There are a lot of good conferences — Supernova is one of the best. This week was the third time I have made the trip to San Francisco to attend. There were roughly 350 technologists, investors, business leaders and media who came together to network, share ideas, and explore the business impacts of many key innovations. The highlight, like all conferences, was catching up with former colleagues and making new friends.
Supernova 2007 is an event that challenges your assumptions, makes you think a lot and allows you to hear some of the world’s experts debate the future of the connected world. The broad topics discussed at Supernova focus on the decentralization of computing, communications and the Internet, digital media, and business models. (See the full agenda and list of speakers). There are so many exciting things happening in these areas — distributed e-commerce, mobile applications, the power of the “long tail” in commerce and media, massively multi-player virtual worlds, business blogging, the video Internet, and voice over IP applications, just to name a few. It is beyond the scope of this posting to try to effectively summarize all that I learned during the week. It was a really terrific conference. If you are interested in the topics discussed and some of my notes and observations then please read more.
The opening day at Supernova is called Challenge Day, held at the state-of-the-art Wharton West facility. The first session I attended was about Social Networks — the definition of which is constantly changing. The core element is the blog but there has been a lot of evolution going on with how they are created and shared. Social networks have blossomed and there seems to be no limit to how many people want to share information and what they are doing at the moment. Part of what has made it easier than ever to share information is the wide availability of really good hosting services. The question is whether sharing of intellectual property of others will shut down social networking. The ultimate answer to me is the digital fingerprinting technology which will allow a content creator to add a “fingerprint” to a video, for example, and once that video is uploaded it can then be identified. The owner can then scan the Internet and find if there are infringements of their ownership and thereby have a clear case to ask for it to be taken down. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act is the defining legislation that is being used to determine how YouTube and most other services are structured. The speaker from YouTube explained the steps they are taking to ensure that uploaders are made aware of what they can and can not do and also what those who are infringed can do to remove improperly uploaded content.
Esme Vos from MujniWireless.com gave an eye opening presentation about how broadband is doing around the world. In Japan they are adding 270,000 new Fiber to the Home (FTTH) connections per month. By October next year FTTH is expected to exceed DSL. In Paris there are more than a million FTTH connections and you can buy 50 mbps symmetrical (same speed up and down) service for $29.90 euros (about $40) or 100 mbps for 44.90 euros (about $60). Similar projects are underway in Germany. In both countries the government is supporting the projects. Norway has a goal to have half of the population have access to FTTH. This is happening throughout Scandinavia in collaboration with state owned energy companies. The new French president is pushing fiber big time. WiMAX at 5.4GHz is being used to get wireless to segments of the country. In the U.S. there are hundreds of municipal wireless projects being discussed but when it comes to municipal fiber there are only a few projects being envisioned. Nowhere near what is going on in Europe. The most hopeful thing is that San Francisco and a few others are considering or planning a municipal fiber network on which they would allow competition for various services to be provided. That is what we need — more competition. The speaker from Verizon actually thinks there is plenty of competition in the U.S. — he actually seemed to believe it!. Verizon claims to have 6 million households with access to fiber and will have 18 million by 2010. That is very nice but overall I would say Verizon has only offered what they have been forced to offer because of cable.
The panel on Virtual Worlds focused on whether virtual worlds are going to replace the Internet as we know it or whether it will be used predominantly for special cases. The “special” cases would include games and niches such as training for pilots and mechanics. One thing everyone agreed with is that virtual worlds is in the very early stages of something really big. My take is that virtual worlds will evolve in unpredictable ways just like social networks and the Internet itself. If you have doubts about Virtual Reality, stop in at Second Life and give it a try. IBM is using it to enable worldwide teams to collaborate. At some point the virtual worlds will have simultaneous translation — a team member says something in Japanese and another team member hears the first person’s avatar speaking English, and vice versa. One of the speakers said that anyone who is not a “gamer” is an aberration.
