Virtual Reality With Real Pain

I hurt my shoulder…playing tennis on a Wii.

This experience made me ponder how the concept of immersive virtual reality evolved over time. Ever since the novels such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash or Michael Crichton’s Disclosure, we have had the idea of what virtual reality should be like. It is this cool place where people can do virtually everything and that is way better than the real reality because it was designed by programmers. Since then, we are trying to build such immersive virtual reality in the non-fiction world.

Virtual reality has come a long way from the first oh-so-slender-looking avatars in Yahoo’s Instant Messenger. Second Life became the rage a couple of years ago, allowing our still oh-so-slender avatars to attend product announcements, fly through the cyberspace and flirt with strangers. Second Life has since lost a bit of its luster – at least for now. Frankly, the flying and flirting via mouse clicks wasn’t all that immersive and got pretty boring after a while. So far, Second Life is falling short of the promise of Stephenson’s metaverse.

There are actually some useful applications for virtual reality today – from home decoration and landscaping, all the way to production line design. I saw once a very cool virtual reality application for chemical facilities that enabled the repair crew to analyze best path of access and determine needed equipment in case of a breakdown. But these applications are more focused on modeling the reality rather than the human experience in it – they are not particularly immersive. By the way, Wikipedia offers several good ways of categorizing immersive virtual reality.

I am really excited by the new types of immersive virtual reality applications that combine the cognitive immersion with sensory-motoric immersion, and sometimes even the emotional immersion (to use the Björk/Holopainen categorization). Here, the experience on screen is combined with actual physical activity. Driving and flight simulators were the first of such applications. If you want to see how immersive they can be today, check out the Cyber Speedway at the Sahara Hotel in Las Vegas. Playing tennis on a Wii is a similar kind of immersive virtual reality. This kind of immersion provides a pretty decent physical experience of the activity. OK, the experience might be still lacking the G forces or the sliding stops but that’s perhaps only a temporary limitation. The highly acclaimed Microsoft’s Wave (aka Project Natal) is the next step in this direction.

What’s exciting about the immersive virtual reality is the fact that it offers a more realistic experience than just clicking buttons while staring at a screen. It allows us to actually do things – develop and improve our skills through practice that would otherwise be restricted by physical limitations. And that’s way more engaging than flying through Second Life.

But now it’s time for me to rest my shoulder while I practice piano on my iPad. Or perhaps a round of golf on Wii?

Images:
1. Grand Slam Tennis for Wii by Electronic Arts
2. Professional grade offering by RedBird Flight Simulations, Inc.
3. Playing piano on iPad with JamPad by ONG

Meeting Clay Christensen and My Innovator's Dilemma

Communitech is an organization devoted to promote the Waterloo Region (Region = County in Canada) as a technology hub, which it is, with over 700 tech companies including RIM, Open Text or the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Once a year, Communitech puts on a fabulous Technology Leadership Conference which I got to attend yesterday. The keynote speakers were Fast Company's founder Bill Taylor, Avid Life Media CEO Noel Biderman, and the Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, author of the renowned Innovator's Dilemma book and one of my gurus.

Having seen that Clay Christensen was on the agenda, it took me only about 5 sec to decide that I had to clear my day and attend. And so, I got to see him speaking about the innovator's dilemma which is so acute for so many high tech companies today. The long and the short of the story is that established vendors are often being challenged by bottom feeders who take over the unattractive, low-margin business that the established vendors are more than happy to give up. But as they get good at it, the disruptive innovators start moving up the stack, getting better and better at addressing more complex problems while leveraging the disruptive innovation that challenges the incumbent's pricing and business model.

In the subsequent roundtable discussion, Prof. Christensen explained that there are only two solutions for the dilemma. One of them is to make yourself obsolete by either acquiring or organically building a new business and keeping it separate from the old business. Over time, the new business makes the old one obsolete which is bad for the particular business unit but good for the company. Because, as Clay Christensen said, “…while the business units cannot evolve, the company can”. Failing to do this can only mean a demise as the company is driven into obsolescence by new entrants.

The second way to counter the innovator's dilemma is moving up the stack. The incumbent company has to keep innovating on the top tier, creating more sophisticated capabilities, as it surrenders the bottom to the new arrivals. This is of course only delaying the inevitable but this strategy can work for many years.

