Christian Renaud's Blog

TEDxDesMoines- Come on Down!

[sound of Christian blowing the dust off of his blog]

The team at Foundry Coworking have kicked off Des Moines' own TEDx conference, listed here.

I'll be speaking mid-day there this Sunday about the workforce, and workplace, of 2020 and what we can expect to see.  For those of you who have been in prior presentations of mine at NDU or at the ISU ETC conference, this is one area you will remember I am passionate about and now have an opportunity to double-click on this specific aspect of the workplace/workspace transition that is underway.

I hope to see you there!

Emerging Technology- Slide Presentation

Belatedly, but as promised, here is the SlideShare link to the Emerging Technology: 2020 presentation I delivered at the Emerging Technology Conference at ISU, as well as the Federal Consortium of Virtual Worlds conference at NDU.  I will provide an annotated one in the near future as well.

Emerging Technology 2020

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Good Karma or Bad Karma?

My current 'object of desire' is the absolutely gorgeous Fisker Karma.  Built by Fisker Coachbuild, and powered by a powerplant from Quantum Technologies, the Karma is an eco-geek's dream machine.  It is a plug-in-hybrid, which operates exclusively off of it's batteries, with a gasoline engine to power the electric plant in the event that the driven range exceeds 50 miles between charges.  If your commute is less than 25 miles in each direction, the gasoline engine never kicks on, and you end up with an effective 100MPG.  When you have returned home (or if you have an AC outlet at work), you plug it in and charge the batteries and you are ready to roll after work or the next morning.

The clever folks at Fisker Auto also have the option of a solar array on the roof of the car to keep the cabin (and batteries) cool during idle periods, thereby boosting the batteries' efficiency.  Rumor has it that there is also a garage-roof-solar-panel option with the car as well, to allow it to charge using solar while parked.  Of course, if you drive home from work in the evening, that doesnt give you much time to harness the sun to charge the battery unless you have some sort of fuel-cell that stored it up all day.

In my case, with two young children, it is the perfect pairing of exotic sportscar (it goes 0-60MPH in 5.8 seconds) and family sedan.  Granted, the estimated retail price is somewhere north of $80,000, so it is unlikely that my smarter-and-better-half will green-light the pre-order in these harsh macro-economic times.

Never one to be deterred, I set about trying to justify the value to myself (in preparation for the harder sell to my wife), and was surprised to discover some nasty facts about electric power in the United States that caused me to think twice about a plug-in hybrid. 

I'm going to lay out some data that I uncovered, and hope that some astute readers can point out the holes in my concerns, or new data, so I can justify this after-all:

Dusting off the Crystal Ball

A little over a year ago, I wrote a number of industry and technology forecasts within a blog post entitled Look into the ball and tell me what you see.  In the post, I predicted changes and announcements in the Virtual Worlds industry, and I'd be a poor futurist and technologist if I didn't revisit that blogpost and see how my predictions fared.  Most futurists are loathe to do this sort of thing, as rear-view mirrors are usually not very flattering. There was a humorous anecdote I once read in one futurist tome about a professional forecasting study done in England where the most accurate forecasters of future events were actually plumbers.

So, with the prescient-plumbers in mind, lets revisit my prediction of June of 2007 for June of 2008 and see how I fared:

Prediction: "T= This time next year.  Three or Four major 'verses competing for customers with status/infrastructure innovation ("Transfer your avatar and property to our world for free from Second Life when you join, no charge!" (American and United regularly do this with frequent travelers)).  Voice is common, and the 'verse developers have finally figured out that the utility of their 'verse is directly effected by the amount of other data sources they can integrate into their environment (Note: RSS is a fine start, but it's a .0001 on a 10 scale).  Worldwide adoption of virtual environments as a dominant Internet tool is still <1%."

