The industry with the greatest potential for disruptive growth

Where is the next big opportunity?

According to renowned Harvard Business School professor and author Clayton Christensen, in a video recorded recently for BigThink:

The biggest opportunities are in healthcare. We are now just desperate to make healthcare affordable and accessible. Healthcare is something that everybody consumes. There are great opportunities for non-consumers to be brought into the market by making things affordable and accessible. I just can’t think of another industry that has those kinds of characteristics where demand is robust, and there's such great opportunities for disruption.

The healthcare industry has many angles. I'm personally fascinated by the potential of smart mobile devices to play significant new roles in maintaining and improving people's health.

Another important dimension to healthcare is the dimension of reducing (or even altogether removing) the impacts of aging. In an article on "10 ideas changing the world right now", Time magazine recently coined the word "amortality" for the growing trend for people who seek to keep the same lifestyle and appearance, regardless of their physical age:

When Simon Cowell let slip last month that he planned to have his corpse cryonically preserved, wags suggested that the snarky American Idol judge may have already tested the deep-freezing procedure on his face. In 2007, Cowell, now 49, told an interviewer that he used Botox. "I like to take care of myself," he said. Cowell is in show biz, where artifice routinely imitates life. But here's a fact startling enough to raise eyebrows among Botox enthusiasts: his fellow Brits, famously unconcerned with personal grooming, have tripled the caseload of the country's cosmetic surgeons since 2003. The transfiguration of the snaggletoothed island race is part of a phenomenon taking hold around the developed world: amortality.

You may not have heard of amortality before - mainly because I've just coined the term. It's about more than just the ripple effect of baby boomers' resisting the onset of age. Amortality is a stranger, stronger alchemy, created by the intersection of that trend with a massive increase in life expectancy and a deep decline in the influence of organized religion - all viewed through the blue haze of Viagra...

Amortals don't just dread extinction. They deny it. Ray Kurzweil encourages them to do so. Fantastic Voyage, which the futurist and cryonics enthusiast co-wrote with Terry Grossman, recommends a regimen to forestall aging so that adherents live long enough to take advantage of forthcoming "radical life-extending and life-enhancing technologies." Cambridge University gerontologist Aubrey de Grey is toiling away at just such research in his laboratory. "We are in serious striking distance of stopping aging," says De Grey, founder and chairman of the Methuselah Foundation, which awards the Mprize to each successive research team that breaks the record for the life span of a mouse...

Notions of age-appropriate behavior will soon be relegated as firmly to the past as dentures and black-and-white television. "The important thing is not how many years have passed since you were born," says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford, "but where you are in your life, how you think about yourself and what you are able and willing to do." If that doesn't sound like a manifesto for revolution, it's only because amortality has already revolutionized our attitudes toward age.

Just how feasible is the idea of radical life extension? In part, it depends on what you think about the aging processes that take place in humans. Are these processes fixed, or can they somehow be influenced?

One person who is engaged in a serious study of this topic is Dr Richard Faragher, Reader in the School of Pharmacy and Biomolecular Sciences at the University of Brighton on the English south coast. Richard describes the research interests of his team as follows:

We "do" senescence. Why do we do this? Because it has been suggested for over 30 years that the phenomenon of cell senescence may be linked in some way to human ageing. Senescence is the progressive replicative failure of a population of cells to divide in culture. Once senescent, cells exhibit a wide range of changes in phenotype and gene expression which give them the potential to alter the behaviour of any tissue in which they are found. In its modern form the cell hypothesis of ageing suggests that the progressive accumulation of such senescent cells (as a result of ongoing tissue turnover) may contribute to the ageing process.

Richard is the featured speaker at this month's Extrobritannia (UKTA) meeting in Central London, this Saturday (21st March). The title for his talk is "One foot in the future. Attaining the 10,000+ year lifespan you always wanted?":

Dr Richard Faragher, Reader in Gerontology, School of Pharmacy & Biomolecular Sciences, University of Brighton, will review the aging process across the animal kingdom together with the latest scientific insights into how it may operate. The lecture will also review promising avenues for translation into practice over the next few years, and current barriers to progress in aging research will be considered.

I'm expecting a lively but informative discussion!

Top posting on Techmeme

At the time I'm writing these words, the website Techmeme, which is a technology news aggregator, has the following display:



The top billing on the site is taken by a posting I made on the Symbian Foundation corporate weblog a little over 24 hours ago, on the subject of the Symbian platform release plan.

It's the first time that something I've written on a blog has generated so much coverage. The powerpoint pictures (originally created by my colleague Ian Hutton) which I spent some time tweaking last night, have ended up being copied to numerous locations on the Internet.

If I had known there would be so much interest, I would have taken more time over the posting!

