Tag: Twitter

The future, never in past tense

Peter Jennings took a smoke break, his first in years, from 9/11 live coverage. It was the beginning of his end. The Canadian co-author of “The Century” must have studied the Wright brothers, whose invention could lift itself up into thin air albeit for just a few blocks. But he had never seen anything like the two planes that aimed low that morning.

In the decade since, from Steve Jobs (the I-series) to Steve Chen (Youtube),

from Facebook to Twitter founders, we have seen a new breed of inventors.

Instead of fixating on the hunt for an old man, wrapped in blanket with a remote control, watching makeshift propaganda videos of himself (BL), these digital natives followed the trail to the future.

They limit data transmission to short bursts (140 characters) or miniaturize play-back device (I-pod) while charging only 99 cents per song. Search has evolved from generic to semantic and shopping from global E-Bay to local (Zagat).

Rattled? Yes.

Deterred? Hardly.

Five stages of grief, processed in one fell swoop (in less than a decade).

What evil didn’t plan, was for the very invention in the West, be used against dictators in the MidEast.

(Arab Spring propagated and went tweet-viral in Egypt, birth place of caliphate).

You can take down a building, but not its blueprint.

Yes, there were people who ran down the stairs to safety, and stayed there in the past.

But there were also 343 heroes who ran up the stairs, 43 more than at Gates of Fire, to “fight (fire) in the shade” .

Just as the analog stairway (Encyclopedia Britannica, book stacks) shows the way down, the digital one (Wikipedia, Skype) points to “the sky is the limit”.

In the decade since, we have started “friending” each other, made possible by another Harvard drop-out, whether we were from NYC or not, just because we all share in a future, that will never be conjugated in past tense.

How I wish to have “followed” Peter Jennings on Twitter to read his post-9/11 reflections!

Technology doesn’t sleep, but we do.

I had my share of empty TV studio, that is, between broadcasts (6PM and 10PM). Now, there is no recoup time. We have evolved to Office 365, with servers resided in the “cloud” instead of the (telco) closets. Mobile working has evolved from CB radio, to Motorola brick phones, from Skypage to Skype chat.

Cryptography moved from a code book to complex self-improved algorithm (Amazon shopping experience : buy this + this = this.)

Pop-up ads even have a “K” for keep (time-shifting ads), while some companies are now offering a service to measure your Twitter‘s scores (influencer’s graph).

McLuhan was on the mark about “the medium is the message.”

Dot.com domain was just a start.

ICANN is opening up more domains.

And within a few years, we will be inundated with dot.this, dot.that, same way we now have with mobile phone area codes (which used to have a zero and a one in the middle of the three-digits).

As with cable TV channels where pundits feel the need to fill the emptiness with noise, new technologies such as Twitter and Facebook (and Google Plus)  will challenge us to come up with “sound bites”. Our attention span has evolved from attending for hours on end under preacher’s tents to today’s tweets.

Our brain has learned to process messages and images much quicker.

Bum, here is a Bieber’s (Be Bop a lula), Bang, there’s a GaGa (innocent like a Chic out of her egg-shell).

Good thing that we can upload and talk back. But not for long, just 140 characters.

You can tweet again, but it won’t be a part II of an earlier tweet. No guarantee.

So we learn to tame new technologies, and cope with their sheer availability.

User-generated content. BTW, from Page One, a documentary on “a year at the New York Times”, journalists on Charlie Rose, commented that the paper was now in better shape than it had ever been.

So the proliferation of citizen-journalists doesn’t threaten or dethrone existing media. Not when it’s the NYT.

Meanwhile, I keep reading volumes of “likes” from one Facebook friend.

All of a sudden, I miss my solitude in a broadcast studio when show’s over.

Lights off. Let’s go home. We need some sleep. The audience already turned off their sets.

In Vietnam, they would put back the Indian poster for white balance.

I guess it’s called the “sleep mode” because studio cameras need longer warm-up time. In today’s parlance, it means our influencer’s scores got dropped a bit when we are offline. The real self needs rest, so the virtual self must give.

