Business Intelligence. The enterprise will increasingly use cloud agents and semantic analytics to better understand their customers, markets, finances, and internal workflows. Companies will engage in behavioral modeling and web meme profiling more aggressively. With diminishing worforce resources due to budgetary constraints, increased investment into automation and intelligent software solutions will give businesses more information and feedback without requiring as many large paychecks. Electronic business workflows, services, and applications will evolve to write more intelligent metadata and semantic subtext into file formats while similarly reporting usage analytics out to dyanamic data streams. All of this data will be sorted by cloud agents, filtered, parsed, and then rendered to rich media layers (eg Flash) for practical visualization and analysis. All documents and file types will evolve to contain more legacy information about who and how the file was created, when & where, who has access rights and to what degree, who has reviewed them and what comments have been attached. Such intelligent files will enable greater and greater usage by both human and cloud agents.
When Redmonk’s James Governor opined that Cisco might make a play for Adobe Systems, bells went off in my head. It suddenly made a lot of sense and made me realize I should really be paying more attention to Cisco.
From James:
Cisco competing with Apple? Who would have thunk it? To really make its ambitions count I believe Cisco will make a play for Adobe, filling out a video internet value chain from low to high production to the web.
Adobe is arguably the predominant enabler of web video, with much of the web firmly invested in Flash and all of it’s platform components & accessories. Cisco knows how to make hardware and has not been at all shy about their goals in the consumer digital market, pursuing rich internet-enabled media on set top boxes and in TVs. Recall not too long ago the legal battle with Apple over the term “iPhone”. And at CES in January Cisco is expected to introduce a new line of consumer media products.
Cisco Systems, the dominant provider of the digital pipes that run the Internet, is making a big play in digital entertainment. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January in Las Vegas, it plans to introduce a new line of products, including a digital stereo system that is meant to move music wirelessly around a house.
That is the first small move in a long-term strategy to take on Apple, Sony and the other giants of consumer electronics. Cisco is working on other gadgets that will let people watch Internet video on their televisions more easily. And its biggest bet is that people will want to use a version of its corporate videoconferencing system called Telepresence to chat with their friends over their high-definition televisions.
While this article notes the looming battle with Apple & Sony it should be considered that the set-top and video market is clearly of interest to Adobe, as well as the obvious similarities between Telepresence & Adobe Connect for video conferencing solutions. Cisco & Adobe are both invested in the Open Screen project but the relationship between the two will surely get closer whether or not some sort of acquisition is in play.
The strategy for Cisco, of course, is to encourage more high-bandwidth content running through all those Cisco routers that will need to be upgraded to keep up with the throughput. There’s no greater bandwidth hog than video and its just exploding with the boom in cheap consumer video hardware and turnkey hobbyist solutions. Adobe would be wise to pursue the authoring side of this hobbyist video boom, and focus on an aggressively marketed, cross-platform Premiere Express solution, as well as developing an ecology for video capture and publish from mobile devices. Meanwhile, their set-top Flash initiative will continue to intrigue Cisco and if the two are not already talking to make sure Cisco is using Flash everywhere possible, then somebody at Adobe needs to get busy and make it happen.
It remains to be seen whether Cisco might make an acquisition play or Adobe but it seems likely that the future of the two companies will be tightly coupled.
Now more than ever, screens are competing for our attention in daily life. The distinctions between desktop PC, laptop PC, mobile, etc… are being replaced by the simple abundance and omnipresence of digital screens conveying information and mediating interaction. As LCD newsfeeds, airport terminal displays, set-top video box menus, billboards, advertisements, multi-touch screens, and augmented mobile devices, data and content are everywhere. All of it requires a lightweight and dynamic graphic layer in which to render content. Dynamic render plugins like Flash and Silverlight are very well engineered to address the requirements of these displays but it should be understood that much of the technology represents a shift away from the 2D ad/interactive paradigm primarily addressed by the Flash runtime.
