Technology Intelligence Group

The Environmental Cost of Electronic Collaboration

An ex-Cisco colleague of mine called earlier this week to talk about his concern that distance collaboration technologies were not as ecologically friendly as they could be. His concern was that by constantly increasing the fidelity of technologies over time to approximate in-person interactions, that the end-point and infrastructure equipment required would increase emissions beyond what was necessary to complete the task. One quote of his stuck with me...."For a staff meeting, you don't need immersive telepresence and all the cost and environmental impact. You just need a phone call."

Not to be a neo-Luddite about collaboration, but he has a point.  You don't always need the highest-fidelity technology available to you, you need the appropriate one for the task at hand.  With Internet electricity use near or over 100 terawatt hours in 2009, and the high electricity consumption of new endpoint devices, there should be a 'pause' before we mandate holographic immersive virtual reality conversations with our co-workers about every little thing.

This was a threshold concept for me, having traditionally been an advocate of using the highest-fidelity collaboration technology available for each interaction.  What I hadn't synthesized was my environmentally-friendly views with these collaboration tools, as I had been so focused on eliminating physical travel, that the cost of emissions from electronic collaboration were lost in the noise.  I decided to look around at the research to see what if any the energy costs were. It turns out, there is a cost, and it is very real. 

Here are some hard numbers to put things in perspective:

The slippery value proposition- Virtual Spaces

Value Proposition. Return on Investment. Justification for Expenditure.

However you phrase it, there are skeptical people in every organization who want empirical, objective, hard evidence that any new initiative has a clear return on investment. In these harsh macro-economic times, this tendency towards risk-aversion is amplified to the detriment of new technology deployments that can save organizations much needed hard capital in the long term. The conundrum with RoI is that it is best defined after extensive deployments of a given technology, and their associated beneficiaries. When 100 or 1000 early adopters have installed a technology, used it extensively, and have had the leisure to write up a quantitative statement of benefit, the skeptics are happy and have covered their respective assets enough to green-light a project.  This would be fine if the organization wasn't attempting to gain a technological advantage or benefit from either making or saving money in the short term, because these well-defined RoI studies don't emerge until about 25-30% of the way through the maturity curve of a new technology. By the time you can definitively justify it, it's not new.

Looking at Virtual Spaces, there are luckily a number of RoI vectors, with both 'soft' and 'hard' numbers.  Lets walk through some of them briefly and the best sources for updated data:

Nortel and Immersive Spaces

Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to tour Nortel's new web.alive platform for virtual interactions.  I had been in contact with the project team for some time, and was receiving periodic trickles of feature/functionality of the platform, however had not had a chance to experience it first-hand.

I must say I came away impressed by the level of effort and thought they have put into the platform.  The user interaction is more gamelike than most virtual worlds, with easy ASWD/mouse controls for the most part, which addresses an ongoing concern of mine with regards to making virtual world environments as easy for a first-time user as possible.  Also, they have integrated the DiamondWare spatial audio code for excellent and clear audio, with great visual notifications if someone is speaking (or standing) off-camera.

We were not able to tour the deeper feature-functionality, such as shared whiteboards and other rich collaboration, however the first impression of the platform is that they did an excellent job.  Now, the next step for them will need to be integration with their existing product portfolio, so this doesn't become a technology orphan (cough cough lively cough cough) and suffer from lack of corporate (funding) attention as a result.  This integration, paired with target marketing at the most obvious uses  of education/learning and enterprise collaboration, will play into Nortel's strengths.  All this equals a good new entrant into the virtual worlds arena.

Emerging Technology- Demographics and Economics (Third of Three in the series)

In the last two Emerging Technology blogposts, I wrote about the non-technical factors to adoption and success of emerging technologies.  The last component I would like to write about is the broader environment the technology innovation, as part of a system of technology surrounding an individual or company, is operating within.  This plays a critical part in the success of the broader technology.

As we have seen with the current macroeconomic conflagration, capital spending for IT projects in corporations has been almost exclusively frozen (or as an ex-VP of mine was quoted recently, the IT staff are burning through the remaining budgetary dollars in anticipation of a industry-wide freeze).  These economic slowdowns affect different portions of the globe at different rates of speed, as you can determine by the time-delay of financial bailout packages in the United States, Europe, and China.

A broader issue is the demographics of the adopters.  Unless you are targeting a specific age group or demographic segment with your technology, then you are most likely going to get adoption from the 24-30 age bracket (early adopters, traditionally), or the 30-50 age bracket (peak earning years and discretionary income).  Where this becomes interesting is when you plot age ranges (and associated economic brackets) on a region by region basis, as noted in a recent Economist magazine story regarding how the average age of child-bearing was effecting unemployment rates in Utah.

