Guest Blogger
The Visionary Position
As we enter another year, what better time for making predictions? I’m not saying these will come true in 2008, but I’m confident they will come true at some stage. Anyway, whoever said visionaries had to be good at time management? Look at Nostradamus. He made sure he was well dead before any of his predictions came back to haunt him.
- The Internet becomes the Intonet as the integration of virtual worlds, touch screens and plasma technolgy enables us to literally dive through our computer screens. We can finally experience what totally immersive content really means.
- Human beings are no longer born with fingers, just two thumbs for texting and joy stick control.
- Searching for words on Google which return no results becomes an Olympic sport.
- Returning online purchases becomes easier when bar code scanners become the latest USB accessory. Scanning the product bar code will instantly credit your account and cause the unwanted product to disintegrate in front of your eyes, Mission Impossible style.
- Every child in Africa has a Facebook page. Insufficient food but a Facebook page. A spokesman for Facebook unfortunately remarks: “The African kids are proving very popular with other users and are attracting friends like flies”.
- Scientists discover that the average distance between the sender of an e-mail and its recipient is less than two miles. This phenomenon becomes known internationally as the local loop, except in Ireland where of course it means something entirely different.
- A new development in hands free technology combined with a loophole in the law allows you to legally project incoming text messages onto the windscreen of your car.
- Microsoft is so engrossed in the development of its new operating system that it forgets to renew its domain name. Microsoft.com is now owned by the Irish Times.
Kieran
Guest Blogger
The Ghost of Christmas Future
It is Christmas 2012. Everyone buys petrol online at 20c a litre from Ryangas, the cheapest petrol station in town. Just don’t wait until your fuel warning light comes on or you will have to pay double. Order at least a month in advance and woe betide if you don’t know exactly how much petrol you will need when you arrive to fill up. If you need more than you ordered online, you will have to pay triple for it. Arrive in a car with a disabled sticker and you’re really stuffed, so make sure you hide it. And if the reg. number of the car you arrive in differs from the one you entered on the website you will have to start from scratch and in addition pay a €50 surcharge.
To most, it’s still worth it. So you negotiate the booby-trapped website and place your order. Then embark on the journey to your local Ryangas station which for some reason, no matter where you live, is always located 50km away. When you finally arrive to fill up, at least you can do so secure in the knowledge that every Ryangas petrol station is equipped with state-of-the-art petrol pumps, the cost of which has been pared to the bone by their not being equipped with nozzles. The forecourt is full, mainly with PL, SK and LT registered cars with their steering wheels on the wrong side. There is a small Ryangas surcharge for this due to these cars not having adequate insurance.
You go to the cash desk to be allocated your pump, only to be told that you should have done this before you arrived. They send you to the back of the building to pay a €3 surcharge while an attendant valet moves your car to the back of the queue. This procedure takes 15 minutes and actually costs Ryangas €4 but they absorb the difference as part of their customer training programme. You return to the desk to be told that you must pay a further €2 for not buying a Cuisine de France croissant which is usually complimentary but which you now have to pay for because there are none left and you didn’t take it when it was free.
You retrieve your car from the attendant valet and rejoin the queue. You are tempted to offer him a seasonal gratuity but the 150% government forecourt tax proves a deterrent and you don’t bother. While you are in the queue a number of other attendants try to sell you train tickets and you begin to see the merits of public transport. When you finally get to the pump, your hose is being straddled by a scantily clad female attendant posing for a Ryangas calendar shoot. She offers to sell you the resulting calendar for €12. You decline but her brother in a PL registered Astra buys one. He pays a special staff rate of €15 for this privilege. It is a Christmas present for his mother.
Exiting the forecourt, you carefully avoid the striking petrol truck drivers who are being nonchalantly trampled by a herd of grazing Charolais. What a load of bull, you think to yourself. You look forlornly at the Esso station across the road with its uncluttered forecourt and 120c a litre neon sign and promise yourself never again.
Kieran
Guest Blogger
The Digital Revolution Irish Style
Returning to the concept of the intellectual infrastructure, why does this make sense? Reason 1: We love to communicate. We have more than one mobile phone per person. Reason 2: We love to publish. Ireland has produced four Nobel Prize winners for literature. Reason 3: We have global creative brands. U2, Riverdance, Guinness (the latter more a catalyst of creativity). Reason 4: We love litigation and should be good at protecting our IPR. Reason 5: Property trends will change. Why should property ownership always imply buildings?
So what would the Republic of Wireland team be if it was playing in an IPR World Cup? In attack we would have Beckett, Joyce, Bono and Roddy Doyle on the wing. In defense we would have Saint Finian of Moville in County Donegal, Saint Columba and High King Dermott. Who? In 561ad these were the protagonists in the first recorded incidence of IPR litigation IN THE WORLD! Hundreds of years before Gutenberg, an Irish dispute over ownership of a handwritten prayer book led to 2,000 casualties in the battle of Cooldrevny. Proving that Irish people are willing to lay their life on the line to protect their intellectual property. We need to capture that spirit of commitment again now!
