I put together a slideshow that gives our thinking on personal event networks and how they related to current trends around mobile and social.
Tags:
kynetx
personal+events
krl
mobile
social
Occupy Something
17 October 2011 by
My friend, Jim Harper, has an excellent post on where the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street crowds have common ground that is anchored by this Venn diagram from James Sinclair:
This is a perfect reflection of something I thought over the last few weeks: the Occupy Wall Street crowd have good intentions, but are looking to government to fix the problem. The Tea Party (at least the grass roots people I know) have good ideas about limited government, but often miss the corporate-government complex (often called “corporatism”) that is the root of the issue.
To that end, I’d like to point the #OWS crowd and the Tea Party crowd at the “change Congress” movement–now called Root Strikers. I think that changing the system to reduce the corrupting influence of corporate money in politics and government is the route to salvation.
That said, I think the Root Strikers are prone to left leaning and class struggle terminology that will turn off the right-leaning people that could and should be their allies. Of course, the Tea Party is suffused with ultra-right dogma. But there is common ground. The issue is too big and important to let disagreements over other issues drive us apart.
Tags:
change+congress
politics
Are you more than a social graph?
10 October 2011 by
If the web is a "Social" something then this equals Facebook, Xing, Twitter, LinkedIn Google+.
But social could mean….
"see what your friends are searching, buying, watching, liking, saying or doing"
"buy together and recommend
"filtered by who you know"
"what's trending"
"where are my friends right now or where will they be"
Given that a social graph is a digital map that says, "This is who I know." It may reflect people who the user knows in various ways: as family members, work colleagues, peers met at a conference, high school classmates, fellow cycling club members, friend of a friend, etc. Social graphs are mostly created on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn, where users send reciprocal invites to those they know, in order to map out and maintain their social ties.
And an interest graph is a digital map that says, "This is what I like." As Twitter's CEO has remarked, if you see that I follow the San Francisco Giants on Twitter, that doesn't tell you if I know the team's players, but it does tell you a lot about my interest in baseball. Interest graphs are generated by the feeds customers follow (e.g. on Twitter), products they buy (e.g. on Amazon), ratings they create (e.g. on Netflix), searches they run (e.g. on Google), or questions they answer about their tastes (e.g. on services like Hunch).
However where is the value? It has to be in the mashup/ combination of all social data so I can determine who influences you and who you influence - where is your power and how much you are worth to a brand…….
How much data are we producing? – infographic
10 October 2011 by
Source : http://smartdatacollective.com/wearecloud/40960/world-data-infographic?utm
SOURCES: Cisco; comscore; MapReduce, Radacti Group; Twitter; YouTube
A collaboration between GOOD and Oliver Munday, in collaboration with IBM.
The Evented API Specification
5 October 2011 by
![[]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/70/398522252_67b1f1d4cb_m.jpg "[]")
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been blogging a lot about the benefit of evented systems:
- On Hierarchies and Networks
- A Facebook of Things
- Personal Event Networks: Building the Internet of Things
The underlying message of each of these articles is that events work better for building networks of products and services (what we have called “mashups”) than request-response-style systems. Event-based programming styles fit the dynamic nature of the interactions we want to have online. Event-based systems work on “this happened” where request-response-style systems work on “do this.” The former better supports the looser coupling we’ll need to build huge networks of products and services.
Fine, you say, but until more companies build events into their APIs, I’m stuck using their old-school request-response API. More to the point, if everyone does it differently, coding up a system that can use all those events in a loosely coupled way will be impossible.
To that end, Sam Curren and I have developed the Evented API specification. The spec says how event generators and consumers should operate and, as a result, how they interoperate. All interactions are over HTTP to make the spec as flexible as possible. You can use any language to generate and consume events. We’ve tried to design the spec so that it is easy to implement–particularly for event generators. We’d like every existing API to signal events when appropriate. Here are a few examples:
- Withings – the Withings people really ought to generate an event when a new data point gets added to my data.
- Endomondo – wouldn’t it be cool if Endomondo published an event at the start and stop of a ride or run? I could do more than Tweet my exercise, I could use it to drive other programs.
- Flickr – Flickr ought to publish an event whenever my collection is updated. Now other programs know when to come grab a new picture. Photography workflow ensues.
