Last week I was in a village in the rural hinterlands of West Bengal in India on a field research. I observed that they use a certain interesting method to share the local community information. It is done in a way that uses 'Public Information Landmarks' to distribute and disseminate knowledge. Every village administration office (Gram Panchayat) has an information post (mostly on the wall or a notice board outside the office) that depicts a map or land use survey of the village area and some key information regarding the commercials of the administrative office, as mandated by the laws governing accounting transparencies. If you have noticed the pic (above left) of the information post, it has a few 'inline' black patches that are used to record information (handwriting it with a piece of chalk) that are subject to change from time to time. e.g. numbers denoting amounts of money saved or disbursed as loan for the week by the village administrative office.

In the other example a village telephone booth & recharge shop in Ethiopia publishes mobile recharge coupon rates for the consumer. Here we need to remember that many of these mobile companies offer a daily changing rate for their rural consumers to crate the 'pull' factor. 

The interesting bit is that here the information was changing at a very local or micro level. And when we think about all rural ICT based solutions for the developing world market that have been conceived or deployed so far, it is difficult for them to handle information at such a micro-level. This is simply because the vast swathes of rural hinterland in India, China or Africa are not digitally represented in the information super or infrastructures that we have grown accustomed to in our urban existences. The only system that does account for such a scale, GIS or Geographical Information System, unfortunately does not integrate with others to create a seamless whole. Far from  it, even the basic access of a digital community information network is not available for these rural communities. So even if we could map all the little village hamlets on earth on global digital information systems, it can not create that locally thriving information exchanges, unless these local communities are empowered to do so.

The rural communities did have an easily accessible, efficient and sociable platform where they could share or consume various information or knowledge, it is known as the 'Word of Mouth' or WOM. It is one of the most successful traditional community platform even today. But with the advent of communication technologies like 'mobile phones' in the rural social ecosystem, the forces of WOM are on the wane. Some would argue that mobiles have actually augmented the communication and that is partially true, but WOM exists in an organic medium of various 'one to many' or 'many to many' social relationships, that 'mobile phone' has breached by bringing in the direct person to person communication shutting out the others. Today no one depends on the community to know something, rather they call the person who has that knowledge.

I also asked some basic questions (since it was outside the scope of the study) about a possible socially sharable information platform to some our village respondents, I found a set of amazing insights. They reacted to an imaginary scenario of being able to get an update on the progress a loan application requested by a community member to the block development office. They were quick to come back on it  saying 'the fact that the application was being tracked on a daily basis would put pressure on the concerned authorities to  process the application faster.' Here one of the aspects stressed upon was the visibility of such information in public spaces.

When we look at the mental model of the village communities, that 'Hyperlocal' level is extremely crucial and provides a frame of reference for them basis their world view. And probably it is only these communities themselves who are capable of creating and sustaining such a massive scale of 'hyper-local information microcosms'. 

[To be completed...]

Like any other new dimensions in evolving technology, Cloud Computing is going through a usual Curve of Diffusion & Adoption. Here are a few trends in the cloud computing paradigm that are shaping the application and commercialization of the clouds.

•  Mobility or Portability of the Cloud Framework that makes information processing available anywhere & anytime. Though this was mainly conceived for the mobile enterprise work groups, this augurs well for the communities in the developing regions since development of advanced mobile applications does not remain dependent on the sophistication of the device. Few key challenges like interoperability and network availability still remain to be addressed.
• Localization of virtualization. Many new offerings are being developed to create a secure, private virtualization for specific enterprise applications. There are some instances of open clouds but it is still far from full maturity. There is also a forecast of 'Hybrid Cloud' that would make a win-win combination of the private & public clouds that can be customized based on specific requirements. Here there is a clear emphasis on 'productization' & 'localization' of clouds that probably precedes the complete understanding of the technology paradigm.
• Packaged Cloud Offering. Amazon's AWS, Microsoft's Azure and Google's App Engine are proprietary framework for hosted services. While these offerings are yet to take off commercially, they have certainly created a definite 'lead by example' advantage. Some issues that face this approach are difficulty in migrating existing applications to the 'Cloud' without rewriting some of their code bases. 'Write once run anywhere' generation of applications face an obvious stumbling block.
• Optimization through Distributed Virtualization. This is possibly one of the most critical components of Cloud Computing and holds the maximum potential to impact the Global Productivity as a whole. This has the capacity to bridge the digital divide by turning one machine into many. The California-based startup NComputing has installed more than two million computer "seats" worldwide in the past two years. There is this huge group of consumers, living in the digital divide that could really benefit from broad access to PCs. Partridge, CEO Vital Wave Consulting, sees virtual desktops working in schools, Internet cafes, government centers and other venues where people are comfortable using computers in communal spaces. NComputing feeds into local economies by buying hardware locally and training people in communities to provide support for virtual machines. "NComputing recently announced an alliance with Chinese PC maker Haier, which is expected to provide access to low-priced hardware.

