Tag Archives: Innovation

Facebook Home Highlights Android as a Double-edged Sword

Facebook Home Promo Image

A couple of days ago, Mark Zuckerberg announced the new Facebook Home. Rather than the speculated new phone from Facebook, it’s instead, a new “home” screen of the Android phone. Or, put differently, an Android Facebook “skin”. Wired went as far as to refer to this as Zuck’s Android Takeover.

Facebook Home has vividly demonstrated that the Android ecosystem has been a double-edged sword, both for the handset manufacturers that are on the Android bandwagon, and to a lesser extent, to the mobile telecom operators.

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The future is already here! Or is it?

I’ve been asked to deliver an opening keynote at an upcoming conference. In this talk, I’ve been asked to survey future technologies and how they might shape communication service providers landscape. To prepare, I started jotting down a list of all the interesting future technologies and it immediately occurred to me that many of these are already here with us today. This reminded me of the quote by William Gibson – “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed”.

And indeed, the difference between today and the future is often merely the pervasiveness of these technologies. In most cases, the technologies exist and their potential can be anticipated to a large extent, if considered carefully.

But then I wondered whether I missed something or got my estimates wrong.

It’s much easier to see the direction of a trend than to know when it will be realized. For example, we all know that at some point in the future, cars will drive themselves. The question isn’t whether or not this will happen. The question is only “when?” this will be a reality. Similarly, we can now all see that at some point in the future, people will barely use paper books. These will become a thing of the past. The really interesting question is “when?” will this future be reality. Certainly in less than 100 years, perhaps less than 20, and perhaps even less than 10 years from now.

Why is this critical?

Well, innovators must get their timing right – bringing a solution to market too early can be as devastating to a venture as bringing it too late.

So I was thinking, perhaps inspired by my crowdfunding blog post, that you might help me figure out if I got it right. I’m going to put forth my initial estimate of when and why I believe a set of technologies will become mature and pervasive (not ubiquitous). When I say “pervasive”, I mean when will the technology be widely used – perhaps as much as 25% of the potential users will already be using it. At that point in time, it would probably not yet completely take over its predecessor technology.

Then, I’d like you to help me. Please point out any important technologies I have missed (note that I intentionally dropped over 40 items from this list, as otherwise this would have become a very long list) and also comment on the time you think they would become pervasive and why.

So here we go: the technologies, when they will mature, and why:

Is this our future?

Tech Trend Year when   pervasive (at least 25% of the users) Why
Mobile Money / Peer-to-Peer (P2P) money exchange

2014 / 2017

In developing economies this will come sooner and will gradually penetrate developed economies.
Location-Based Services (LBS)

2015

Some might argue that we’re already there with so many GPS-enabled smartphones. The question is when will 25% of users be expecting and using services and experiences based on their location.
Internet-connected TV

2015

I believe it will take that long to reach a quarter of the population. To some degree, we’re still in early-adopter phase right now. And I don’t distinguish here between the various methods to net-enable the TV experience.
Cloud computing

2016

Till cloud computing operates a quarter of business compute resources.
Telepresence

2017

What is marketed today by some vendors as Telepresence is simply higher quality video conferencing. The original vision of Telepresence has taken a backseat. I here refer to that real vision and refer to it in a business context. It’s when companies have telepresence rather than high quality video conferencing.
Near-Field Communication (NFC)

2018

It might take some time to roll out this technology for contactless payment systems, for instance. Especially in developed economies where alternative forms of credit and payment are widespread.
Zero emission alternative energy powers the world

2018

Costs must come down and the substantial focus on “green” and various incentives will help bring that about, eventually.
3D TV

2018

Until 3D TV is in 25% of the homes. See my blog post about 3D TV.
Social communications

2018

People use free communication via social media and P2P VoIP/IM rather than paid services by communication service providers to conduct most of their communication.
Cloud-based operating systems (truly thin clients) – or is this a cycle?