The China Brain project and the future of industry

An intriguing note popped up on my Twitter feed a couple of hours ago. It was from James Clement, owner and manager at Betterhumans LLC:

with U.S. economy hurting, AI programs may move to China to work with Hugo de Garis. He sees house robots as biggest industry in 20 - 30 yrs

And slightly earlier:

de Garis has already received 10.5 million RMB for the China Brain Project. Basically 10k's of neural nets for Minsky style "society of mind"

James is attending the AGI-09 conference in Artificial General Intelligence, which is taking place at Arlington, Virginia.

Casting my eye over the schedule for this conference, I admit to a big pang of envy that I'm not attending!

As James says, one of the most significant talks there could be the one by Hugo de Garis. The schedule has a link to a PDF authored in October last year. Here's a couple of extracts from the paper:

The “China Brain Project”, based at Xiamen University, is a 4 year (2008-2011), 10.5 million RMB, 20 person, research project to design and build China’s first artificial brain (AB). An artificial brain is defined here to be a “network of (evolved neural) networks”, where each neural net(work) module performs some simple task (e.g. recognizes someone’s face, lifts an arm of a robot, etc), somewhat similar to Minsky’s idea of a “society of mind”, i.e. where large numbers of unintelligent “agents” link up to create an intelligent “society of agents”. 10,000s of these neural net modules are evolved rapidly, one at a time, in special (FPGA based) hardware and then downloaded into a PC (or more probably, a supercomputer PC cluster). Human “BAs” (brain architects) then connect these evolved modules according to their human designs to architect artificial brains...

The first author [de Garis] thinks that the artificial brain industry will be the world’s biggest by about 2030, because artificial brains will be needed to control the home robots that everyone will be prepared to spend big money on, if they become genuinely intelligent and hence useful (e.g. baby sitting the kids, taking the dog for a walk, cleaning the house, washing the dishes, reading stories, educating its owners etc). China has been catching up fast with the western countries for decades. The first author thinks that China should now aim to start leading the world (given its huge population, and its 3 times greater average economic growth rate compared to the US) by aiming to dominate the artificial brain industry.

If it's true that the downturn in the economy will cause a relocation of AGI research personnel from other countries to China, this could turn out to be one of the most significant unforeseen consequences of the downturn.

What have operators done for us recently?

Mobile Monday in London this Monday evening (9th March) will be on the topic of "What have operators done for us recently?".

To quote from the event website,

What have mobile operators done for innovators and developers, lately? Our next MobileMonday London event will explore this issue. The event will be held on March 9th at CBI conference centre (at Centrepoint Tower) at 6:00 pm, sponsored by O2 Litmus and Vodafone. Panelists will include James Parton from O2, Terence Eden from Vodafone, Steve Wolak from Betavine, David Wood from Symbian Foundation and Jo Rabin representing dotMobi. The event will be chaired by Anna Gudmundson from AdIQ and Dan Appelquist will be your host for the evening.

At the time of writing, there are still a few registration slots left. If you're in or around London on Monday evening, and you're at all interested in the future of the mobile phone industry, you will almost certainly find the meeting worthwhile. From my past experience, these events are great for networking as well as for highlighting ideas and sharply debugging them. The breadth and depth of experience in the room mean that any superficially attractive proclamations from panellists are quickly challenged. I typically leave these meetings wiser than when I went in (and often chastened, too).

Usually people blog meetings after they happen (or whilst they are happening). In this case, I'd like to set down a few thoughts in advance.

Early last year, Symbian commissioned a third party report into the viewpoints and experiences of mobile developers. The report had a Californian bias but the results are familiar even in the context of Europe. The report did not specifically seek out the opinions of developers towards network operators, but these opinions came through loud and clear regardless. Here are some representative comments:

• "Everyone in tech has rope burns around their necks from doing business with the carriers [network operators]. They hung themselves trying to do carrier deals."
• "The operator is an adversary, not a partner."
• "The basic problem with mobile is that operators are in the way."
• "The reality is that the mobile operators will screw you, unless they already want to do what you're developing. They always ask, 'What's in it for me?'"

I raise these comments here, not because I endorse them, but because they articulated a set of opinions that seem to be widely held, roughly twelve months ago.

Operators are (of course!) aware of these perceptions too, and are seeking to address these concerns. At the Mobile Monday meeting, we'll have a chance to evaluate progress.

Ahead of the meeting, I offer the following six points for consideration:

1: With their widespread high bandwidth coverage, the wireless networks are a modern-day technological marvel - perhaps one of the seven wonders of the present era. These networks need maintenance and care. For this reason, network operators are justified in seeking to protect access to this resource. If these resources become flooded with too much video transfer, manic automated messaging, or deleterious malware, we will all be the losers as a result.

