Doc Searls - The Internet of Me and My Things

So, okay. The year we're gonna go into the past the year is 1983 in the year, 1983. You're an I, you're an MIS director. That's what they called you. In those days. You're running ma you're a manager of information services. And as a manager of information services, you're dealing with the original form of big data because the term data processing had already been around for 20, 30 years. And your job is tending giant machines and helping the company run its computing. And at that point, every large company was already doing computing.

It was central to what a company did, but in the year, 1983, if you were asked, are you going to let these new things called PCs into your organization? What would your answer be? Because in 1983, the, the IBM PC had already been around for about a year. It was introduced in 1982. PCs had actually been around for about six or seven years, but they weren't serious. They didn't get serious until IBM came out with a PC, but your, an, your answer is going to be no. And the reason you're not gonna let PCs into your organization is because personal computing is an oxymoron.

Computing is a serious thing that large organizations do. It's not personal they're oh yeah, you can go do your, have your hobby thing and, you know, and make stuff with your apple too or whatever, but it's not, it's not a serious thing. And tell you what if, if you actually wanna do serious computing, get an attachment card, stick it in the back plane of that $2,500 PC, have it fake being in IBM, 32, 70 display terminal, or a, or a deck VT 100 or 200 and let it do the serious work that, that the main, the main mainframe is going to do. So what happens over the next several years?

What happens is that your company has filled up with PCs. They've replaced the dumb terminals on desks, and you're doing much more than you ever could before, because you've got on every desk, something that'll run up to 10,000 or more apps that have showed up on dos and mostly, almost entirely on dos and among them are spreadsheets, for example, and that allow your employees to who are working numbers to get action much faster and do all kinds of corporate heuristics that were not possible with the centralized system.

So to sum up that moment in time, what happened was that individuals got a power that was formerly organizational alone. That was the key thing. It wasn't just that the tools showed up, but that we as individuals got a power that was formally organizational. So now let's fast forward to 1996. And as similar revolution is just getting underway. The internet, the internet had actually been around for a while, but it was in 1995 that Microsoft and Netscape came out with the first graphical browsers.

The first ISP showed up the first commercialization of the net with Amazon and many other companies, eCommerce was born and we could all be servers as well as clients. We could use port 80, we could use port 25. We could have our own email.

We could own our own domains and suddenly a power that was entirely core organizational before the power to network the power to communicate worldwide and almost no cost to put ourselves at zero distance from every other node in the known universe was suddenly personal, but still as powerful and amazing as the internet was, would you as an it manager now, cuz that's what you recall. Would you let the internet operate at full capacity in your company, on the desk of every individual who was there? And the answer was no in 1996, the majority answer was no we're gonna, we're gonna throttle this.

We're we're, we'll look at it. But you know, we already have our networks. We already have our land, Nobel lands and other lands. We have wide area networks. We have PBXs. We have ways of communicating that are ours.

We are, you know, the internet thing is it's good, but we're not quite ready for that. Yet. Of course the.com thing happens over the next several years. And every company has to be saturated with the internet.

And, but the key thing there is what happened with the internet as what happened with the PC is that a power that was formally organizational became personal, the power to communicate. And it wasn't going back. Now. Those may seem like obvious things, but they have a relevance now because they were not thinkable beforehand. And now it's 2013 and in 2013, the question is about data. You're an it manager now in the year 2013. And if you are asked and I'm asking you, will you take the big data that you have in your big cloud? And will you hand it over to your employees and customers?

What's your answer? Dave says, yes, Dave's gonna do it. So Martin makes sure that all your data that you've got on all these people here gets into the hands of their customers.

The, the thing is that it's not a very thinkable thing right now. It's not even a very doable thing because all of the messaging we're getting right now about big data is coming from big companies, telling other big companies that they can do big things with these big data things in their clouds, heavy analytics, for example. And if you look at the way the spending is going, it's not on the personal side, it's on the corporate side and not in it, but in, but under some, a new character called the chief marketing officer.

This, this is a title that didn't exist a few months, a few I'm sorry, a few years ago, the chief marketing officer, but IBM is out there saying right now that the chief marketing officer has a bigger budget than the it guy does. Well. Why is that? Because you need to buy the big solutions to do the big data crunching and do all the analytics that you're gathering from all the big data you're collecting from the customers and so on. So what are you gonna do? So if you look at what's happening with big data in the cloud, here's the oxymoronic side of it.

