Is this the Death-Knell For (Relative) Silence on Airplanes?

The BBC carried a report yesterday that raises the alarming possibility of extending cellphone use on board airplanes from just either end of a journey to throughout the duration of the flight.

Now before I go any further let me just say that I do not go as far as the British essayist Pico Iyer, who once wrote, in "The Eloquent Sounds of Silence":

Silence is sunshine...company is clouds;
silence is rapture...company is
doubt;
silence is golden...company is brass.

But I will admit to a horror of being surrounded by people talking on their cellphones while the rest of us are trying to enjoy the latest movie or catch up on work, on life...or on sleep.

Here's how it would work, according to Ofcom, the official body that's basically the telecommunications regulator in the UK:

The key to the whole thing, the technical trick that circumvents the problem found in 2003 by the CAA that mobile phone signals skew navigation bearing displays by up to five degrees, is that cellphones in the plane are not allowed to connect to any base stations on the ground.

The proposed system utilizes an on-board base station in the plane which communicates with passengers' own handsets. The base station - called a pico cell - is low power and creates a network area big enough to encompass the cabin of the plane. The base station routes phone traffic to a satellite, which is in turn connected to mobile networks on the ground. A network control unit on the plane is used to ensure that mobiles in the plane do not connect to any base stations on the ground. It blocks the signal from the ground so that phones cannot connect and remain in an idle state.

So much for the technical side if it. The social side of it is less clear-cut. One thing is an iPhone, but a skiPhone might just be the death-knell for (relative) silence on airplanes.

"No Boss Can Afford to Remain Clueless About Web 2.0"

There is only one path: Marketing and technology in your company must work together to design and implement your Web 2.0 strategy," says George Colony, chairman and chief executive officer of Forrester Research, the very same week that Web 2.0 University has announced that its unique one-day Web 2.0 education event is now being made available to Greater New York Area's executives for the first time ever on October 2nd, in midtown Manhattan.

As BusinessWeek wrote already in March 2006: “For all its appeal to the young and the wired, Web 2.0 may end up making its greatest impact in business.”

In his "Perspective" piece published yesterday at CNET ("Web 2.0 and the CEO"), Colony contends that "Web 2.0 has forever changed the relationship between your company and your customer" and advises them to take on board four key principles of doing business in the age of the New Web:

• Your company is inside-out in an outside-in world.


• Your company has a bad Web site.


• You should be asking your customer one question.


• You don't own your customer; your customer owns you.

Knowing the customers better than the competition is now crucial, Colony contends. He uses the example of Dell:

"This spring, it launched Ideastorm, where customers make suggestions and vote on them. The result: Dell's Net Promoter scores are back on the rise."

Inspired by Dell's example, Colony issues the following call to arms to Web 2.0 era bosses everywhere:

"They see the power of digital and its inherent flexibility. They know that it can do amazing things, and they could not care less about artificial, archaic restrictions that are designed to protect somebody's 50-year-old business model. So, Mr./Ms. CEO, wake up and face the brutal truths, and get on with inventing the future."

The full CNET article can be read here.

Would These Web 2.0 Roses By Any Other Name Smell As Sweet?

One of the first things that anyone reading this recently compiled 'ABC of Social Software' will notice is that the Web 2.0 world – with gems like Blummy, Linkwalla, Qumana, Spurl, Yedda and Zotero – isn't close to losing its happy knack for coining jaunty names.

Will the inventiveness ever run out? An A-Z based on the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco would have revealed further characteristic examples, including Fatdoor, JibJab, Jubble, Quagga, Tangler, and Zuzzle.

I can't help wondering: web-wide, what are the ten most pleasing – and/or exotic – Web 2.0 names to date?

Nielsen/NetRatings Elevates 'Time-Sink' To #1 Metric for New-Web Success

"Total minutes is the most accurate gauge to compare between two sites. If [Web] 1.0 is full page refreshes for content, Web 2.0 is, 'How do I minimize page views and deliver content more seamlessly?'" With that declaration, Scott Ross, director of product marketing at Nielsen/NetRatings, aligned his company with the New Web and the next-generation Internet.