Mobile augmented reality solutions require heads-up-display, alpha-channel rendering of text and graphics. Dynamic data visualization requires strong integration with back-end databases as well as messaging protocols like JSON, SOAP, and SMS. To enable rendering large datastreams in plugin runtimes like Flash & Silverlight, companies should aggressively pursue runtime adoption across mobile devices and smart phones, while defining prototypes for active camera overlays. They should optimize rendering and expand into all rich-content displays (set-top, automotive, kiosks, smart objects, and embedded systems built on the Android/Linux platform). They should optimize for dynamic rendering of large data streams, like the Nasdaq AIR application. The runtimes should be increasingly exposed to SEO and analytics retrieval so that secondary services and agents can easily be built on user workflows and data collection. And they should not neglect the 3D gaming market, but should consider how it can play a role in immersive worlds as a dynamic data layer (eg billboard adverts that can be remotely updated).
Competitive landscape: Adobe Flash (dominant market share, full turn-key solution), Microsoft (Silverlight remains the strongest competitor to Flash though it continues to play catch-up with our tech), Java (JavaFX just released but has little traction and is too late to the party), W3C (HTML5 has perhaps the largest share of hearts but is also the slowest to move), Google (might be cutting around Flash & Silverlight by pushing its interests into HTML5, Mozilla, and through Android & Chrome).
Related: Augmented reality solutions will require semantic architecture and image recognition
algorithms (identification, recognition, relation).
The folks over at Twitchboard.net have the right idea. From their site:
TwitchBoard listens to your twitter account, and forwards messages on to other internet services based on what it hears. Our first service will automatically save any links you tweet to the del.icio.us bookmarking service. We’re working on connections to many other services — stay tuned!
This simple tool is a software agent built on the web platform. It lives on a server as a script watching your personal datastream - Twitter, in this case. The initial service notices when you have put an url in your tweet, grabs it, and passes it along to your del.icio.us account as a bookmark. It effectively concatenates two web services together to optimize your workflow and eliminate the need to double post. It extends the function of Twitter to include the function of Del.icio.us recapitulating the phylogenetic imperative evolving from unicellular function to multicellular. Twitterl.icio.us!
Twitchboard represents the emerging class of cloud agents that will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. Our connections are getting too dense and the data we’re working with is growing far too big for us humans to handle manually. We need subroutines customized to our interests, affiliations, businesses, and collaborations that can do the heavy data lifting for us while we focus on the meaningful expressions these agents will create for us from the noise.
Increasingly we’ll have swarms of such agents running across our digital lives doing our bidding and the bidding of numerous marketing and security agencies as well. These tools will have particular value across the enterprise where they will monitor workflows & financial movements, gather market data from clouds, and sift through productivity metrics to formulate valuable business intel. Agents will tell us about our lives and our health delivering colorful abstracts with pretty animated datasets showing how much we drove this week, how many miles we walked, tasks completed vs. outstanding, and much more feedback based on an array of scripts & sensors.
Twitchboard is using the fertile comm grounds of Twitter and it’s API to watch the datastream for keywords that can drive additional services. You can bet they’re also deriving all sorts of interesting meta-patterns from the Twitter feed that will be plugged into further modular mashups and visualizations. Through it’s popularity and the openness of it’s API Twitter is lighting a roadmap towards the semantic web. Groups like Twitchboard are building the services reading the machine web and helping us better manage the mountains of data piling up, meanwhile giving rise to a class of autonomous agents moving across devices, sensors, cameras, and clouds.
Killer feature: Immersive gaming companies like Rockstar, Blizzard, ID, Epic, NCsoft, Valve et al should implement a way for game server admins to tap live in-scene camera feeds that can be bussed out to HTML. Liberty City should have public CCTV’s that viewers can watch from their browser or mobile client. Like a virtual Adam’s Block people could tune in to an alleyway or freeway underpass and let the action unfold in the streets below. World builders should enable first/third-person game cameras to send their viewport to Flash embeds.