Verdict: Fast forward to June 2008.  Google Lively launched in July, IBM was demo-ing multiple internal virtual world efforts and announcing interoperability but did not officially ship any product as part of their collaboration suites, Microsoft was mum, and Sony Home slipped not once but twice from their Beta in 2007.  So, from the enumerated vendors in the blogpost, I missed launch by a few months, batting a big zero for timing. On the other hand, each platform prides itself on data integration, specifically video or slides, from the outside world.  No one is really interested in 'transfer your property' yet.

Revisionist history verdict:  Sun (a major player) shipped Wonderland code for public download.  Lively shipped one month later than I predicted.  IBM is working on private label products using multiple virtual worlds for hand-picked customers.  A slew of startups have shipped,  like Rivers Run Red and Electric Sheep, in addition to the major technology players.

Final verdict:  I under-estimated the timing of the launches. They are all walled gardens as predicted (no interoperability other than the proof-of-concept demonstration by IBM with SecondLife and OpenSim).  Feature functionality for the most part is better than SL (or is SL++ like RRR's offerings) with the notable exception of Lively.

The predictions and prognostications regarding virtual world interoperability are proving less and less relevant as we see disruptive players enter the market with web-based solutions (Electric Sheep, 3DExplorer, etc.) that do not require a fat download or special browser software.  As these environments begin to leverage the vast array of social networking APIs,  other micro-blogging technologies such as Twitter and Pownce, and communications technologies such as AIM or Skype for VoIP, the relevance of walled-garden-interoperability seems rather outdated.  It never has made sense to walk your avatar between World of Warcraft and Second Life, and it seems even less relevant to do so now between Lively and Second Life other than to make it simpler to have your avatar look consistent between tools.  However, this is putting lipstick on the pig if we don't address the broader concern of compartmentalization of these environments, essentially replicating the Instant Messaging market instead of the Email market, where we can use interoperable systems and different clients for the same end result.

There have also been a number of platforms launched in the intervening year for virtual environments  (Electric Sheep, Multiverse retreaded, VastPark, others) that will be interesting experiments in toolkit vs. finished product.

A sad casualty of the last year was Transmutable/Ogoglio, Trevor Smith's efforts towards building 3D spaces as a web service that could be leveraged.  I hope someone is able to take the gauntlet from Trevor's efforts and carry them forward, because I predict that this approach has the most promise of any of the models currently deployed.  Make it a feature, not a product, or (heaven forbid) industry.  That's when you'll see real market penetration numbers and ROI.

In my (new) formal day job, I'm putting the finishing touches on the Technology Intelligence Group's Virtual World Industry Outlook for 2008-2009, with some specific focus on not only activity in the last year but also leading indicators like VC money-flow, new major market entrants and potential standards emerging from surprising places.  This will dive into much greater detail about predictions for the coming year beyond this post or last year's crystal ball.  Stay tuned, it'll be one of our first publications as soon as the main site goes live.

Functional 'Augmented Reality'?

Call it Augmented Reality, rev 1.

Now I know there have been experimental augmented reality platforms before.  The MIThril platform at the MIT Media lab was the foundation for a number of technology breakthroughs that my old team at Cisco sponsored over the years in the hopes of making 'presence' relevant in day-to-day interactions.  MIThril was the stereotype of augmented reality systems (AR), heads up display, location information, and so on.  Inevitably, the standard example for AR seems to focus on where you are how to get to restaurants your friends recommend (unless you are doing component assembly, at which point you receive 'in line' documentation while assembling). 

I was thinking about this, in the context of Charlie Stross' excellent book Halting State and his 'copnet' that the law enforcement officials wear plugged into their transparent glasses, when my wife was configuring all the widgets and applications on the new version of software on our iPhones. I'd say that she was 90% there on the phone, minus the application crashes.

If you discount the heads up display (which would be slightly difficult, to say the least, to get widespread adoption with when you have states outlawing pedestrian tasks such as speaking on cellular telephones whilst driving or security guards hassling people for taking pictures within a shopping mall), then what does that leave you?  Location, presence, metadata and the social aspect.  Lets approach those one by one.