While Nielsen/NetRatings will still report page views as a secondary metric, Ross continued, "For the foreseeable future, we will champion minutes if you are comparing two sites.

The news immediately made Slashdot, where worries were expressed that this emphasis on viewing time will cause designers (and their bosses) to try anything they can think of to slow down the user.

Although today's longer user session lifetimes are with us to stay, one Slashdot regular – SmurfButcher Bob – found the implications of the Nielsen/NetRatings announcement objectionable:

"Welcome to Web 2.0. What was the phrase? Oh yes... 'it's about the data, stupid.'

This "2.0" cr*p generally has nothing to do with data; it's generally related to bullsh*t, and that's why most of us don't "get it" as having a point. And in that context - page hits are an excellent metric for data; time-sink is an excellent metric for "feel-good" crud. ... The non-data crap has no point, so a metric that measures something pointless is... pointless.

Ya have to remember - "1.0" success is based on the merit of the data. "2.0" success is effectively based on users, and the data (if any) typically has no actual merit - so page hits have no meaning. It's all about "look at the monkey! look at the silly monkey!" - an area in which Nielsen has great expertise (Wackiness ensues).

The stupidity of "2.0" aside, Nielson is probably correct in their assertion about measuring it (not the stupidity... that's too big to be measured. But the time-sink aspect seems correct.)"

Ouch. If he's not already a member, it sounnds like SmurfButcher Bob will soon be joining the Boycott "Web 2." group now active on Facebook, as reported earlier this week by Social Computing Magazine.

Is Web 2.0 Just Riding the Synchronicity Highway?

The Swiss pyschologist Carl Jung believed that many experiences perceived as coincidence were due not merely to chance, but instead suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic. He even gave this occurrence of multiple events which occur in a meaningful manner a name, he called it "synchronicity."

There is a school of thought that views "Web 2.0" as nothing more than a marketing term in search of a meaning. I do not agree. Clumsy as the term itself may be, it resonates with enough people using and harnessing the Web in their life and their work to make discussions about its merits as a lexicon item moot. Even Cisco's chairman and CEO, John Chambers, is happy now to give Web 2.0 the endorsement of the ruler of routers, the sultan of switches; and when Cisco Systems, with a market cap of about $165 billion, gives a phenomenon the business thumbs-up – emphasized by its recent purchased of WebEx and the select assets of Utah Street Networks, putting it firmly in the social networking marketplace – then you know it is definitely very, very real.

What other "multiple events" can we adduce, to bolster the sense that Web 2.0, in the words of Social Computing Magazine, is "Reaching into the Business World with Both Hands"? And can we reliably conclude that this is more than just happenstance?

Chambers, when Cisco bought Webex for $3.2BN, said that Web 2.0 "is redefining how people, companies and countries collaborate in ways never before realized." In the press conference given to announce the purchase, he defined Web 2.0 as simply "the technologies that enable user collaboration," – adding that "these technologies include web services, Unified Communications, TelePresence, blogs, Wikis, pier-to-pier networks, podcast, Myshelf" etc.

The business relevance of all this co-technology (a term that I have coined to help with connoting somewhat more accurately than "Web 2.0" the essence of the next phase of the Internet) was spelled out by Chambers in a keynote this week at Interop Las Vegas. It is that it will increase enterprise productivity.

The gains won't come fast (Cisco's own leadership team, Chambers revealed, took four years to adapt to a more collaborative work environment), but they will come – at a rate of about 3 percent or more through per annum the next several years, according to Chambers.

"What kids started with social networking," Chambers intoned, "will move into business."

In other words, as Dion Hinchcliffe has repeatedly pointed out:

"It’s usually the new arrivals and the technologically savvy, younger workers, who will be using those new tools. They are going to proliferate and spread, no matter what you do."

