Listening to Howard Rheingold this morning, I was especially sensitive to his insight on how emergent mobile and digital technologies such as location-based services, distributed computing, social networks as well as ubiquitous communication actually integrate themselves into the underlying fabric of our post-industrial societies: whether it is the teenage Finns using SMS as a vector of friendship bounds (example taken from Smart Mobs), the daily casual (and unnoticed) C2C deals on the virtual marketplace of eBay, or even this very act of blogging, they all contribute to building new habits and practices that clearly and voluntarily differ from the incumbent ones, whether it is about going away from operator-centric and vertically-integrated communications, B2B or B2C transactions or mass-media.
Like the personal computer in the 80's and the Internet in the 90's, this new wave of pervasive services is today still in its infancy. As the consequences of the excessive hype around the Web are still fresh in minds, prophetic predictions and unbounded optimism is not the way to go. Yet, there are several encouraging signs showing that this may well be a promising field:
- Wide availability: Ericsson and the GSM Association now envisions the next billion users, which will means that "The lion's share of the GSM family market growth is now in the lower-penetration markets, primarily China, but also some other Asian Countries, as well as India, Russia, Africa and South America".
- Integration to the "physical" world: the idea of Cities without Borders means that such technologies bring information, media, culture and property beyond the geographically-bound metropolitan clusters. The phone in your pocket is not only a means to reach you easily, it is now an immediate tool that anyone can use, forget, and rediscover again and again, hence becoming far less demanding than dedicating one's full attention span in front of a computer.
- Active end-users: the backside of freeing users is that they can, and will, take a pro-active role in the use of mobile services. Many "revolutionary" services have failed because they were based on technology-push (i.e. geeky dreams) rather than on user-driven, demand-pull analysis. As hilighted by Rheingold, "additional questions such as 'Do people really need this?' and 'What
are they doing in their lives where this is a large value?' need to be
asked" when working on such innovations.
Referring to Schumpeter, these coming innovations have the potential of "creative destruction", that is to say they hold both the seeds of encouraging a new type of growth and usages, while at the same time threatening today's accepted business practices and structures (for instance rethinking intellectual property, media distribution as well as privacy issues). An exciting time to live, work and play in, indeed!
I was reading Dagens Industri yesterday on the plane back from Paris, and on the front page stood this dramatic statement: Venture Capital is a bubble (Riskkapitalitet är en bubbla). A very pessimistic article indeed, as it predicts that venture capital firms are "at the brink of becoming the millennium’s first financial bubble". Journalistic sensationalism apart, the situation seems quite serious indeed: as of today, the value of the equity funds Swedish controlled in Sweden almost reaches the overall value of the Stockholm Stock Exchange!
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