- Foursquare – send events when you check in so that check-ins can drive other programs around the Web.
- Airlines – send events about delays, ticket purchases, and so on so services like TripIt can more easily mash up with them and guide my trips.
- Banks – Mint! Just stop the screen scraping already.
- Fitness data – don’t even get us started…
I could go on. There are literally thousands of APIs that have useful information to tell us without our having to ask first. We are stuck in a state of affairs that is the legacy of where we’ve been (the Web), not where we need to go.
Adding an event generator to an existing service is trivial. Every modern programming language has a way to make HTTP requests and that’s all that’s necessary. I think many services could add events in a few days of programming time.
If you’re familiar with Webhooks, you might ask “how’s it different from a webhook?” Webhooks are used for both events and RPCs, and (intentionally) lack constraint on how they are used. Evented APIs are only used for transferring events, and the API allows for a generalized way of transferring events with a common format. The Event API spec fits within the Webhook model and thus any event consumer in the Evented API space has implemented a Webhook. Event generators are calling Webhooks.
If you visit the Evented API site, you’ll find an example event generator and event consumer so you can visualize how event subscription, generation, and consumption work. Visit the consumer and create a event signal URL, cut and paste it into the event generator, and start playing.
The Evented API spec is separate from Kynetx. We support it (or will, very shortly), but the Evented API spec is designed to be independent. No proprietary technology is needed to generate or consume events using the spec. Evented APIs is for everyone–not just Kynetx customers and partners. Help get the word out!
Personal Event Networks: Building the Internet of Things
3 October 2011 by
The Internet of Things keeps coming up in conversations. I think when Marc Benioff talks about social products and services, for example, he’s talking about the Internet of Things. Because of the particular arc that the development of the Internet has followed, using “social” to describe connected products and services makes marketing sense.
This talk by Wim Elfrink is also talking about the Internet of Things. Wim does an excellent job of painting a picture of what a completely connected world looks like.
(BTW, if you’d rather listen to Wim’s talk, IT Conversations has Wim’s talk as well.)
The Internet of Things is close. Your car has had processors in it for a long time. Many cars–thanks to teathering with a mobile phone–are online. The same goes for a host of other products. My Tivo, for example, is online and I control it with a little app on my iPhone. More products could be online if someone knew what value that would provide.
The chief obstacle to getting more things online is that no one is quite sure how to get them to interact with each other, although we’ve got some ideas. Certainly APIs will play a role. Beyond that it gets fuzzy. Consequently what we see are connected products–like my Tivo–that have an app and not much else. For my Tivo, remote programmabilty is enough added value that an app makes sense. But do you want an app for your refrigerator? Or your toilet? Today’s connected products look like the picture below:
In this drawing, the Toyota car and the TomTom GPS are both online and they each have an app that you can install on your phone. But beyond that, it’s kind of boring. How do the GPS and the car interact with each other? They don’t. They’re online, but they’re not “networked.” They’re not really “social” because they’re not cooperating or communicating with each other.
What’s more, even if we conceive of each having an API, we’re missing some of the most important interactions if they have to be queried before they take part in a conversation. I don’t want to have to initiate all of the interactions between my products. I want them to speak up when something important happens.
Social products need to be networked if they’re to cooperate. The following picture shows the same online products, but now they’re connected to an event network.
The event network allows the car and the GPS to raise events when something of interest happens. What’s more, this event network is personal, meaning that my things raise events that other things that belong to me see. Your things raise events in your event network. The apps installed on this personal event network represent my intentions and interests, choreographing the interactions among the products and services I own.
The apps from the car manufacturer and the GPS manufacturer are still available, but so are other apps that third party developers have created, like a “travel app.” This app, for example, sees me researching routes on the GPS for a trip I’m going to take and reminds me to plug my electric car in because it needs juice. Note that I’m not using the app to plan the trip, I’m using the product–the GPS–but the app sees the events from the GPS and the car and links them together. This is an important distinction because the product, naturally, is the locus of my activity. Rather than forcing the user to interact through a phone interface in a video game-like virtual world, I merely use products as they were intended. The UX is the natural interactions I have with things in my life.