Imagine tuning into a South Korean Quake deathmatch tournament as a spectator and being able to view the world through the game eyes of the champion or to switch across various fixed camera feeds in corridors, over walkways, and above central arenas to witness the gameplay from alternate angles. It might seem odd in sports-addled America and the UK but in Asia hundreds of millions are online and they love 3D gaming. The gameworld becomes a performance space. Second Life could finally entertain more than just the local cliques by broadcasting the actions of art collectives and protest groups out to the world.
It doesn’t take much effort to see how this multiplies the available media advertising real-estate considerably. Fixed camera views become hot advert property rented to savvy marketers who know they can reach both the local gamers and the viewing masses. Attention property goes meta. This is a two-way street as external feeds begin to pipe into the game worlds. The walls really start coming down when you can take a cellphone call in-game and then wave to the camera for your friends to see. They take a screenshot and then send it to the clan web site and the GTA Flickr feed that gets displayed on the side of a building in downtown Liberty City. Sponsored by Verizon of course.
Blizzard claims something like 10 million regular users of World of Warcraft. Their WoW wikia page is the largest collection of data on anything in the world. You think they might be interested in being able to view their clan members remotely and communicate with them at any time? Or tune into video feeds showing the night elves in Darnassus, or watch the pass at Chillwind’s Point? (Truth: I googled these.) And if Blizzard wins the fight to keep the gameworld free from advertising, marketers can accrete around the popular viewing channels and their Flash embeds.
These worlds are dark clouds, opaque from all but those that pay the playing fee. Yet there’s so much entertainment and interest and real human nature playing out in these worlds. People will watch. Agents will sift through the user data feeds streaming out along with the A/V feeds. And think of the up-sell as viewers convert to players. Someday I’m certain some of the reality tv channels on my mobile device will be looking into such immersive worlds and showing me where in my friends are and who they’re battling and what type of car they just jacked for a joyride through Liberty City. (I *really* want the GTA CCTV’s!)
I’ve finally upgraded Wordpress and have a shiny new template. This one should be easier to read, is hopefully more SEO’d, and has a bit more of a professional look. In theory, it will even have more content now that I’m on indeterminate hiatus from employment.
This is kinda blowing my mind. Adam’s Block has gotten a ton of local and national (international?) press in the last week. Adam Jackson’s pair of webcams capturing the daily & nightly life of the San Francisco Tenderloin is becoming the latest booming media channel.
I just tuned in and now, in the middle of the intersection, framed in optimal view of the camera, is a white spray paint tag: WKT. A tagger has meta-tagged Adam’s Block. Whoever did it was painting the ground but is advertising to the web. There are far more people watching that intersection than the locals. With viewers come advertisers of all stripes. Everyone wants to be seen and heard. This totally up’s the ante of post-reality tv and redefines the very notion of space.
This is just the start. Expect more street art, performance theater, protests, and outright corporate advertising to invade the short stretch of Taylor St. The value of this dirty chunk of SF has just gone up exponentially. Adam’s Block is a hole in the wall between The Cloud and The Street, helping forge that new land where the two are indistinguishable.
Cars buzz along at remarkable speeds, occasionally screeching around the corner or stomping on their breaks to avoid oblivious pedestrians. An SUV parks on the curb and 5 men dressed in dark clothes emerge bobbling around in the manner of slightly drunken friends rolling from one event to another. A tall lanky man drags himself along the sidewalk with a staggered gait, half-limping in hazy diagonals across the concrete. People sit on the sidewalk while elders riding Rascal scooters roll past them. A lone bulky figure walks slowly then stops to wave across the road. A man jogs up to him and reaches for his hand with one arm, wrapping his other around him in a hug. They seem like old friends but then quickly part striding in opposite directions. Sirens echo off in the city canyons. Another grey figure stumbles along, pauses, turns and simply stares up into the sky for some interminable duration before turning around and stumbling back the way he came.
