trends

David Galbraith is a former architect turned internet entrepreneur. He helped incubate Yelp.com and was one of the authors of the RSS 1.0 specifications. He talks about four trends for the digital world: people vs. celebrities, people vs. robots (recommendations from friends replace algorithmic results), people powered design (consumer Internet products are better than professional ones) and public vs. corporate networks.

David Galbraith has a long history as an entrepreneur. A former architect for Norman Foster, he founded or co-founded Curations, Yelp, Moreover, Origins Network while also co-writing the specifications of RSS 1.0.

At Lift11, David will explain the big trends he sees developing in the digital world, a provocative talk sure to trigger reactions among the audience when he says that the long tail is dead or that there is a huge fight brewing between telcos and internet services providers.

David Galbraith

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Laurent Haug: What is the most important trend in the digital world right now?

David Galbraith: A significant percentage of the world's money disappeared. It could be like the 1970s - minus the good music - or it could be like the 1930s. Technologies are getting people to talk and exchange like never before. It could make things worse, but if you believe in democracy, you have to believe that the more people talk, the more chances we have for a positive outcome. The green revolution in Iran - which was facilitated by twitter - or the coup d'état that was prevented by SMS in the Philippines, this shows that people are using technologies for the better. There is a lot of self emerging good. The internet works like that. Take a system like chatroulette, it is full of crap but the most popular image we have of it is Merton the guy playing piano. You could somehow sense a certain relief that this technology ended up being used positively.

You will also talk about the upcoming war: people vs algorithms

Yes. Google is imposing algorithms on us. Google or Google News have no human intervention. The Google car can drive itself without a human being behind the wheel. Some companies are trying to replace people with algorithms, but I think it is a ridiculous idea. The internet is a communication network, it needs people in it. That is Google's weak spot, what they are trying to do is fundamentally against the DNA of the internet.

I search for a pizza, I find an aggregated value that is becoming meaningless because it is based on 500 reviews from anonymous people. I have no relationship to them. Day to day, we have 2-3 people influencing our behaviour, and the internet will give us the possibility to recreate that. This is what Facebook wants to do: they are about people, and they clash frontally with the model of Google. Like all good battles, it will be fought on a fundamental level. It's really algorythms vs people, the next big war on the web.

Another big change ahead?

The death of the long tail. The idea behind the long tail is that all the little guys are worth more than the big guys. But mediums do one thing: they amplify celebrity. Since Rudolph Valentino, the world's stars have always been bigger than all the little guys. The phenomena has been amplified by the internet. An artist like Lady Gaga is generating petabytes of data download for Google, Justin Biber is accounting for 3% of Twitter's servers infrastructure. The point is that the internet is a place where the rich get richer. It is a story nobody wants to hear but it is true. The left part of the long tail - the one with the big guys - is bigger than the right part - the smaller guys. This is not getting better, also because of global competition that forced a merger of niches.

Now is a provocative idea: if you take Lady Gaga's downloads and charge them at the SMS rate, it would result in charging 10.5 trillion dollars to customers... A single itunes video would cost more than a million dollars.

Does that mean there is a problem with the way we charge and pay for data?

Yes. There is a fight brewing about the way we carry data. We have two business models competing right now. The internet is like a road: normally you don't pay toll unless it is a really fancy road, there are shops where you can stop and spend your money, advertisements asking for your attention. For the phone, it is like the railway network: you get on a train, everything is controlled by the train company and you pay a ticket to ride. That created this situation where Lady Gaga gets a free ride and generates traffic for which she does not pay. Why isn't she paying? Something's got to give there.

Where is this going? I don't know. But the telcos own the infrastructure so they have the power. And we can expect changes, especially because of videos that are generating more mobile traffic that telcos will try to charge users for.

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post introducing in more details the Business Schools 2.0 workshop happening at Lift France.
Authors: Boris Bartikowski, Associate Professor of Marketing at Euromed Management and Nitish Singh, Assistant Professor of International Business, St Louis University

In recent research that we conducted in this field we argued that three interrelated Global Megatrends, namely Globalization, Rise of Networks and Open Innovation, are facilitated by the global expansion of the Web. Looking at these three Global Megatrends can help anticipating some challenges that business schools may face in the future.

Globalization comes along with convergence and integration. Globalization leads in many instances to increased standardization of social and economic interrelationships. Coincidentally, globalization leads to increased cultural flow, cultural multipolarity and growing global workforce. Business schools are at the crossroad of this development. They strive to establish global market presence, and to strengthen their position through international partnerships. One of the challenges they are facing is to create economies of scale through standardization in an environment that requires culturally sensitive dialogues and that values offerings that are adapted to the local needs of diverse stakeholders.

Younghee Jung, Senior Design Manager at Nokia, recently moved to London from Tokyo. Learn more about Younghee's groundbreaking work by viewing her LIFT08 video.

Many will remember her presentation in the User Experience Track where she shared research performed in shanty towns around the world. The purpose was to capture input from users with a view to analyzing trends for future development.

Younghee's well-known colleague and Principal Researcher at Nokia, Jan Chipchase, will be attending LIFT08 in Korea. We'll be back with more about Jan's contribution soon.

I just added a blog post on some general Lift observations to the Canoo company blog at:
http://canoo.com/blog/2008/02/11/lift-08-some-observations/

Many thanks to the organizers for a great event!
Special thanks to all of the conf bloggers. It's great to be able to go back and read about a talk.
Hope the remaining videos will be up soon.

Have a good week,
Sandra

Why we invited Heewon to LIFT
She is Korean, doing anthropological research on how Asians use certain technologies (social software, virtual worlds). Her knowledge of these local markets is invaluable to us. It helps us understand what is happening there. Asia is to many of us a mysterious place where we do not really know how to apprehend things because of language/cultural barriers.

What is Heewon going to talk about?
As a speaker in the glimpse of Asia track, Heewon Kim will address trends and in particular with respect to how teenagers use social software in Korea.

Official biography
Heewon Kim is a researcher at the Center for Youth and Cultural Studies at Yonsei University in Seoul, specializing in social software and online environments. Before working at Yonsei, she worked as a researcher for several companies such as Daum Communications and NCSOFT.
See Heewon's LIFT Profile to learn more about her enlightening work.