Considering that one of the basic premises for Cloud Computing was better optimization of total globally available processing power to meet the distributed computing needs in the wider regions in the world, there are many issues that need careful consideration from the global research community towards creating a sustainable, robust framework for Mass Market Computing through a global network of clouds.

• The Cloud Computing research agenda must address the scalability and availability of the infrastructure rather than focusing on the intelligent clients. i.e. MID or Smartphones; or virtualization platforms alone. There is a significant role that must be played by the network technologies & protocols to facilitate such a large and diverse scale. Various trends in Network Technology development such as effective decentralization, supporting the complex hierarchy of the Highly Federated Networks (HFN), sustaining time-based or demand driven Value Based Networks, self-organizing networks etc. will play an integral part in the overall realization of Cloud Computing grand visions.
• The information consumption patterns will dictate a lot as to how the capacity can be engineered and implemented. The information processing needs can vary widely depending on the context of application, e.g. individual or community needs may be tactical, sparse and shared in nature, whereas in the markets, exchanges or public systems the amount of information to be processed is enormous
• On the application side, supporting the small & medium enterprises, or the 'Other Private Sector' defined in the Millennium Development Goal, through a network of clouds presents yet another set of challenges & opportunities. The 'Small' to 'Very Small' enterprise inherently depends on the local ecosystem of services and value exchanges. And this is where a Open Cloud Networks can bring in a revolutionary change. Cloud based tools & frameworks ranging from supply chain integrators, provision of critical services through self-managed access, Dashboard or aggregation of various relevant information feeds including price or demand etc. can provide tremendous value to these local business ecosystems

Here is an interesting presentation on Open Cloud Network from Sun

Scribd

In a recent interview, John Quelch, professor and author of the Harvard Business Review article "How to Market in a Downturn", has talked about a very interesting psychographics of consumers in the time of a financial crisis. He sees a few emerging segments of consumer’s psychology while making important financial decisions in the ‘downturn of the century’:

• Slam brake-ers - Stopping all buy decisions and cutting down on costs severely
• Pained but patient - Badly affected but are hopeful of a medium term recovery
• Live for today-ers - Not much affected since they didn’t have a lot of savings
• Comfortably well - Well cushioned from any financial impact, showing a moderate restrain

These segments have different behavioral traits when it comes to taking buy decisions. He goes on to outline a few important traits, outlined for the ‘Pained but patient’ segment,

• Essential: Essential livelihood commodities, that one can not do without. Here one important shift is visible from branded labels or niche products (e.g. organic produce) to private labels and generic goods
• Treat: The periodic indulgence that the consumers have to get a sense of satisfaction is becoming less frequent
• Postponable: Many durable purchases are being postponed or being upgraded rather than a outright purchase
• Expendable: Some expenses like vacationing are being dropped from the agenda or significantly minimized

It is interesting to see the impact of these segments and behaviors when it comes to consuming technology and related products or services. Are people consuming fewer services, e.g. changing service tariff plans, lowering renewal frequencies or postponing upgrades? Are these consumers exploring new ways of product consumption, e.g. going from licensed to ‘open source’, from ‘owned’ licenses to ’shared’ seats?

Do these behavior traits extend to the online purchases of general goods & services as well. How will people’s information behavior change? In a recent Economist article, ‘From buy, buy to bye-bye‘ a few trends in social information behavior have been highlighted,

A second shift in consumer psychology has been prompted by fallout of a wave of financial scandals leading to a deep distrust of big business institutions. This will also accelerate the use of social media, such as blogs and social-networking sites, by consumers looking for intelligence on firms and their products. As trust in brands is eroded, people will place more value on recommendations from friends and peers. Social media make it harder for brands to pull the wool over consumers’ eyes, but they also offer canny companies a powerful new channel through which to promote their wares and test new products and pricing strategies.

In these changing times, how should the persuasive strategies of  ‘Customer Experience’ change. Do the language of persuasion that held good in relatively better times, still talk to the ‘consumers in a crisis’. Will the brands need to talk differently? Does ‘Hope’ or ‘Optimism’ add a useful dimension in the psychometric framework of today’s consumer behavior. We need to find these answers fairly soon.

