Today ‘Social Networks’ are a way of life. We see it in every possible web based service or application that we use. Sometimes we even wonder if all these ’sociability’ actually serve their purpose in our respective information environments. So is ‘Social Networking’ only a business model for advertising revenue? There is more to the ‘Sociability’ itself rather than numerous discussions around the web about ‘how wonderfully social networks multiply the ‘advertising’ real estate’. Behind the phenomenon of ‘Sociability’ of Information Spaces, there is a very unique psychology at work, termed as ‘Social Translucence’.

Socially translucent digital systems make perceptually-based social cues visible to their users. Such systems - by supporting mutual awareness and accountability - make it easier for people to carry on coherent discussions; to observe and imitate others’ actions; to engage in peer pressure; to create, notice, and conform to social conventions; and to engage in other forms of collective interaction.

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 that 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…

I found a very interesting comment posted by a reader in Venkatesh Hariharan’s (Head Open Source, Red Hat India) blog Open Source India that underlines the crux of the matter from an expert user’s point of view:

I sit on a variety of standards committees. I don’t really want to, I have other things I’d rather do with my time, but I am forced to. If I don’t some dimwit will try and get something adopted that is duplicative, single sourced, or downright idiotic. This happens a lot. … someone in the automotive industry decides to innovate, and designs a 14.5″ wheel and tire, and it’s installed on a new car. Now you’ve got a tire that can only be replaced from one vendor (because there’s a patent on that size of tire). The vendor charges 3 times the price of a 15″ tire, because it’s a VERY special tire, and your tire blows in a city where no one sells that tire. Pretty damned stupid, isn’t it? Wacko Electric designs and patents a new light bulb, that only fits Wacko sockets. The socket and bulb are sold to home builders at half the price of a standard socket, but the bulbs are sold to home owners at 5 times the price of a standard light bulb. Pretty damned stupid, isn’t it? And damn - guess what? My old computer backups are on 8″ floppy disks. No computer today comes with a floppy disk drive. If I have an old 8″ disk drive, no computer built today can run it. Maybe I got lucky, transfered from 8″ to 5.25″, then to 3.5″, and then to CD, and now to DVD, so the source is still available. My old programming codes won’t compile without a major re-write because the languages have changed. Oh, and Tweedle Dee Compiler Company innovated proprietary extensions into their product. Jerks.

So evidently the ‘Interoperability’ we talk about, sitting in the high powered steering committee of a standard regulatory apex body, isn’t the same in the common user parlance. It is something much more crucial. Continuous ‘data migration’ is time consuming, skill & resource intensive and most importantly it prevents the information, that happened to be encoded in a certain document format, to flow freely and feed into the collective intelligence for common good. Point to note here is that the document company may own the format but they have no right to control the freedom of information that they contain.

Additionally there are many forms of information exchange that do not fall into the category of ‘business to business’ or ‘business to consumer’, particularly in the case of government to citizen channels. Documents are the life blood of modern governments and their citizens. Governments use documents to capture knowledge, store critical information, coordinate activities, measure results, and communicate across departments and with businesses and citizens. Increasingly documents are moving from paper to electronic form. To adapt to ever-changing technology and business processes, governments need assurance that they can access, retrieve and use critical records freely and without bearing major cost overheads. This applies to citizens’ access to government documents as well. Especially with new and effective democratic tools such as RTI (Right to information), transparency between various processes, stakeholders and beneficiaries critically depends on the access to information at little or no cost.

Lastly the low income marginalized communities in the developing regions are very far away from this debate of document formats. Electronic documents and their fancy presentations in a desktop environment or sophisticated exchange protocols do not mean a thing to them. They couldn’t care less about what format the information is encoded in. Rather what has become increasingly clear through years of research is that people interact with technology in such a way that they do not distinguish separate acts of information gathering and communication. While to some extent this conflation is not necessarily confined to developing regions, it is particularly acute in areas where people live in significantly impoverished information environments. Communication as Information-Seeking: The Case for Mobile Social Software for Developing Regions. Kolko, Rose, Johnson. IW3C2, Technology for Developing Regions.
These communities do not have the necessary conditioning to respond to the information and communication artifacts in the way digital-haves do, but a majority of them, particularly the semi-urban communities, are habituated in a multi-channel, multi-platform information environment. They also learn quickly by observing and to some extent the effort to integrate with the larger system force them to adopt similar communication behavior. Yet they fail to make full utilization by accessing, living and acting upon these information primarily because of the inability to switch modes or formats of communication easily.
It is time the world gets out of the ‘document hang over’.