So, if you have a product or service that appeals to a specific age bracket, or requires a certain amount of discretionary income, you will need to look at not only the feature/functionality required by the customer base, but also the age-spreads by geography and where each geography is at present economically speaking.

We'll be using these three factors, adoption, combinatorial innovation, and Demography/Economy, as weighting when introducing new technologies on the Technology Intelligence Group.  As noted in prior blogposts, technological failure is seldom the determinant factor of success with emerging technologies, but rather these adjacent variables in the equation.

Emerging Technology- Combinatorial Innovation (Two of Three in the series)

Recently I wrote about the diffusion of technologies into personal and corporate technology systems as a key component to emerging technology innovation.  Although there is always the risk that any new technology will not work, this technological failure is most often weeded out in early product development or market trials.  One of the key factors is more often how the new invention is adopted as part of the broader ecosystem of technology that surrounds all of us.  If it doesn't fit with our current relationship or systems of technology, and requires widespread change (as opposed to incremental additional functionality), then it's odds of success are low.

Another contributing factor that seems remarkably obvious, however seldom receives it's due attention, is the dependent supporting technologies required for the new emerging technology to thrive.  If it's a new broadband video service like the Roku/Netflix brick, or Hulu, then you need video codec technologies to be at a certain maturity level, processor on a chip technologies to be at a mature price point for the Roku brick, and pervasive broadband.

The current economy and Virtual Worlds

These are indeed interesting times for businesses, most particularly startups.  I always seem to be in a virtual world presentation or at a virtual world conference as the macro-economic situation worsens and worsens.  In stepping back, this downturn should have some surprising impacts on this stage of development of the virtual worlds industry.

By way of context, in my humble opinion, the virtual world industry is still relatively nascent. There have been companies doing virtual world platforms for fun and profit for decades, however as a technology sector overall, they are just now coming into mainstream adoption numbers.  There is the standard first/second/third technology generation tensions between early entrants (many of which are making money) and new market entrants (who are not) looking to disrupt and capitalize.

The virtual world companies that are in the middle of (or about to seek) fund raising will find their valuations pushed down as a best-case-scenario, with 'no capital availability' as a worst-case scenario.  Typical sources of capital like friends/family/angel investors are all feeling the pain of watching their personal portfolios shrinking on a daily basis, and are therefore less likely to invest in a speculative venture in an increasingly-crowded sector.  The venture community is suffering from a combination of gripping fear, lack of self confidence, and overall paralysis.....but only at a certain altitude.  Large VCs are most impacted, as they have so much more capital to put in to play that they need certain (absurdly large) valuations of the startups they are injecting capital into.  Smaller funds, which invest in smaller denominations/valuations, are going to clean up during this time. 

Bad news for VW startups wanting large valuations about now, good news for smaller VCs with capital on hand and VW startups looking for early smaller rounds.

What about the impact of the economy on the broader value proposition of the industry?  Lets break it down a step at a time....

Eduverse Follow Up- Symposium3 Video Now Online

Robert Shepherd, the coordinator behind the recent Symposium3 event in Amsterdam, was kind enough to post the video of the event on GoogleVideo this morning.  My video-conferenced keynote address, with the 1970s earmuff headphones and all, follows:

Emerging Technology - Adoption (One of Three in the series)

On Tuesday and Wednesday of this week, I had the honor of participating on the 'Blogs, Wikis, and Virtual Realities' panel at The Nature Conservancy's ConEx conference in Vancouver.  I presented virtually, and received some excellent questions from the professionals at the conference.

One question forwarded by Jonathon Colman, TNC's panel moderator, associate director of digital marketing for TNC, and all around great conservationist, was 'What is the big thing coming down the technology pipeline that will change everything?'.  This is a frequent question I receive from clients, venture capital firms, and about every seat-mate on international flights.  Unfortunately, the answer is not an easy one.

As is the case with picking the best wine, emerging technology is entirely a subjective experience.  What works best for you may not be the thing that works best for other people.  Just as each fingerprint is unique, so is each individuals or organizations interaction with technology.

The path this leads you down is that technology innovation is an iterative process.  Sometimes the innovations and inventions are small (the new Apple laptops come to mind), and rarely they are a giant leap ahead.  The interesting bit is that the degree of invention or innovation is most often not the determinant factor, but rather the ability of companies, people, and governments to integrate these technologies into the existing system of technology that they use.