2018

Thin/thick, dumb/smart terminal is a pendulum. Will it swing back (e.g. Chrome)? Perhaps, as connectivity truly becomes ubiquitous.
eBooks replace books in all current forms of use (including education)

2019

It will take a few years to acquire all these books for educational institutions, but eventually, it’ll happen.
Mobile broadband at 10 Mbps

2019

Late stages of 4G technologies might get there on existing spectrum and consumer insatiable demand for bandwidth.
Ubiquitous broadband connectivity

2019

There is an expectation that for most populated areas on the planet, anybody traveling there can receive an affordable broadband connection.
High-efficiency inductive charging

2019

Aren’t we tired with all the wired chargers? At some point these will be replaced, no? How about 8 years from now?
Smart meters

2019

Smart energy saving devices in the home and remotely accessible and administered power meters will roll out, eventually. There are some geographies (such as Italy) where this might have already happened, but when will it reach a quarter of the users?
Telemedicine

2019

Medical professionals will routinely monitor patients from remote.
Natural gesture interfaces (e.g. touch, hand gestures, vocals) will be used for almost everything

2021

I’m not yet sure these interfaces are always better. Right now, I’m using a keyboard, for instance. However, in the future I might use Gmail Motion. It was announced April 1, 2011. You must check it out.
The Internet of Things / Machine to Machine (M2M)

2021

Since these are not “used by people”, it doesn’t exactly make sense to talk about pervasiveness in terms of users. Therefore, the benchmark here is a bit different – when 25% of “things” are connected to the net that are not operated by people. So for this, tablets, smartphones, PCS would not count. I think it will take longer than some anticipate.
Self-driving vehicles

2021

Not too far into the future, we’ll see these in our neighborhood. Wouldn’t that be cool?
The semantic web

2021

Everything’s meaning is connected and understood. When we ask questions, the meaning will be used to determine the answer.
Digital life integration

2026

Our digital lives are still very disparate. Contacts, calendars, music, photos, videos, etc. All created and stored on a variety of devices and mediums and not easily accessible. It will take some time to resolve this in a pervasively available method, but it’s bound to eventually be solved.
Voice and text simultaneous translation

2026

I don’t think this is ready yet and it might be comical today.
Artificial body part replacement for many more parts

2026

The brain will probably be the last to be replaceable, but I believe it too will be “bionically” enhanced in due course. Before then we’ll have all sorts of limbs and internal organs.
Cure for cancer

2026

This is for many forms of cancer, through genetically specific and personal medicine. Optimistic, perhaps. Something to hope for.
Physical books no longer in practical use

2031

Seeing a physical book will become a rarity. Libraries will, effectively, be museums. Most will not exist as all books are accessible online and on reading devices anywhere.
All storage be cloud-based

2031

We’ll no longer have DVDs and BluRay discs, or any other portable medium for that matter, all data will be cloud-resident. No more new forms of media will be required by individuals.
Home automation

2031

If you’re wealthy, you can have full automation of your home today. When will this be a reality for 25% of the population? The issue is retrofitting existing homes, of course. That’s a long cycle.
Affordable brain-power computer (yet not brain-capable)

2031

One can buy a computer, like a PC today, but its power will be able to compute the equivalent of a human brain. However, as it will not operate like a human brain, it will have only niche uses.
Affordable space tourism

2036

You won’t have to be filthy rich and it becomes an everyday occurrence. Those with income at the top 10 percentile will be able to afford a trip. Some believe it’s nearly here already. Not me.
Cold fusion

2036

Hmmm. Not much to base my assessment here, I’m afraid.
Virtual tourism

2041

You can have the full experience of travel, without leaving a facility. Not just as “an experiment”, but as actual replacement for tourism… I don’t how attractive this will ever become.
Interplanetary human travel

2071

Ditto

Some observations

If all this is true (and it certainly isn’t), there are some rather funny consequences. For example, this would imply that in 15 years we will have cured cancer and have self-driving vehicles, yet our home would not yet be fully automated. Also, if much of this plays itself out as suggested, the next two decades are going to be extremely exciting, don’t you think?

I’m the first to admit that this table certainly has many errors and omissions. In fact, this is not a set of concrete predictions so much as it is a straw man for you all to tear up and suggest corrections.

Call to action

Please, help identify notable omissions and correct these estimates, and perhaps our collective wisdom will provide better insight into our future.

My plunge into crowdfunding

Crowdfunding – the notion of funding “something” by collecting funds from the crowd, is not new. Philanthropy has many such examples and 3 years ago, Barack Obama’s campaign for presidency was an astonishing example of how it could become extremely effective. By some accounts, there are over 150 web sites that support various forms of crowdfunding.