We see this happening all the time in the software world. For example, Microsoft Office is being attacked from the bottom by new, lower-cost entrants such as Google Apps or Open Office. And Microsoft keeps countering with innovations on top of the stack, such as the Office infrastructure provided by SharePoint. But as Google or Open Office keep adding features, Microsoft needs to consider disrupting itself with an innovation that would make Office obsolete. Otherwise, Office will become history.

Even my industry, enterprise content management, is not immune to this problem. Established vendors such as Open Text or IBM are being challenged by new entrants coming up with new business models from the bottom. Google Wave or Box.net are examples of disruptive innovations – free and based on a SaaS model – that could become competitors in the long term. So far, they don’t address the kinds of problems that our customers buy our software for and we have been successfully moving up the stack by adding new capabilities along with horizontal and vertical solutions. We, at Open Text, have plenty of ideas to keep doing that for several years. But we are also working on technologies that may completely change the way content is managed. Stay tuned for that.

Meeting Clay Christensen was inspiring and it made me think about his Innovator's Dilemma model again. And that's what is so great about the Communitech Leadership Conference in Waterloo. I saw Seth Godin there last year and I can't wait to see who comes next year. In the mean time, I will be working on the Innovator's Solution...

Sorry IT, the Time of Homogeneous Environments is Over

In the early days of computing, the IT (information technology) world used to be wonderful. There was typically just one computer in the organization to worry about - a mainframe or a mini. The computer was locked in a secure data center and all users used the same hardware and software. This centralized IT environment was relatively easy to manage, control, and secure. IT was in charge and the users couldn’t do anything but work with their applications. Life was beautiful.

But then came Intel and Microsoft and put a computer on every desk and ever since Novell has connected them together, the IT world became a nightmare. (We called it IS back then but I digress). Every user had a different PC and everyone used different software. And what was even worse, the users could tamper with it. They were able to install new applications, add additional hardware such as cameras or external drives, and compromise security by taking the data home, contracting viruses and committing other sins. The IT environments became extremely difficult to manage and impossible to secure.

Then decades later, IT was finally regaining control. After years of desktop dominance, Microsoft was establishing a position where they could control the entire environment: the desktop OS, the desktop apps, the network OS, the database, the Office infrastructure, the server based apps, and even the systems management tools to automatically configure the desktops and prevent users from tampering with them. IT was just inches away from the goal line – Microsoft’s promise of the beautiful life was very tempting.

But Microsoft got distracted - first by AOL and Yahoo!, then by Nintendo and Sony, then by Google, and now by Apple, and Facebook. The results are quite evident – Microsoft is losing its monopoly on the desktop. In my professional life, I have never seen so many iMacs, iPads, iPhones, Androids, and BlackBerrys that people around me use to do their job. These are desktops, tablets and mobile devices that use no Microsoft software at all.

Many people buy these devices on their own, regardless of what the company’s IT standard is. They simply help each other get them integrated with the corporate systems and circumvent IT altogether. And IT is on the defensive again as they have to do what they users want. The Microsoft monopoly and its promise of a homogeneous environment is fading and the good old days of mainframe are not coming back.

The old IT mantra that ”nobody gets fired for buying Microsoft” is shaking. The users are taking over. They are rebelling against Windows, Exchange, and PowerPoint. What they want is iMac, iPad, iPhone and Android and the two hundred thousand applications these systems offer. The time of homogeneous environments is over. Long live the freedom of choice!

Content Without Borders

Since the early days of the World Wide Web, we have understood that the Web transcends national borders. It is not governed by any country and it is open to anyone, anywhere and in any language. We have believed that even a small company can compete with the big ones on the Internet, using it to reach customers anywhere in the world. The Internet has no borders which is what makes it so appealing and which is perhaps the key reason why the Internet has changed everything.

But not everyone sees it that way. I will not dwell on oppressive governments that filter the content or outright prevent their citizens from accessing certain sites. While I decisively condemn this kind of censorship, it is at least not surprising given the agenda of such dictatorships. What really puzzles me is to see such actions from for-profit companies in the free world – the media companies.

In the history of entertainment, the media companies followed a flawed logic according to which they can reduce piracy and increase profits by preventing content from crossing borders. That's relatively easy with physical goods and with content that is language specific. Books are hard to move between countries because they are relatively heavy physical goods and their transport is a major cost factor. Movies on VHS were available only in one particular language which kept them effectively from crossing borders.