So Enterprise 2.0 tools are the spiderwort of the 21st Century work environment. Jan Wergin, executive vice-president of Jubii, agrees with Hinchcliffe:

"We know what we are doing at home. It gets us excited, it gets us involved. Now we want to do it in our workplace as well where we spend 8-10 hours a day. Why not do the same thing? It’s not the focus on technology and making it more sophisticated and making it more complex, but it’s making it very easy, making it intuitive, making it easy to understand and taking something that we know from consumer Web 2.0 into the business suite and using it there."

What are the barriers to co-technology in the workplace. A British PR executive and social media analyst by the name of Richard Stacy has written that the disruptive nature of social media is so significant that, in the consumer world, it will mean that in some categories consumers will effectively have all the power and will operate the category under the form of a virtual user franchise. The counterintuitive consequence of this is that, since best-of-breed options will replace the mere illusion of choice, consumers will – in Stacy's view – "know as they walk down the supermarket aisle that they won’t be facing a range of duplicates – each and every one of the products they put their hands on will be the best in a class of one."

Here's how Stacy unpacks this idea more fully:

"I know this sounds a little like the Soviet Union or China where there was only one choice in every category and a very limited range of categories. The difference however is that the provider is not a remote and inflexible state enterprise but will have to be an organization that can instantaneously respond to consumers’ needs or else run the risk of losing its franchise.

Such an organization probably won’t own the means of production – this will be contracted out – but in reality many branded product manufacturers already do this. Instead, the organization will be focused on quality of product and real product innovation, rather than spurious innovation designed to establish differentiation.

You could say that the current system of having many organizations offering many choices and all competing against each other already provides this or is the best possible way of doing this. Well no. We don’t actually live in a world where the consumer is king – we live in a world where the consumer is important but where collective corporate profitability is king. We should also not forget that consumers don’t necessarily like choice, consumers like options and they like to know they are getting the best in all of the options they select."

So Stacy, in short, believe that co-technologies are capable of transforming more than just the workplace: they're likely to turn upside down the world as we know it today:

"The implications of this spread beyond just marketing. The possibility of social media actually empowering real consumer (or citizen) choice could have quite profound consequences and might actually deliver the forms of more efficient or perfect markets that proponents of free market economics set up as a necessary condition, but supporters of free markets find conveniently impossible to deliver in the real world."

So, is Web 2.0 just riding the synchronicity highway, hanging on to the coat-tails of happenstance? Or is social computing, as I have been alleging for some time, genuinely turning the world – including the business world – upside down and inside out? What do you think?

Making the Business Case for Enterprise Social Software Is Getting Easier

According to a report today by CRN's Heather Clancy, Forrester analyst Laura Ramos wowed the audience at the recent Forrester Research IT Forum 2007 by sketching a scenario – "Enterprise Software in 2017" – in which consumer expectations made business users more impatient and went with service-oriented architectures that support myriad application combinations, especially those promised by Web 2.0 and the social network movement.

This is precisely the same trend addressed by serial entrepreneur Mark Sigal in his recent article for Social Computing Magazine, "Social Media: It’s All About Breadcrumbs and Conversations."

Sigal asks whether social media is "just a consumer phenomenon or the tip of some larger iceberg that subsumes big brands and large enterprises" – then answers emphatically that it is the latter.

"Specifically because this stuff is so visceral and because it has proven to be so virally effective," Sigal writes, "its role in business, today a tiny heartbeat, is destined to grow into a walking and talking organism that some people call Enterprise 2.0."

Wikipedia already agrees that "enterprise social software" is now a real and distinct category, which is why too CMP Technology next month is launching a new conference devoted entirely to Enterprise 2.0.

And why Dion Hinchcliffe is running an Enterprise 2.0 Track on Tuesday at Interop Las Vegas, one of the biggest IT shows of the entire calendar this year.

Convincing upper management of the business benefits of social software used in enterprise contexts is the next ongoing task. Besides the usual suspects like enterprise wikis, corporate blogs, and unified communications, what are the most interesting, productive, and profitable "edge cases" of social software being used right now in the corporate enterprise? I'd love to hear up-to-date reports from the trenches - jeremy at geelan dot com.

Are Enterprise 2.0 Tools the "Wildflowers" of the 21st Century Workplace?