The, we can have our own clouds. Data can be personal data. Can the data processing can be personal in ways that they haven't before. If we have this data, all the, the zillions of petabytes that are being collected about us all the time. Imagine if we had that.

Well, the title of this talk is the internet of me and my things. I don't have a title slide up here, but that's the title of the talk. So I happen to bring a couple of my things with me to illustrate some of what I'm talking about. This is a, a Sony camcorder.

It's a, it's when I bought a couple months ago and I just needed it for a job that I was doing. I actually don't do that much video, but it comes with something Sony did not put on it. It comes with a little tag. This is a square tag it's called. It has a QR code on it. And on the QR code, it says, scan me.

And, and if you do scan it, I dunno if anybody's sitting close enough, I'll hand it off to somebody. If they wanna scan it, if they have a scanning thing for their, maybe one of you guys over there have a, have a camcorder. If you scan that, there you go. If you scan that, it'll say this is doc circles, camcorder, and here's his phone number. And here's, here's where to get in touch with 'em cuz apparently it's lost. Here's what's key about that. That camcorder has a personal cloud.

It is in, it is, it is where that square code leads, where that QR code leads. It has intelligence that's intelligence that I gave it that is in addition to whatever intelligence Sony put into that device, I can put whatever I want there right now. I've just got a message for anybody saying this is lost, but I can put a lot more into that in that cloud.

And, and that cloud, that personal cloud for that device in my internet of things is in my cloud and my cloud, my personal cloud runs on something new called cloud OS that Phil Windley wrote and Phil can't be here. So I'm kind of hearing his stead, but there are many others that are, have, have similar things, but it's open source. You just open source that announced it yesterday or the day before. And it uses KL, which is an open source language he created and it's executed on an open source rules engine.

And that'll, it's one of the sets of technology that allows me or service providers for me like square tag to develop solutions that give me much more, that I can do with my data. Now I don't care about that. Camcorder as much as I care about this thing here, this is a can a can camera. And this is a, an old fived it's almost over eight years old, shot hundreds of thousands of shots with this thing.

And I put a sticker, a square coat square tag sticker on the bottom of this, which of you scan will give you a message like the other one that I put in there at square tag as well, which by the way, is a substitutable service. It is meant not to be a silo to begin with. So the market can get as big as it can. It can possibly be and filled it that on purpose. So what I can do with this is I can put anything I want in it. I can put a connection. I can put a connection to the API for my 50,000 photos that are on flicker.

And so you can, can, can see if I send this in to be repaired, which have done twice before and a cannon guy scans this. He can see, well, this is, these are all the photos that are taken with this. Or I can put a reference to a given photo and say, you know what? There seem to be a problem with vignetting on this one that I think is a flaw flaw on the camera. You might wanna know that, or while you're fixing it this time, you can fix the hairline crack in the back. And I'd like you to clean the sensor all the way to the edges this time.

There's no limit to what I can do with this, but here's an interesting thing. This can be this, this single symbol that doesn't require that the manufacturer put any additional intelligence in this device can be the center point, the pivot of a much richer relationship between me and cannon and me and the photography business and me and whatever else.

If cannon, for example, had put this on here in the first place and I recommend that manufacturers do this. They could get rid of the need, for example, to print out a manual on this. They can just, just, you know, so you just scan this and you can get to the manual.

They can, they can update it as much as they want and I can keep track of it by scanning it again. And, and I can, I can see what they're doing. I can connect to community. We can have an actual relationship. And so if we look at relationship as something that actually matters in the world and, and not just transaction, what, what we have in that space right now is a business called CRM customer relationship management, customer relationship management is a, an $18 billion business. Right now. It includes Oracle and SAP and Microsoft dynamics and Salesforce and IBM.

And if we look at Salesforce, for example, the name Salesforce says what the focus is there. They are there to help companies sell stuff, but there's more to CRM. They're just selling. There's also in, in the CRM business, they have what's called the sell cycle, which is what they go through when they're selling you something. And there's also the own cycle. The own cycle is when you actually own the thing. That's where call centers are. That's where, where loyalty cards live. And right now that is, is a one way business. And it's a very siloed business.

