium computing market – the stuff works and is beautiful. What makes Apple so influential as a company is its ability to change business models, making everyone else a follower.
Sure, iPod was a great little device, but others had portable MP3 devices, however ugly. It was iTunes that got people thinking of MP3s as legitimate purchases instead of illicit stolen files. The music publishing world is still reeling, and Apple is the number one music retailer in the world. The iPhone is not only cool, it introduced the App Store that allows each phone to be user-customized, with prices set by the free market. They don’t yet own the market, but the word “app” is now an accepted concept in the business lexicon. Sexy brings you to the dance, and wonky, quantifiable, innovatively-engineered business models take you home.
And so what awaits the Tablet?
Now, in order to make the Apple Tablet a real success, it has to have certain functionality which will not cannibalize iPhone and Mac notebook sales. This is why it’s point of attack will have to be on books, magazines and the publishing industry. It will offer developer tools for Apple’s digital publishing solution. Already there is talk about Apple’s new SDK for this new platform.
My prediction is that this new SDK will make it apparent why Apple has not been friendly about offering Adobe’s Flash access to the iPhone, since Apple’s solution will offer much of the same feature set as Adobe Flash, but will be more tightly bundled in on the front and back ends to the device and to the store. (Steve Jobs likes closed ecosystems where he controls the whole experience.) Tough times for Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight: all dressed up and nowhere to go.
Speaking as an author, the industry is ripe – no, begging – for disruption. And as usual, it’s the Googles and Apples who notice first.
This will be fun to watch.
Will bankruptcy result in banks owning major media?
The United States is facing a difficult situation. It is no secret that all too many of our major organizations function not by the value they produce, but by the debt they take on. Last year’s financial armageddon was the result of too many banks leveraging themselves against assets made of completely fictional, and declining value. Debt was laid on top of more debt, until the whole thing melted down, and the only “fix” was to have the U.S. Federal Government take on even more debt. At no point has productivity or value entered into this debate, just debt, invented from thin air, helping nobody and shackling future generations to our poor management.
Coinciding with our failing banks is the failure of American media. Information is going online, content is free, attention is scarce. As advertising revenue shrinks, media companies are going into default. But in the event of failure, who gets the assets?
Banks.
And major media companies are financed by major banks. This brings us to the incredible situation of Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan inheriting so many media companies, that they are running afoul of already-weak media ownership laws.
So, to recap, banks that failed last year are only around due to the American taxpayer. Those taxpayers can only keep tabs on such organizations through government agencies and news outlets. The banks are now so big that they essentially in direct partnership with the United States government, which cannot let them fail. (Or at least protest that it would be too dangerous.) And now, those banks will begin owning an increasing percentage of the major media which most Americans use, rightly or wrongly, to derive information about the economy.
Our institutions are becoming intertwined at a level where a dialogue is nearly impossible. For every conversation, you need at least two people. What are the differences between the banks who control money, the media telling their story, and the government offering to prop both of them up?
The answer may have to do with large organizations in general. Major media need huge advertisers to pay for their conglomerates. Small, niche, local media? They can survive on engaged, passionate niches. Major banks need huge customers for their debt. Small regional banks can survive helping local businesses actually provide value.
Maybe the problem isn’t banking or media or government, but the BIG versions of all three.
A proposal for an Intelligence Collaborative
Originally posted over at the Competitive Intelligence Ning forum, our intention is to bring forth a collaborative of people who use intelligence for more than just creating value in businesses. More on this idea to follow.
WE NEED EACH OTHER: A Proposal for a Collaborative of Intelligence Professionals
We live in an era of transforming economies, simmering terrorism, transitioning institutions, and few historical analogues to guide us. As such, intelligence, in all its manifestations, is a matter of life and death, prosperity and poverty, reason and superstition, light and dark. It is our profession and our passion, and we must support it now, more than ever. We must come together for dialogue, education, and mutual support.
RECENT FAILURES OF INTELLIGENCE
Intelligence has never been more important, yet it finds itself on hard times. In the past few years, the word itself has suffered a number of scandals. At the government level, America’s national intelligence apparatus missed the weak signals leading up to the greatest attack on its soil since Pearl Harbor, if not 1812. Shortly following September 11, the architects of the war in Iraq used an incompetent reading of Iraq’s military capacity to justify a war that has proved immeasureably costly in blood and treasure.
