Beware the cloud

Certainly worth a read is Charles Leadbeater, who refers to the cloud capitalists

Facebook, Apple, Google, Salesforce, Twitter, who will seek to make money by creating and managing clouds for us.

We will, he adds

find our choices, social connection and searches being shaped by the clumsy algorithms these companies come up with and therefore his solution

1.Maintaining a diversity of funding for the development of web platforms, so that some will be social and public to complement the corporate platforms.

2.Ensuring people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud based services: anti-monopoly legislation covering social media and web platforms will be central.

3.Keeping open spaces for experimentation on the web, rather than allowing incumbent media companies to occupy emerging spaces.

4.Defending net neutrality rather than a system in which those that pay more — large companies

5.Ensuring people have freedom to move between suppliers of net services and content, to avoid being locked-in to cloud services provided by one supplier.

Rickets returns-blame the computer

The latest scare story about computers in the Times this morning claims that they are bringing about a return of rickets.

According to the paper

Scientists say that rickets is becoming “disturbingly common” among British children. The disease is caused by chronic vitamin D deficiencies, which can be triggered by long periods out of natural sunlight and a poor diet.

and the

many hours children spend indoors playing computer games or watching television may be to blame for a resurgence of rickets.

The future will be seen rather than heard and in 3-D

I met Andrew Keen last year and always take an interest in his writings and musings.

Regarded by some as a maverick in the digital media world but many of his predictions have come to fruition.

In this piece he muses about what the internet world will be like in 2020 and says that

I will speculate that by 2020, real-time community video -- either online or via mobile networks -- will have reached its Gladwellian tipping point. By 2020, social networking and mobile telephony will be increasingly video-based. By 2020, voice will be dying. In 2020, the future will be seen rather than heard.

and in that same year,he says we’ll all be living in 3D worlds.

Interesting ESPN have announced the launch of a 3-D channel in time for this year's world cup.Sky are also reportedly playing with the technology and will be broadcasting in 3-D in the summer,although with set top boxes not available until next Xmas,only the chosen few will see it results

How maximising the net is the number one objective for an enterprise

As the online world and the destiny of a firm combine,the health of the matrix becomes paramount.

That's the conclusion of Kevin Kelly who wrote 10 years ago that:

Whereas once it was maximising the enterprise and the market place which ruled now

Maximizing the value of the net itself soon becomes the number one strategy for a firm. For instance, game companies will devote as much energy to promoting the platform--the tangle of users, game developers, and hardware manufacturers--as they do to their games. For unless their web thrives, they die. This represents a momentous change--a complete shift in orientation.

Furthermore it also involves feeding the network

During certain phases of growth, feeding the network is as important as feeding the firm. Some firms that already have large market shares (such as Intel, which owns 80% of the PC processor market) channel money, through minority investments, to younger firms whose success will strengthen the market for their products, directly or indirectly. They feed the web because it is good business.

Internet TV watching to be tracked

An interesting development in the United States sees measuring of television viewing to take account of the internet.

This morning's FT reports that

Nielsen, the dominant tracker of television viewing, will begin measuring internet usage across its national panel of US television viewers by August next year, accelerating a plan to offer its network clients the ability to gauge the impact of online videos.

In the UK almost as many people are accessing television via their iPhone or PlayStation 3 as via a Mac computer,

This gives me some confidence in the current shake up of the media business model

Kevin Kelly quotes from Stuart Brand

the main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance. The gift economy is one way players in the net rehearse for a life of following the free and anticipating the cheap. This is also a way for entirely new business models to shake out. Furthermore the protocommercial stage is a way for innovation to fast-forward into hyperdrive. Temporarily unhinged from the constraints of having to make a profit by next quarter, the greater network can explore a universe of never-before-tried ideas. Some ideas will even survive the transplantation to a working business.

Internet rights v Pirate ones

Plans to make internet access a “fundamental right” are to be dropped, a move that paves the way for European law enforcement agencies to cut off web users who have been caught downloading pirated films and music.reports the FT this morning

The European parliament has agreed to drop an amendment that was aimed at countering so-called “three strikes” laws, legislation that allows law enforcement agencies to shut down internet connections that have been allegedly used for illegal file-sharing .

How the web will look in 5 years time

So according to Google CEO Eric Schmidt,the internet will be dominated in five years time by Chinese charactors and social media.

Read Write Web have handily summarised his 45 minute interview including

1.that today's teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years - they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

2.Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance - and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

3.people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that "is the great challenge of the age." Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Geo the new web

This for me really encapsulates the web today (via Adam Tinworth)

It is Ross Mayfield's theme of this year's Web 2.0 Summit,the web squared who thinks that the big driver will be

geo, or location, provides as big of a vector for exploration and impacts the others. Geo has always been the missing dataset of the web, but very soon all mobile devices, browsers, laptops and specialized devices will provide geotagging. Geo will become a facet of the other three trends, becoming ubiquitous in existing services, and the founding opportunity for new ones.