My old iPhone (1G) could triangulate from cellular towers to determine general location, whereas the new iPhone 3G has built in GPS that tracks your location (in greater detail than my in car navigation and comparable to my TomTom).  This data is now requested by about every application which requests permission to access your location to narrow results, such as local movie theaters or restaurant recommendations.

Presence is trickier.  When you have a battery-operated device, you need to periodically sleep the interface else you run low.  You also don't want to constantly be updating your telephone if you are busy or not, so this is an area that could use some implicit-application innovation, versus explicit-updates like the AIM app on iPhone.  Imagine if twitter auto-updated ('spimey!') with your location periodically with references to your prior notes on the location ("this place has great tofu!").

Metadata is probably one of the easiest aspects of AR currently instantiated on the iPhone.  By this I mean augmented information about some location or item that you are currently either searching for or looking at.  Is that a good or bad noodle house?  Is this book cheaper on Amazon than this bookstore?  What do the reviews say about this book?  That is metadata.  I use EverNote and love it, and love it even more now that there is a iPhone app for it.  It seems like an automatic memory aid.  In the event that the metadata I seek is outside of my Evernote domain, I have the entire web available to me from either a standard search interface or customized apps of every shape and color (wine suggestions, restaurant recommendations, and so on).  Yelp or UrbanSpoon + iPhone-with-location rocks.

Which brings us to social networking.  Yelp already incorporates your social group's input into restaurant reviews and the like.  As the tools progress and we are able to work around tagging and categorization issues a bit more, you can expect that movie theater time widget to also tell you that your three friends panned the movie you are looking for before you spend the $11.00 for the tickets.  Handy.

So, what is the difference between the traditional definitions of Augmented Reality and a handheld device that has, as we used to say in the Emergent Collaboration team at Cisco, "The three C's: Contacts, Content and Context"?  Probably just the heads-up-display, although I am sure some savvy Apple developer could make my newest vga goggles do a pretty good imitation if there wasn't a police officer somewhere around to ticket me.

The Workplace/Workspace Shift

Last week I had the honor of keynoting the Friday session at the CMP Metaverse Life 2.0 conference.  During the presentation, I mentioned the multiple points of evidence that I had encountered of the evolution underway from traditional workplaces to geographically-independent workspaces.  The summary of the argument is:

We have been gradually migrating from a traditional industrial-age workplace metaphor of individual work tasks performed in a shared setting (think of a cubicle-farm of either call-center representatives or engineers occupying three floors of a building) to a Knowledge-age metaphor of more collaborative, integrated tasks that are performed by virtual, geographically dispersed teams.  So, instead of doing autonomous work in a collaborative setting, we are doing collaborative work in more and more autonomous (or at least geographically distinct) settings. This is the Shift.

As far as proof points for the arguments, consider the trends towards globalization of industry (and therefore a more distance-collaboration-sensitive market) that are an inevitability of the flattening effect of world commerce, outsourcing and off-shoring of labor and other tasks, and an increasing trend towards telecommuting, flexible work arrangements and work-at-home roles. JetBlue stay-at-home call center agents come immediately to mind.

A factor (that I hadn’t really considered until recently reading more about the major impact on the global workforce composition by the retirement of the baby-boomer generation) is that there will be a shortage of skilled labor in many areas that will mandate new tools to allow retired boomers to selectively participate in the workforce.  If these gainfully-unemployed retirees are to be courted in this soon to be ‘sellers market’, the successful ‘buyers’ will be those that provide the tools for frictionless distance collaboration from their balmy retirement locations.

Having recently ‘pitched’ a room full of senior citizens on new technology trends, I can assure you that they are disinclined to buy a computer (if they do not already have one), much less create an avatar.  They are comfortable with the traditional workplace metaphor described above, with autonomous-work/shared-environment, so any tools that are developed for them must be painfully easy-to-use and consistent with their ingrained habits.