The next session was about the impact of the Internet on public policy and politics. One theory is that Net has brought people into the political dialogue that otherwise would not be. An example given was Personal Democracy Forum. There were widely different points of view on the subject ranging from there will be no impact to “move on” beliefs that the technology creates an opportunity for more activist politics. One site, sunlightfoundation.com claims to create transparency to government data and has no political agenda. I do believe that the site exposes government data to the public with the hope to change outcomes but I have trouble believing there is no agenda. The home page has news headlines. Who decides which headlines to choose? One point that I bought into is that it took fifteen years to see the impact of TV on politics and that we are at the very early stage with regard to the Internet’s impact. BarackObama.com was cited as an example of success with 600,000 people signing up since the site went live in February and with 5,000 social networking groups, 13,000 bloggers, 50% (50,000) of donors giving their money online, and a mobile application to receive text messages on the campaign. For some reason the panelist (Remix Politic) and all the panelists were avowed democrats. Too bad there wasn’t more balance in the points of view. I think the bottom line is that the Net is not going to create a groundswell of people in national dialogue but I do think it will facilitate many new political intermediaries. Another thing I learned in the political discussion was about the good work being done by mouse.org.
The last sessions of the day were called “Challenge Roundtables” wherein panelists shared their thinking on various topics and then interacted with the audience. I gave a short presentation called “Are we there yet?” which was a short version of “Net Attitude“. I said we were only two percent of the way there. One audience member objected and said it was only one percent!
After breakfast on day two, Kevin Werbach kicked off the program and introduced Denise Caruso and Clay Shirky, two deep thinkers who set the stage for the conference by challenging us to question our assumptions about technology. Denise discussed her new book Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet. Her basic premise is that effective innovation requires a lot of collaboration with a wide range of stakeholders. Doing so reduces risk and raises the odds of success. Clay Shirky gave an emotional but clear view of how powerful open source communities are. He contrasted a Perl programming project a dozen years ago where AT&T insisted that it would fail because Perl had “no support”. They did not realize the power of the community to support itself. A dozen years later AT&T is out of business and Perl is still going strong.
The opening session was followed by some visionary looks at things by Nathan Myhrvold (former Microsoft chief scientist), Greg Papadapolous (Sun) and my friend Irving Wladawsky-Berger (IBM). Greg gave a classic view of how computers and bandwidth are growing exponentially. Irving had a complimentary view but related it more to the integration of processes and people. He discussed how computer assisted business modeling can make a business operate more like a digital model. It is part of the evolution of systems from standalone computers with back office applications to market facing systems. Another way to describe this evolution is to say that it moves from machines and products to people and services. The result is an evolution from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy.
A roundtable before lunch focused on search in a very broad way. There is a huge economy that has built up around search. Companies that help others get found by search, companies that help people do something with their search results, and companies that specialize in marketing of generic domain names (tennis.com, cars.com, wine.com, etc.). A discussion of black hat activities was alarming. An attorney on the panel estimated that phishing and related identity theft is costing U.S. businesses around $50 billion per year. The good news is that e-commerce does work. The mafia has existed for a long time and ripped off funds from commerce. It should not be surprising to see similar activities be present on the Internet. The good news is that fighting Net crime is evolving as a major business opportunity itself — I am optimistic we will see a lot of innovation.
Udi Manber, VP Engineering from Google, gave a talk called “Search is Hard”. He said that 25% of the searches they see everyday are things they have never seen before. They are trying to break the language barrier by allowing everyone to find any document in any language and translate it on the fly.
John Kneuer from the U.S. Department of Commerce talked about the 700MHz spectrum. The transition to Digital TV mandated by the government will mean that spectrum currently being used by TV will be freed up. The new spectrum will be coming to the market at a very opportune time and can make high speed mobile Internet access a reality. In fact the new spectrum will make it possible for the Internet to be as speedy on your handheld device as on your desktop. John called it a “greenfield game changing” opportunity. The audience asked a lot of tough questions about how the new spectrum will get to market and many concerns were expressed that the existing operators will get control and not innovate.