Your loyalty card with, with company a is, has no communication with your loyalty card with company B or C or D. They are not integrated. And they can't be integrated very well for all of the name space problems that we've gone over here. And in other conferences like this for a long time, but I can integrate them. I know what I'm loyal to.

If I have, if I'm keeping track of my data and my life and my relationships, there's much more that I can bring to the table of a relationship than I can inside of any siloed CRM system. I can, for example, with, with quantified self data, quantified self is a hot topic right now, but it, your Fitbit, your Fitbit, gizmo, you wear here, or your Nike plus thing you have in your shoe or your Zs sleep monitor or your, your Withing scale. All of these things are siloed. The only place that this data can be integrated is with the individual in a personal cloud or in a larger sense.

What, what Kuppinger call calls a life management platform. The life management platform has to be the individuals, just like the PC has to be the individuals just as the capacity to network in a serious way. Also has to be the individuals. So the what I, what I want to get across to you, and what I want to make clear here is that we are at the same infl kind of inflection point that we've been before twice. We've seen this movie already.

The movie is one where all of the talk, all of the action is from on a business to business level, where big suppliers are talking to big customers about what they alone can do. They can do it with identity. They can do it with big data. They can do it with analytics and the individual has nothing to do with this except being at the end point of a conveyor belt. And they're busy being managed in some way. And we saw that with PCs. We saw that with networking and now we're seeing it with data. There's almost no talk about what we can do with our own data.

It's always assumed that the big company is gonna do it for us, but that's the zero trillion dollar market right now. I've been running a program at a project at the Berkman center at Harvard for the last six years where we've, where all we've done is encouraged development of tools that make individuals both independent from sellers, but better able to engage with them. And among the, the companies, the star companies there is is, is key in the Netherlands.

And Marcel's gonna speak next than I advise you to listen closely to what he's saying and to the heuristics he's gone through for the last few years in working on exactly this problem, how do we equip individuals with ways to manage their relationships, the ways to manage their lives in the world? Because what we're seeing there is very much like the very earliest PC apps, the very earliest websites, the things we could do with communications, but this is the third stage in a revolution.

The revolution was computing communications, and now data, big data is going to be each of ours and not just the companies. Thank you very much. Dave's nodding. And so we have time for Q and a, or thank you very much. It's always a pleasure to listen to you, even when you don't have slides and you don't have these other things over here and, and the internet, I'm sorry, personal cloud is certainly a necessary part of a life management platform. It's not sufficient, it needs some other things, but it isn't necessary part. I think you'll agree there that, that we need the other things.

We need other things such as well. We need the open API economy, right? In order to pull in all that siloed data that you were talking about to bring it into our personal cloud so that we now have our own big data, not as big as a big corporations, but big, as far as we're concerned that we can do something with, right. Right. Will we reach Nirvana when we can do that?

Yes, we will. Of course, no we won't. But you know, it's an interesting thing if you had, if you had said in, let's say the late seventies that we would have a, that everybody would have in their pockets, something that had essentially near infinite computing power and would put us all at zero distance from everybody else in the world and in full control of our communications, it would be like talking about flying cars or going to the moon.

What, what happens that Ralph Waldo Emerson said that if, if the stars showed through the clouds, but once in a millennium, their beauty would be legend. We, we are one of those points where the miraculous becomes mundane over and over again.

And, and that's going to happen here. What we are, what we are missing is the invention that mothers, the necessity, we need the one invention that says, wait a minute, I need that. I gotta have it. And I think we're close. Sure. And the reason I bring up personal clouds is that, and, and I wrote a book called the intention economy came out a year ago.

We, we were, we were then talking about personal data stores and lockers and vaults and so on. And almost as a sort of organic thing, personal clouds emerged as a development category in the last several months. And there have been lots of meetups on this lots of organic activity happening around it. It may not be used a year from now. I don't know. What I like about it is that we have, as we did with personal computing, something that looked oxymoronic at first and turned out to be quite normative, you know, that, you know, cloud has been entirely a corporate thing.

And now the notion that it could be personal, I think is an interesting thing. If somebody calls it oo, great.

You know, that'd be great. So very Good. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's always a pleasure.