 Listen to this HBR Ideacast:  "How to Market in a Downturn."

Copyright 2009 Harvard Business School Publishing

 The Symbaloo web application. It aims to create a visual bookmark or icon wall. Sounds similar to a desktop metaphor with various shortcuts to utilities.

A visual campaigning on Facebook with multiple copies of a photo from Israel-palestine conflict. The users tag their friends on the photos as many times as possible to spread the awareness.

It’s all good. We hear about the quantam leap in the quality of experiences with Web 2.0. And hopefully this richness is driving value in stickiness as well as (most critically) dollars!

This dynamism is bringing in significant shift in the way we interact with web elements. The whole point about Rich Internet Application is that users act upon the information itself. Every piece of the interface is actionable. And users learn to expect that. And this is becoming a standard of a sort since the ‘page model’ does not exist in these rich apps.

This ’shift’ brings us to think about a few issues that we have grown so accustomed to through the ages of the ‘Old Web’. For one, how does one share a page link.  It is so much a part of our web behavior to post or share links that take the recipient to a ‘certain instance’ (traditionally a page) of the target URL. But in the rich apps, this instance is not visible to a larger audience since a large part of it happens locally on the client side. In a very interesting work around, many users I know, have started sending ’screen shots’ capturing the ‘page state’ in stead of a HTTP link. But obviously it slows down the collaborations, because what has been shared is not ‘immediately actionable’. And everyone has a different version of it.

Many people are pointing out flaws even the ‘Indexability’ or ‘Searchability’ of a Rich Web Page:

There has always been a question mark around indexability of RIAs, whether they’re built in Flash, or Silverlight, or even Ajax. The fundamental problem is that static indexing of a RIA is likely to turn up only the user interface of the application, and not the interesting and meaningful data fetched by application logic and presented dynamically to the user. Indexing an application binary or script is akin to having desktop search index winword.exe instead of your documents… not very useful. Most folks are now seeing indexing something like a raw swf binary as less and less useful, as applications become more and more dynamic.
Full article link

In the fast changing world of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), a solution to this issue may not be far away. But before that we should define and standardize the Web 2.0 platform first. It is critical to unify the environment rather than fragmenting it by coming up with another ‘rich platform’ with your brand name on it. There are many issues like creating a ‘Meta-infrastructure’ of all the rich media and ways to bookmark various ‘data instances’, that need immediate attention. Because if we cant share what we do, the richness won’t get us very far.

In a very interesting twist, the recent wave of popularity of the ‘Twitter’ is somewhat on the wane. Part of the reason is that, much though it claimed to be a ‘Spot Yourself’ application, it never gave any geographical cue. If you looked at ‘Twitter’ App site, it just looks like a series of tweets without any visibility of where they were done.

Now that is going to change with the new ‘Loopt’. The advantage is obviously the integration of location based micro-blogs to the geographical data….namely Google Maps! Now that’s a heck of a powerful experience. You immediately have a reference. And conversely you can actually pull up peoples’ notes (or Tweets, Loopt will have to come up with a name or….) as soon as you spot yourself with the embedded GPS tool.

What’s more intriguing, it offers you a kinky feature of locating your friends’ whereabouts!! We can obviously imagine a lot of interesting use of that one. The trends in the Location Based Services are getting more and more interesting!!

And after becoming the iPhone App of the month, ‘Loopt’ has made the great entry into the G1 Android Phone, powered by the Google mobile OS. Not really surprised…I must say!

We use the phrase "social translucence" as a rubric for our approach to designing such systems. "Social," of course, signals our interest in providing cues that are socially salient. "Translucence" has a more nuanced role: Most evidently, in an implicit contrast to "transparence," it indicates that our aim is not to make all socially salient information visible. However, translucence also stands in for the notion that, in the physical world, cues are differentially propagated through space - something which, as social creatures, we understand and make use of, in governing out interactions. Thus, we know that those across the room may see that we are talking, but will be unable to hear what we say; and we adjust our interactions to take advantage of this. - Erickson, Halverson, Kellogg, Laff & Wolf, IBM Watson Research Center. See article for a more complete discussion.