"The real question is, how do you get people tools so they can use the technology well without bring tethered to it? You want people to feel like they always have access to technology, but that they’re not tied to it when it’s not in use," There’s a real opportunity to innovate. Workers will want it, and CIOs will want to give it to them." - Steve Balmer, CEO Microsoft. Read full article here.

Many enterprise products are trying to find a niche as the ‘Office’ is being redefined into a fluid form - a hybrid between physical, virtual and functional spaces. Microsoft ‘Share Points’ and other collaboration extra-nets have practically replaced the face of an organization. This is usually referred to as ‘Activity Centric’ collaboration. At the same time Skype and other IMs are becoming de facto modes of access in a ‘people-centric’ view of knowledge sharing and collaborative work processes. Many are attempting to bring in rich data & media in the experience of the collaboration to make up for the geographical distance. Others think it is the ‘distributed knowledge artifacts’ that is truly defining the new trends in work collaboration. Danny Kolke, CEO of Etelos, spoke in a GigaOm event on Office 2.0:

A focus on replicating what Microsoft or others are doing and putting it in a browser isn’t Office 2.0. That’s the wrong vision. The key is innovation and doing it differently, redefining the work experience. The reason I use spreadsheets from Google is not because of advanced features but because I can create easily and share it.” Read full article here.

Google has done a remarkable job with ‘Docs & Spreadsheets’ in this regard, though it’s office collaboration suite called the ’site’, offered as a part of the Google apps, leaves many expectations unmet. It is nowhere near the ease of Google Docs in the way it seamlessly merges with the workflow. Zoho office does a clever trick by making the conversion of the office work artifacts from offline to online a breeze. There are many players in the traditional enterprise or ‘Process Centric’ collaboration space with many products meeting diverse needs. From SAP to Salesforce.com, the diligent innovators are knitting targeted products and high quality user experiences relentlessly. Developments are taking place in mobile offices as well, making most of the collaboration and exchanges possible at the press of a button in your mobile phones. With so many options it is already looking crowded and yet there is no clear consensus about what the Office 2.0 or popularly known ‘Nomadic Office’ is going to be like. Moreover global business processes are undergoing sweeping changes that have significant impact on the way people work. We have seen ‘virtual employees’ with the onslaught of ‘Off-shoring’; ‘just in time hands’ with ‘Job Aggregation’. We experienced ‘Remote work groups’ enabled by secure VPINs. Ever wonder how the next technology wave or Process change will shape tomorrow’s jobs and the experiences of work collaborations?

Something very fundamental is going through a silent and profound change. It is how we estimate the value of an object, an intangible or tangible artifact and attach a price tag to it going by the rule of our monetary market system… and it is what we never thought we will sell, like the ‘moblog’ on my experience of using that expensive skin treatment lotion as a lubricant for my bike! Sounds strange? But these are slowly becoming a marketer’s valuable tool to get deep inside the potential consumer’s psyche. Some futurists read these as a significant sign:

…there were powerful, unrecognized interactions between the non-money, or “prosumer,” economy and the money economy of our world. Rather than ignoring these interactions, we need to understand that these two economies are, in fact, parts of a unified “wealth system” in which the two parts pass value back and forth.
There are all these channels between what people do without money and what goes on inside the money economy. I think they are going to multiply as the money economy creates more and more technologies that people can use to do things for themselves. For example, if you’re of a certain age, you probably remember that when you wanted to get photos developed and printed, you took them to a drugstore, they sent them to Kodak in Rochester, N.Y., Kodak sent them back, and then you paid the drugstore, and took your prints home. Now you do all that in the palm of your hand, because you have the digital camera technology that makes that possible. As a result, the market for printing and developing film is disappearing. It is moving from the money economy into the non-money economy. See Alvin Toffler, the most powerful futurist’s interview on Strategy+Business here.

