Politics and New Tech

Washington Post asks the question: "What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop?" and provides the answer built around Coase's insight that the cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations.

the end result of the Internet revolution on companies has been exactly what Coase's theory predicted: Cheap information has allowed firms to shrink. Size is now less of an advantage in organizations, and that means more competition in the global marketplace. For companies, it's either reorganize or die. That's what Coase, who won the 1991 Nobel Prize in economics, was talking about.

Coase's ideas are no less true for political organizations, as Dean's success shows. He is the first candidate to use the Internet effectively as a political organizing device.

To an economist, the "trick" of the Internet is that it drives the cost of information down to virtually zero. So according to Coase's theory, smaller information-gathering costs mean smaller organizations. And that's why the Internet has made it easier for small folks, whether small firms or dark-horse candidates such as Howard Dean, to take on the big ones.

Now anyone with a Web site and a server, a satellite transponder and about $100 million can have -- in a matter of months -- much of what the political parties have taken generations to build.

The Internet doesn't reinforce the parties -- instead, it questions their very rationale. You don't need a political party to keep the ball rolling -- you can have a virtual party do it just as easily.

And that's what Howard Dean has done.

As technology spreads in India, it will be very interesting to see how politics and governance will change.

Camera Phone as Fortune's Best Tech

Fortune writes:

Considered a novelty when they appeared three years ago in Japan, camera phones are rapidly gaining popularity worldwide; tens of millions are already in use, and analysts expect the numbers to rise to hundreds of millions in the next five years. By that time camera phones will outsell all other forms of cameras.

Their rapid spread has profound implications for the photography business, which in 2003 saw sales of digital cameras overtake film cameras for the first time. While the demise of film has long been expected, the camera phone as perpetrator caught us by surprise, as did the related fact that Finland's Nokia, the leading maker of mobile phone handsets—including the popular model 3650—will soon be the world's largest camera company.

A related article named Apple's iTunes Music Store as the Product of the Year.

EmergeCore's Mini Server

Slashdot points to EmergeCore's IT100: "Designed for small business use, it comes equipped with a Transmeta Crusoe 533MHz, 128MB RAM, 20GB IBM TravelStar, 802.11b Access Point, and boots from a 32MB Flash card. The IT100 is powered by a 60 watt external PSU and is smaller than a PS2."

Interesting, except for the cost (USD 1400). The concept is right - they need to bring the cost down, and also look at small-footprint thin clients.

Arthur Clarke on Digital Divide and ICTs

[via Anish] Excerpts from an interview in OneWorld South Asia (related to the Digital Divide and the role of ICTs):

A major concern is that not every one of us benefits equally from these technologies. The communications revolution has bypassed tens of millions of people, and something needs to be done about it.

We are now reaching the point in our technological evolution when we can – and must - commit more time and resources to solving the problems of poverty, deprivation and inequality.

Virtually everything we wish to do in the field of communications is now technologically possible. The only limitations are financial, legal or political. In time, I am sure, most of these will also disappear - leaving us with only limitations imposed by our own morality.

The Information Age offers much to mankind, and I would like to think that we will rise to the challenges it presents. But it is vital to remember that information – in the sense of raw data – is not knowledge; that knowledge is not wisdom; and that wisdom is not foresight. But information is the first essential step to all of these.

ICTs should be part of a wider solution that needs to be applied with care and caution. Information and communications technologies should be part of the solution, and not the only solution.

There have always been disparities in this world – the digital divide is just the latest manifestation. I think we need to take a few steps back from the digital hype and first try to bridge the ‘Analog Divide’ that has for so long affected the less endowed communities and countries.

A computer in every classroom is a noble goal – provided there is a physical classroom in the first place. A multimedia computer with Internet connectivity is of little use in a school with leaking roofs – or with no roof at all. The top priorities in such cases are to have the basic infrastructure and adequate teachers.

And we have to be careful that we don’t create new problems while solving existing problems. The information age has been driven and dominated by technopreneurs – a small army of ‘geeks’ who have reshaped our world faster than any political leader has ever done. And that was the easy part. We now have to apply these technologies in saving lives, improving livelihoods and lifting millions of people out of squalor, misery and suffering. In other words, our focus must now move from the geeks to the meek.

Clarke sees voice recognition as the next big thing:

I see voice recognition as the next major step forward – which will also overcome current limitations of literacy and make ICTs truly accessible to millions of people.