In the private sector, nearly every purveyor of business analysis was caught flatfooted throughout the 2000s, failing to understand or foresee the bursting of an economic bubble from which we suffer today. At the center of this catastrophe were financial analysts who judged, using their own intelligence methdology, that a large group of financial instruments were AAA-grade debt, despite being composed of nothing but fantasy and fraud. Instead of recognizing the failure of their intelligence, the cataclysmic (yet predictable) event is portrayed as an act of God, totally random, and business resumes as usual, plus or minus a few trillion in bailouts.
In all of these catastrophe’s, where was intelligence?
Read more
15,000 visitors to the Competitive Futures Blog in August
Just checked the stats and it’s our biggest month ever on this blog – 15,000 visitors this month alone.
We’re glad you’re listening, and hope to hear from even more of you in our Disqus comments section, which can automatically link to your Twitter account.
Lots more discussion about the future to come. Enjoy the last weekend of summer!
The Do-It-Yourself Future
The vast majority of the media reported economic activity only in terms of gigantic institutions and abstract numbers. We hear about the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, and the rates they charge mega-banks to borrow imaginary money. We hear about unemployment rates, though those statistics rarely include those underemployed, running their own business, or those who don’t participate in society enough to work at a company. Then we hear about the stock market indexes, which is a tabulation of what a tiny group of gamblers in New York, Tokyo, and London were willing to hypothetically pay to own a chunk of some companies’ future earnings. (Actually, it’s not even gamblers, but computers programmed to think like gamblers.)
You may notice, that at no point have you heard about people. Your friends and neighbors and not covered by this analysis. When you provide each other child care, it doesn’t hit the books. Build a barn yourself out of lumber you purchased directly from a mill? GDP will go down. Start a foreign language club? Sorry, it’s not educational sales, and we don’t count that. Grow your own food and eat it? Sure, you may be eating delicious food and cutting your risk of heart disease and diabetes, but all you’re doing officially is taking potential revenue away from companies we measure (and tax.)
When we don’t measure this activity, it’s hard to tell when a trend is happening. When I need help getting reliable trend data, I do what every good analyst should: I go and ask my Dad.
My father still lives in our hometown of Rutland, Vermont. Yes, yes, I know you’ve been skiing nearby, and it’s quite lovely. Well, the state nearby is lovely; the town is generally on hard times. Due to a completely nihilistic policy of zero economic development, Rutland, and indeed most of Vermont has shed jobs at a terrifying rate. (One of the local heads of economic development once confided to me that what the place needed was more gift shops, “So the tourists really know we’re ‘open for business.’”) Average age of the county is around 53. The kids are gone to Boston and New York and Washington in search of work, except for those who make up our growing heroin problem. Those kids are hanging out near the collapsing downtown of boarded-up former retail space. Pretty bleak, really.
Except my Dad has never had it so good. He’s running the local farm and garden store, and after surviving an onslaught from Home Depot, Tractor Supply, and Wal-Mart (retail stores designed for MUCH larger markets) he’s having his best years ever. The reason: GARDENS. As soon as that economic disaster hit and fuel oil went through the roof, Vermonters wasted no time in getting back to their birthright of bringing up their own food in our frigid, rocky soil. Speaking as a native Vermonter, when you tell us we’re headed back to the agriculture age, threatening some scary pre-industrial nightmare, it just wasn’t that long ago for us. The last town in America to receive rural electrification was Victory, Vermont in 1967, about five miles east of where I grew up. The idea of a 19th century lifestyle is simply not that terrifying for Vermonters.
Today, despite the meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming declaring the whole financial crisis “over,” people in Rutland are still planting gardens, chopping logs for firewood and going back to more self-reliance. This is good news, the sign of a civilization that may not crumble over some fruity derivatives sold by financial companies that didn’t understand them either. In the end, the word economy comes from the Greek for “how you run your house.” Our major institutions sure help run the larger picture, gluing together discrete economic activity into a global picture that could ostensibly be managed. In the end, gardens are necessary and they aren’t. With all the scandal and backroom dealing and intrigue, it’s comforting to know that when push comes to shove, people can and do plant their own gardens, look after each others’ kids, build each others’ houses. The fate of central banks are not the fate of people in general. This should give cause for optimism.
About Eric Garland
Eric is one of the world's pre-eminent thoughtleaders in forecasting and strategy. He helps leaders of business and government make critical decisions about their futures.About Dan Vecchi
Dan Vecchi is the director of economic risk analysis for Competitive Futures. He helps leaders examine their investments in countries around the world, exploring future options and ensuring profitability in the years to come. He speaks natively fluent English, Spanish, Italian and works regularly in South America as well as Europe.New project: Manufacturing 2020!
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