This just may be the beginning of what could be something like a tidal wave of redefining and re-evaluating transactions and value exchanges in areas ranging from ‘personal consumption’ to ‘business processes’ in the coming days. In a recently published article by Manyika, Roberts & Sprague in McKinsey Quarterly, Issue Dec ‘07, a few trends have been predicted that are set to transform the landscape of business, Technology and Information in the near future. These trends are quite in tune with the ‘Free-Lunch’ Economy that Alvin and Heidi Toffler have discussed in their new book “The Revolutionary Wealth”,

• Distributing co-creation
• Using consumers as innovators
• Tapping into a world of talent
• Extracting more value from interactions
• Unbundling production from delivery
• Putting more science into management
• Making businesses from information

Read the article re-published on Cnet News here
Yet some may question if this will really occur in a real market context that itself is based on a monetary system of wealth. I think that is a very valid concern. Additionally there have been strong criticism on the ‘prying’ of the businesses and corporations on their customers to get more strategic advantages and creating better niches by accessing private information from them.

But this tectonic shift can not be stopped by any single market force. The ‘Participation economy’ has arrived. And it has something for everyone. While the companies will benefit in bringing in more credibility in the ‘development process’ by transferring decision controls to customers, suppliers and distributors, it will have access to a massive amount of information from the ecosystem that could in turn be used to spawn off many new offerings. Customers will become valuable stakeholders in the business ecosystems, they will find their own markets and channels to monetize their own casual web browsing habits. There will be many innovations in the lines of the famous time-sharing enterprise in the UK, the Timebank or the ‘Unofficial’ syndicate for exposing corporate scams and other legal settlements, the Wikileaks (the IP addresses are masked to fend off censorship). And not all these transactions will be measured in monetary wealth. Intangibles like ‘Social’ and ‘Network’ capital will be invested and divested in rapid and successive cycles. Assets will be utilized in unconventional ways and new opportunities will be brewed out of non-core investments and ambient resources…

However one concern that overshadows this ‘value implosion’ is that it may remain limited only to the ‘enthusiast’ participants who are relatively more comfortable with technology enabled channels like blogs, wikis or extranets! If this ‘Social Co-creation’ really needs to be the next big wave, obviously the focus needs to be on the ‘Digitally Excluded’, particularly in the low tech developing region communities. Think of ways to coerce the most ‘non-connected’ into the realms of participation. Start considering the WOM (word of mouth) as the most natural ‘Social media’, ‘trivial journaling’ as an important message, ‘counseling’ or ‘help seeking’ - a critical tool! Deep immersion into the contexts & behaviors about ‘prosumption’ will hold the key.

"Interactive TV is becoming the new order of media and should be available in India, at a reasonable price in five years." - Shubha Madhukar. Domain-B.com. Read the full article here

From the tech and business savvy elite to the lower end of the emerging middle class, the TV revolution reaching out to everyone. In the Indian television scenario there has been a remarkable surge in interactive programming, reality shows, audience voting and citizen journalism apart from the regular share of entertainment and information. This hugely popular, always-on, always-connected, ‘customized content providing’ device could have tremendous potential for the mass market affordable computing in India. Nova net PC, from Hyderabad, India based ‘Novatium’ is a complete desktop with in-built internet access,chat webcam reaching users’ home just like cable TV service. A network home computer means you get the benefits of a PC without worrying about maintenance ,security and upgrades at a low cost. Novatium sells net PC for $100-just within the reach of India’s growing middle class.This price is less than the children machine XO.The monthly rental plans begin at $10 with a broad band connection. Read more… The emerging patterns of TV viewing is an important direction as to how this ‘computing through television’ will influence the user and system behavior. User behavior is definitely changing very rapidly: People are spending less time at home watching TV fixed to a monitor. As some popular reality-TV formats have proved, the integration of wireless devices (mainly SMS and WAP and even radio) can become an extension of the TV experience outside the home. If fact the three different media, TV, mobile and radio, actually come together to form an almost seamless experience.

These reality-TV programs show another phenomenon: how TV opens doors to members of the public who are interested in having a primary role. Democratization is taking place … as TVs develop mechanisms to increase viewer participation and feedback. These trends can be characterized as the evolution of viewers to participants. This movement is being fostered by the diffusion of interactive TV technologies. - Anxo Cereijo Roibás, University of Brighton and Riccardo Sala, Faculty of Design Politecnico di Milano