We see these examples everywhere, both for and against our advantage, on various interactive web and information spaces. For example ‘message boards’ are a great way of documenting conversations, and they have important impact on browsing or seeking of information in a socially pervasive way. We may look for an answer to a specific query and find that it has already been answered by someone else. A ’social’ system makes the ‘most read’ or ‘best rated’ answers visible to others. On a ‘translucent’ system, we may look up an answer to a question we never asked, only because we see that "more people are talking about it."  In e-auction ‘places’, you keep picking up more ‘trust’ badges to quote higher. You get an email message with a specific reference, suggesting you should remember the topic well but you can’t. You wish you could look up previous threads. Right then your system pulls up the social graph or timeline to remind you of the last discussion you had with the sender. Translucent systems make large amount of ‘invisible interactions’ visible through high level patterns that people instinctively get queued in. These are a few general observations about how to achieve ‘high translucence’ while designing a socially pervasive information system that makes collaboration easy through social mediation or ‘proxies’-

• Provide a persistent history of asynchronous activity

The general direction should be toward providing common ground, the context necessary for guiding effective collaboration and complex activities. Without support for common ground, collaborators are unable to effectively assess each other’s contributions or develop trust and common goals. One technique for this support is a durable artifact depicting interaction over time, such as conversation trees and threaded discussion boards, which offer the key benefits of a coherent recording mechanism and peripheral awareness of groupwork (Smith et al., 2000).

• Facilitate coherent, near-synchronous communication

Other efforts have focused on improving computer mediated conversation interfaces to more closely match norms of spoken interaction. Te’eni (2001) argues that designers of communication support systems must balance the communication medium and message form, and offers a model for studying the communication process and selecting optimal configuration of medium and message attributes. Te’eni lists several communication strategies that can be augmented by computational solutions: contextualization, control, attention focusing, affectivity, and perspective taking.

• Link the real and virtual worlds

As we look for ways to link virtual and real world events and awareness, notification options provide answers. Users are able to learn something about collaborator actions at a glance. More advanced systems provide interactive maps that use real world metaphors to represent virtual community events. However, challenges are many, considering the need to seamlessly & unobtrusively integrate notification within user’s physical environment. The nuances of ’symbolic mappings’ of activities and ‘presence information’ can significantly leverage the ‘depth and range’ of notification possibilities.

So if it really has to be the ‘Google’ way, the rumor about g-phone being the centerpiece of it, does not sound convincing. There is a philosophical difference in how ‘Google’ thinks about its businesses than ‘Apple’. Google will never be the ’sexy machine’ company that will pull users into using it. Rather, it is known for working below the surface and capturing the whole ecosystem under its clutches. So whosoever makes any money in the system, a cut of it is always bound to be directed to Google’s coffer. Open Handset Alliance (OHA) or Open Social platform under the ‘Android’ program is a very definite indicator to that direction.

After Google bought Android in July 2005, Silicon Valley pulsed with gossip and speculation about what the search giant was planning. Everyone figured Apple had a phone in the works and assumed Google must be developing one too…but when Google finally broke its silence in early November, there was nothing about a gPhone. In stead there was a talk of building an alliance of 34 wireless companies including Intel & Sprint Nextel. This was how Google planned to shake up the nearly trillion-dollar global wireless market? A consortium?

Read more about this interesting ‘Wired’ article here.

Though the importance of the client device, supposedly named gPhone, is equally strategic to Andy Rubin, the original proponent of Android, now in Google; it should not be compared to the iPhone for fairness’ sake.

“The comparison between Android and the iPhone is unfair. The iPhone, with all its glorious UI experience, is a very closed and tightly controlled platform. The promise of Android is not a better user experience but rather an open experience - the sort of stuff that the mobile web really requires at this stage.”

Read the full story here.

With the power of openness, comes the loss of control. But that does not matter as long as the user can fulfill their goal seamlessly rather than worrying about compatibility all the time. Again from the Facebook experience, we have seen users are not willing to trust the third party applications in terms of security and traceability. Google will have to address that problem in a major way if Android has to become the de facto mobile web standard in the near future. They need to carefully trade off how much control to let go and how much to retain, in order to maintain sanity.

Web has changed from being only PC centric for a fairly long time. And since Mobile web, that is ‘always on’ and ‘always available’, scores a major point towards being ‘Cloud Computing Ready’, Google seems to have big plans to create completely new grounds of business with the launch of Android, particularly in PAAS (Platform as Service) or IAAS (Infrastructure as service). These new offerings will allow anyone to create and launch web applications on Google ‘App Engine’ hosting service. Even some applications can be custom made by the user communities for very narrow usage bands. And that just may be the beginning of a very different kind of Internet. Sounds too much like Web 3.0? We will have to wait and watch it play out to know the real worth of such ambitious vision…