Tom Davenport, who the Harvard Business Review informs us holds the President’s Chair in Information Technology and Management at Babson College, contended recently that "Enterprise 2.0 Won't Transform Organizations."

Davenport is nothing if not straightforward:

"The primary proponent of this movement is HBS professor Andy McAfee, for whom I have a lot of respect. His are some of the most interesting thoughts on IT to come out of HBS in a long time, and he's a nice guy to boot. What he's trying to do is to bring Web 2.0 technologies into the enterprise, to understand and describe how blogs, wikis, tagging, and other participative tools will change large bureaucracies. He believes they will empower employees, decentralize decisions, free up knowledge, and generally make for better places to work. I share his goal of more democratic organizations and hope he is correct.

However, I fear he is not."

The reasons Davenport gives for his skepticism include "organizational hierarchy and politics," together with all the usual suspects whenever change is involved: "power differentials, lack of trust, missing incentives, unsupportive cultures, and the general busyness of employees today."

That last factor is uncannily reminiscent of the Oregon logger found sawing down a Pacific Silver Fir with a bread-knife. When interrupted by a neighbour who'd observed him hacking away for the past three days and who sought to lend him a chainsaw, the logger replied "I'd love to stop and chat but really I haven't the time – I've got this huge tree to fell."

Dion Hinchcliffe, as we have come to expect, has a radically different take. Davenport is missing the predominant reality of E2.0, Hinchcliffe retorts, which is that "the challenges of Enterprise 2.0 adoption will likely take care of themselves." By this he means that, as a generation of professionals enters the workplace who have been brought up on Wikipedia, MySpace, and Facebook, "it is inevitable that Web-based tools will simply appear, like wildflowers, in the fertile fields of our businesses and institutions."

If anyone be in any doubt, by the way, they needn't be. Enterprise 2.0 a process that has already begun.

This is precisely why, in April, a global IT leader like Accenture launched its new global employee network, an Intranet application that borrows ideas from Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life.

“The younger employees carry it,” explained Accenture's CTO Donald Rippert in a presentation at his company's recent Global Convergence Forum in Rome – meaning that they were the first to publish on wikis, to tag content so it can more easily be found by their Accenture colleagues worldwide and so on.

So when Tom Davenport rounds off his "Why Enterprise 2.0 Won't Transform Organizations" post with the remark that

"It's going to be very interesting to see what happens when the young bucks and buckettes of today's wired world hit the adult work force. Will they freely submit to such structured information environments as those provided by SAP and Oracle, content and knowledge management systems, and communication by email? Or will they overthrow the computational and communicational status quo with MySpace, MyBlog, and MyWiki?"

he is, well, basically...too late.

Hinchcliffe documents the process as follows:

"I now routinely collect stories of firms large and small encountering these tools sprouting up within their organization, both via internally installation of these platform to employees just putting their favorite externally hosted Enterprise 2.0 tool subscription on their corporate credit card. In other words, because they appear to so easily cross organizational boundaries, can be adopted so easily, require virtually no training, are highly social, and so on, Enterprise 2.0 apps appear to have their very own 'change agent' by their fundamental nature."

Now I am certain that neither Hinchcliffe nor I would claim that enterprise wikis and/or other collaboration platforms can turn around businesses by themselves. As the Burton Group's Mike Gotta has written:

"Change is a complex choreography and as new ways of doing things takes shape, new tools are one facet of that emergence. So tools can indeed help enable all types of transformation (expected and unexpected), but there is no silver bullet, you need to do more than deploy technology."

But when the likes of Accenture, Morgan Stanley, and Wells Fargo – all three blazing a trail in the enterprise-wide adoption of these kinds of tools – endorse something, you have to believe that the rest of the business world cannot be too far behind.

Don't forget to catch the first episode of The Enterprise 2.0 TV Show, by the way, in which 4 industry pioneers talk about their work in the trenches of Enterprise 2.0: Socialtext, Near-Time, Kapow Technologies, and Jubii. Disclaimer: Jeremy Geelan is the Web 2.0 Anchor of The Enterprise 2.0 TV Show, and Dion Hinchcliffe co-presents.