The Great Seduction

Virtuosos of the moment

What’s the connection between Michael Moritz, Silicon Valley’s leading venture capitalist, and Hizb’allah, the Middle East’s leading terrorist organization? According to Joshua Cooper Ramo, the author of the stimulating The Age of the Unthinkable, Moritz and Hizbollah are both able to think and act like revolutionaries in a contemporary era defined by surprise and innovation. They are both “virtuosos of the moment” able to leverage the complexity and unpredictability of today’s world in order to the realize their goals.

All new media entrepreneurs should read The Age of the Unthinkable. The ability to think and act like a revolutionary is what distinguishes the grand digital innovators – virtuosos of the moment like Steve Jobs, Mark Andreessen, Larry Page and Sergei Brin -- from everyone else. And Ramos’ message is acutely pertinent today, as the moribund Web 2.0 world is being swept away by the revolutionary stream of Twitter and its ecosystem of real-time communications technologies.

This week and next represents a particularly unthinkable fortnight in the history of new media. Yesterday, Google announced the launch of Wave – an ambitious new communications platform for the Internet. On the same day, Microsoft announced the launch of Bing a search-engine designed to chip away market share away from Google’s quasi monopoly in search.  Meanwhile, next Saturday (June 6) represents the much anticipated American launch of Palm’s Pre, a smartphone device upon which Palm have, quite literally, bet the entire company.

The contrast between Google and Microsoft is revealing. The static Bing search-engine appears neither surprising nor innovative – just one more example of Microsoft’s persistent failure over the last decade to innovate or surprise. In contrast, Google’s Wave appears to be an attempt to reinvent both email and instant-messaging in today’s real-time Internet. As Lars Rasumussen, the Sydney based engineer driving the Google project said, “Wave is what email would look like if it were invented today.”  With Wave, Google is once again trying to revolutionize new media. In 1999, the launch of their user-generated search engine was the first barricade stormed by the Web 2.0 revolution. In 2009, Wave might represent a similar landmark in the unfolding of the real-time web revolution.

So is Palm like revolutionary Google or reactionary Microsoft? When Palm demonstrated early versions of its smartphone at the Las Vegas Consumer Electronics Show in January, many pundits were sufficiently impressed to describe the Pre as a legitimate iPhone killer. But I’m not convinced that the Pre will save Palm. To borrow again from Joshua Cooper Ramos, the Pre appears to be neither shockingly innovative nor surprising. It will, of course, be a highly competent and well engineered product that doesn’t disgrace itself against the iPhone – but, in today’s turbulent new media economy, competence is Microsoft rather than Google, it’s Bing instead of Wave.

Joshua Cooper Ramo described a conversation with Michael Moritz in which the Welsh born partner at Sequoia Capital – who famously discovered Google, Yahoo! and YouTube -- explained his success as a technology investor. What Moritz looked for in young companies, he told Ramo, is the ability to “pivot”, to perpetually reinvent themselves in an Internet economy that is, itself, in endless flux.  It’s no coincidence that Moritz invested in Google, but not in Microsoft or Palm. In the age of the unthinkable – from the rugged mountains of southern Lebanon to the gentle flatland of Silicon Valley -- only permanent revolutionaries survive.

Wolfram Alpha versus Twitter

What is the future of wisdom on the Internet? Let me offer two quite different versions. The first is scientific wisdom distributed out over the global network by a supposedly super sophisticated computer. The second is wisdom distributed in real-time by a global network of super ordinary human beings. The first is a new Internet service called Wolfram Alpha; the second is the real-time social media network Twitter.

The just launched and hugely hyped Wolfram Alpha is the brainchild of the American based, Eton and Oxford educated Dr Stephen Wolfram, a boy-genius physicist who got his PhD by the time he was twenty and who is the founder of the computational engine Mathematica. Described by no less than the London Independent’s Andrew Johnson as “the biggest internet revolution for a generation” and “an invention that could change the Internet forever”, Wolfram Alpha claims to be a hugely powerful and sophisticated online computation data engine that retrieves information via the worldwide web.

In contrast with the Internet trawling Google, Wolfram Alpha has aggregated and curated huge amounts of data from established offline scientific sources. It’s what Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain calls a “computable almanac”, designed to juxtapose data in myriad ways. Wolfram Alpha then is a taxonomist’s wet dream, a computational engine that, in principle, enables scientists to splice and dice reliable knowledge to their heart’s content.

My problem with Wolfram Alpha is that while it all sounded very exciting in theory, it doesn't appear to work very well in practice. Currently, there's too much Alpha and not enough Wolfram. Everything of importance that I entered into the computational engine -- my date of birth, my ideology, my religion and my football team -- resulted in either useless, self-evident or confusing information. And when I entered all five of these simultaneously, it failed to retrieve me from its computational engine. Given the massive hype around its launch (mostly invented/invited by Wolfram Alpha's PR department), I assumed at first that it was me and not Wolfram Alpha at fault. My own gross scientific ignorance, I assumed, was stopping me realize the full power of the newest new thing that, we've been told, is about to change the Internet forever.

