I am settling down to bed at a friend's house in Brooklyn after a flying in from San Francisco. A flying habit that I have is to read the magazines that I never have the headspace to deal with otherwise. So, I noticed the latest HBR had an article on their Breakthrough Ideas for 2008.
Of the 21 ideas, 9 were specifically technology related. Of those, they really focused on the ability of technology to connect people across physical distance, or, networks. This is not a new or radical idea really, even the virtual-world aspect of this is not particularly novel. The interesting thing is that it is interesting to the HBR as something that business' should pay attention to.
There goes the neighborhood.
Four of their big ideas revolved around alternative reality, but I'm not so hip to that gig. However, two of their new ideas were particularly interesting to me:
Here Comes the P2P Economy
The P2P Idea started out as one might expect by looking at how file sharing has disrupted the media industry, but they very quickly moved on to financial systems like those pioneered by Kiva.org and Prosper.com saying:
"Indeed P2P finacial systems are set to reprise in the banking industry what has happened in media. ... It is only a matter of time before these digital systems close the arbitrage enjoyed large banks, which lend at up to 15% interest and but pay only about 5% on capital."
The author, Stan Stalnaker, goes on to discuss how personal currencies, derived from the quality (and quantity) of a person's network activity, are being traded for knowledge services. This market place could easily grow in to other industries where knowledge can be delivered as a service.
And finally, Stan raised the possibility of a P2P energy market. Certainly carbon trading and the very creative work of folks like Social Venture Technology Group and Rainforest2Reef have moved us in this direction. This article talked specifically about a P2P energy grid where solar power on your home feeds back in to the grid or where even your car, with regenerative braking and the like, might be able to make more energy than it uses.
The absolute stunning beauty of this that 1) it makes gobs of sense, 2) it deflates the over-importance of three huge blow hards of the corporate world: media, finance and energy. They will fight this.
Happy Metadata Trails
The author of this article, Jan Chipchase, concentrated on the rich information created as a world of Internet consumers surf. Things like your Google search history, your GPS coordinates from your cell phone or your various social networking profiles, if aggregated with the right metadata tags, could be very valuable for understanding exactly where, when and how to advertise to you. On the consumer side of this equation, there is a nifty Firefox plugin by a nonprofit called AttentionTrust.org that tries to give consumers control of their own click-trail.
"AttentionTrust is a not-for-profit organization that puts the user in control of their Attention data. Until now, only companies on the other side of our clicking captured the value."
All of this is interesting, and a bit scary, but, in terms of a Breakthrough Idea, I think it misses the boat completely. The potential of metadata is all about aggregating data to draw a bigger picture, to lift us out of the granularity of specific causes and effects but, instead, to present a river of change where we can examine the flow and the perturbations of that flow. Metadata is what will give us the needed visibility in to this. It means we can think less about exactly what Bobby and Juanita will buy today and more about how to supply food and health care and education to a constantly changing planet.
P2P points to the individual, giving her a valuable node on the network. Metadata points to us all, collectively. And, if we plan well, P2P can introduce the metadata into the river of infomation that will help us to understand its flow.
There was a third article on how business people should act more like multi-player gamers, but, I don't know about that one...
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