Category: Future

  • The questions in Big Data

    In my last post that touched upon Big Data, I had mentioned how the seeming intent of Big Data is to synthesise actionable insights from processed and unprocessed information at touch points related or unrelated to the enterprise, and then use it to target consumers better. While this is probably true for the short-medium term, I read a wonderful perspective at GigaOm by Beau Cronin on its true potential – the path to building the equivalent of global-scale nervous systems. As I tweeted after I read it, it reminded me of something I’d written a couple of years back before I’d heard of #BigData – if we could actually use data to go beyond that to answer life’s profound questions. Before we go into the subject, here’s a nice video by OgilvyOne titled “Big Data for smarter customer experiences” (via) though it’s skewed more towards the experience rather than the data.

    Beau Cronin has mentioned several possibilities this would give rise to, and the post made me think if something like the hive mind concept would mesh into it as well – a sort of hybrid neural network. He has also pointed out the hurdles we would face while we get there – gathering, processing and conversion into actionable insights, and how phenomena such as priming,expectations, and framing matter so much in how we perceive our physical and social environments. In essence, a fascinating read.

    I was particularly intrigued by framing, and began thinking about it in the context of the unstructured data – tweets, posts, mails, videos – that is a major component of Big Data. The fundamental question being – is it unstructured because we’re framing it ‘wrong’? Based on the enterprise’ intent and not the users’? Ironically, I couldn’t frame the questions right until I met the ever-brilliant S, who has always maintained that the answer is easy to find once the question has been framed right. He has developed (Tulpa -to build or construct in Tibetan – is the concept he enlightened me on while we were discussing semantics) something that at a rough level mashes the MECE principle with Frame Semantics and the entity-relationship model. There’s IPR involved, so no more beans shall be spilled, but as always, I learned much from the conversation.

    In essence, structure can definitely be derived from what we currently call unstructured data, provided we frame the queries right. I can intuitively begin to understand that in the era of data abundance, the only way we can make sense of all of it is by focusing on an intent that is derived from a common purpose, so that the sources of data (users) will be more open to help solve the challenges of data collection. The processing and inferences that follow would yield the best results when the right questions are asked. I have a feeling that the questions asked by a business in an earlier era might not cut it.

    until next time, role models

  • Future Tensed

    Thanks to Neal Stephenson’s The Confusion, (Vol 2 of The Baroque Cycle) I’ve had to do something that I haven’t done since I started reading – read two books in parallel. Every 200 pages of The Confusion, I take a break and read a volume of The Hunger Games. Neal Stephenson, to me, is genius, and I’ve been a fan since I first read Snowcrash. I could speed read The Confusion, but I really want to pay attention and understand the nuances, the humour, the larger thought and so on. I cannot do that for 800 odd pages, hence this shift.

    I only understood the ‘connection’ after I started reading The Hunger Games. The Baroque Cycle is set in late 17th-early 18th centuries, and uses an excellent mix of historical and fictional characters to cover a whole variety of themes. In some ways, it uses the past to understand the present. The Hunger Games, on the other hand, is set in a dystopian future, and shows a potential fate of humanity. It uses cues from the present to predict the future. The connection ends there, almost. Though at massively different levels, both require imagination, the former at a much more larger scale.

    That’s what led me to think about imagination in the present. We’re in the midst of probably the biggest upheavals in the history of humanity – new technologies emerging at a rapid pace, institutional realignment, socio-cultural changes, behaviour alteration and so on. All of this means, that collectively, we’re having to run really fast just to cope. Where does that leave time for imagination? In fact, such is the assault on senses that I wonder if anything really disruptive is being written in the science fiction genre these days (I hope to be proven wrong and pointed in the right direction) because except for things like teleportation and time travel, pretty much everything that was science fiction is getting played out now, and so busy are we – trying to keep abreast – that science fiction is merely extrapolating the present (read) or giving alternate versions.

    There is a term in psychology called Functional Fixedness, wiki-defined as “a cognitive bias that limits a person to using an object only in the way it is traditionally used.” With my limited knowledge, I wonder if that’s the dystopian future of the human imagination.

    until next time, the end of collective imagination

  • Can media become social enough?

    A few days back, it was reported that Facebook now had a million active advertisers, and that LinkedIn has 3 million company pages. I’ll let that sink in, in case you hadn’t heard. Despite all the social-ness, I realised it’s impossible not to call it media. The wiki definition for media is “tools used to store and deliver information or data” That, for me, is a smartphone now! I also wondered how many media behemoths could boast of a million active advertisers. And that’s when it really struck me how much the traditional media we were used to have been sidelined – yes, they still get advertising revenue, but from a sheer reach perspective. Google, Facebook, YouTube and many more platforms get anywhere between a few million to a few hundred million visitors every day.  To put it all in perspective, TOI – the world’s largest English daily has a readership of over 7 million.

    Media and advertising have had a very intertwined life, unless of course the publication/channel has been on solely a subscription based model. I think the magic of Facebook (and Google, before it) and those that followed is that they have democratised advertising by not just making it something any small business could spend on according to their means, but also giving them the ability to advertise according to contexts – intent, interest, social etc.  Though Google, Facebook etc are still intermediaries, they never flashed their powers, though the latter has begun to, recently. As brands move away from a one-size-fits-all mode of advertising, these platforms give them more options of form and function, and changing the face of advertising. (Google’s exploits are known, here’s a pertinent read on Facebook)

    In such a scenario, what really does a traditional media channel have to offer to its consumers and clients? I’m not saying that they’re all going bankrupt next Sunday, but it’s clear which way the wind is blowing. One way, of course, is to use their brand value, and replicate (and grow) their audience on devices and platforms which better serve advertising interests. They can hone their value offerings by offering various contexts and their combinations – local, social, interests, and so on, and build business models for each. The early movers are already making big deals. But that is the red ocean that everyone is fighting for. How really can a player differentiate?