But belittling myself doesn’t come naturally. So I went onto Twitter for a second opinion on Wolfram Alpha. Having experienced the wisdom of Stephen Wolfram’s computational engine, I turned to the wisdom of my handpicked crowd. I tweeted my followers:

“Don't understand Wolfram Alpha…..Is it for real?”

And the replies I got confirmed all my suspicions about the general uselessness of the product. Wolfram Alpha really didn’t work according to almost everyone in my network. Purely designed for scientific geeks, it had little value to general Internet users like you and I. My favorite answer was from Hugh McLeod, the noted cartoonist and author of the hilarious new book Ignore Everybody, who tweeted:

“Short Answer: Nobody knows.”

When nobody knows, nobody cares. Compared with Wolfram Alpha, Twitter – a simple to use instant-messaging network -- is built on radically unsophisticated technology. Yet even today Twitter works as a retriever of wisdom. Instead of a computational engine, it contains a human engine that spits back useful knowledge in real-time from trustworthy people with who I choose to communicate. What’s lacking in Wolfram Alpha are similarly transparent human-beings. I suspect that it's just another of those "transformational products" that everybody will ignore. I wonder if the wise Dr Stephen Wolfram is on Twitter.

Is the stream passé?

In today's London Sunday Times, columnist Bryan Appleyard quotes David Edgerton, professor of the history of technology at Imperial College London & author of the excellent Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 about the Internet's revolutionary qualities. “The internet is rather passé," Edgerton told Appleyard,  "It’s just a means of communication, like television, radio or newspapers.”

In a sense, of course, Edgerton is absolutely right. For example, much of the debate between bloggers and professional journalists about the future of newspapers has become painfully passé. The endless backwards and forwards in which everything is discussed and nothing resolved reached one of its messy little anti-climaxes this weekend, first with the publication of a reactionary op-ed in the Washington Post by a couple of big-media lawyers, then with the equally predictable response of orthodox mainstream-media bloggers like Koz & Jeff Jarvis.

But not everything about the Internet is passé. In the past, this Internet has appeared, as Edgerton says, "like television, radio or newspapers." Thus this endless debate about how "old" media would become "new" media and how print newspapers would morph into digital businesses. But, as Clay Shirky so elegantly argued in Thinking The Unthinkable, the old doesn't conveniently translate into the new and there is no certainty that newspapers will ever be reinvented. So we seem to be stuck in historical limbo, caught between the destruction of newspapers and the non-appearance of whatever it is that will replace them.

Maybe that's because most of us are looking in the wrong place. Alongside the staleness of the blogging/MSM debate, a new, more interesting -- albeit inchoate -- discourse around real-time media is emerging. Driven by daring thinkers like Steve Gillmor & John Borthwick, it suggests that the Internet is fundamentally being transformed from a controlled distribution flow of information into what Borthwick calls "a real-time stream of data". Twitter and its rich ecosystem of applications is, of course, the best example of the real-time stream. So is Friendfeed and the latest version of Facebook.

David Edgerton would probably argue that the real-time stream is another example of the shock of the old -- "just a means of communications". But in contrast with either Web 1.0 or 2.0, I think that it's a fundamentally different means of communications from television, radio or newspapers. The real-time stream not only changes all the rules and practices of traditional media, but it also transforms communications into the 21st century first mover, the thing-in-itself. Techcrunch's Erick Schonfeld gets it. He says we should jump into the stream:

So jump into the stream and let it carry you away. Or you can stand timidly on the banks until everyone else around you has already taken the plunge.

Schonfeld is right. I'm not entirely clear where the stream is taking us, but surely it's better to be drowned in the torrent of real-time media that to be suffocated to death by the torturously boring debate between bloggers and journalists. Both newspapers and blogs have become passé. The stream is the new. Don't let it pass you by.

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Tweeting the real-time song

The killer song this spring in Silicon Valley has been real-time chirruping of the little Twitter bird. First Twitter, the micro-messaging network founded by Biz Stone, Jack Dorsey and Ev Williams in March 2006, grew its user base by over 1000% between the Spring of 2008 and 2009 – making it by far the fastest growing social network on the Internet. Then Oprah, that most viral of American media high-priestesses, noisily opened a Twitter account and acquired 900,000 followers in less than a month. Then Facebook, the social networking leviathan with over 150 million users, tried in its latest incantation to reinvent itself as a real-time Twitter service. Finally, in a mid April nail-biting race to the million follower mark, Hollywood actor and model Ashton Kutcher narrowly beat out CNN by 1,200 followers.