This is Adam’s Block. The little slice of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district surveilled by Adam Jackson and his two webcams. People spend hours just watching the street life, commenting below the cam views in a streaming chat window joking and speculating about the seedy and probably illegal nature of many of the transactions they witness. This is the new age of discovery masquerading as entertainment. A time where increasingly finite fragments of the human experience are being witnessed and shared shared across the species. This is humanity observing itself and peering into the every crack of life.
Adam’s Block is riding a wave of buzz after a number of high-profile TV news shows gave him national coverage. His page is registering an average visit time of 2.5 hours - an unheard of number for any web page. The simple web cam is out-competing the most zealous media outlets. Hollywood constructed the simulacrum in which dreams could be manufactured. Reality TV broke the paradigm by televising so-called real life. Such a compelling notion faltered when the scripts and directors meticulously crafting the narratives were exposed. Now, the YouTube generation is finding entertainment in the very homes and streets of the world around them. Human life, it seems, is immensely fascinating. We’re all stars in the New Reality TV.
As Hollywood flails with more and more recycled pap and the music industry guards its shareholders by never taking risks, preferring the safe profits squeezed from the next big media clone, the public hungers for authenticity and novelty. Content industries have become so conservative and profit-driven that real expression and entertainment is mostly squeezed out and marginalized. The inevitable response is the current democratization of media content that is completely redefining the broadcast industry. The viewers are taking over the network.
Life is vastly more diverse and compelling than 98% of what corporate media churns out for consumption. And this hints at the bull in the china shop of the Information Age: the best content is free content. Profit seems to erode authenticity and inevitably manages to calcify even the most creative minds. The experience of entertainment is shifting into the experience of life in all it’s detail, leaving business to hustle whatever it can from the narrowing interstices of observer & observed.
The Google paradigm is effectively partitioning content creation from many of the fiscal interests that feed on it. It’s only getting easier and easier for an individual to record, edit, publish, and share content. Adam’s Block runs on a host server, a couple of webcams, and some simple web programming. He can leave for the weekend and the feed continues to pump out quality slice-of-life entertainment while the community of viewers adds their own content and data. An incredibly simple setup is delivering one of the roughest parts of San Francisco to potentially millions of people across the globe. For ill or good, such remote voyeurism is the new media. The lo-fi street is now competing with big-budget properties of mainstream media.
Adam’s Block is only the beginning. YouTube and video is now the dominant bandwidth usage across the web. More and more free tools will arise on the mobile web platform to make it easy for anyone to share content. More cams will go online just to glimpse and capture the daily movements of humanity. The Shiba Inu puppy cam is hugely popular and viewers are hanging on every day to see the pups grow. Justin.tv is growing with hundreds of live video channels. Cameras and screens are spreading out to capture & mediate the world. CCTV channels will open and network, bringing public access to formerly-private cameras. Imagine Neighborhood Watch leveraging every open webcam in the area to reduce crime. Or local transport authorities deriving congestion patterns. Police & emergency services will increasingly use public cams to reinforce their existing information networks. Temporary wireless field cams will be deployed to capture & broadcast events, demonstrations, and invasions. Even now Qik turns a mobile phone into a live streaming video capture device. One user was recently expelled from China for streaming a Free Tibet protest to the world. The world of voyeurs is crowdsourcing the legions of self-made journalists, investigators, and sociologists. We are finding, witnessing, revealing, recording, & archiving everything that catches our eye because, really, beneath the creeping malaise of the daily grind, it’s all absolutely mind-bogglingly amazing.
