Cloud Musings: Packing My Bags For Prague and Dimension Data #Per...: Prague is a beautiful city! My last time was in June 2010 when Jeremy Geelan invited me to speak at CloudExpo Europe (see my blog post a...
Hope Prague also meets all your expectations second time round, +Kevin L. Jackson ! :-)
Jeremy | @jg21
Saturday, May 16, 2015
Friday, October 10, 2014
Welcome to The Co-Technology Era
Seven years ago – on February 27, 2007 – I wrote that "Blogging Is Just the Tip of the 'Co-Technology' Iceberg", thereby ushering into the 21st century lexicon a coinage that I knew would resonate with almost anyone who was, at the time, concerned with the intersection of the Internet, co-operative advantage, and the future.
Much has changed about the Internet, the Web, and the wider world since then. But much more has not changed...
As I travel the globe interacting with the movers and shakers who have helped move us beyond mere Web 2.0 to a predominantly mobile and hyper-connected paradigm where applications have replaced websites as the focus of energy, attention, and investment, I am becoming increasingly aware of how little attention is nonetheless being given to what I assumed we had all long since agreed are the three core questions around any technological innovation: Do we need it? Can we afford it? and What problem does it solve?
Call me a curmudgeon, but I honestly believe that we may be bumbling and stumbling toward a future that we ought rather to be hurtling toward: let us call it The Co-Technology Era for want of a better term.
Another remarkable co-technology, in my view, is Skype which was already three years old when Twitter went live. Created by Dane Janus Friis and Swede Niklas Zennström in cooperation with Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, Skype was first released in August 2003 and combined voice and video connectivity with IM, peer-to-peer over the Internet, in a way that just two years later brought its shareholders the then almost inconceivably huge sum of US $2.5 billion, from eBay. Still free to this day, Skype to Skype international traffic in 2013 reached 214 billion minutes.
If any further proof were needed of the value of Skype to those seeking secure, P2P connectivity, then one need look no further than to the fact that no fewer than four open source alternatives to Skype now exist – including Jitsi, Ekiga, Tox and Vox.
But communications between people are swiftly being overtaken, in terms of sheer volume, by communications between Things – a term which includes machines, devices, sensors, consumer products, vehicles, etc. While estimates vary, there is broad agreement that already in 2008 the number of things connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on Earth. In the coming years we are going to see billions more 'things' coming online, and indeed Cisco claims that the number of Internet-connected devices already reached 8.7 billion in 2012.
In my view the Internet of Things will be the next historic and irrefutable QED of the value of co-technology – indeed of co-technologies, plural, since one of the most pleasing aspects of the IoT explosion that we are witnessing is precisely that it's helping to popularize a welter of complementary innovations, from the WebSocket protocol to MQTT, XMPP, CoAP and the rest.
The Internet of Things is a broader and more abstract concept than M2M. As one expert on Quora expressed it recently:
"IoT it is about interacting with the objects around us; even static non-intelligent objects and augmenting such interactions with context as provided by geo-location, time and so on. Even non-intelligent/non-conne
If Cisco is right, then there will be about fifteen billion 'things' connected the the Internet by 2015, and around forty billion by 2020. You can like it or loathe it, but one thing is certain – and that is that the Internet of Things is here to stay.
Welcome to The Era of Co-Technology!
Much has changed about the Internet, the Web, and the wider world since then. But much more has not changed...
As I travel the globe interacting with the movers and shakers who have helped move us beyond mere Web 2.0 to a predominantly mobile and hyper-connected paradigm where applications have replaced websites as the focus of energy, attention, and investment, I am becoming increasingly aware of how little attention is nonetheless being given to what I assumed we had all long since agreed are the three core questions around any technological innovation: Do we need it? Can we afford it? and What problem does it solve?
Call me a curmudgeon, but I honestly believe that we may be bumbling and stumbling toward a future that we ought rather to be hurtling toward: let us call it The Co-Technology Era for want of a better term.
What would be a textbook example of a co-technology that passes the three-question litmus test? How about Instant Messaging? Long before the Web, and even longer before Facebook Chat, in the mid-60s in fact, real-time text systems were available to multiple users logged into the same machine. IM was a connectionists's wet dream, and when four decades later the first tweet was sent – on March 21, 2006 – it bore eloquent testimony to the continuing value of IM. "Productized IM" if you will. The rest is history.
Another remarkable co-technology, in my view, is Skype which was already three years old when Twitter went live. Created by Dane Janus Friis and Swede Niklas Zennström in cooperation with Estonians Ahti Heinla, Priit Kasesalu, and Jaan Tallinn, Skype was first released in August 2003 and combined voice and video connectivity with IM, peer-to-peer over the Internet, in a way that just two years later brought its shareholders the then almost inconceivably huge sum of US $2.5 billion, from eBay. Still free to this day, Skype to Skype international traffic in 2013 reached 214 billion minutes.
If any further proof were needed of the value of Skype to those seeking secure, P2P connectivity, then one need look no further than to the fact that no fewer than four open source alternatives to Skype now exist – including Jitsi, Ekiga, Tox and Vox.
But communications between people are swiftly being overtaken, in terms of sheer volume, by communications between Things – a term which includes machines, devices, sensors, consumer products, vehicles, etc. While estimates vary, there is broad agreement that already in 2008 the number of things connected to the Internet exceeded the number of people on Earth. In the coming years we are going to see billions more 'things' coming online, and indeed Cisco claims that the number of Internet-connected devices already reached 8.7 billion in 2012.
In my view the Internet of Things will be the next historic and irrefutable QED of the value of co-technology – indeed of co-technologies, plural, since one of the most pleasing aspects of the IoT explosion that we are witnessing is precisely that it's helping to popularize a welter of complementary innovations, from the WebSocket protocol to MQTT, XMPP, CoAP and the rest.
The Internet of Things is a broader and more abstract concept than M2M. As one expert on Quora expressed it recently:
"IoT it is about interacting with the objects around us; even static non-intelligent objects and augmenting such interactions with context as provided by geo-location, time and so on. Even non-intelligent/non-conne
If Cisco is right, then there will be about fifteen billion 'things' connected the the Internet by 2015, and around forty billion by 2020. You can like it or loathe it, but one thing is certain – and that is that the Internet of Things is here to stay.
Welcome to The Era of Co-Technology!
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