So it’s not surprising that some of the big media and technology cats are now trying to get their greedy mitts on that little tweetie bird. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, even, most bizarrely of all, the New York Times are all now rumoured to be interested in acquiring the venture capital backed, San Francisco based company. The supposed price has been inflating as quickly as the number of Twitter users: $200 million, $500 million even $1 billion –  not exactly small change for a start-up without any revenue or even a business model. And then last week, Biz Stone appeared on ABC’s “The View” television show and cheekily told host Barbara Walters that Twitter wasn’t for sale. Clearly something is up.

What would you get if you bought Twitter? According to the now immortal words of Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, you’d be buying a “poor-man’s email system” – which is how he described Twitter at a Morgan Stanley technology conference earlier this spring. So why is Google supposedly so keen on buying Twitter? The answer, naturally, is search. Many Silicon Valley pundits believe that the next big thing will be real-time search and that Twitter, with its hundreds of millions of short messages, houses an phenomenally rich informational seam that could rapidly make the Google search engine seem out-of-date. But while Google obviously needs Twitter, it’s less clear if Twitter needs Google. Last year, Twitter acquired Summize, a search engine of its own which could enable it to become Google 2.0 without having to answer to Eric Schmidt.

Twitter, of course, it is more, much much more than just a poor-man’s email system. With it seductively simple interface, its intensely viral community, its real-time communications technology and user-controlled features, Twitter is represents not only the future of the Internet, but probably also the future of media. Thus the rumored interest in Twitter of companies as diverse as Microsoft, Amazon and the New York Times.

Then there’s Apple, the most insurrectionary of Silicon Valley companies, who have been linked to a Twitter acquisition by the normally well-informed technology blog Techcrunch. Why would Apple want to buy Twitter? Because, I suspect, locking Twitter into their iTunes store and iPhone network would provide valuable individual brands like @oprah and @aplusk with a remarkably effective marketing and sales platform to distribute their products. The Twitter-Apple cat then would be truly amongst the old media pigeons. Merging the revolutionary Twitter into insurrectionary Apple would be one more nail – perhaps the final nail -- in the coffin of traditional record labels, publishers and television and movie networks.

In 2009 the page has turned on the book biz

The medium isn’t always the message. In his 2000 best-seller, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, the American pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell described a “tipping point” as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point" when change becomes unavoidable and inevitable. But Gladwell didn’t use his Tipping Point – a printed book that was mass published and sold through both traditional and online bookstores -- to either discuss or execute fundamental change within the publishing industry.

Today, almost ten years after the publication of the Tipping Point, the medium has finally caught up with the message. Till now, of course, while the Internet has savaged the newspaper and recorded industries, it has had much less impact on the book business. But in 2009, one big thing and many little things in new media have conspired to bring the traditional publishing industry to a boiling point. Writers, publishers and readers have collectively reached that moment of critical mass, at a threshold of fundamental change from which, like it or not, they can’t retreat.

That one big thing is digital book technology. Till now, the e-book has been more breathless theory than digital practice. But now with the growing popularity of the second generation Amazon Kindle (only still available in the US), the Sony Reader and persistent rumors of an imminent digital reading device from the dominant American book retailer Barnes and Noble, the idea of replacing the bulky print book with a convenient digital device is becoming increasingly attractive to more and more readers.

Digital has even begun to revolutionize the printing process itself. A couple of weeks ago, publishing industry professionals at the London Book Fair were treated to demonstration of the radical new Expresso Book Machine – a digital contraption that prints books on demand in under five minutes. This so-called “ATM for books -- the invention of ex Random House publisher Jason Epstein – changes everything about traditional retail bookstores. With the Expresso Book Machine, book retailing has suddenly gotten very flat -- the tiniest bookseller now having access to the identical inventory as the megastore.

But it’s the little changes in the publishing industry that are really making all the difference to the publishing business in 2009. Some of these changes are connected with the ecosystem of the e-book. Take Apple’s iPhone app store, for example, which is featuring more and more digital applications -- such as Scroll Motion, Short Covers and Classics -- for reading e-books on the telephone. Indeed, the Apple store has become so popular with readers that Amazon last week announced its acquisition of Lexcyle, the company behind the most popular iPhone app -- the Stanza e-reading interface. 

Then there are the increasingly innovative changes to the way in which traditional publishers are packaging and selling digital books. A couple of weeks ago, for example, Random House UK launched BookAndBeyond, an enhanced ebook initiative which provides consumers of ebooks with interactive audio and video interviews and features from popular authors like James Patterson, Lee Child and Marcus Zuzak.

And so, without huge fanfare, Gladwell’s tipping point has caught up with the book business. The age-old reality of distributing centrally published print books through retail stores is being replaced by a new reality of interactive e-books and an evolving ecosystem of supply and demand. 2009 might, therefore, be remembered as one of those rare moments when the paradigm really does shift; it’s the year that the medium seems to have finally caught up with the message.