2: Having invested very considerably in the build-up of these networks, it is completely reasonable for operators to seek to protect a significant revenue flow from the utilisation of these networks - especially from core product lines such as voice and SMS. Anything that risks destroying this revenue flow is bound to cause alarm.

3: The potential upside of new revenue flow from innovative new data services often seems dwarfed by the potential downside from loss of revenues from existing services, if networks are opened too freely to new players. In other words, network operators all face a case of the Innovators' Dilemma. When it comes to the strategic crunch, innovative new business potential often loses out to maintaining the existing lines of business.

4. New lines of revenue for operators - to supplement the old faithfuls of voice and SMS - include the following:

• Straightforward data usage charges;
• A micro-share of monetary transactions (such as mobile banking, or goods being bought or sold or advertised) that are carried out over wireless network;
• Reliable provision of high-quality services (such as would support crystal-clear telephone conference calls);
• Premium charges for personalised services (such as answers to searches or enquiries)
  
• A share of the financial savings that companies can achieve through efficiency gains from the intelligent deployment of new mobile services; etc.

But in all cases, the evolution of these new lines of service is likely be faster and more successful, if new entrepreneurs and innovators can be involved and feel welcome.

5. The best step to involving more innovators in the development of commercially significant new revenues - and to solving the case of the Innovators Dilemma mentioned above - is to systematically identify and analyse and (as far as possible) eliminate all cases of friction in the existing mobile ecosystem.

6. Three instances of mobile ecosystem friction stand out:

• The diversity (fragmentation) of different operator developer support programmes. Developers have to invest considerable effort in joining and participating in each different scheme. Why can't there more greater commonality between these programmes?
• The hurdles involved with getting sophisticated applications approved for usage on networks and/or handsets - developers often feel that they are being forced to go through overly-onerous third party testing and verification hoops, in order to prove that their applications are trustworthy. Some element of verification is probably inevitable, but can't we find ways to streamline it?
• The difficulties consumers face in finding and then installing and using applications that are reliably meet their expectations.
  

In all cases, it's my view that a collaborative approach is more likely to deliver lasting value to the industry than a series of individualist approaches.

A different kind of job title

The companies where I've worked for the last twenty years - first Psion PLC, then Symbian Ltd - were, in the end, commercially driven companies, with a mission from shareholders to generate profits. The Symbian Foundation is different: it's a not-for-profit organisation.

That's not to say we are blind to commercial considerations. On the contrary, our task is to support a collection of member organisations, many of which are highly profit-focused. We have to manage our own finances well, and we have to enable our member organisations to earn significant profits (if that's what they want to do). But we're not, ourselves, a fundamentally commercial entity.

With this thought in mind, we took the decision that we ought to rethink other aspects of how we organise ourselves, and how we communicate. We did not want to take it for granted that elements from the setups of our previous companies would automatically also appear in the setup of the Symbian Foundation.

One outcome of this is a decision to avoid overly business-oriented language like "vice president", "officers" and "chiefs", in describing the senior management team. Instead, we've eventually settled on the term "Leadership Team". Hopefully this terminology conveys an emphasis on openness, approachability, and a pioneering spirit.

To designate my own particular area of responsibility, I've taken a deep gulp, and I've plumped for the description:

Catalyst and Futurist, Leadership Team

In brief:

• As catalyst, my role is to enable the Symbian software movement to discover and explore innovative solutions for the many challenges and opportunities faced by the mobile industry;
• As futurist, my task is to distil compelling visions of the future of technology, business, and society – visions that provide the energy and inspiration for deeply productive open collaboration among the many creators and users of mobile products.

As catalyst, it falls to me to accelerate reactions that might otherwise occur too slowly. These reactions draw on energy that's already present in the ecosystem, but my activities should help to ignite that energy. I've written before about the important role of catalysts in ecosystems, in my review of the book "The starfish and the spider" by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom.

What's involved in igniting reactions? In part, it's to hold out an attractive vision of a different way of working, a different kind of product, a different software architecture, a different user experience, and so on. That's where the "futurist" part of my job description fits in. In part, it's also to act, on occasion, as an irritant.

From time to time, I'll be acting as an ambassador for Symbian, as an agitator, as a networker, and as an evangelist. I've got mixed views about the term "evangelist". On reflection, here's why I prefer "catalyst":

• Evangelists come with pre-cooked solutions - they already know the answers;
• Catalysts come with suggestions and ideas, but the answer actually comes from the ecosystem, rather than from the catalyst;
• Evangelists listen, but only to improve their prospects for converting the listener;
• Catalysts listen, in order to find the ingredients of a solution that no one fully understood in advance.

If I should forget this advice in the future, and speak more forcefully than I listen, I'm sure that members of the ecosystem will find the way to remind me of what true openness really means!