Future trends

I wrote yesterday about Apple's excellent and free videoconferencing software. Last night, I saw a Microsoft ad touting the advantages of their LiveMeeting product. It's interesting to look at the two very different approaches to the same market space.

Bert Rutan's SpaceShipOne won the $10 million X Prize by sending a ship into suborbital space twice in two weeks. The second of two successful flights took place today, and Mojave, California will likely become a historical milestone alongside Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

Following up on the new Book of the Month (The Hidden Power of Social Networks), here are some of the conclusions from the book, and they may surprise you.

• It costs an organization or business money to foster collaboration and to support it over the long term. Too many organizations pay lip service to the notion of collaboration but don't do what it takes to support it or make the changes needed to encourage it.
• Technology and personal expertise does not distinguish high performers. In other words, having a lot of technology stuff and being good at using it does not, in and of itself, make a person more effective. The authors caution that workers do need the appropriate technology to do their jobs, but a lot of toys do not make someone smarter or better.
• One of the best predictors of high performance workers is how diversified their personal network is--the more diversified it is, the more likely they are ranked above average. In other words, who you know is what is important, more so that what you know, because the authors indicate that "relationships are critical for obtaining information, solving problems, and learning how to do your work."

I've been collaborating with Rick Smyre of Communities of the Future on capacity-building needs for organizations and communities, and one of the key concepts we have identified is "learning webs."

A learning web is a small group of people who have a strong trust relationship and who are committed to helping each other learn about and stay current with new ideas, concepts, and information that may be important to individuals in the group.

Do you have a learning web? What about your personal relationship network? Do you have a small group of people with whom you are comfortable asking for help? What about your community? One of the things you can do to help your community get connected with the Knowledge Economy is to help form learning webs centered around economic development, civic affairs, and local governance.

An article from the July 19th issue of Newsweek talks about recent studies that indicate young adults (between 18 and 34) are now reading less than any other group. Even worse, this used to be the group that read the most.

Even worse, instead of reading, this group has become largely "passive consumers of electronic entertainment." Video games, entertainment Web sites, and TV are taking the place of exercising our brains.

In a widely reported story, Apple's iPod will be given to all Duke University freshman this fall.

The handheld computers will be loaded with course materials, lecture notes, and other university-related materials. While at Virginia Tech, I was involved with freshman orientation (providing information on university computers and networks), and I can tell you the incoming students get an enormous stack of paper, most of which is probably never read.

The owner of Budget Suites of America, Bob Bigleow, has had a secret operation at work for the past several years in Nevada, building a space hotel. Not surprisingly, one of his closest associates is Burt Rutan, owner and designer of SpaceShipOne, which flew into space just a couple of weeks ago.

Bigelow and Rutan together are creating synergy. Rutan's spaceships will attract a lot more paying customers if he has somewhere to take them, and Bigelow's space hotel needs an inexpensive (i.e. non-government controlled) spaceship to get folks to and from orbit.

Sound crazy? No, it's the global Knowledge Economy at work. The article is long, but well worth reading to the end, where Bigelow describes how he has cut costs ($200 million versus the $50 billion Nasa has spent) by shopping globally. Bigelow cited one example of a subsystem he needed; an American aerospace company wanted $100 million to design and build it. Instead, he bought it in Europe for $1.3 million.

Like it or not, we're at the dawn of a new age. No, it's not the Information Age; that was over 2 years ago. In the Knowledge Economy, as Bigelow is demonstrating, who you know is more important than what you know. Bigelow has been able to reach out globally, forge business relationships with firms in other countries, and design and build better and faster than NASA. NASA is stuck trying to make "old" relationships work; the government agency has had numerous failures and despite all the money it has spent, has not been able to advance its program.

What about your region? Are you still stuck trying to make "old," Manufacturing Economy relationships work? Are you helping your existing businesses learn to shop globally for the parts, products, and services they need to be competitive in a world market? Are you throwing away the rulebook and starting with a fresh sheet of paper to create your economic development strategy?

Delta Airlines has announced plans to use RFIDs (Radio Frequency ID) to track and manage luggage. Finally--a great use for RFIDs that has no privacy problems (unlike proposals to embed them in clothing so that we can be tracked 24 hours a day by the Gap). An RFID on a luggage tag will allow the airline to be able to tell where a piece of luggage is virtually in real time.

I am beginning to wonder if many of us are beginning to suffer from Internet fatigue. Over the past few months, I have observed the activity and discussion on most of the mailing lists I am on dwindle to near zero. Some of the Web sites and blogs I visit seem to have fewer and fewer comments and discussion.

This is in contrast to the late nineties and even a couple of years ago, when most of the mailing lists I was on were active, and I felt like it was difficult to keep up with the often rich and interesting discussions.

I think there are several things going on.

• First, the novelty of the Internet has worn off. The Internet as a community, work, and civic phenomenon is now a decade old, and if you measure the real start of online community with the BBSes and FreeNets of the eighties, it is twenty years old. For most of us, it's now just a part of life. We don't feel the need to discuss it, anymore than we discuss other routine technologies that we use (e.g. the telephone, the microwave). We have successfully integrated the Internet and its communications services into what we do.
• Second, we're busier than ever, and we have less time for activities that are not directly related to whatever it is we have to do today, tomorrow, or by the end of the week. The Internet has contributed, for better or for worse, to this common feeling of life being uncomfortably speeded up. By dropping out of peripheral activities like online discussions and mailing lists, we are taking back some control over a bit of our time.
• Finally, we are worn out from spam, viruses, upgrades, bugs, glitches, printer jams, blue screens of death, reboots, and all the other timestealers that technology has brought to us over the past two decades. We want our lives back.

In a way, I see this as a good thing. We are putting technology into proper perspective. We are making more time for face to face relationships and spending a little less time chatting with, well, strangers.

South Korea has announced a new initiative called Ubiquitous Korea that has a very simple vision for the country:

To transform the country into a more modern and technology-oriented society, which has been nicknamed U-Korea for Ubiquitous Korea, the government is envisioning a future that allows people to have uninterrupted access to the Internet, via fixed lines or mobile networks, any time, anywhere.

An AP article in the Sunday Roanoke Times discussed China's growing influence on the IT industry. What caught my eye was the fact that China is promoting an alternative to the DVD format called "EVD." China wants to avoid paying royalties to the Japanese developers of the DVD format.

But wait, there's more. China is also pushing a new and different cellphone protocol that they claim is better than the GSM and CDMA standards used in the rest of the world.