In another exciting project addressing the Digital Divide, Dr. Raj Reddy of Carnegie Mellon, an internationally acclaimed pioneering researcher in artificial intelligence is developing a $250 device that does a whole bunch of things: It’s a computer, it’s a TV, it’s a DVD player, it’s a videophone - it’s a PCTVt. Reddy is hoping his project — with backing from Microsoft and TriGem, the Korean computer maker, and in partnership with the Indian Institute of Science, the Indian Institute of Information Technology and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley — can prove that it is possible to bring IT to impoverished communities without depending on philanthropy. Because his low-cost computer doubles as a TV and a DVD player, Reddy believes that he will be able to use it as a vehicle to take computing to populations that until now have been excluded. Read more The technology could turn TV sets into virtual online computers able to send e-mail and texts, download films, or make hotel and airline reservations. Advertisers could send commercials directly to subscribers with viewing habits that suggest a potential customer. Though still in its infancy, iTV or interactive television opens the door for true participation and niche markets. Particularly for an emerging market like India, this could have deep impacts, cascading into many potential utility services and infotainment for the huge number of existing cable & satellite TV viewers (More than 80-100 million households have Television! Multiplied with the average family size in India, that number looks awesome 400-500 million. China has about 900 million). Source: IndiaStat.com Though few of the critical challenges remain in the fact that with so much choice comes the difficulty of building necessary infrastructure and appropriate interfaces that transform the ‘passive’ viewing into ‘active’ and ‘participatory’ transactions. For all you know, the ‘entertainment’ factor could actually pull it off, as it did in case of the Internet.

Blow up your cell phone
by Phil Agre, UCLA

In the United States, much has been said about the dot-com meltdown. In Europe, however, the salient meltdown is in wireless. Government regulators auctioned off spectrum for broadband wireless services, and a combination of clever auction design and speculative mania drove prices to insane levels. Now large parts of the European wireless industry is imploding. The Japanese industry is doing better; at least they, unlike the Europeans, have some proven applications for their current-generation wireless services. But the assumption that people will dive into broadband wireless just because it’s there is not proving true. Time and again, industry seems surprised by how long it takes to establish critical mass for a new standard in the market. The Internet was misleading in this regard; its sudden growth resulted partly from pent-up demand during the period of “acceptable use” policies. The point, in any case, is that the wireless industry is driving off a cliff.

At the most basic level, the cell phone industry has lost the simplest driver of innovation: reducing the size of the handset. Cell phones are now so small that, barring sharp turns in human evolution, they’d be useless any smaller. They can be made cheaper, of course, and from different materials, but we are rapidly heading to a world where cell phones as such are no more exciting an industry than calculators.
So where should cell phone design head next? Part of the problem is simply industry habit: except in Japan, whose experience does not seem to generalize, cell phones have been used almost exclusively for two applications, voice communications and text messaging, and the latter application isn’t even widely used in the United States. The market has been unified by a few standards and a lot of price competition.

The future will be different. I’d like to see the whole concept of a “cell phone” blow up. A “cell phone” as we know it now is a bundle of functionalities: microphone, speaker, buttons, display, internal software, and various elements of the communications protocol between the handset and the base station, among others. Location-finding functionality is on the way. One direction of future development
already seems clear: instead of wiring the communications protocols into the hardware, generalizing both the software and the protocols with “software-defined radio” that can be changed dynamically. But another direction has had less attention: unbundling the functionality of the cell phone and then embedding various subsets and supersets of that functionality into a world of other devices. Taken together,
these approaches — software definition and unbundling-and-embedding
– can lead to a vast new design space.

Here are some possibilities. In Japan, I am told, radio stations give out radios that consist of nothing but a credit-card-sized piece of plastic with embedded electronics and a headphone jack. The radio is tuned permanently to the station that gave it out, so it doesn’t need a dial or display, and it’s only meant to be used with the headphones,so it doesn’t need a speaker. The same thing could be done with cell
phones. Imagine a small object with a headphone jack and a single button on it. When you push the button, it “dials” a pre-programmed number, such as a service that provides movie times. If interaction is needed then the button could be used, or else speech recognition.
If you add a microphone to the device then parents could buy it, program it with their own number, and give it to their children. It would be like a specialized calling card, except that it would include much of the functionality of the phone as well.

Unbundled cell phone functionality can also be embedded in personal technologies. If we imagine that we will all become cyborgs, carrying around a mess of suitably streamlined gear, all of whose components talk to one another, then the “cell phone” will surely need to talk to personal sensors, databases, display screens, and so on. These personal technologies could communicate with other services over
the network. This sort of thing has been explored by the wearable commputing people. What has been less explored is the main good purpose for such services: maintaining awareness of the many people and institutions with which we have ongoing relations: the kids at day care, the public personae of our professional acquaintances, the ball scores, the bus we hope to board, the discussion groups we monitor, and so on. (Traditional HCI research has drawn some lessons about
maintaining real-time awareness of work collaborators that presumably carry over to wearable services.)

