Ludovic Copéré

Collective Action and Creative Destruction

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!

Howard Rheingold coming to Stockholm

Howard Rheingold is coming tomorrow morning at Handelshögskolan in Stockholm: for those who have not heard of him, he is an Internet Guru, founder of The Well, one of the first (if not the first) true online Internet community,first redactor-in-chief of HotWired - the online presence of Wired, the journalistic emblem of the worldwide digital society, and more recently author of Smart Mobs, a book on "the next social revolution" through digital and mobile technologies enabling individuals, groups and societies as a whole  organize and coordinate themselves better and thus transforming themselves into "Smart Mobs".

It goes without saying that I'm looking forward to it - rest assured that I'll blog more on that after tomorrow's seminar!

Going to the Search Engine Strategy 2004 Conference

Tomorrow I'll be heading to the Search Engine Strategy 2004 Conference & Expo, organized here in Stockholm by Jupiter Media (thanks Henrik for the tip!). It will be interesting to get acquainted with the latest and hottest in the search field, hopefully streamlined from the hype far too often present in media articles (yes, I did read that Google's capitalization just reached $50 billion, effectively topping up Yahoo!'s mere $48 billion).

For those interested in coming to the conference, free passes to the exhibition are available.

QR code generator

A quick follow-up to my previous post: I've stumbled onto a nifty webpage that generates QR codes. Who will be the first to decode the picture on top of this post? ;-)

Information Technology in Africa?

In my last post I wrote about the development of broadband infrastructure in Sweden. The same day, I also listened to a government representative from Rwanda, which is not necessarily the country you usually associate with Information Technology (ICT). Although it is definitely still on the bad side of the digital divide, it might also hold some opportunities for substantial ICT-related opportunities in the long run.

Indeed, the almost absent penetration of ICT in sub-Saharan Africa can be an interesting test-bed market for large corporations, like Nokia, Microsoft and Ericsson, who have been operating there for several years and are able to respond to an actual local need through adapted products, support and business models: the Return On Investment (ROI) is of course bound to be very different from what to be expected in a "traditional" OECD environment.

As Ericsson wrote in their 2003 annual report, [o]perators in emerging markets make very different
demands from those in developed markets, so in order to reach the second billion mobile users, companies must look towards emerging markets and adapt their operating conditions, marketing strategy and overall vision radically to meet those markets' needs and capabilities.

On the backbone infrastructure side, there are existing coastline connections from western and north Africa (Sat-3 / SAFE WASC and SEA ME WE-3). For the most part, Eastern Africa is today absent of the major Internet backbone and is the missing link towards connecting the whole Africa to the world. Even with that solved, the major challenge of landline distribution would still remain - and even accentuated by the scattered and rural living of the vast majority of the people. Out there, WiMAX (broadband, long-distance wireless connection) could do wonder: 250 WiMAX base stations would be enough to cover all Rwanda.

Considering the political and economic conditions in this region, ICT cannot be viewed as having the same direct impact on the short term as it has in industrialized countries. However, it does contribute indirectly to the benefit of everyone through a long-time spill-over effect - for instance as being re-injected to poorer areas through governmental policies and international aid (Sweden is very active in this field, thanks to the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, which has among other things funded broadband infrastructure projects in Tanzania, Mozambique and Rwanda).

Unmet customer needs fuel piracy

I have recently read and had debates on whether the piracy is stoppable or not. For most people, piracy represents the "ultimate competitor", the unbeatable force in the media and digital content industry, and it's true that in many countries (think Eastern Europe, Russia, and most of Asia), it is simply not viable to set up local distribution, with such a rampant, on-the-street digital forgery.

My view is that there will always be, no matter what technological, legal barriers to piracy nor commercial incentives to buy, a percentage of people who will prefer to pirate and illegally consume digital content, which then, through the magic of group dynamics and mimicking, convince a larger, less die-hard share of people to join in those activities.. The crux is: how does one control and, when possible, reduce such percentage to a negligible one?

If we take the music distribution industry, they are now suffering from the series of mistakes they made in the 90s and early 00s - that is to consider the CD medium as the sacred and unique way of distributing music. That and their late concern for fairer prices (both towards the end-customers and the artists) have indeed contributed to the overall decrease of music sales.

However, just look at what Apple has been doing for a year with its iTunes Music Store: by shifting the paradigm of how to distribute music, they have created a new wave in which tens of competitors (Sony, Real, Walmart, Microsoft...) are now trying to get their marketshare. Such a new delivery channel is far closer to actual customers' habits and demands. Of course you will not stop all the downloads on the P2P networks, but for most people, having a perfectly encoded and labeled song in one click for 0.99$ overcomes the long searching, waiting and disappointments occurring in the illegal download channels.

