appTV - a vision for a new interactive TV experience

The world is evolving at an ever increasing pace, and companies and organizations are challenged to find new ways of delivering value for their customers. The traditional closed development model is no longer able to keep up and compete with the rapid innovation cycles of the Internet. A different approach is called for.

Cloud Media believes that open innovation and co-creation is the key to success in this brave new world. Rather than building closed, end-2-end systems which vertically integrate all required functionality, we should collaborate and combine components, modules and online services from many different companies and developers.

appTV articulates a vision for the future evolution of TV and IP video services in general. This market is characterized by high fragmentation and shifting business models, which makes it a very challenging and very relevant opportunity for everyone. The idea is to enable web-based interactive applications on TV and other screens. A cross-device TV app store model is proposed, to govern the innovation process and delivery of HTML based apps to the devices connected to the service.

So what? There are many more TV screens out there than PCs, and older generations and people in developing economies are more familiar with TV than with the Internet. By enabling access to simple Internet services on TV, we can connect more people to the digital economy, and help them engage in social networking and communication to enhance their lives.

Bits of immortality

By writing these words in my blog I am changing the world. These bits and bytes end up in numerous servers around the world, converting zeros to ones and vice versa, evidence of my existence available to future generations. In this sense, blogging is a way to immortality.

The question is: Will it make a difference, and if so will I know about it?

Shirky's Shock of Inclusion

Nice quote by Clay Shirky : "Scarcity means valuable things become more valuable, a conceptually easy change to integrate. Surplus, on the other hand, means previously valuable things stop being valuable, which freaks people out."

I believe there is more to it than this though. For example, inflation reduces the value of money, and yet it does not freak people out - until it becomes exponential of course.

Recent insights

During the summer holidays I read the book "Here comes everybody" by Clay Shirky. It contains many good examples about things that exist or happened in the world, with a perspective on some of the underlying mechanisms and structures. The power law distribution features prominently in many cases, for example the relationship between blogs and the number of readers (with this blog still very much being at the end of the long tail). The book also explains how social networking lower the barriers for group forming and collaboration, thereby fundamentally changing the need for corporate organizations to address certain problems that require joint effort.

It struck me that wealth and decision power at both national and company levels also seem to follow a power law distribution. With organizations organized in hierarchies, the number of people at the top is very small compared to the total. For countries, the number of people in power is very small too, and this seems to be consistent across both democracies and other types of systems like communism. Wondering why this is so, my theory is that this is due to natural selection: groups with few decision makers are more efficient. Other power distributions may have occurred in the past, but have been replaced by a more effective one.

I bought a Samsung Galaxy S last year, and this year they already introduced the Galaxy S II - my phone is obsolete. A similar thing happened to my brand new Samsung TV, so I got curious and found that this phenomenon is actually quite common: accelerated obsolescence. This is partly due to Moore's law, I also found a related phenomenon called "Android's law" which explains what's happening at a software level. I then wondered why these "laws" are the way the are, and today I found the work of Ray Kurzweil on TED who provides some explanation for the exponential curve - each advancement in technology is used to build the next - and also shows that Moore's law is but one manifestation of this principle. The Flip camera and netbooks are some examples of the consequences.

So what are the implications? To illustrate, here's a graph that shows the decline of human cognitive abilities with age.

Technological innovations happen at an ever increasing speed. What is new today may be gone tomorrow. As we get older, we humans increasingly have trouble to keep up with this cycle, leading to cognitive stress and a widening of the knowledge divide. This in turn may lead to social isolation of older generations, a problem which is becoming more prominent due to the aging population in most developed countries.

It also means that if you're a company producing products, a process in which it takes one year to develop a product may have been working fine some years ago, but it will no longer work in today's economy. Market windows for opportunities get shorter, so you need to be faster, engage with customers earlier, etc.