    Biz_Is_The_ArtI had a vague thought. Media’s original strength was its relationship with users and the trust involved. In the social media era, how can that be leveraged? Flipboard has already allowed users to become curators and create their own magazines. Is that the future, along with shared revenue on advertising? What if users can also curate the advertising their ‘subscribers’ can see? After all advertising is also news/information and has a certain value depending on the source. Traditionally, media  has been the middle man between advertisers and users, but what happens when everyone is media? Can media start aggregating influencers in every domain, including niches, provide them the material for curation, negotiate on their behalf to relevant advertisers, and share the revenue? Perhaps the next  disruption will be the platform that can handle the complexities involved. What do you think?

    until next time, mediator

  • Humachines and the role reversal

    In his post ‘Virtual People‘, Scott Adams writes that his generation would be the last of the ‘pure humans’  raised with no personal technology. Someday historians will mark the smartphone era as the beginning of the Cyborg Age. From this day on, most kids in developed countries will be part human and part machine. As technology improves, we will keep adding it to our bodies.

    Singularity has appeared on this blog in various forms, and in at least a couple of posts, I have written about the augmented human, and like the proverbial frog in the slowly-boiling water, we wouldn’t know when it happened. (check this post for a fantastic short film on the subject) In fact, medical applications of 3D Printing are already accepted and on the rise. Not just ‘accessories like hearing aids or dental braces, we have moved on to a lower jaw, (previous link) 75% of the skull, an ear, and yes, ‘cyborg flesh‘! It’s obvious that the applications are improving the lives of many. My question though remains – as we replace more and more of ourselves, possibly the brain itself within my lifetime, what happens to the essence of us that makes us human – the feelings, the emotions, the zillion unique reactions to various physical and mental stimuli?

    In this wonderful post titled “How not to be alone“, in which the author writes about how we have begun to prefer (diminished) technological substitutes to face-to-face communication, (I couldn’t help but remember this)  he quotes Simone Weil, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” And from that statement I realised how the the narrative might come full circle – I remembered this post I had read a few months back. It mentions bots that have passed the Turing test (“test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of an actual human”) and has a compelling argument that while we’re singular entities with a complex design, we’re still just blueprints –  with many similarities. This also  entails that we’re building machines that can mimic, and evoke, our emotions. Thus, he writes, the era of artificial emotional intelligence is not far.

    Perhaps, in the future we will outsource our humanity and reverse roles – half-machine former humans who deal with each other in mechanical ways and go back home to a humanoid bot that will give it all the empathy and emotional anchoring needed. Or would it need it at all? 🙂

    until next time, be human, comment 😀

  • Brands and the Personal API

    Lifestreaming and I go way back, at least 5 years. 2008 was when I wrote about it first, though the experiments had started earlier. Most of the services I’ve mentioned in the post are now defunct, but my interest in the subject never waned. From the perspectives of memories mentioned in that post to speciation to brands using their lifestreams to build communities around it, I have had several thoughts on the subject. That’s why I found this post at GigaOm, which was about Foursquare co-founder Naveen Selvadurai sharing data logs from his life (weight, sleep, activities) and hoping developers would hack his ‘personal API‘, very very interesting. There have been stories about people and the tons of lifestreaming data they have amassed, but I had never heard of an API, and therefore consider it pioneering work.

    Pioneering, less because of the novelty, and more because I think it has the potential to become mainstream, and even, the default paradigm of creation and consumption. Since the engagement @ scale framework refuses to let go of me, I immediately thought of the personal API in that context. With technological advances, I think it’ll become easier to create one’s own APIs and you can see several companies mentioned in the GigaOm post that are working on it. So I’d hope that its evolution is as fast as (or faster than) that of self publishing (on the web) which about a decade back was a relatively complex thing to do. So, in essence, we’re talking about huge amounts of data that are being generated and captured by individual users, and this is only going to be accelerated thanks to phenomena like wearable technology.

    The current way of looking at Big Data is to synthesise actionable insights from processed and unprocessed information from touch points related or unrelated to the enterprise. As I’d mentioned in my presentation (on engagement @ scale) this is then used to target users better or drive more efficiencies.  They don’t really operate at the higher levels of community/meaning/purpose. Now think of the personal API and the data it holds. What if we looked at this individual streams of ‘Big Data’ not from the enterprise’ perspective but from the user perspective? What if brands created platforms that  would allow people to upload data that they choose to so that the brands could solve their needs better? Like I wrote in my ‘maker’ post, with massive technology leaps happening in areas like 3 D printing, there are tremendous opportunities for co-creation. Brands could even aggregate data from these individual streams to find need gaps and package that for a larger market. In fact, I’d say that this is probably what Nike+ is doing already.

    But the real story is that these personal APIs could give great insights into the individual’s purpose in life, his priorities – in short, his life’s narrative. It gives brands the window to latch on to the narrative that they can identify with, and create value and meaning in the individual’s life. I think that’s what brands originally strove to do!

    Update: Thanks MJ, for pointing me to the Nike+ Accelerator!

    until next time, AP”I”

    PS: Over at Soylent, they’re creating the nutritional equivalent of water, an ubiquitous ‘meal’ that is customised for body types. Funding? Kickstarter of course! 🙂