“The future is already here -- it’s just not very evenly distributed,” William Gibson so presciently said in 1993. And late last week, that future, our open 21st-century future, was on show in a windowless late 20th-century building in downtown New York City, at an event hosted by AT&T.
“Did you know that this is the only building in New York City designed to withstand a nuclear attack?” the cab driver asked when he dropped me at 33 Thomas Street, the former AT&T Long Lines building, a granite monolith that takes up almost a block of lower Manhattan. The location is now AT&T’s corporate research center.
No, I hadn’t known the history, but the story of this skyscraper without windows didn’t surprise me. Architecture, after all, is fate. Built in 1974 in the so-called “Brutalist” style, the concrete-slabbed building was designed to house telephone switching equipment, which explains why its abnormally thick floors can carry 200 to 300 pounds per square foot.
But, rather than a history field trip, I had come to 33 Thomas Street to get a glimpse of the future: an open, collaborative 21st-century future, which AT&T -- that quintessential 20th-century company of closed telephonic systems and windowless concrete buildings -- is embracing with all the passion of an early 21st-century collaborative and transparent startup.
While the architecture of its closed, proprietary building hasn’t changed, AT&T is radically transforming itself. On show at 33 Thomas Street last week were the kinds of tools, products, and services that will enable AT&T to become a leading player in our brave, new digital world of transparency and sharing.
Most of the products that were being shown were prototypes of ideas that AT&T is developing in its research centers, particularly in its “Foundries” -- AT&T’s impressive new collaboration centers with offices in Palo Alto, Plano, and Tel Aviv. And what most distinguishes these new digital products coming out of the Foundries are their openness and collaborative foundations.
Take, for example, the prototype “Driving Safety,” a device demonstrated last week by Raz Dar, the business director of the Tel Aviv Foundry, which can be plugged into a car’s computer and which enables parents to monitor and control in real-time their kids’ driving patterns. In the old days of a closed, proprietary AT&T, of course, this kind of product would be secretly designed in-house, inside windowless buildings like 33 Thomas Street.
But “Driving Safety” actually originated in a fast-pitch presentation by the Israeli company Traffilog and has been a collaborative effort involving developers from AT&T, Traffilog, and the Israeli software company Amdocs Ltd. (NYSE: DOX) to create services and products that can enable safer driving.
Or take AT&T’s new API Platform, which the company claims will make it the “most open carrier network in the world.” As Michael Fairchild, the director of new technology and product development engineering in AT&T’s Palo Alto Foundry, told me last week, this API Platform exposes the company’s internal services, such at AT&T’s Watson API for speech recognition, to third-party developers.
As Krish Prabu, AT&T’s new CTO, told me last week, big companies like AT&T can innovate as nimbly as any startup. Prabu (who perhaps not uncoincidentally used to run AT&T’s Foundry network) is, of course, right. Research done, for example, by Michael Mandel
at the Progressive Policy Institute, shows large firms like AT&T are actually often more inventive than small ones.
So I set eyes on the future late last week in a famously Brutalist concrete building in lower Manhattan. But that future, unlike 33 Thomas Street, is anything but windowless. Indeed, Krish Prabu’s new AT&T may well be building the infrastructure for a collaborative 21st-century network that will blow the windows off the closed, proprietary systems of the 20th-century industrial firm.
Sixteen billion dollars of projects at Google? Hmm, probably all of that is work on proposed products. Probably not much is being spend on "basic research" -- the stuff that adds to our store of knowledge, but may never lead to a sellable product. Who does that in this day and age? Well, the three letters "IBM" spring to mind. Their basic research in the past has led directly to higher storage densities, new materials with amazing properties, and computer systems that win at Jeopardy tournaments. Every once in a while, they'll pull a stunt for publicity, like spelling out "IBM" in atoms -- not molecules, mind you, atoms -- to demonstrate that they're playing with the building blocks of matter. Sixteen billion is a lot of scratch, but Google might want to take a closer look at what it's being spent on. They could do worse than to emulate IBM's example in this case.
Kicheko: Fair enough, but we recently did a report that showed Google is spending $16 billion on projects that seem to be headed nowhere. Even if it has the funds for that, it seems really wasteful and like the company is lacking the ability to execute. As for Android, it's a beloved OS but it's also a drain on Google's resources.
Nicole,- While i see your point here, let me give a little credit to google. At least out of their multiple failures android came to be. One of the greatest contributions to the mobile revolution IMO. Often they do undertake a host of seemingly unnecessary projects, but possibly thats because they believe in doodling around just in case something pops up. Fortunately they have the funds to support that otherwise bad habit.
When I was in high school I was selected to go to a special overnight trip to AT&T Bell Labs in New Jersey. I remember one of the areas we visited was a voice recognizer. Of course this was the mid 1970s, so the output (I tried reciting a lyric from Strawberry Fields) was printed on a DecWriter.