Reality cross-over

In a  God-Father scene, the execution order was carried out as cut-away from the black-tie wedding scene.

Lately, President Obama in Brazil attending state dinner (while France-led air strike was carried out over Libya no-fly zone ), and two nights ago at the White House Correspondents’ dinner (while the takedown was carried out in Pakistan). Hollywood materials. (at this edit, Hurt Locker’s Oscar-winning director was slated to direct “killing BL”).

Then there was Tom Clancy‘s Dead or Alive just out late last year.

People are confused and intrigued more with reality than fiction. China news agency published a different version, and I am sure, in the dark corner of Islamic extremism, we will find a Moon-Landing type of  conspiracy to vent their anger.

Meanwhile, our Reality-Show star (as of this edit, he withdrew after the birth certificate debacle) wanted to run for President.

And our current one could be cut out of Hollywood billboard (with the God Father’s sound track, of course).

One reality that should overshadow everything else: Twitter rules the day, as far as  scooping.

140 characters is hard to beat.

Until some young guys in a garage  come up with another disruptive technology, Twitter is King of the Hills.

It jolts you out of your seat. Sparks a conversation. Triggers further inquiries into said topic.

To Tweet is now our 21st-century verb, as common as Xerox and Google (whose re-org charted a new course, that of “knowledge creation” as oppose to just Search, or document handling as Xerox).

Our attention span can always handle one more tweet. And one more.

Same 24 hours a day. Same sleeping pattern and daily habits. But a tweet can always enter and intrude our lives.

Until we can no longer do without it.

There are lots of  lessons in short-burst communication. Use imagery that strikes the chord, like :

“I will be back!” (in this case, the same actor, making a real Hollywood comeback after trying his hand at governing).

Reality finally has another way to creep into our lives, in new format.

No more newspaper on the train. Just me, and my tweets, 140 characters at a time. Until eternity.

No one wants to be left out of the loop.

Now, the meaning of “up to speed” just gets more refined, or should I say, re-calibrated. Up to the second.

We will sort it all out later. Is he dead or alive? The guy who broke the story had to tweet good-night “I did not kill him, now can I catch some sleep”.  Twitter is our 21st-century communication conveyor belt, and excellent source of materials for Chaplinesque school of comedy. Communication in short bursts. Think in chunks of 140 characters. I was told there was a margin of allowance, but the limits were set for optimal transmission and reception.

For sound bites such as “I’ll be back” or “Dead or Alive”, we don’t even use up all the Twitter’s allowance.

Last Sunday night, a short burst of tweets i.e. we’ve got him,  was enough to turn college students into monkeys. Catharsis it was.

flat “pyramid”

Viewed from above, the Pyramid in Egypt looks flat,  almost origami-like. And viewed from where I am sitting, the 18-day Revolution looks protean: leaderless, collaborative and spontaneous.

Although not the first to use Twitter ( Iranian post-election was), last week’s protesters showcased coordination and team work only digital natives can pull off.

First, they understood the power of organization i.e. the means (self-organized citizen patrol),

the mode (social media) and the manner (being kind to soldiers, just stop short of ” wearing some flowers in your hair”).

Second, they staged their demonstrations to appeal to Western media, their conduits to the developed world, Mubarak‘s entrenched base of support ( note the use of sound bites, and visual symbolism e.g. burned effigy).

Third, collaborative model. They built tents in the square, make-shift first-aid stations etc… like  Woodstock without the mud slide.

And they were young, urbane, well-conversant in English ( to offer comments on CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera).

The tipping point was when their expat counterparts flew back to join them while Westerners, American “non-essential” community, were evacuating for fear of the worst .

In The Future Arrived Yesterday, the author argued for the Protean Organization (boundary-less with a soft core). To unseat the Pharaoh who sat on top of the Pyramid takes a lot of thumbing (texting) (in 1989, they had to use electric saws to cut down the Wall).