Another assumption of the industry has been that cell phones are for mobility. But from an unbundling-and-embedding perspective this need not be true. Imagine a historical battlefield. At each point where something important happened, the rangers have installed a green post with a button and a speaker, and maybe a video display or other more imaginative kinds of interactive devices. The green post now has a cell phone embedded in it, or certain functionalities of a cell phone. The rangers use it to manage the interpretive “content” at a distance, for example updating it when new scholarship becomes available or else extending it with special features for significant historical dates, material in other languages, and so on. The posts could also include public-address capabilities (”the park closes in half an hour”) or emergency call functions, etc. In this case, the “phone” sits still, being tied to a significant place, even as the people move around. The posts could also interact with “augmented reality” gear that is carried by the park visitors, for example by projecting diagrams or animation onto the landscape.

The “cell phone” functionality could also be embedded in objects. Warehouses already have a world of tracking technologies, such as RFID tags embedded in the boxes, for keeping track of where particular items are stored. (This is a serious problem for warehouse people, and large objects get lost in warehouses all the time.) With time, the object tracking devices could converge with the unbundled-and-embedded cell phone. It would then be possible to pose much more general queries to the objects, for example embedding sensors in the contents of the boxes to assure their environmental conditions, run periodic tests on stored electronics, etc. Of course, when an object “phones home” across an institutional boundary, for example between a consumer who owns a washing machine and the manufacturer that sold it, the relationship across that boundary becomes more complicated. It will be necessary to design the relationship along with the technology.

It is evident, I hope, that the design space of the the unbundled-and-embedded cell phone is quite large. It should be possible to look at a particular application area and brainstorm a spectrum of possible applications, each requiring different subsets or supersets of cell phone functionalities. That very diversity will pose a significant
challenge to the cell phone industry. Look at the experience so far with WAP. WAP may well succeed — its poor showing so far may simply be another manifestation of industry’s tendency to underestimate how long it will take to establish a new standard in the market. But WAP itself and the WAP coalition display every warning sign. Not enough attention was paid to interface design, and the wireless industry did
not understand how to build the alliances needed to make the various WAP applications really work as businesses. They had lots of demos, lots of start-ups, but little serious market acceptance.

What was needed, and missing, is a robust feedback loop between applications experience and the basic design of the standards. Usability problems became critical late in the day, rather than being at the core of the design process. Unlike the traditional cell phone applications of voice and text messaging, a platform like WAP succeeds only if it achieves economies of scale twice over: first in each of a large number of applications domains, so as to make each of the applications viable, and then in the applications taken as a whole, to make WAP services viable in general, for example generating demand for WAP-enabled handsets.

The unbundle-and-embed design paradigm makes the situation both easier and harder. On the one hand, if it really is possible to disassemble the existing cell phone architecture and embed some of the components into other systems, then that can only help the existing architecture redouble its current economies of scale. On the other hand, if that unbundling-and-embedding strategy becomes economically central to the industry, then it will surely place signficant pressures on the future
development of the architecture: the same problem as WAP, only worse.

As the trend toward embedded services unfolds, the design process will have to change. History suggests why. The initial telephones were fixed in place, either fastened to phone booths or tethered by wires. For many years one could speak of a person as “waiting by the telephone” because the telephone was a place. Cell phones changed that, as phones become attached to people. But the functionality of the phone remained much the same, and the designer didn’t need to know much about the phone user’s way of life. As cell phones acquire more features, more knowledge about users becomes necessary, and as cell phone functionalities are unbundled and embedded, the resulting services will become intertwined with the patterns of their users’ lives. This, it seems to me, is the main line of development in the history of communications services: a progressive intertwining between communications services and the lives of the people who use them.

It follows that the design process of the future will require a more sophisticated understanding of the user community. This starts with anthropological fieldwork, and it includes participatory design processes, mock-ups and prototypes, and systematic mapping-out of the whole universe of potential applications niches. A good place to start, as I’ve mentioned in the context of wearable devices, is with relationships. Think of the unbundled-and-disembedded cell phone functionalities not as devices for making phone calls, but as infrastructures for maintaining relationships. What is the informational architecture of a user’s ongoing relationship with a family member, a school, a doctor, a video game company, and so on, and what could those architectures become? What issues, privacy for example, are at stake in the design and ongoing renegotiation of that architecture? How can the design process be part-and-parcel of the large-scale cultural process by which people reimagine their lives and choose once again the relationships that make them up?