An Internet of Things will happen if there’s sufficient value. In this model, there’s value for customers and sellers. The customer sees more value in products that cooperate than in products that are merely online. On the product side, the seller now has a product that is a platform on which other developers can build applications. Most products are not interesting enough in themselves to represent a viable platform that can attract significant developer interest. Consequently they miss out on the benefits of having others create valuable add-ons. But products in an network of other cooperating products represent a rich ecosystem that will excite developer imaginations.
An Internet of Things–social products and services–will have as profound an effect on our lives as the changes of the preceding 15 years. I believe that personalized event-driven programming models are a key part of the architecture that makes them real. Events make active participants of formerly passive APIs and make social products a reality.
Related:
Tags:
live+web
social+products
krl
kynetx
GuardTime Wins $50,000 #Innotribe Start-Up Challenge for most promising Fintech startup
29 September 2011 by
I was one of the judges at the 2011 Innotribe $100K Start-up Challenge (designed to introduce the most promising FinTech and Financial Services start-ups to SWIFT’s community) and also I was asked to mentor GuardTime (www.guardtime.com), creator of the Keyless Signature technology providing indisputable proof of time, origin, and integrity for electronic data. Delighted that they won !
They were selected from over 100 applicants; this year’s judges awarded the prize to two winners, each receiving $50,000. The other winning company announced is Truaxis (formerly BillShrink), for its StatementRewards application that creates data-driven personalized services for financial institutions, merchants and consumers.
“We’re thrilled to be recognized by the financial services industry for innovation that creates indisputable and mathematically-sound audit trails for all electronic data, making it ideal for applications such as Internet banking, mobile payments, digital log forensics and eDiscovery,” said Mike Gault, CEO, GuardTime. “This award further validates why our customers partnered with us, and the benefits they’ve realized from using GuardTime.”
Kosta Peric, Head of Innovation at SWIFT, said: “The Start-Up Challenge is a vital component of Innotribe’s work to nurture new solutions to common financial industry challenges, and Innotribe@Sibos is the ideal environment in which to foster collaborative engagement with the most exciting new propositions coming out of the start-up community. This year’s winners, including GuardTime, represent innovation at its best.”
More information about the competition can be found at: http://innotribestartup.myreviewroom.com/pages/details/
A Facebook of Things
21 September 2011 by
Marc Benioff has spoken about “social products and services” at multiple events over the last year. He uses Toyota Friend as an example of a social product. Here’s a video of a joint Salesforce and Toyota press conference where Benioff talks about what this means (the meat starts at about 4:20)
Marc says “The car needs to become your friend. How does the car speak to me? How does the car integrate with the dealership and the factory? How does the car help me get to the service station? … I want a relationship with the car in the same way I have a relationship with my friends. … The car is going to become social. All our products are going to become social.” (emphasis mine)
I have to admit when I first heard this, I wasn’t sure I understood it. The demos that accompany the Toyota Friend pitches didn’t help, because they mostly seemed like dashboards. Do I really want my car sending me tweets or writing on my wall? But as I’ve thought about it, I think Benioff’s vision, while short on implementation details, is a brilliant articulation of a concept I’ve believed for a long time–what I’m calling the Live Web. Brilliant because it puts things in terms that almost anyone can understand.
The idea of social things (I’m just going to say “social things” from now on as a short hand for “social products and services”) raises a few interesting questions:
- What does it mean for things to be social? I think it means more than being chatty.
- What does a Facebook of Things look like and how does it work? Facebook and other social networks were built for people–things need something different.
We understand intuitively what it means for animals to be social because we’re social. Insects like bees, ants and termites create societies that are super organisms. Prarie dogs, monkeys, whales, apes, and humans all create societies. When we think of social animals we expect that they will do more than simply communicate with each other. A school of fish is not “social” in the same way that bees are–fish don’t cooperate. We expect cooperation in social animals that complete tasks more complicated and sophisticated than any individual can do independently.
Societies are not hierarchical. They are networked. See my last post On Hierarchies and Networks for more on this. I happen to keep bees, so I know a little about how they work. While there is a “queen” and bees have different roles at different stages of life, the overall operation of the hive is remarkably decentralized, being controlled by pheremones that the queen and other bees emit. For example, when a bee detects a threat to the hive, it emits a pheremone that serves as an alarm to other bees, who respond individually–not under any kind of centralized command or control. The guard bee doesn’t “command” other bees to go sting the intruder, rather it says “intruder” and other bees know what to do. The rules governing the proper response to an intruder are encapsulated inside each bee.
