@Michael LOL! No not the movie, I'm refering to the black swan theory where the term is used as an unforseeable but happens. (Swans are mostly white but every now and then one is born black)
@Awilliams - in this case, I think it will be death by a thousand cuts. bad service coupled with poor performance - added to repetitive mistakes in results (marketing and features) - How long did it take people to complain about Facebook's privacy and yet we all still use it? Eventually, there will be replacement diversions - but nothing new under the sun means we're making the same things/mistakes - just with better toys/tools
@Awilliams - There are sooo many ways this Internet thing could go down in flames badly - loss of privacy, outsourced education, crazy social networks...
@ALL - Steve and PARC may be gone, but the chat is free to continue. Would anyone like to discuss more nightmare scenarios? or how about ideas on R&D or clean tech??
@PARCinc ...and for those of you on Twitter, we'd love to keep up with you there as well! Thank you @MichaelSinger @NicoleFerraro @NetEvolution for having us here today.
@Michael, thanks for setting this up. Very interesting dialogue with you and the folks here. If anybody wants to keep up with PARC they can go to www.parc.com/updates. thanks again. Steve
@Awilliams or it might require government healthcare and retirement plans as safety nets to function well. But would individuals agree to pay for that? And what would people need in terms of social media if that is their professional branding and marketing? Is what we have today with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and blogs good enough.
@Steve actually if you play out your scenario a bit further it would create a rise in tribalistic support structures after things like job security, healthcare, etc were no longer givens
@Steve - That Hollywood-IT comparison is not too far off. Having a core team of visonaries and implementors can be very effective. Changing the mindset of employees would take time will take longer - especially since most of our audience hasn't changed jobs more than one or two times.
@Michael, I think my vision could go bad in a bunch of ways. And that was why I asked would it be better or not? But I think your example of AOL points that the trend is starting to occur. And as an innovator I always pay attention to new trends when they are early and then play them out to the extreme. That is a great way to envision innovation opportunities that can exploit a growing trend. What parts do you think are bad? What countermeasures in terms of offerings of services or products would mitigate that? If they are good at mitigating the bad part they can be great innovations.
@Steve, @PARCinc. - what about PARC culture... are the researchers encouraged to spend time on non-work related projects (like they do at Google) or participate in gamification?
@SHoover sounds like what IBM did, created a cloud talent pool, but doesn't that eliminate the social support structures that make corporations viable in the long term?
@Michael we have nearly 200 technical staff and actually are actively recruiting right now to support some recent growth in our business. We have many, many partners on projects. Our policy is to work with the best in the world on key problems - where ever they are.
@Nicole here is a radical far out vision that in some ways has nothing to do with technology but in another way has a lot. It is this. I wonder if the days of people working for a company at all might just go away? Think about how movies are made in hollywood. IT can be $150M production where everybody comes together for 6 months and then goes their separate ways. IN the world of social media, high speed broadband and the breaking of employment for life. Maybe we all jsut become our own brand and we come together for projects and then go our separate ways? Could that work? Would it be better?
@Nicole - great question - My wife and I were at the physics department at UC Berkeley the other day for a discussion on nanotechnology. If it's become academic, is it passe'?
It just seems like there is a huge hype factor with some of these technologies. It surely must be difficult to determine which projects are worthwile and which are duds.
@Mary the fundamental namespace in a content centric network is in fact the name of the content. Not the device it happens to be on at the minute. IP addresses are machine names. In CCN the fundamental name is the content. For example it might be internetevolution.today. broadcast. That would specify then today's broadcast. Of course there has to a lookup and name resolution process that scales well and that is where the technology comes in.
On the cloud outages. It is clear that cloud technology is new. The failures modes and the system design rules are still getting figured out. So, there is risk. This looks like electricity distribution systems did 80 years ago and frankly look like today in places like india. But it doesn't mean you don't use electricity. But it does mean two things - for critical resources what is your back up plan and for us innovators what a great innovation opportunity! How can we make the cloud more resilient and reliable? We are working in that area at PARC to some extent and many others are as well.
@Steve, I'm not sure I really understand what replaces the IP address in the CCN plan. Can you speak to that? I promise I'll watch the video later. But would like to get your high level take on that.
@Steve, I enjoyed the discussion about the Internet as a content-driven device. What is the biggest change due to the Internet that the average white-collar worker will see in the next five years?