An example: I will sell you a device today for your enterprise that will provide relevant and timely data to your employees in the areas they are working in, like personalized business intelligence.  This would save your staff from 'Search', a tool that was useful when there were scarce assets on the Internet but provides less utility with each additional piece of data we add to the Internet or enterprise.  Your employees will have the data they need to make important decisions BEFORE they even realize they need it. Sounds pretty good, right?

Now, go tell your existing database teams that you are going to upend their query structure and processes.  Tell your corporate business intelligence people that you are democratizing BI for the masses.  Listen as all of the infrastructure component teams (SharePoint, Unified Comms, Infosec) tell you how the new tool doesn't integrate with the legacy systems and that they will not support your purchase request. 

So much for that idea.

I've written in the past about technologies like VRML (which suffered from lack of an ecosystem of hardware and network bandwidth to reach critical mass) and Broadband over Powerlines (which suffered/suffers from a dysfunctional regulatory regime for electricity delivery worldwide, as well as the occasional complacent risk-averse utility).  These technologies were independently viable, however were not viable when transplanted into the real world.  Like a body rejecting an organ transplant, the rest of the environment was hostile to the innovation.

What can you do?

As a vendor of emerging technologies, you can understand your customers business processes, and tailor your offering for their environment (integration with legacy tools is a painful but necessary boat-anchor).  You can try a Trojan Horse approach of offering a reasonable degree of incremental functionality to get your foot in the door, then expand your offering greatly to allow your risk-friendly customer an excuse to provide to the inevitable organizational immune-response.  Or, you can relegate yourself to the small but vibrant community of early-adopter customers that thrive on disruption and new technology opportunities.

You can read more about the broader framework in each of the Technology Intelligence Group's analysis reports, in addition to the focus on a particular technology.  The technology AND the environment need to be ready for these technologies to be viable.

Adoption and diffusion of innovation is one piece of the emerging technology puzzle.  The other two are combinatorial innovation and the broader global framework of economics and demographics.  We'll be writing about these other two pieces of the puzzle next week.

Virtual Worlds Forum 08- London wrapup

Many of the TIG contributors traveled to London this week for the Virtual Worlds Forum in London.

Unfortunately, due to an incident at the meeting venue, the event had to be canceled. Quite a few attendees switched location to the Hospital Club in Covent Garden for some networking and an Unconference on Tuesday.  A number of industry luminaries were there, including TIG contributor Dr. Richard Bartle, as well as Jessica Mulligan, Raph Koster, and Ian Hughes.

The kind folks at SXSW held a party at Digress City Monday night, which was a nice mixer of the VWF crowd, as well as attendees of a number of other conferences in London this week. 

Overall, it was an unfortunate circumstance for the attendees and organizers, but we were able to make a little lemonade from the lemons handed to us in the circumstances.

I now travel back to the US for a bit , and am speaking again at the ConEx Nature Conservancy panel on the 14th & 15th of the month.  If you are in Vancouver for ConEx, please drop by the 'Blogs, Wikis, and Virtual Realities, New Media Tools for Conservationists' panel in the 'Values and Society' track, and say hello to the virtual me!

3......2......1......LIFTOFF!!!

It is with great pleasure that I announce today's launch of the new Technology Intelligence Group website.  The new website complements the professional activity of the TIG contributors by providing a marketplace for their insights and research.

Emerging technologists around the world have similar problems, which is timely access to pertinent and educated research and insight in new technologies.  The Technology Intelligence Group brings together leading subject matter experts from across industry and academia to provide their insights directly to these emerging technologists. 

In the past, technology analyst firms have been challenged in how they cover emerging technologies, if at all.  When you have a finite pool of proprietary analysts, you take risks by betting that one emerging technology will succeed and another will fail.  A zero-sum game.  Conversely, when you have intimate access to the insights of an open pool of industry luminaries, we can embrace all new emerging technology areas and provide access to the critical resources needed by early-adopters, which will ultimately decide which technologies will succeed and which will fail. 

Our initial contributors to the Technology Intelligence Group include Dr. Richard Bartle, Dr. Edward Castronova, Bob Clay, Dr. Parvati Dev, Benjamin Duranske, Dr. Wm. LeRoy Heinrichs, Sean Kane, Dr. Jim Oliver, and Michael Periera.  Look for more contributors to be announced in the next 30-60 days as we rapidly expand our emerging technology subject areas covered.

Please take a look at our 'beta' website as we move forward into the next evolution in emerging technology analysis.

ADDITION: We are having a launch party on Tuesday at 10am Pacific Time in Second Life, hosted by our good friends at World2Worlds.  If you haven't already joined their group in Second Life, please do so to receive details on how to attend the launch event.  Alternately, message me in Second Life (Avatar: Christian Renaud) and I'll be glad to drop you a landmark.