Soon the video stream will separate and become transparent, revealing the rich array of data within. Video will be object-taggable and searchable. Video content will be scanned by image recognition algorithms and sent to cloud servers to identify known matches. Bots will watch streams and add their own semantic layers to the timeline, customized to serve whichever analyst or advertiser employs them. Yelp users will be revealed by their mobile GPS, identified on video by alpha channel text as they walk into the camera viewport. Increasingly network-aware vehicles and devices will communicate to cameras augmented with radio transmitters that read remote RFIDs. Clothing and accessories will be designed to communicate directly to the eyes and agents of the global panopticon, while street tech will evolve to render users invisible to the ever-present eyes of the world. And why limit to the real world? Video streams will soon provide web portals peering into virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Grand Theft Auto. Information, culture, and networks are all merging around the individual, helping us better navigate our world and communicate & collaborate with our allies, while abstracting our very selves out into distributed digital networks.
Still, people stream past the staggering beggar on the sidewalk who turns to find some human moment with a woman in a wheelchair parked at curb edge. Below the cam view, the chat window scrolls ceaselessly meandering between rude humor at the expense of the homeless and casual comments among emerging clicks of remote viewers who know more about the SF Tenderloin than they do about each other. The world is getting smaller and smaller but is it getting any friendlier? What will become of the simple grace of human touch and the ionized charge of air between hands and hearts face-to-face against the deepening hypermediation of life lived through inumerable screens? How is such tech helping people and communities? Given the option, would viewers click to donate money to help lift these people out of the brutal poverty of their lives? Or do screens make everyone into hollow actors always capering solely for our amusement?
Responding to low Q4 revenues and economic uncertainty, Adobe Systems laid off 600 employees reinforcing its conservative posture amidst the growing epidemic of fear in the markets. The cuts were wide and deep and many very talented people were let go. I was among them. This move was surprising for a company on an innovative surge with zero debt and over $2Billion cash in the bank, and is certainly ominous and portends to a long recessionary slump across the industry. Indeed, the entire global economic paradigm is faltering and losing faith in itself sending waves of fear up into the highest ranks.
I started contracting at Adobe in the beginning of Jan 99, then converted to full-time in June 01. I’ve been working for the company for 10 years but I learned long ago not to personalize such realignments. I’ve been through several, barely spared. It’s business, nothing personal. The move will probably strengthen them through the slump but I do feel there may have been less severe options with fewer side-effects. The company is well-positioned to innovate and capitalize in this downturn and could easily operate at a loss for 16 months if necessary. To be certain, profits are down but certainly not negative. In the aftermath, Adobe should capitalize on its lightened books and quickly reinforce its core properties and revenue streams with enough resources to get the job done, instead of further retracting to spare the nerves of The Street. It will be interesting to see how Adobe balances its highly innovative and ambitious platform play against its very conservative financial posture.
More importantly, however, I feel strongly at odds with the fundamental notion that a business must continually grow and deliver heavy dividends to the shareholders in order to be of value. The very paradigm of relentless growth is clearly unsustainable. It appears to be a dying system built on top of ancient biological imperatives. Get as much as you can, spread out to cover the broadest swath of territory, always struggling against the other big dogs in the pack. Meanwhile, the Long Tail slowly, steadily, patiently cuts into your markets from every edge. If nothing else emerges from this global economic meltdown, hopefully the principles of sustainability, transparency, fairness, and accountability will find their way back into the market. Friedman, Keynes, and even Adam Smith can all rest in peace.
But I am not a CEO or CFO and I must accept a certain degree of faith in those trained and entrusted to steer the ship. Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of responsibility that rolls up to executive teams. They must manage a huge multinational business as if it were a living being and a host to thousands of lives. Employees and investors must get paid for their support and markets must be carefully tended and nurtured and defended. Disgruntled board directors could be just a bad day away from outright hostility towards the CEO if things are not being run with maximum diligence to the benefit of the Trust.
And to be fair, Adobe is an exceedingly open & honest organization that has operated with great integrity since its inception. I do want them to succeed and it’s my passion (and admitted ignorance) that makes me worry this may have been a damaging move. The company has been injured by its own hand. There will be a lot of work to rehabilitate the degree of commitment and passion needed to execute on its strategic directives. Letting go of respected contributors who know your business inside & out is always detrimental to the troops and the brain trust, and often helpful to your competition. As I’ve noted elsewhere, there are a lot of really exceptional people hitting the streets, looking for a new work family to fight for and wondering which company will snatch them up and capitalize on their talent.