This youth revolution, despite being leaderless, wasn’t disorganized. Its flat “org chart” was in contrast to the traditional command-control style.  It accommodated many sub-cultures (tech, youth, urban, westernized, pro-democracy) and world views, secular and religious. Their future arrived not a day sooner.

In all, they managed  to un-brand the leader (dictator) and throw a red carpet in front of the new flat pyramid for Nobel-prize winners from abroad and Muslims albeit Brotherhood Muslims at home, and any one in between (including a Google executive).

Even the author of the World is Flat was taken by surprise when he witnessed his ideas jump off the page into the middle of the Square, Tahrir Square.

Facebook prosumerism

We have put in long hours, uploading, editing, “friending”, texting, in-mailing, posting, commenting, searching and even reading up on and seeing a movie about Facebook.

A recession distraction? or tip of the iceberg in what is finally Personal Computing and Networking? At least, computer finally “think” out of its “computing” box.

Now, it’s about lifestyle exchange (what he had for breakfast, what photo compelled her to share etc…).

I still remember the post cards, send between North and South Vietnam. It is today’s equivalence of  “Status” on Facebook. Except that those post cards traveled across the DMZ, much like North and South Korea today.

So, we have evolved, from tin cans to tablets, from post card to Facebook.

The Tofflers were right. Today’s Revolutionary Wealth takes on new forms, the principal one is prosumerism (whereby we take part in the making of the products and services we consume e.g. Stuff a bear, or submit your T-shirt design).

Facebook not only provides the platform for sharing, advertising, but also, a chance to jump-start this economy.

Let the game begin, again.

The rush, the drive. There will be blood.

Facebook’s own status: Alive and well. Still with the CEO in T-shirt and jeans.

Coding away or traveling to China.

I can’t wait to see what happens at the Oscars. Will they come on stage on roller blades? Tuxedo with T-shirt inside? Meanwhile, I have to log on to my Facebook.

It’s a daily ritual  borderline addiction. And I am glad Tina Tequila’s fans don’t follow her over to Facebook  from  MySpace. There was too much prosumerism in her eroticism. Mam, just the Face, Mam.

 

A Face w/ a name

A few years ago, TIME’s Person of the year got a face with a name. In fact, he manages to drag in a billion faces and names with him. The last time someone wearing pajamas in public yet got that much publicity was John Lennon (who invited the press into his honeymoon suite).

Mark was told to attend one of the VC meetings in pajamas (talking about sabotage).

Facebook personalises the impersonal Web. Between Facebook and YouTube, we see a bottom-up movement that gets endorsed by enterprises (latest McKinsey research shows enterprises who adopted social media came out ahead).

To make media “social” we first need to put a name to a face.

Then, slowly, we learn about that person through his/her social graph (evolving profile). It  is another message altogether i.e. with subtext like “I am cool”, “I am with it”, “I am in the know” albeit starting out as a medium.

Change agent. Thought and opinion leader. Votes of confidence. Hot topics.

When Hollywood got into the act, you know it’s in (The book, the movie and now TIME cover).

Almost a billion and counting might not mean a lot, but in sheer number, it is a force to be reckoned with.

It has not been without some controversies (privacy) as well promises (in-mail).

In the hierarchy of snappy content, Facebook delivers creme de la creme (tweeting is by far a data burst while yahoo chat and G-mail, yesterday’s tools).

Inside Facebook, you interact with peers, your Web Ivy League. Think of the Web as a huge city, and Facebook as Cheers, where everybody knows your name (and face).

In an age of globalization (7 billion) and ubiquitous technology (mobile), we have carved out for ourselves a virtual community, discussing and gossiping about topic du jour. That beats “bowling alone” and bingo hall. No wonder a few  days ago, one of the topics was getting hooked on Facebook.

By naming Facebook’s founder Person of the Year, TIME was posting its own eulogy, acknowledging this many-to-many medium is here to stay and grow in influence.