@Steve: How do you feel about so-called clean data centers like Facebook's being criticized by Greenpeace for using "dirty" coal utility power? Is that fair?
@PARCinc what would you say the breakdown of PARC's activities based around the Asset Classes? followup- how much goes to Options or the most far out research
@Kim you raise a great point on how much in short vs long term investment. My first answer is that the most important is to make sure you think about it. Again, I am not sure there is a one size answer for all businesses but it is a strategic question. The factors to think about are the rate of change in your industry or technology - the faster that is then you better be making more long term investments.
@Awilliams I agree with your point on failure having rewards. It is really true. one way to think about innovation is that it is a learning process. If you knew the answer it wouldn't be innovation.... So failure is always a learning opportunity and embracing that is great.
@Michael on the question of prioritization. It has to consider I think a couple of key things - the first is what do you have to bring to bear? It might be a great area but what does your organization have that will make a real difference? Another competing tension though bears to my point on risk. Never think as a management team that you can predict the future - you have to leave some space for things that don't have a clear future but are just inherently interested and have potential.
@SHoover how often do you find that seemingly failed projects later return to offer greater insight to other efforts? It seems failure has rewards even if they are rarely obvious at the time.
@jwallace We'll let you take credit for it if you like;) Since you're interested, you can watch Bo give a talk on Ubiquitous Computing for Business from then to now tonight - www.parc.com/forum
@Awilliams you ask a great question on the culture of innovation. But then you talked about structure and I think the focus should be more on culture as you say. One big cultural aspect is how open is your organization to admitting failure? I think that is key. Taking risk means admitting the possibility of failure.
@Steve, as my first folow up question - as a manager of these projects - what's your process for prioitization? When has a project either died out or jumped the shark?
@Awilliams @JW @MaryJander @Nicole Ferraro -- On balancing R&D, how do WE do it?? Would love your comments on our portfolio management approach: http://bit.ly/iidbhu -- oh, we provide details!
Thank you Steve for that very insightfull interview - As you mentioned, PARC has a lot of innovation behind it and issues that your researchers are working on.
@Awilliams: A dilemma for how any company invests in R&D. How much goes into short-term developments for the existing market, how much into innovation research which may be long term, and which is high risk (might lead nowhere)?
Steve: We are anxious to know your take on the recent cloud outages by Amazon and PSN. How did these happen? Were they to be expected? Do users have to look to backing up clouds with clouds? What gives?
What main mistakes do companies make when investing their R&D dollars? I'd guess one is that they don't figure out what problem they're trying to solve first, as you say.
@Awilliams: R&D is usually allocated specifically as a segment of earnings. Most big public tech companies state the R&D allocation in their earnings reports
Clearly, in the Amazon and PSN outages, it seems the cloud model wasn't structured adequately. Or perhaps it was, and users simply haven't realized they need to buttress clouds with clouds -- ??
@MaryJander No problem. To answer your other question, independent wholly owned subsidiary -- incorporated in 2002. Partial list of external clients is at http://bit.ly/cfAZ2
@MaryJander Exactly... More details in video you can watch at http://bit.ly/ed5vuC and some details on security model and more at http://slidesha.re/9B3JGd
Thanks PARCinc. From your own site, though: Content-centric networking is PARC's vision for taking the next step in data communication — a change in network architecture to make content retrieval by name, not location, the fundamental operation of the network. Our approach is to reuse and build upon successful features of TCP/IP, with the key change of replacing the machine-oriented IP model with a named content model as the basis for the central protocol that connects networks.
I'd like to know whether he thinks that the Amazon/PSN outages were to be expected, and whether users might have to plan on their end for better backup/recover
On background, Steve's personal research and long-term technology work spans several disciplines including cloud computing, clean-tech, nanotech, mobile, and the Future of Work, as well as advanced printing and mass customization technologies.
@ifyleraks - Hello there! Our show starts at 1 p.m., Eastern promptly. If you have some advanced questions for Mr. Hoover, please feel free to post them here and we'll add them to the question queue.
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.
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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M2M: Rise of the Machines? Not Yet David Weldon In the 1970 science fiction thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, two giant supercomputers from the United States and Soviet Union secretly join forces to take control of the collective nuclear might of the two countries. In the film, the two machines discover each other's existence, communicate back-and-forth, share their collective data, and cut their human creators out of the process. It is the ultimate example of machine-to-machine communications, or M2M. CLICK FOR MORE
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