But since the dawn of digital content, the situation became a bit more tricky. First, the media companies failed to prevent CDs from traveling. CDs were relatively cheap to transport and they are not language bound. That got even worse since the invention of the MP3 format that made the audio content easy to transport at no cost. And we all know what happened next. The Big Media won the Napster battle but they have lost the music war. Today, Apple makes money on music and the media companies are relegated to be the low cost suppliers.

But Big Media has sworn a revenge. The next battlefield became movies. The emergence of the digital video disk (DVD) created a disruption that prompted an action. Just like CDs, DVDs are relatively cheap to transport and unlike VHS tapes, they are not bound to a single language. In fact, many DVDs in Europe are published in as many as 10 audio and 20 closed captioning languages to lower production cost. DVDs could easily cross borders and to prevent that, media companies invented something new – DVD Regions which make it impossible for DVDs from one region to be played on DVD players in another region. As a result, Europeans can't buy the relatively cheap DVDs in the US and the pirates in China have much more overhead dealing with multiple zone formats. This technique has been somewhat effective even though you can buy a region free DVD player on the Internet for about the same amount as a regionalized one at the store.

The DVD regions are enforced also on the computer DVD drives, which makes DVD ripping more difficult. But there are tools available on the Web that allow you to circumvent this restriction easily. And of course BitTorrent has rendered this problem obsolete – by avoiding DVDs altogether as you can download movies already ripped. Whether or not this is legal has been a subject of an ongoing debate. As consumers, it is our right to digitize our own DVDs to play them on a computer or a mobile device. It is also unacceptable to prevent us from buying content from foreign countries. Today, we can order German DVDs from Amazon.de and have them shipped to the US. But we cannot order those same movies online on iTunes? That's not right and this artificial border only promotes piracy. All in all, the media companies lost again.

But they have not given up on their revenge. Their next frontier is the streamed content. This is the future of personal entertainment and a new set of players are becoming powerhouses in streaming content such as movies and TV shows: Netflix, Hulu, ABC, etc.. However, this time, the content stops at the border. If you try to access your Netflix subscription from abroad, even from Canada, you get an error message saying that “Due to international rights agreements, we only offer this video to viewers located within the United States and its territories.” Yikes!

This is completely unacceptable. It's basically like disabling your iPod when you cross the border. No matter that you pay for your Netflix subscription – you only get the streamed content while in the US. It is only a question of time before users find a way around this. Already today, you can VPN into a US network from abroad or use a Slingbox which circumvents this restriction. The media companies are doomed to lose again, because they simply don't get it. They are in denial of technology and the changes it causes. They have proven it with every innovation, from early phonograph, to VHS video to Internet music on MP3. Each time, they fought the innovation and each time, they had to accept it and lose a ton of money while someone else makes out in the end. They will lose again, again, and again, until they finally accept that the Internet knows no borders and that content needs to be available everywhere.

Pictures from the G20 Summit

My post on the G20 Summit and its Technology Infrastructure was very popular and so I have uploaded an additional batch of pictures. Trying out the Flickr code was part of the fun!


Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

I took some of the pictures myself, some were taken by others with my camera and a few are the courtesy of Open Text. The quality varies...

G20 Summit and its Technology Infrastructure

This weekend, I had the opportunity to take part in the Group of 20 Summit in Toronto. I should say right up front that I wasn’t rubbing shoulders with the heads of states. In fact, I came nowhere near the actual Summit delegates. But neither did most of the thousands of journalists covering the Summit – they all were relegated to the international media center and that’s where I have spent an interesting couple of days. Yes, this is was the site of the “Fake Lake” – a feature that was bringing the atmosphere of the G8 Summit at Muskoka Lake to the G20 journalists and that was heavily criticized by the press prior to the Summit for its alleged lavishness. It wasn’t lavish and it was actually really well done, if you ask me.

Since my blog is about technology, I should perhaps explain what I was doing at the Summit. As it turns out, Open Text was selected to provide the technology infrastructure for the Summit. As members of the Canadian Digital Media Network, we’ve built a site that is basically a virtual rendering of the media center with the Fake Lake. This site is built using the digital experience management (DEM) technology which manifests our vision for an engaging user interface. Just check it out at vg20net.org. I am sure I will write more about digital experience management and its syndication of tethered content in the near future.

The next part of the infrastructure was the secure social media site for all the journalists and other attendees, who were able to communicate with each other along with dozens of librarians at multiple universities happy to answer any question. And then there is the high security social media environment used by the actual delegates. That was a very interesting experience – having to go through a series of security evolutions while keeping a high level of confidentiality about the project. As the actual work is done prior to the Summit which is basically a photo-op, the application has been used for months leading up to the Summit. And the entire time I wasn’t allowed to talk about it for security reasons, which is rather tortuous for a marketer. In fact, it wasn’t by my choice that I didn’t provide any live Twitter update from the Summit.