My plunge into crowdfunding occurred a few months ago.

Let me tell you the story:

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CES 2011 Wrap-up

Over 140,000 people attended CES 2011

It’s quite a challenge to add to the plethora of CES 2011 blogs. This post puts together some of my key observations. I didn’t touch on everything I saw and might have even missed key insights, so it’s not “the definitive” guide to anything CES. The show is huge and there were over 140,000 people there, so it wasn’t easy to catch all the action. But I did see a lot, and gain some insight along the way:

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Thinking outside the box at Management World Americas

I recently attended TM Forum’s Management World Americas in Orlando, the largest BSS/OSS event in the industry. The key theme of this year’s event was about how to unlock new monetization opportunities as carriers look to recoup network investments. One approach discussed was to leverage existing networks and service enablers. The other approach to monetization discussed was to create of new services—cloud services were probably the most talked about development at the event. I thought this poster I saw at the event was a poignant reminder of the vast untapped potential that many see in existing services.

Several of the keynotes and debates were around enabling the two-sided business model suggested by the Telco 2.0 initiative.

I agree that these are indeed great opportunities, yet the orthodoxies of the industry are clearly holding us all back from exploiting these and other opportunities.

Innovation Workshop – What happens when we let go of our preconceptions?

I always present, moderate a session track, or lead some other activity at Management World events that I attend. This time, the forum added a new format on the third day: “intensive debate”. Within this framework, I led an interactive workshop on “Digital Service Innovation – the new era of service provider innovation”. Here are a few pictures from the workshop as well as a short video. As you can see, it was very interactive.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4WjLdMq3z4

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About Innovation: Why we hung movie posters on our office walls

Click to enlarge

A key part of my day job is looking at how Amdocs, as a company, continuously improves its innovation capabilities and becomes an innovation powerhouse. So, I’m going to start a series of “About Innovation” posts talking about this—welcome to the first installment! I have so many things to tell you about what we do at Amdocs to nurture a culture of innovation and to become an effective innovator. So in order to help me choose which topics to discuss, I’ll rely on your feedback to help guide me.

So why did we hang a bunch of movie posters across the company?

We wanted to make sure everybody in the company, and beyond, understands that “innovation works” at Amdocs. Not only that we are seeing the results of our innovation activities, but also that it is really worth it for all the various stakeholders, and in particular, one community was most of interest to me – the innovators themselves. As a large company, we have many processes to help weed out variability in our day-to-day operations, in order to consistently recreate our successes, consistently produce quality products, and consistently deliver massive transformation projects for the world’s largest service providers. You cannot do these things consistently without good established processes and best practices—so we have many of these. But that can make innovation, challenging, as it requires trying something that’s new and different, and not part of the established process. Some might think that innovators might not fit in this culture. Well, they are wrong. Innovators can fit in, and we need them. But it takes some adjusting and encouragement to make this happen.

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Why OTT Video Might Not Be So Disruptive After All

Earlier this year, I presented at OTTcon. This was the first major conference about OTT (video) ever, and was attended by a few hundred people and many industry players. Coming into this conference, I was under the distinct impression that OTT is a significant disruption to traditional service provider business and that it would have a significant and negative long-term impact on that marketplace. The common wizdom is that service providers who have the most to lose will be the least motivated to support OTT, and will therefore be the last to embrace it, if ever, will ultimately face the disruptive impact most of all, possibly losing their video distribution business over time.

But—I came out of the conference with the opposite conclusion! It’s not that OTT won’t be disruptive – it will, but not “as” disruptive as one might expect. And most of the market players will probably remain in place and not be sidelined by OTT. If it were truly disruptive, it would harm the existing service providers more than I expect it actually will.

Why? Because I think the current service providers themselves will ultimately be the ones that enable OTT content, thus avoiding a major disruption – whether they know it right now or not! In fact, right now, they’re doing very little, and most OTT is being enabled by others. So why do I think they’ll wake up in time? Read on to find out.

How OTT might get to the viewers

Some background

In case you’re wondering, OTT means “over the top” and it refers to all traffic that flows “on top” of broadband access, typically provided by someone else. For the service provider who provides the access to the Internet, this is just “data”, but for the consumer, this is “video”. While there are many other types of OTT content, this conference was only about video. When I’ll use of the term and “OTT” here, I’m referring only to over-the-top video content.

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