In a similar way, social things aren’t just chatty, telling you about their status. Neither are they making requests or issuing commands. Rather, a social thing cooperates with other things you own on tasks that matter to you–your purposes, intents, and interests. They don’t accomplish this because someone has set up an elaborate hierarchy of command and control, but because they are designed to cooperate. Of course, this is easier said than done. We are better at building hierarchical systems than enabling networked systems.
If you’ve been following my writing, you’ll know I have specific ideas about how this can be accomplished–or at least how we can progress toward the ideal of loosely-coupled, cooperating networks of things. There are three key ideas:
- Data in motion is better than data at rest
- People (and their information) matter
- Networks trump hierarchies
I think events play a key role because they enable networked systems, whereas requests work best inside a tightly-coupled, command and control hierarchy. The only way to reduce coupling is to wean ourselves from our dependence on hierachical systems. Events also support semantic encapsulation–the idea that a product or service in the network keeps as much of its semantics to itself as possible. This is critical to reducing coupling between components.
Another important idea is that people are at the center of the interactions between the things they own and use. We can’t build a coperating network of things if we place the person they are supposed to be serving on the sidelines. My things are different than your things (yeah, we share some) and they need to cooperate on my behalf. Being at the center of the interactions doesn’t mean I’m coordinating them or somehow driving them. For this to work, I need to be involved only in the most critical interactions or when there are decisions only I can make.
If things are social, what is the “Facebook of Things?” What constitutes the network that they use to store their relationships and communicate? This Facebook of Things can’t be Facebook. Facebook stores the relationships between people and has a limited set of verbs for how people interact: post, share, poke, message, etc. My car likely wants to do more than “share” with my GPS. My TripIt account doesn’t need to merely “poke” my Expensify account.
A network that serves as the Facebook of things needs to support a larger set of events than these few verbs. Events are subject-verb-object triples. Because of the nature of what needs to be communicated, events need to be free-form and flexible. The systems that respond to them should support complex event scenarios to recognize situations more complicated than what a single thing can communicate with a single event. For example, “Phil’s leaving on a trip and his car needs gas” is a combination of two events: “Phil’s leaving on a trip” and “Phil’s car needs gas.” These two events mean something important to me when they’re linked. Less so when they’re not.
This event network must be universal–standards-based and open. I call it the “global event bus” or GEB. The GEB supports raising event and subscribing to specific kinds of events for specific entities. The GEB must also support discovery for event processors and generators. Everything I own and use will eventually tie into the GEB.
The addition of identity to the GEB allows each entity (usually a person) to overlay their own personal event network (PEN) on top of the GEB. A PEN comprises the collection of things that a person owns, personal data she controls, and the apps she uses to manage scenarios (think “take a trip,” “find a service provider,” etc.). All of these, on the basis of being associated with an identity, link products, services, data, and applications together in a social graph in service of an individual. My PEN is obviously different than yours–it is uniquely individual and personal. The PEN is the “society” or “ecosystem” in which my things interact and provides a new model for integration. Adding new things, new data, and new apps is easy because the entire network is loosely coupled and the architecture supports emergent interaction. (See my living room scenario in On Hierarchies and Networks for more detail on this.)
As I said, this is what I call the Live Web, but if “Facebook of Things” works better for you, go right ahead and think of it that way. I believe such a system is inevitable. While its exact nature and form may differ from what I envision, I don’t think the overall idea will be long in coming. We can build this now and it will prove extremely valuable–so it will be built.
Tags:
facebook
events
automation
live+web
kynetx
#Mobile2 – write up of: What Will Change in A MultiScreen World? Native App vs Web? @marcedavis @olof_s @adamboyden @michaelmace @tonyfish
2 September 2011 by
The opening Panel: What Will Change in A MultiScreen World? Native App vs Web?