Well, it was an interesting weekend – we were showing our software to hundreds of journalists including many on-camera demonstrations. This is the first time a highly secure social media application has been used for such multi-lateral event involving senior diplomats from many countries who have used the environment actively prior to the event. And it was cool to show it to the journalists on an iPad and touch-screen monitors. And I even experienced up close and personal some of the protests and riots in downtown Toronto which was not cool at all.

Images:
1. Top: Me at the Fake Lake in a moment of pure vanity
2. Middle: Honourable Peter Van Loan, Minister of International Trade of Canada getting a demo from Tom Jenkins, Open Text's Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer
3. Bottom: Me with an iPad showing Open Text Everywhere accessing the G20 social community

Man versus Machine

A recent article in Wired Magazine titled “Clive Thompson on the Cyborg Advantage” described the result of a “freestyle” chess tournament in which teams of players competed with help of any computerized aid. What was surprising was that the winner was not the team with a chess grand-master or the team with the most powerful supercomputer. Instead, the team that won was a team that was best able to combine the power of the machine with the human way of thinking.

Years ago, I was dipping into the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI) which was the hype of the time. AI has failed for a variety of reasons. Perhaps it was way ahead of its time but perhaps it attempted to relegate too much decision power to the machines while the human expertise and intuition have always proven superior in the end. And so AI vanished and I’ve moved on to other things like content management.

The problem AI attempted to solve is more than relevant today. Faced with the staggering over-abundance of information, we are trying to find ways in which to use computers to help us make sense of all the data. The first step was making the information retrievable via search. But as soon as we have halfway accomplished that task, we have come to realize that this is not the solution. Virtually every search query produces too many results and the poor humans have to employ their expertise and intuition yet again to weed out the millions of hits.

The next step is to employ machines to automatically analyze and classify the content to reduce the volume of information humans have to deal with. But while such analytics and classification technologies have been around for years, they are still in their infancy. Outside specific applications that deal with limited content volume and scope, we don’t trust the machines yet. Usually, the final decision is up to the humans – just think of the e-Discovery reference model where we find all relevant content and then filter it to reduce the manual review cost. The goal today is to cull the volume of data that humans have to deal with. And that might remain the right approach for some time to come.

The right line of attack might be just like in the freestyle chess match. The solution is to facilitate the best possible interaction between the machines and humans. That needs to be reflected in the software architecture and its user interfaces but perhaps also in the skills required from us, humans. In the near future, it might not be the smartest people who will be most effective but rather those who will be best able to take advantage of the machines to augment their decision making ability.

Redefining Scalability

Scalability matters to enterprise software. Enterprises have usually much more complex requirements than consumers or small businesses and so there are different expectations on enterprise software and scalability is always right up there with security, reliability, and customizability. The idea of scalability is that the deployment needs to be able to grow as the enterprise growths. Surprisingly, that is not always the case for enterprise software as sometimes, scalability is an afterthought for the vendor.
Scalability has been traditionally defined as the ability to grow the deployment in size without any degradation in performance. The growth could be measured as:

• number of users,
• amount of transactions, or
• volume of data.

The growth in one or more of these metrics can put tremendous pressure on the system performance and only well scalable systems can cope with such growth.
That said, scalability has to consider additional factors besides the performance metrics. No, I am not suggesting that performance doesn’t matter. Au contraire! With trends such as mobility, process automation, and relentless data growth, performance matters a lot. But other things matter too:

1. Distributed environments
Enterprises operate often in multiple locations and working in a geographically distributed environment requires the ability to preserve user proximity to data for performance, while maintaining data consistency and integrity. That’s easier said than done and only scalable systems can do it well enough to support tens or even hundreds of locations.

2. Leverage
Deploying enterprise software is inherently expensive, due to its complexity, integration with other enterprise systems, customization, and the above mentioned performance requirements. Because of this cost, the system scalability improves with economies of scale. Basically, the deployment becomes more cost effective when it can be used for more applications. Similar classes of applications can share a significant portion of their infrastructure for multiple use cases. This kind of leverage is a characteristic of a scalable system.