Voice recognition systems that are now coming into use enable users to bypass the keyboard and dictate inputs directly. But these systems still have some limitations: while they are very valuable for those working alone, imagine the chaos that a whole officeful of talkers could produce!

Besides, the software has to cope with a huge diversity of accents in which the same language is spoken. I cannot resist quoting from my own first attempts to train one of the best current systems. When I said, ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of the party,’ the programme revealed its impressive vocabulary with a startling display of political incorrectness: ‘Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of apartheid.’

But it’s only a matter of time before this capability will improve and VR applications will proliferate. Better and more sensitive voice recognition systems will iron out current difficulties and make us less dependent on keyboards.

Offloading Memories

Among its "Year in Ideas", the NYTimes has one by Steven Johnson on using the computer to remember all the details of one's life:

In a way, it's already starting to do that. Your e-mail files contain a good portion of your personal communication, and your calendar software has a record of every dentist appointment and staff meeting you've had in the last few years. But while it's easy to track down an address that your colleague e-mailed you six months ago, it's a bit more challenging to reconstruct a joke your friend told you during a phone call sometime in the late 90's. So why not take matters a step further and record everything? Now that most of our information streams are built out of zeros and ones, it's vastly easier to capture all those bits for posterity: every phone call, every passing conversation, every book you read or face you see -- the totality of information that flows through a human life.

Think of it as a TiVo for real life, according to Johnson. He adds on his blog: "For space reasons, the piece dropped down a few hundred words, and lost a (somewhat predictable) little riff about how this connects to Vannevar Bush's original vision of the Memex, which was all about using machines to extend our memory. But of course, the Bush vision is really about academic memory -- it's all about being able to track down that reference to the Gettysburg Address that you read five years ago and have almost forgotten. These new projects, on the other hand, are much more clearly directed to the stray details of everyday life. It's not so much remembering some academic treatise as it is being able to determine, for once and for all, who really started that marital spat that's been simmering for three weeks now..."

Blind Spots

As I lookback over the past few years, I realise that I have a few blind spots in dealing with some issues. For example, I have a mind block against looking at service-oriented things and custom projects in my quest to create products. I haven't looked enough at the wireless revolution - my cellphone is more than two-and-half-years old and needs to be replaced so I can start using the phone for more than just talking and the occasional SMS. Marketing has been another problematic area, with my belief that if I build it, they will come.

Blind Spots can be the death knell for a growing business. It is important for entrepreneurs to recognise what areas they are uncomfortable with, and spend some time thinking about those, and whether they are letting personal likes and dislikes interfere with the growth of their business.

TECH TALK: My Mental Model: …of Integrated Solutions…

The story so far: Creating disruptive innovations for the bottom of the pyramid requires ecosystems. But how do these ecosystems get created? My next learning is that to bootstrap the process, one entity has to put together the whole solution. Others will join in when they see that entity become successful, but not initially. This means that someone has to take the plunge and demonstrate that there is indeed a business opportunity in which we want others to participate.

But before we go ahead, we need to understand product architectures and interfaces and the interplay between interdependence and modularity, as explained by Clay Christensen and Michael Raynor in their book “The Innovator’s Solution”:

A product’s architecture determines its constituent components and subsystems and defines how they must interact – fit and work together – in order to achieve the targeted functionality. The place where any two components fit together is called an interface. Interfaces exist within a product, as well as between stages in the value-added chain.

An architecture is interdependent at an interface if one part cannot be created independently of the other part – if the way one is designed and made depends on the way the other is being designed and made…Interdependent architectures optimize performance, in terms of functionality and reliability.

In contrast, a modular interface is a clean one, in which there are no unpredictable interdependencies across components or stages of the value chain. A modular architecture specifies the fit and function of all elements so completely that it doesn’t matter who makes the components or subsystems, as long as they meet the specifications.

When product functionality and reliability are not yet good enough to address the needs of customers in a given tier of the market, companies must compete by making the best possible products. In the race to do this, firms that build their products around proprietary, interdependent architectures enjoy an important competitive advantage against competitors whose product architecture are modular.

Think back to the computer industry in the 1970s. The likes of IBM, Digital, HP and Apple were all integrated companies – they did everything in-house. As performance improved and overshot what customers wanted, the basis of competition shifted and the industry modularized into the sub-systems, which greatly benefited two of the component makers: Intel in chips and Microsoft in software.

We will take these ideas from Christensen and apply them in our context, to see how the disruptive innovations need a single entity to provide the whole solution, as a precursor to building the ecosystem.

Tomorrow: …of Integrated Solutions… (continued)