TIME Person of the Year = Chief Influencer

Filter builder

Building up our filtering capacity does not mean firming up our prejudice. But no matter what we do, we can only watch an average of 4 hours of TV and a few hours on the Web, mobile or stationary.

So we rely on thought leaders. Two-step information flow. Except this time, information flow through a social network i.e. multiple gate-keepers. We essentially recreate what early radio stations did when they strung together broadcast relay stations (to deliver a larger audience to advertisers) with their affiliates.

To be prejudice-free (reaching out only to friends and reading only their posts), I try to connect with a diverse pool, from left, center to right, black white and yellow, male female and gay and straight.

While we die alone, we don’t have to be isolated in our thought life.

In fact, we should recalibrate our filter, to let in more

data of different shapes and sizes. Ours is a post-Columbus Google era and each of us, our own press agent. Some even venture to suggest Social Media profile to replace credit history.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/26/why-your-social-media-profile-might-be-your-next-credit-score/

In 2010 the year in review, they posted a picture showing a naked Haitian woman who contracted cholera, lying and dying on the streets. No one stopped to cover her up (I hope the photographer would, after taking that picture that stirred our conscience).

And remember Nida, dying in front of our Twitter eyes during post Iranian election?

When I was in International Journalism class, we touched briefly on information flow, and how it had always been from North to South, from information-rich countries to information poor ones. Well, that was before YouTube and Twitter.

Now, anyone with a clip or tweet can share. New Dean of Columbia Journalism school, Steve Coll, will have to start a Twitter account to  stay relevant.

I have yet learned how to build a twitter filter. So what harm can it do me, reading unsolicit 140 characters. It would be an equivalence of hearing an elevator pitch from an aggressive salesman, whose odd of success is quite small (because he skips over the discovery phase). But some tweets stick and I learn something new every day. Technology is just a tool to deliver content.  Just don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Do you hear what I hear.

Act 2

At the gym, I couldn’t help notice two guys with Mountain-Dew T-shirt. We can still have “black swan” scenario in our life time e.g. the US rises again from the depth of deficit (muscle memory), or someday a Hispanic president will seek a M&A with Mexico (will not be the first time the US offer to buy more territory).

When we went through Y2K (getting plenty of water and batteries) we anticipated worst case scenario. People said this has been a Lost Decade. Now, that the worst has been behind us, let’s buy some champagne and balloons.

The challenges of the past decade have steeled our resilience but at the same time diminished our faith in institutions.

While tragedy comes in pairs (two recessions, twin towers, two disasters in Louisiana), luck will also come in pairs. Look at what Web 2.0 has given us: friends from Facebook, free videos from YouTube and millions of Who’s who on LinkedIn. The list goes on and on, as one tweet begets another in this 4-G, 3-D, 24/7 always-on world.

As we defy gravity by going to the “cloud”, our experience will grow much richer

All of our investment in hardware finally pay back with an abundance of software options albeit cases like Iridium, Concorde etc…

Our global village will show case Best of the Best. Stay tuned. The next decade will unleash apps from 20 years old’s who are now in Middle School (Yahoo just bought  Tumblr, and now eying Hulu). The sooner they are bored with texting the better. New toys for tots will spill over as Act 2 for the rest of us (Act 1 being the Ipod, Ipad, mobile apps like Twitter, Social Network such as Facebook). With an audience of 7 billion, any content will be devoured in an instant.

Build it and they will come. Level 3 must have looked deep into the crystal ball. Without the likes, we wouldn’t have Netflix as is. Clusters of innovation all converged in our time while adoption rate has never been quicker.

Instead of shopping for batteries, I will go for balloons and instead of water, champagne.

 

Contagious innovation

Last week, I installed a new Search engine (w/ a slash).

Today, there is a whole new browser altogether. Rockmelt.

It does improve Facebook quite a bit.

Steven Johnson calls this phenomenon (of one bright idea led to another), the adjacent possible.

It’s like my New Year resolution of hanging out with positive people to “catch” their enthusiasm.

Yes, we can.