(addendum- Some people have mis-interpreted this prior paragraph to imply that I am making some ageist comments about the technical abilities of people older than my 40-year-old-self.  Before everyone gets more fired up than they already are, let me assure you that I have worked for/with/managed young and old alike who are technophilic or technophobic, and that age has little to do with it.  I will say, and gladly stand by, that my six and three year old daughters are more inclined to go-to-work as avatars than nearly all people I work with regularly in Silicon Valley.  The point being, we need easier to use tools that leverage workplace metaphors we are all familiar with, not something orthogonal and disruptive. Unless you are three or six years old, at which point, 'disrupt away')

To return to the Shift, what tools will we need to develop to enable technophobic retirees to participate in a Hollywood-style of work?  Is it easy video-conferencing, shared whiteboarding, avatars?

Suggestions welcome and encouraged.

Open Innovation Revisited

I've been spending a fair bit of time considering the ramifications of the Open Innovation model lately.  Henry Chesbrough's 2003 book of the same name hinted at what changes would be required to move from an isolationist, walled garden model of innovation and ideation to an open, best-of-breed successor.  The executive summary of his book combined with my stochastic wanderings is essentially:

In the Industrial age, competitive advantage came from the physical possessions of an organization, and their own explicit now-how in best utilizing those possessions.  In the Knowledge age, the rate of change is too rapid a single company, and change and innovation are happening everywhere in the world.  The industrial age walled-garden paradigm of corporate labs and research will be quickly outpaced by organizations who can leverage the best thinkers and innovation from around academia and industry to their competitive advantage by out-executing the garden-dwellers.

This challenges a few current structures and value systems.  First is the idea of 'corporate as sovereign' where an employer owns all thought and labor of an individual while in their employ.  Second is the 'publish or perish' mentality of much of the academic community, where the New York Times non-fiction book market is held up as some sort of yardstick by which professors can determine how their ideas resonate outside of campus.

I keep returning to the concept of the Library from Snowcrash by Stephenson.  For those who have not read the book, the Library was the privatized remnant of the CIA, after the United States Government imploded on itself. Stringers would check-in intelligence and analysis into the Library, and a dynamic market-based pricing scheme would determine the price of those who would want to access that analysis.  There have been smart contracting mechanisms in the past, as well as the resurrection of 'task, not time' systems and EBay-esque market-based auction schemes.  The Library seems to have had a combination of the three of them, which was the ability of people to check in data 'on spec' to a potential customer base, demand-based pricing to determine market rate, as well as a mechanism for more freelance or contract consulting and follow up.

As we move to a more Hollywood-style of work, I wonder how the open innovation model and the Library will turn the traditional R&D function into more of a 'gourmet chef' role of selecting the choicest ingredients from the world-at-large to create the best end product.

The Human Touch

I received a nice note from John Jainschigg over at CMP Metaverse this morning about last week's Future of Work blogpost.  He had resonated (as had I) with the idea of 're-intermediation' that was put forward by one of my colleagues (who at this juncture should feel free to chime in on the comment roll and remind me, pretty please with sugar on it) at the MetaverseU a few weeks ago.

Someone once said that every challenge is also an opportunity, and the converse is true as well.  The workforce is being rapidly globalized, and roles you would have never envisioned being outsourced are migrating to Bangalore or Beijing at a breakneck pace.  I was personally shopping prices on personal assistants from three different shops in India earlier this week, something which would have seemed insane half-a-decade ago.

At the same time, you have the demographic mass of baby-boomers who are frustrated with the first generation of outsourced service, and are demanding a higher-touch model of customer care.  This is going to have two effects if it 'gets legs', which isn't such a BIG IF:

1) Operational Expenses (OpEx) of the firms switching to providing 'domestic' customer care  is going to go up in most cases.  Despite the vaunted examples of JetBlue and others in having stay-at-home-moms-in-Utah provide call center support, US labor is inherently more expensive than other parts of the world can currently provide.  The rising cost of living in India and China combined with the falling value of the dollar are driving those forces towards some equilibria, however it's not going to resolve for another decade or more.