Would I return to Adobe? Absolutely. They have a huge future and a great vision. Like all organizations heading up their growth curve, they should take time to carefully re-evaluate some of the fundamental assumptions and operating procedures that may have served well in earlier iterations but are now working against their optimization and execution.
The greatest advice I have to Adobe is this: be paranoid, fix your installers and look at performance & stability as the #1 feature. Do whatever is necessary to incentivise point products to work cooperatively and collaboratively across the Suites. Instead of reducing the workforce you should be reinforcing it. Realign without reducing headcount. Marshall the forces and move when your enemy is weak. Don’t assume the brand is untouchable and understand that managing the narrative of your business is just as important as managing sales. Turn that cash & credit into product innovation. Bring the future to the world again just like you did with Post Script and Photoshop and Flash.
I will be fine and have been working up my own transition for months anyway. For me the hardest part is the damage to close relationships. The hugs and tears among boxes piled up in the hallways. Shots of tequila with managers & directors heavy with the decisions they were forced to make. There was such a swelling of good will between colleagues who had worked together so many years, decades even, as the boxes pilled up in the hallways. The warmth and friendship of the workplace will be hurt, as will the functional networks optimized for efficiency over years of collaboration.
My layoff is simply a single point in a much larger dysfunctional global economic paradigm. Everyone is in panic, uncertain of what the next day will bring, but knowing that, surely, it cannot be the same as it was yesterday.
“Like people,” Darpa notes …such a story-telling system would be able to “retrieve and reuse stories to construct an appropriate interpretation of events …because they convey the aspects of a situation that are most important in determining a decision.”
Darpa hopes to have this Experience-based Narrative Memory (EN-Mem) system make “complex situations… simple, understandable, and solvable.”
…Making sense of a complex situation is like understanding a story; one must construct, impose and extract an interpretation. This interpretation weaves a commonly understood narrative into the information in a way that captures the basic interactions of characters and the dynamics of their motivations while filling in details not explicitly mentioned in the input stream. It uses story lines with which we all have experience as analogies, and it simplifies the detail in order to communicate the crucial aspects of a situation. The story lines it uses are those the decision maker should be reminded of, because they are similar to the current situation based upon what the decision maker is trying to do.
Experts believe Iran has enough nuclear material for one atomic bomb. Will this draw us into war to defend Israel? Expect a lot of saber rattling from Washington in the 11th hour. Yet another big test of the incoming Obama presidency.
Former Nixon aid and architect of the GOP propaganda arm, Fox News, Roger Ailes signs on for 5 more years. Will he continue his mission to help build conservative business rule in America? Will he lead an attack on Obama?
Scientists now believe there may be vast frozen water reserves on Mars. Get ready for the prison colonies (weak Total Recall reference.)
With the Dow skidding down towards 6000, Al Gore warns of global civilization collapse. Is he right or just being alarmist? Is the global network strong enough to right itself amidst this sudden shakeout? Systemic change happens a lot more quickly than human cognition is able to keep up with. Expect continued struggle to rebuild the Old Ways amidst sudden innovation and concerted work towards The New.
[Note: I haven't been blogging much and this is just a lazy way of passing on some content. I'm just back from the IFTF Blended Reality Exchange and will have some more inspiring words in the next week or so.]
Twitchboard represents the emerging class of cloud agents that will help us sort and search the massive volumes of data we interact with regularly. Our connections are getting too dense and the data we’re working with is growing far too big for us humans to handle manually. We need subroutines customized to our interests, affiliations, businesses, and collaborations that can do the heavy data lifting for us while we focus on the meaningful expressions these agents will create for us from the noise. 
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