![Digital Revolution Digital Revolution](http://www.mmlab2.rlc.dcccd.edu/sideshow/big_orange02.jpg)
So no problem with creativity and commitment, what about communication? No problem there either. The Irish communicate because we have an inherent and insatiable desire to do so. On the other hand, a little bit further north than Moville, we find the Finns who deployed technology not because they particularly wanted to communicate, but because they had to. Finland is a large country with a relatively small population. Cities are separated by long distances and by an inhospitable landscape. The telephone became essential early on, as did cars. It was logical that the mobile phone would take off. Hence the rise of Nokia, Finland’s predominant global brand. But the Finns are not natural communicators, at least not outside their own country, and are poor at exporting their ideas. By comparison the Irish have been global wanderers, flesh pressers and craicmeisters for years in the offline world. So online there should be no stopping us.
We must start to mobilise the troops now, the Republic of Wireland team backed up by every citizen who has a role to play either in the creation or consumption of digital services. We need to think about what we will do with ubiquitous broadband if we get it and how to do without it if we don’t. In the connected world, an unwired society would be like an island but we have always been an island and it hasn’t stopped us in the past. The digital revolution needed in Ireland is not a technological one but one that mobilises the wealth, creativity and determination that exists in this country. One that doesn’t wait for the drawbridge to be lowered but instead storms the walls to secure the lifeline we need to be a real player in the global networked economy.
Kieran
Guest Blogger
Back To The Future of Content
As we approach the end of the year, let’s look back at the last decade. In 1997, I co-authored a publication for the European Commission called “The Future of Content”. We interviewed strategists and statesmen, artists and inventors, scientists and students … just about everybody really. It did more or less what it says on the tin: we asked them all to tell us where digital content was going. And they did. One contribution read:
“We must also recognise the social impetus that is building. Digital publishing gives every citizen the capability not only to consume but also to produce content. As hardware prices fall and marketing efforts accelerate, people are exposed to technology more and more and from a younger and younger age. Most of this technology comes in the form of devices for communicating, creating or accessing content: computers to surf the Internet, consoles to play interactive games, mobile phones to call your friends. With this exposure comes a technical maturity and a critical eye for good content. Consumers are becoming more sophisticated and less passive and their influence on the commercial fate of new content services will be crucial”.
That probably could have been written today. It certainly applies today. But it was written before Facebook, Bebo, YouTube and even Google existed. The term social networking websites had not been invented at that time but that is exactly what we were talking about back then. 1997 was a good year for stargazing. As well as The Future of Content, Scott Adams also wrote a book about where things were going. His approach was slightly different but the sentiments were the same. It was called “The Dilbert Future – Thriving on Stupidity in the 21st Century”. In it he predicted that Internet capacity would increase indefinitely to keep up with the egos of the people using it. I wonder what he makes of Second Life. He also predicted a huge market for technology products that help workers “goof off and get paid for it”. He might have been talking about blogs, except as everyone knows, they don’t pay.
The point is there has been no serious evolutionary thinking done over the last ten years. That had already been done by 1997. What has actually happened over the last ten years relates more to emerging tools meeting predicted demand to create profitable opportunities for the founders of Google et al. This has been a decade of implementation, of accomplishment and of coming of age. The Internet equivalent of the Berlin Wall has come down and millions of people have become empowered to create user generated content. It has been a very consistent decade for me – I didn’t make money for writing the Future of Content, I didn’t make money on social networking and I’m not making money writing this blog. That is surely consistent. But I would do it all again. So I plan to write The Future of Content Ten Years On – or FOCX as I affectionately call it. If only Scott Adams will agree to be my co-author.
Kieran
Guest Blogger
The Republic of Wireland
The broadband argument still rages. I was reminded of this while listening to Senator Shane Ross speaking at the IIA Net Visionary Awards recently. While he was clearly preaching to the converted on that particular occasion, there was no doubting his passion. Then I had a Utopian moment. What if there was complete saturation of broadband in Ireland? We seem to be perpetually standing in line behind this obstacle but what if broadband penetration was as extensive as mobile penetration? If every man, woman and child in the country had their own unique broadband connection, what would the resultant outpouring of productivity look like? Would there be a huge spike in GDP? Would Ireland become a glowing landmark for astronauts like the Belgian motorway network at night?
Perhaps it would be used to send large graphics files from Kilkenny to Sligo. Or empower the emergence of an indigenous Irish web giant. Or provide a platform for the James Joyce of the digital age. Or entertain us in our homes. In fact it will do all of these. And it will form the backbone of our intellectual infrastructure. Let’s face it we’re crap at physical infrastructure, things that are taken for granted in most countries don’t work here. I’m not just talking about the old chestnuts either –roads, railways etc. My local sorting office keeps losing my mail because (in their words) An Post is being overhauled and everything is in disarray. If I was on death row in San Quentin I would get my mail, but not in Dublin.
Anyhow, I digress. As a nation, we should be good at intellectual infrastructure. We should be as good at that as the Swiss are at inventing things. As a race we are creative, witty and even our large population of chancers are creative in their own right. Broadband can be the foundation of our intellectual infrastructure. However we should avoid concentrating our efforts solely on leveraging broadband for industrial productivity and third level education. We also need to nurture its use in schools, by the creative industries and for social networking. This needs to be the subject of a major government programme but it’s likely that getting the government on board will need to be the subject of a major programme in itself. Perhaps they could start by buying Ireland.com – only joking, but then that’s a joke that’s nearly as old as broadband.
Kieran