2) A gray-dawn contract workforce. The boomers aren't ready to sit back and accept a uni-directional money flow.  They want to work, and wouldn't mind if you offered some health care while you're at it.  There are some amazingly well-trained people in the boomer generation just now retiring, like 12 percent of the engineers and 21 percent of the scientists at NASA for starters, who are ready to tackle whatever technological marvels you throw at them.

If you don't think that the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) isn't already the strongest lobby in Washington D.C. already, wait until their numbers swell with the boomer bolus.  They will be in a position to not only harangue your CEO for making them wait an hour for a call center representative, they will also exert pressure in the form of regulatory measures and tax laws to drive macro-level patterns of business.  Think of how large of a group of people this represents, how well-educated, and how much free time they will have on their hands to do nothing but what fix the aspects of their life that annoy them most.  Pretty much the customers from hell.

So the latte-slurping freelance workforce I posited in the last post, while agreeing with all of Prokofy's comments that delivering babies, pizzas and taxis will always exist in meatspace and are immune to the transition from manufacturing to knowledge workers, will be both servicing the baby boomer generation, and will also be comprised of a number of those boomers who will work-at-leisure to finance their vacations and second-home-property taxes. 

And for those that are concerned that boomers and seniors will be discriminated against directly or indirectly because of their age,  how about their avatar?  Their Brad Pitt/Angelina Jolie looking one.

A metaverse outpost would allow them to provide value to the workforce from their snow-bird homes in the desert or on the Gulf coast.  In the Metaverse, no one knows that they are a retired engineer sitting on his/her back deck enjoying a margarita while resolving your customer service problem.

More later, the treadmill beckons.

The Future of Work

(with all apologies to Tom Malone, author of an excellent book by the same name)

Lets step back from all the hustle and bustle and think about this for a minute.

1) There is a major demographic shift as the baby-boomer generation eases into retirement and the workforce composition changes considerably.

2) The rise of more global competition from the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries to established Western players has a considerable impact on how business will be done moving forward.  The increasing number of middle-class (potential or current) Internet users in India and China are far far greater than all of the Western users of the Internet.  Expect the lingua franca of the Internet to shift from predominantly-English to a much more polyglot mix.

3) The ease of creating an entirely virtual company, using services like Earth Class Mail and RingCentral, is less expensive, more flexible and much easier than in years past.  On the development side, there are almost too many contract development houses competing to be the low-bidder on engineering jobs.

4) There is a need for companies to be 'Globally Localized'.  If you are a big multinational corporation, you haven't been able to expect your Asian product/market/operation to look even remotely like your South American product/market/operation since the 1980s.  The days of 'Build it for the US, change the packaging for ROW (rest of world)' are long past.  At the same time, small local players cannot financially compete effectively with multinationals in just one small market, and need to expand to larger and larger markets to reap  benefits of scale.  The result?  Precision marketing and products for smaller and smaller sub-populations of consumers.

5) The backlash against dis-intermediation and 'web self service' in already in full-swing, most notably among the aforementioned baby-boomers as they seek assistance in dealing with new technology.  One colleague at the MetaverseU conference referred to the result as 'Re-Intermediation', or putting a human being back in the loop to provide full-service support when required.  If you look at the amount of competition and noise on the Internet, and the average cost of customer acquisition for most companies, the math on keeping a customer happy is very simple when considering when a well-timed phone call will result in a subscription-renewal.  Look at what Sprint has had to resort to for bargain-basement mobile pricing plans due to the exodus of users they experienced in the last two years due to spotty mobile coverage and atrocious customer service.

6) Finally, we have two seemingly contradictory forces at work when it comes to doing business.  Businesspeople are traveling more and more (677 million travelers last year in the United States alone, compared with a total US population of less than half that number) while the amount of interest and concern for the environmental impact of this travel is resulting in rapid innovation in distance-meeting-technologies, such as web-conferencing, video conferencing/telepresence, and immersive environments.