3. Downward Scaling
While most scalability concerns deal with performance growth, modern applications need to be able to also scale down easily when the performance is not required. High volume of people, transactions, or data usually comes in peaks and provisioning a system for the peak is exceedingly expensive. The only economic solution is to have multiple systems share the resources via a grid or virtual environment. But any software that hogs the resources and does not share them well with other applications is simply not scalable.

4. Customization
No two enterprises are the same. There may be similarities across industries or geographies but enterprises are like living organisms and every single one of them is different. Therefore, any software deployment – on premises or in the cloud – requires some degree of customization that adapts the software to the needs of the organization. This customization may include adaptation of the user experience, definition of the data model, integration with other systems, etc. As the organization growths in any dimension, the amount of customization often grows as well. The degree to which any software makes such customization possible and easy is also an aspect of scalability.

Enterprise software needs to be scalable but scalability is not all just about performance.

Google Search and the Tip of the Iceberg

The Web is often considered the known content universe. Indeed it appears that today, everything that could be digital has become digital and can be found on the web – articles, images, music, movies, and games. Since every search query on Google returns millions of hits, all digital content in the world is available through the Google search. After all, Google indexed and cached the entire World Wide Web, didn’t they?

Not so. Google only exposes content that wants to be found. It is content on the public Web that is not protected by any security. A vast majority of content, however, resides behind a login challenge that prevents Google from indexing it. In fact, the 2003 study “How Much Information?” conducted by the by the University of California, Berkeley, estimates that less than 1% of content is exposed on the public Web (“Surface Web”) while the majority resides in the “Deep Web”. While the Internet has evolved since 2003, the percentage of content not indexed by Google and other search engines remains huge.

Searching secure content is not trivial which is why Google has only a modest presence in the enterprise. Restricted access to content applies not only to the content itself but also to the index and search results. Not only should you be prevented from accessing the document you are not authorized to see but you should also not be able to see a link with the document’s name in the search results. And so Google takes the easy way out by searching only the unprotected content. Search with security – an absolute must in the enterprise – is a much harder nut to crack.

There is another trick that makes Google’s job easier. It really searches content that really wants to be found – content that has been optimized for search. There is an entire industry called Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which spends millions of dollars on making sure the content employs all kinds of tricks to ensure that Google can find it easily and rank it as relevant. That’s of course not the case for the deep Web content, not to mention documents and other types of content in the enterprise. And Page Rank, Google’s famed relevance algorithm, is based on hyperlinks between Web pages that don’t really exist in the world of enterprise content.

The public Web searchable via Google only represents the tip of the iceberg and searching secure content on the web or content in the enterprise is much more difficult.

Metadata - The Secret Value of Social Media

A lot has been written about social media and so I am not going to talk about its end-user appeal or benefits. Instead, I’d like to discuss the value of social media for the operator. Advertising is of course the first thing that comes to mind and that’s behind Facebook’s agenda. But there is another benefit that so far has not been making the headlines: metadata.

Metadata is essential for any content. Without good metadata, content is difficult to find and impossible to process. But good metadata is very difficult to get. Traditionally, the users were expected to add it at the time of content creation and throughout the processing. But users are notoriously unmotivated to do so and they won’t. Automatic approaches through content analytics are promising but still nascent (see my article The Problems Waiting to Be Solved). Yet here comes a 3rd way to create metadata – social media.

Just think about what’s happening on Facebook. Millions of users are socially interacting. They are telling each other their opinions about what they like and don’t like, what they do, what they need. This is the online version of an Italian piazza or an American sports bar on a football night. And they do it of their own accord, without corporate policies, and without having to adhere to any taxonomy. Mining these interactions is relatively easy and the result is information about people, processes, and content. And that’s how we define metadata.

Unfortunately, Facebook owns their metadata and they will be selling it to advertisers a bit at a time. And that really worries Google. If you want to read a good book or find a good store, you can either search for it or you can get a recommendation. You can either trust some search algorithm that relies on keyword prominence and frequency of links or you can trust your friends whom you know and share common interests and values with. That’s why the metadata generated from social media is more valuable than any search index and, as a result, ads based on social media are much more relevant than the ads based on search. And that’s why Google fears Facebook.

The same applies for private social media deployments on your intranet or web site. The high quality metadata generated by social media in an enterprise is just as valuable. It can be the driver for use cases such as recommendations, expertise location, knowledge discovery or suggestive records filing. Yes, the value of social media lies not only in the user engagement and interactions; it also represents a great source of metadata. And that’s the secret value of social media.