Now we live in the age of Watson, AT&T and IBM, and Siri. Looking at the Siri ad featuring Samuel Jackson as he prepares for "date night" in his kitchen by traipsing around with his iPhone selecting restaurants and setting schedules, I think...with Voice...do we really need GUI any more?
Think of the Star Trek computer. It famously didn't have any input devices except voice. In many cases, there was no visual confirmation at all. It's not like Kirk would ask for the list of recent plague outbreaks on Rigel 9 and then it would display an "OK" on touch screen and he would have to get up and press it.
No...the disembodied voice was good enough for many, many tasks. It made me think...have we all gotten it wrong. Is the Phone Company the computer? If you have a VUI, then do you need a "smartphone" other than to connect it to the network? You could just talk to it with one of those in-ear headsets.
Think of walking through the city with a really smart friend. If you asked him where the Guggenheim was, he wouldn't pull out a map, and a highlighter and draw a line on it and tell you it was 1.2 miles away. No, he would say, go up twenty blocks and turn right.
The VUIs like AT&T Watson, connected directly to an IBM knowledge computer, may allow us to finally put our eyes...back on the road!
Thank you for letting us know what AT&T has been up to, Andrew. The surprise here for me is that innovation came from kind of an unexpected quarter. AT&T once ruled the telephone network. Since its breakup in the 80s, it's been a different story. Now we hear about what seems significant research coming from this company.
What other research groups might be hidden away in companies that may not be viewed as tech innovators in the latest sense of the word?
Hey Andrew. Thanks for taking us inside AT&T's plans. It sounds like AT&T is investing in research that will actually turn out to be useful in the not too distant future, unlike... say... Google, which is spending billions of dollars on projects that have no clear future. Would you agree?
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Dead since 1832, Jeremy Bentham is a cadaver that has been living in public ever since, on display beside "Dapple," his favorite walking stick, in a glass-fronted wooden coffin at London’s University College. His coffin was coined as an “Auto-Icon” by Bentham, which is a neologism meaning "a man who is his own image." Below is an excerpt from Andrew Keen’s new book, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us, in which he describes recognizing the Auto-Icon as a symbol for the digital age.
The following is excerpted from Andrew Keen's latest book, Digital Vertigo: How Today's Online Social Revolution Is Dividing, Diminishing, and Disorienting Us (New York: St. Martin's Press: 2012), which will be released this week.
I had come to London that morning from Oxford, where I’d spent the previous few days at a conference entitled “Silicon Valley Comes to Oxford.” This was an event organized by the university’s Said Business School in which Silicon Valley’s most influential entrepreneurs had come to the closed, haunted city of Oxford to celebrate the openness and transparency of social life in the twenty-first century.
My old sparring partner Jimmy Wales has been busy predicting the future again. This time, in a speech last month at the Global INET conference in Geneva, Switzerland, he said that Hollywood is doomed. But rather than skewered on the sword of piracy, Wales forecasts, it will be killed by its own irrelevance.
Welcome to the zettabyte era, an age of increasingly wireless connectivity in which the gigabyte equivalent of every motion picture ever produced will travel across the Internet every five minutes. According to a Cisco white paper, global IP traffic, having increased eightfold over the last five years, will ascend to this zettabyte (one billion terabytes) peak by 2015. And by then, there will be more than 8 million households in the terabyte club and, even more astonishingly, another 20 million households producing half a terabyte (one thousand gigabytes) each month.
Cisco's rumored sale of Linksys suggests we may have problem with innovation and profit at the edge of our Internet, and that could be critical to the evolution of many Internet-delivered services.
Businesses helped neighbors with Internet access and mobile device charge-ups during Sandra. Following that example, enterprises should consider preparing Internet disaster plans to help the public during disasters.
New tools like laptops, tablets, smartphone, and wireless connectivity let us work from San Diego to Katmandu, and anywhere in between. But time management remains a problem.
Showing results is the best way to win over social business doubters, according to Mary Maida, Medtronic lead information solutions manager. Internet Evolution's Mitch Wagner interviewed Maida at the E2 Innovate conference.
Software-defined networks, which deliver virtualization functions to enterprise networks, have the potential to dramatically change network design and significantly reduce costs and maintenance.
Companies need to take advantage of new technologies to simplify interfaces, improve capabilities, and enhance back-office processes. But they can't upgrade their Websites too often.
Wells Fargo uses social software to replace email chains and help its sales team collaborate more effectively to land deals, according to Kelli Carlson-Jagersma, VP Collaboration Strategy for Wells Fargo. Mitch Wagner spoke with Carlson-Jagersma at the E2Innovate conference
Many enterprises view high-speed broadband connections as ubiquitous. Yet in about 20 percent of the country, businesses and their employees do not have access to even DSL connections. This shortcoming diminishes enterprises' ability to support their employees.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
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