So where does this leave us?  Well, large multinational firms will continue to have hundreds of local offices in particular countries, but will see a decrease in traditional workforce activity (eg. cubicle dwellers) in favor of a more virtual, mobile workforce.  I spoke with a large office furniture company this week who said that they thought that approximately 50% of all office space was sitting unused in corporations, and that the mix was rapidly shifting from the 'one employee-one desk' mode to mobile workers periodically converging to an office composed of predominantly shared-use/collaborative spaces.

At the same time, there is a marked shift in the growth of small and medium-sized businesses.  These businesses, as was the case when Amazon challenged the Barnes and Noble/Borders brick-and-mortar business model, will be on equal footing for providing local re-intermediated customer service and localized products that will compete and beat multinationals at their own game.  They may not be as margin rich as the volume-discount multinationals, but they will prevail in the sticky relationships they are able to construct in their local markets.

These small/medium businesses, when successful, will face the same challenge in scaling their operations as usual, and will become more like a loosely-coupled affiliate network with other small/medium entities who have beaten their local market and are also looking to expand.  Think 'Co-Op' models.

The trick in this transition from 'multinational-employer-as-sovereign/employee-as-serf' model to a more granular market-based skills employment model (think of the 'Library' and submissions metaphor from Stephenson's Snowcrash) will be in the gradual transition of employees as chattel to employees as self-employed businesspeople.  I honestly don't know if every person either wants or is capable of making this shift, as there are countless jobs that require structure and location-centric tasks, and at least 12.5% of the US workforce has demonstrated that they prefer a layer of insulation between themselves and their employer in the form of labor unions.  I don't see the stampede beginning there.

As always, the countries and companies with 'no installed base' will be more nimble and able to implement the new models and compete more effectively than the entrenched labor-union/location-specific work models.  Granted, we're not micro-manufacturing titanium in a center coach seat on United, so there will always be industry that does require a 'somewhereness' of location, however as the workforce shifts from manufacturing to knowledge workers, this trend will begin to reduce as evidenced in the decline in memberships in labor unions in the last five years.

One wildcard is that, in the last four years or possibly more, that people have been more and more forward about the amount of information about themselves on the Internet.  At a certain point, you have a corpus of knowledge about society that can be indexed and utilized by analytical tools (think about how Facebook's terms-of-service allows them to spider the Internet for more links regarding you) and then correlated to potential employment opportunities.

I remember the London cabbie in August 2006 that said that his business was way down because people were increasingly telecommuting on Mondays and Fridays, and I forsee that as an omen of this shift of workforce.  When people work independently and mobile, they have less cultural bonding and team dynamic, and operate more autonomously.  In this situation, they have no filial allegiance to an employer or team of coworkers, and they become much more mercenary (in a non-pejorative way) than the local coffee-machine-gossip club of corporate lore.

Combine this group of adept mercenaries with data analytics tools to help find their teammates for a given contract worktask, and you have your new workforce.  The future of work?  Starbucks, a laptop, and a mobile phone.

The Radiated Library

One of the organizations that I belong to is The Long Now Foundation, which is an eclectic group of thinkers focusing on, not surprisingly, the very long term. They have fascinating talks regularly (always on a Friday in San Francisco when I am just landing in Iowa from my week in San Jose, argh), and this month they featured a talk by Alex Wright on 'Mastering Information through the ages'. The podcast hasnt been posted at LongNow yet, but one of the excerpts from his talk was in regard to a Belgian gentleman by the name of Paul Otlet, who lived from 1868-1944. The YouTube video below is an illustration of some of his prognostications from around 1930. This reminds me of the first time I saw the work of Piet Mondrian....I enjoyed it immensely until I realized that he had painted it when my Norwegian forebears were still sleeping in trees in Northern Minnesota to avoid the wolves, at which point I enjoyed it even more.

I love this kind of foresight.