KC Claffy talked about the sixteen greatest problems of the Internet… and why we aren’t making measurable progress in solving them. She described them as persistently unsolved problems for the last ten years. Much more detail is here. The problems can be grouped into three areas: economic, ownership, and trust. She said that the major problem is not being able to get data about what is actually happening on the Net. For example, the only data on spam comes from companies that make money selling anti-spam software.
A panel then convened on “Does the Net Need an Upgrade?” with Van Jacobson, Rick Hutley, Norman Lewis, and David Isenberg. Van put it in really good perspective. The Internet protocols were created in 1975 and have been changed only three times in more than thirty years and yet have scaled to nine orders of magnitude in bandwidth and a billion users. Another interesting point made by Van in response to a telco saying that Voice Over IP was using too much bandwidth, is that if every phone in the world called every other phone in the world — in other words all phones in the world are having a conversation — it would use at most 10% of the current capacity of one strand of fiber.
The Connected Innovators Showcase enabled thirteen startups to take five minutes each to tell their story and then be critiqued by Josh Kopelman, Julie Hanna Farris, and Paul Kedrosky. The first one was adap.tv which contextually analyzes video content on the Net and automatically places relevant advertising beneath the video content. Next was AdaptiveBlue which creates a semantic browsing experience. For example if you visit a book site you can get a context menu that is tailored to what you are looking at — Amazon and other book-related sites. Aggregate Knowledge launched at Demo six months ago. They claim to enable “discovery” as an alternative to search. The technology and what it does was not clear to me after the five minute presentation. CastTV showed a video search capability which they claim to be the best and most neutral way to find video. It includes YouTube but many other video sites and then it organizes it in a very neat manner. Critical Metrics keeps track of recommendations and playlists across all media so you can easily find, try, and buy the best new music. It is a bold claim since there are many many sites that already do this. The presenter said there are hundreds of thousands of new songs per year and Critical Metrics boils it all down in a way that allows you to choose music you will like. Jangl is a startup which allows you to enter an email address and end up talking to a person via phone. Jangl sends an email to the person you are trying to call and lets that person give their phone number to Jangl. Your phone call then goes to a Jangl phone number which then forwards privately to the person’s real phone number. The person called gets a choice of 1 to accept the call or 2 to decline. Pando Networks claims to have a platform which is the Internet’s fastest growing Managed Peer-to-Peer Content Delivery Platform, combining a robust peer-assisted content delivery network, distributed content management system and a desktop application. It sounded almost too good to be true. SodaHead launched two months ago and is a company that provides a new way to create and take polls.This is not a new application but polling is really popular and sodahead claims to offer a totally new way to approach it. The quick demo was impressive. Spock is yet another search capability. You had to see it to believe it. If it works as well as the demo they may have something big. Wize is trying to change online product research. 78% of the online population does product research. Wize makes it simpler by using the “wisdom of the web”. They claim to have new ways to answer more questions on trends, popularity and relevant attributes. Zapmeals is offering the shortest distance between great food and your tummy. They say they are an eBay for take out food. They match your needs with what providers have to offer. They rate and rank everything and even track the status of delivery via GPS. ZenZui is offering consumer-centric lifestyle-enhancing architecture which makes applications really fast on mobile phones. The apps are built on “zoom spaces”. The demo was incredible but I am a bit skeptical that it may be too proprietary. Zing is all about connected mobile entertainment. They have an mp3 player like device that allows you to connect directly to content services such as Sirius satellite music. You can see on the Zing what your friends are watching or listening to and get it yourself. Discover, personalize, and share is their mantra.
Josh reflected that there were a lot of the companies focused on media — music and video. He was also surprised how many were trying to take on Google. Comments from other panelists were that surprisingly there was not one mention of Ajax or Wiki. There was only one mention of Web 2.0. There were five of Paris Hilton. At the end we found out that Zapmeals was actually a fictitious company.