It’s been more than a decade since Netscape. Now we got Rockmelt, built on Chrome.

Fast we browse.

One can go through life and not see at all.

Suddenly, bright light city (imagine driving from LA to Vegas at night through the desert).

Innovation city is full of creative people. Vibes.

Energy. Unbound.

Take a deep breath.

And be steady for what comes your way.

Life is full of surprises.

Yes, we can.

I like the interdisciplinary approach in Steve’s book  ( Where Good Ideas Come From).

No wonder former Netscape founder hangs out with Creative Artist Agency man.

His point: it took a long time to build relationships with creative people, who tend to clusterize.

While the speed of chip set increases every 18 months, it takes time for artists and writers to cross-pollinate.

Thus, science (and tech) needs to learn from the arts, and the art side certainly benefits from innovation by engineers.

Bloomberg series on Game Changers show us that even in down time, creative genius won’t sit still.

They keep innovating their way out of  chaos and crisis.

It was great to see people scan their bar codes stored in smart phones for airline check-in.

I am sure we won’t stop at just one “adjacent possible”.

May the best innovation win.

 

Against the tide of commoditization

In Selling Professional Services to the Fortune 500, Gary Luefschuetz warns against mix and match people and rates of various service tiers, which will compromise the rate structure. In short, swim against the tide. IBM got it. Cisco follows suit. And HP is moving in that direction.

The Economist takes an in-depth look at IT future. One dominant theme is ” smart” infra-structure e.g. buildings,water, electricity, appliances… even cows). First, we were glad to get our white bread sandwich neatly cut and refrigerated. Then we want it toasted. Finally, we want the toaster to beep like our microwave oven.

The key to all this is inter-connectedness. From blue-tooth to Blu-ray, RF to RFID, we are moving up the value chain.

Years ago I remember watching a demonstration of hologram at Penn State. Professor Roy Rustum was there among the observers. He later was quoted as saying “I felt the chill in my spine” when his crew at Material Sciences Lab discovered electricity conductivity in water. Now we got 3-D hologram to watch the re-release of Star Wars.

At the high-end of the OSI model is the application layer. This is where our imagination pays dividend.

The physical layer move their facilities off-shored to accommodate better rate structure.

Samsung is slated to be a strong contender in the tablet space against the I-pad with huge facility in North of Vietnam.

I also remember watching the young CNN news gathering crew (in black T-shirts) back in the early 80’s. CNN manages to stay above the fold in the cable news business. That business gets commoditized as well since we can now access hundreds of them.

For CNN, the secret sauce has been their first move advantage, and continuing risk-taking (Gulf war). David Brook of the NYT puts it simply “branding is an effort to decommoditize commodities”.

While companies are in a race to produce “smart” applications, schools and companies should retrain people. Smart people created smart appliances. And smart people take calculated risks. Leaders of India and Ireland saw the hand writing on the wall. They moved swiftly to retrofit their nations for the  21st century, not only in IT, but with new ways to solve existing problems e.g. micro lending, mobile banking, cheap automobiles etc…(see The Miracle).  I read the review of Chevy’s latest small car, the Cruz. It took GM, once the largest corporation under Alfred Sloan, 40 years to reduce its automobile size. May the best car win.

The temptation to compromise and mix the different tiers of services led to the downfall of many sectors, especially telecom.

(South Asian agents and resellers first question was normally, “what’s the rate”).

So I wasn’t surprised to read in Fortune magazine about Verizon’s soon-to-be-rolled out Android perfect phone. Can you hear me now.The old GTE has swam hard against the tide, to become the premier wireless company.

Choose your battle, pick your turf, and retrench at the highest service level.  Who wants to stand next to those robots who don’t get sweat or take smoking break.  And I am sure, after the next round of cost cutting, they still stay until robot 2.0 version displaces them.  At Twitter, those guys didn’t even use up the allotted 140 characters. They tweet simply “Be helpful”. I take that to mean swim against the tide, to offer relevant and helpful service to a market gluttered with commoditized services.