Marc Davis, Partner Architect, Microsoft; @marcedavis
[inventing the future of conneecting people, the web and the world. Working on vision and technolgy]
Olof Schybergson, CEO, Fjord; @olof_s
[working @Fjord - cross platform design]
Adam Boyden, President, Conduit; @adamboyden
[founded openlane, an exec at xfire, president conduit, speaker, writer and strategic thinker]
Michael Mace, CEO, Cera Technology. @michaelmace
[tech industry ceo and strategist, worked for Apple, Palm and now Cera - blog at mobile opportunity]
and Me @tonyfish entrepreneur, author and dad
Framing the session….
Mobile devices are personal and this makes mobile unique in the world of digital screens. TV’s, desktop’s, tablets and notebooks are mostly shared and therefore user data that comes from them, and that is stored on them, can be from one of a number of people. A mobile, with the accepted occasional exception is from one person. However the battle grounds are being set out between the eco-systems of broadcasters, web silo’s and mobile as all of them want access to, and control, over your income (discretional and normal purchases). Strategically this is an important time for the three industries that have, as of today, been quite separate, standalone and created value for their own eco-systems. In some respects there has been some leakage and/or substitution of value and control across them already but nothing like the war that is about to ensue.
Mobile 2 has always prided itself in looking beyond the current issues to debate what is coming and who control’s who in a multi-screen world is a critical topic for any strategist in the next 5 years. Mobile companies are depending on their personal relationship and customer insight to keep them at the front line. Broadcasters depend on exclusive access to the best sport and movies to keep their brand and position. Web companies have a generic dependence on the paid for telco bit pipe and barter of your data for free services.
All three realise that their model will change and come under increasing pressure and as we head for the new "digital" normal there will not be three industries but one and each of them want their brand as the brand that demands your attention and income. In this multi-screen world there are regulation, technology, economic and social issues to debate and at mobile 2 we will focus on the economics and the subsequent business models, and the technology solutions.
This session will not offer one solution or propose one outcome as there is a wide range of competing ideals that have underlying assumptions and we intend to get to drive out key assumptions and drivers. To do this we have gathered some global experts who have thought though the issues and implications and are knowledgeable and vocal.
Pithy bullet points from the session
- the consumer if god
- don’t forget content has value
- you need physical and digital
- platforms need publishers who need consumers
- who has the rights
- give up control to gain more
- separate UI/ UX is needed
- devices will remain multifunctional
- need to be able to preserve context
- what where and in what form
- banks are important
- your data (digital footprint) is an asset
- human model introduced by touch
- who has your data and what rights
- who is giving identity
- still a need for an abstraction layer
- trust is needed
- the business models will change
- native vs web; both and best as and when needed
Why talk to with/ follow up with the panel…..
Marc Davis [partnership with Microsoft on digital identity]
Olof Schybergson [cross platform design, UI, UX, strategy]
Adam Boyden [publisher and distribution]
Michael Mace [blog: http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/, information management and strategy]
Tony Fish [Big Data, Digital Identity, Rights, Influence, Reputation, Digital You, Digital Footprints]
Google doesn't want your identity – it wants the data that gives you identity
30 August 2011 by
It’s official: Google wants to own your online identity is the article is from GigaOm http://gigaom.com/2011/08/29/its-official-google-wants-to-own-your-online-identity/ using the same Image from Kat B Photography
So Schmidt told it like it is at Edinburgh that an “identity service” unlocks the ability to do the trade and everyone goes into melt down. Why are you somewhat shocked that Google + plus > than competing with Facebook. As covered in numerous posts here previously, (social) signals are a critical part of Big Data but signals from real, authenticated, trusted real people with an identity means that you undertake a real "trade".
Now lets not get sidelined by Real Name policy issues and the wider political implications; lets just focus on the "trade or barter." You give up data for access to FREE services, but the data cannot be identified means the value is smaller than knowing who you are. If they know who you are, the balance of value is firmly with the holder.
The issue is not about being (or becoming) an Identity Gatekeeper as that will end in regulatory quagmire and in reality you cannot own an Identity, just as you cannot demand faith, command trust or request a reputation. Therefore, lets assume a world in which there is an economy where real people have real cash who want to spend said real cash on real products and services, then knowing who you are could kind of like be helpful.
This is not about identity but is about how you trade for goods. Image a token with your face on it, which represents your ability to trade? – called money.