Provocations of the last day were moderated by John Hagel and included opening comments by Nicholas Carr and Chris Meyer. Both offered their perspective on the potential of technology to reshape business as we know it. Nick described how “General Purpose Technology” used to be electricity and now it is information technology via the network. Moore’s Law for computing power and Grove’s Law for bandwidth are now kicking in and IT as a utility will be the result. It is already happening at salesforce.com, Google, and elsewhere. Chris described how the information economy, just like the industrial economy, started with science which led to technology which enables business creation and finally had huge impact on how organizations would be formed. An interesting comparison was made by Nick about electricity. With electricity the “juice” gets delivered to your wall socket and you plug in your “application (appliance)”. With IT you have the choice of doing that or of getting the application delivered as part of the “juice” — in other words software as a service.
The final session before I had to run for a plane to New York was The Social Web: Choices and Voices with Mike Speiser from Yahoo!, Greg Reinacker from Newsgator, David Liu from AOL, and Martin Varsavsky from FON. The online environment is becoming simultaneously more personalized to the individual and more socially constructed by communities. Companies must free themselves from traditional proprietary mentalities, without ignoring the bottom line. How do services, products, content, connectivity, and ultimately, experiences, change when users have an abundance of alternatives for entertainment and commerce, and the ability to connect with one another as never before? Yahoo! sees the web becoming much more personal and they are focusing on how to make each user gain from the experience of the prior user. Fon is building on the same concept. A user buys a Fon WiFi device and shares their bandwidth with another person. Each person who shares gets to use others’ bandwidth for free. The concept may lead to much more widespread use of WiFi and the web. (see How to become a Fonero). AOL sees a web of great competition where the key is building syndicated experiences, for example widgets. They are trying to personalize and filter and socialize things to gain user loyalty. It seems that all the big players are trying to reinvent themselves.
There a number of sessions I regrettably missed: Data dump with Lada Adamic from the University of Michigan who took a close look at online social activity and then Do You Know Where Your Identity Is? with John Clippinger, Kaliya Hamlin, Reid Hoffman, Marcien Jenckes, and Jyri Engestrom. I really wanted to hear them discuss how, as our lives increasingly straddle the physical and the virtual worlds, the management of identity becomes increasingly crucial from both a business and a social standpoint. The future of e-commerce and digital life will require identity mechanisms that are scalable, secure, widely-adopted, user-empowering, and at least as richly textured as their offline equivalents. This session examined how online identity can foster relationships and deeper value creation. A “Spotlight” before lunch was presented by : Sheryl Sandberg from Google. She would describe how Google cracked the code on monetizing search advertising and where is advertising heading next? There was a luncheon roundtable Innovation In, On, and Through the Network: Regulatory Duel or Business-Driven? with Rob Massoudi, Michael Katz, Craig Forman and David Young. Web-based companies depend on network infrastructure to connect with their users. And network operators depend on “over the top” service providers to generate usage and demand for new network capabilities. Yet these two communities often talk past one another, or even find themselves in conflict. With the Net simultaneously becoming bigger, more sophisticated, more lucrative, and more democratic, the panel debated how companies at the network layer can find common ground with those delivering applications and content. Disorder: Feature or Bug? with Andrew Keen and David Weinberger provided a debate about the value of authority in a connected world. The greatest business challenge that the New Network poses for many companies is also a fundamental social challenge. The old categories, boundaries, hierarchies, and scarcities are being swept away. This panel debated to what extent that is a good thing, and to what extent it is a threat to what we truly value. The final “Spotlight” was provided by John Hagel who discussed The agenda for the future: Open questions and challenges in the age of the New Network. The final session was Closing the Interactive Loop: Supernova is People, and the People Are You with Umair Haque, Liz Lawley, and Jerry Michalski offering their predictions and reflections.