The same can now be seen with videogames, as some companies (like French start-up Boonty) now offers instant paid download and online renting of games. Just as will be doing Valve with their Half Life 2 game (well, when it is eventually released!).

The only (but substantial) downside is that each content provider is fighting for its own Digital Right Management (DRM) techniques and thus create a customer lock-in that is not always desirable: as of today, I can't play a song bought on Sony Connect on my iPod. And Real's attempt has actually backfired to them, creating more flame and criticisim than actual praise over their Harmony technology, which enables crossovers between digital players and different protection techniques (like Apple's).

As a natural optimistic, I see that as a natural pre-chasm crossing phenomenon (to borrow Geoff Moore's terminology), and we'll hopefully see some consolidation and unification in the coming years (or months), as more and more consumers and content providers jump on the (digital) bandwagon.

PS: could Apple make the next generation of iPods in color, like the mini? I mean, 40GB in your palm is cool, but 40GB in blue (or pink, if it's your inclination) is cooler :-)

Information Technology in Sweden and Japan

On Monday I was invited to an extremely interesting seminar on the uses and implactions of Information Technology (IT) both in Sweden and Japan. Organized by ITPS (Institutet för tillväxtpolitiska studier, i.e. Swedish Institute for Growth Policy Studies) , in cooperation with VINNOVA (the Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems), NUTEK (the Swedish Business Development Agency) and STEM (the Swedish Energy Agency), it gave a broad overview of the innovations and challenges in the two regions.

First were several presentations hilighting the state of the art in Japan in respect to IT:
- JEITA (the Japan Electronics and Information Technology Industries Association) shed some light on the sucessful business models in the Japanese IT industry over the next 10 years : building on Japan's exceptional hardware, industrial and Intellectual Property assets, the country should strive towards an ubiquitous IT environment (From e-Life to u-Life - from electronics to ubiquity), as a part of the governmental policy of e-Japan. Through the convergence of sectors in which Japan has a strong presence (such as digital home appliances and mobile terminals) can the country grow as a leader in user-targeted IT innovations and uses.
- Representatives from Total Life and ALICE Forum explained the developments on the newest housing network equipments in Japan and the processes for standardizing and spreading its use. In comparison to what is being done in Sweden (for instance Svenska Bostäder's fiber-to-the-home city network in Vällingby), Japan seems more inclined towards smart house innovations, such as remote and centralized control, monitoring and surveillance. To illustrate this, we were shown an example of a wall socket featuring power, ethernet, TV and sensor access alltogether (pictured here).
- Speaking of sensors, the presentation from IPSquare underlined the impressive innovations occuring in Japan: they have developped a single-chip solution for processing information from versatile physical sensors (temperature, humidity, CO2 level...) and sending it over an IP network using standard protocols. thereby opening the way towards swarms of sensor-based intelligent agents.
- Showing that IT is diffusing itself into every economic sector in Japan, the presentation from SHIMIZU, a 200-year old construction group, underlined the influence of IT throughout the engineering process, with examples such as Mobile Phone Positioning System, Structural Health Monitoring System (important in earthquake-prone Japan), and Biotope Monitoring System.

After that, the seminar shifted towards IT in Sweden, with a special focus on governmental policy and social issues:
- Aiming for An Information Society for All, the Ministry of Industry, Employment and Communication explained Sweden's e-Government strategy, consisting of a specific structure and activity plan focusing on five prioritized areas: education, healthcare, broadband infrastructure, economic growth, and IT culture.
- Very logically, the focus was then put on the issue the ability to create a democratic information society for everyone, with a reflection on going from thinking IT as a tool for Democracy to Democracy in the Information Society. This would entail deep structural changes in the way democracy runs and is perceived by the citizens, but this is a far-reaching and long-term view that could position the Information Society as the founder for a renewed and updated democracy, just like the Industrial Revolution crafted the values and systems in which we are currently evolving.

As a perfect synthesis to bridge the views, assets and issues in Sweden and Japan, the seminar was concluded by an insightful reflection on what makes Sweden an Japan simultanesouly similar and different in the IT world. Both strong R&D and innovcation clusters with a strong home market, the two countries yet subtly differ in their respective strengths and weaknesses: international outlook, conceptual thinking and multidisciplinary thinking in Sweden, quicker Time To Market, playfulness of the domestic market and market push in Japan, to higlight a few.

All in all, this even was a great occasion to get a more global vision on what is driving IT in terms of innovation, markets and policies, thanks to the inspiring people present that day.