If you are wondering what is the McDonald’s connection with web applications, let me clarify that this is not about the offerings. I intend to discuss the kinds of experiences a brand, either emerging or long established, promise to offer to the customer or the user. McDonald’s is more a case in point that has created a true blue legacy of brand franchising across the globe. There are more than 30,000 McDonald’s Restaurants in over 119 countries. McDonald’s global sales were over $41bn, making it by far the largest food company in the world. In 1955, Ray Kroc realized that the key to success was rapid expansion. The best way to achieve this was through offering franchises. Today, over 70 percent of McDonald’s restaurants are run on this basis. [The Times 100-Business Case Studies]. In it’s mind boggling pace of expansion from Bolivia to Bahrain, one thing has stayed true and consistent to the brand - the customer experience! (apart from the fact that these countries never fought a war against each other). In today’s rapidly converging e-businesses a new form of franchising is noticeable. As the web evolves into social patterns of integration and aggregations, the brands are no longer stand alone identities. In numerous discussions about web 2.0, the future of the web comes across as the freedom in data exchange, cross hosting applications and mash ups. "The point isn’t the features, it’s the underlying philosophy of relinquishing control." — Peter Merholz.

So the philosophy of Web 2.0 is to let go of control, share ideas and code, build on what others have built, free your data. It’s actually a difficult philosophy to live by, when you consider how capitalistic Western society is. Read article: Web as Platform Mash Ups

Albeit some would argue that this is not a ‘franchising’ true to the business school definitions. But if one takes a closer look, may be the dynamics will be more revealing. The landscape of data syndication is throwing up new potentials everyday, creating new market forces, novel marketing techniques and business models.Undoubtedly they suggest that a new form of Information Franchising by opening up the boundaries of identity is increasingly becoming the rule of the game. And in this new franchising, individual brands and their promises play a very crucial role. The question is what drives this brand collaboration and how the individual market or mind share of these brands contribute to the shaping of a collaborated message. Today, Facebook, already valued at $15 billion, has become a defacto platform for publishing applications, widgets and blidgets for the social networking community. Every other web service is vying to be published as a ‘Facebook App’. Evidently 100,000 new users each day is a lot of mind share. But is this lightning fast growth of ‘information franchising’ costing the quality of experience that facebook promised it’s users before it made history? I distinctly remember people gravitating towards Facebook primarily because of the appeal of it’s spartan minimalism and ‘how simply and effortlessly you could do things around here’. McDonald’s’ painstaking effort of offering french fries that tastes the same no matter where you are eating it, may not hold out in todays busy mashed up market clusters. Yet it makes sense for the major internet brands today to ponder upon why and how they came along from where they started. Who knows…users may not keep lovin’ it for long!

Despite many regulatory and institutional crackdown, Intellectual Properties often do not hold fort in the mass markets of the developing world. Products that have been designed with millions of dollars and countless man-hours of investments, get completely broken apart and fed into huge thriving ‘technology flea markets’ of the developing worlds like India and China. Fast spreading Globalization and rising penetration of Internet has bolstered the avenues of technology piracy. While the Global corporations are unrelenting in their efforts to police and legalize global distribution, production and marketing of the technology products, rampant spread of pirated technology and content goes unabated in these markets primarily because it supports a subsistent business ecosystem that does not follow the developed world economics of distribution and pricing.

Yet the act of piracy may not be all that new. There have been similar precedences in the world history during the rise of industrial superpowers.

Ben-Atar, an academic and professor of history at Fordham University in New York, in his several publications on today’s hotly debated question of who owns intellectual property (IP), has traced the roots of patent and copyright laws in early America, an emerging British colony. He says that during the country’s industrial revolution, America’s very own prosperity was founded on copyright infringement, industrial espionage and outright theft of IP.
This unusual perspective on intellectual piracy comes in a riveting study that Ben-Atar has brought out on the historical intellectual piracy in the US and the efforts made by Britain to stem this outflow to its former colony. Published some months ago, Trade Secrets: Intellectual Piracy And The Origins of American Industrial Power (Yale University Press) has received widespread interest. Much of the buzz around the professor’s thesis has been occasioned by the growing competition to a range of American industries from the giant manufacturing hub of China, and to a lesser degree, India and other emerging economies.
Read the full article: How to stop worrying and learn to live with piracy