M2M is not taking off as fast as operators would like.
But the threat for them is not about failing to reach billions of devices talking to each other, as M2M promises. That will surely happen. The threat for telcos is that they might not be the ones to control and manage them.
Cheap WiFi modules combined with the nature of IP make Over-the-Top solutions as effective as any other, if not more. For customers, OTT has the advantage not to lock them to a single connectivity service provider.
Telcos know it. More and more, they will have to do as DoCoMo just did, and aim to play over-the-top. It is the right move. Telefonica has done it in other domains with Telefonica Digital by creating a new umbrella brand called Tu, for over-the-top communications services.
The point is not that telcos cannot rule in M2M. The point is that it is unlikely you do, if you just focus on locking M2M Service with Connectivity, as telcos did in the days of voice and VAS.
Learn what experts think about big data
From Google Tech Talks: Discussing the evolution, current opportunities and future trends in big data.
SPEAKERS:
Moderator: Hal Varian, Chief Economist at Google.
Panelists:
Theo Vassilakis, Principal Engineer/Engineering Director at Google
Gustav Horn, Senior Global Consulting Engineer, Hadoop at NetApp
Charles Fan, Senior Vice President at VMware in strategic R&D
Quick Notes from the panel
What’s big data in short?
Unlimited huge amount of unstructured data captured in real time, from which you can get meaningful answers fast.
The promise:
Never delete data again. Keep it all as it comes. Simply focus on asking the right question to get answers.
An example:
In Healthcare, you could store the complete human genome of all cancer patients combined with other possible relevant patient info (habits, living conditions, etc) throughout their lives. The correlation of such a massive dataset would provide wonderful insight with the right analytics.
Trends
More and more devices, more servers, cameras, sensors, etc. Big Data techniques allow now to economically store all that info. And Mapreduce techniques allows you to query and analyse those huge amounts of unstructured data and get meaningful results.
Standards
Open source give people the choice. Hadoop is becoming defacto standard for data storage and data management. It is enabling disparate datasets from unrelated systems to be dumped into a Hadoop cluster. That enables to look for correlations between them. (xml, csv… there will be chaos for a little while)
We are getting better natural language programming. That means more and more of natural language logic and less programming.
Four layers of functionality in Big Data:
applications
analytics
management: query engines
data infrastructure: data storage
Lower layers standardize earlier. A common standard will emerge.
The biggest problem for enterprises
A big problem of companies today is the number of heterogeneous databases with different formats. Connecting them to Hadoop is the key, but vendors will need to provide connectors, which do not help their business of selling licenses.
Google has some advantage compared to a normal enterprise, as in Google all their data is standardized.
For some, a bigger problem for enterprises is knowing what to do with so much data. Experimentation is key to mine and find meaningful insights.
Is the #1 problem the amount of data? or not to know how to use that data?
Model for hardware infrastructure : buy or lease in the cloud?
There is a place for both. Cloud is a good place to get started.
Will SQL become obsolete by languages like NoSQL?
People using NoSQL are looking for more flexible, easier schemas. It relaxes the requirements for the database. Many developers are embracing them, but there is no clear winner yet.
The good about NoSQL is that is a declarative language. It doesn’t state how to do it, just what you want to get.
But SQL will be around for a long time, even if just for legacy databases.
In summary, Big Data will:
provide answers fast
get infinite in volume and size
never forget anything
My two-cents after listening to the experts: a definition of Big Data in five words.
Tyrannosaurus rex, Palais de la Découverte, Paris (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
How is ITU different from a dinosaur? Answer: ITU is not extinct yet.
On the rest, they are the same: Fossilized, old, heavy, slow.
We don’t know if dinosaurs noticed the meteorite that disrupted their world and, some say, led them to extinction.
What we know is that ITU don’t want to notice the meteorite that is leading them to irrelevance: the Internet.
These persistent attempts are just evidence that this breed of dinosaurs, with their pea-sized brains, hasn’t figured out that they are dead yet, because the signal hasn’t traveled up their long necks. — Vint Cerf
It’s time that an organization like ITU, that has done so much for the development of telecom over almost 150 years, adapts to a new world, where they no longer have the control. Else they will end like dinosaurs, extinct.
Not because you already anticipated it, it’s less of a dramatic picture. The chart from Statista shows the result of how technology reinvents industries.
In 2004, Google’s $3Bn business seemed nothing compared to a $70Bn industry. Only eight years later, Google is bigger than the entire Print Media business in US.
A single company — let’s call it the disruptor— is worth more than the entire industry it disrupts, in less than a decade!
Though it is the company that gets more attacks from the newspaper and magazine industry, Google was not the only one driving the change.
Some years ago when you wanted to sell a car or a house, there was one obvious place to advertise: Newspapers. Nowadays you would only think of eBay, Craigslist or Carlist.
Bloggers were the first to grab readers from traditional media, though Google Adsense dollars helped here.
Then came the big social media boom with Facebook and Twitter attracting eyeballs from other media.
And finally, also contributing to the decline in offline revenue, Print Media has gone online, though they have not been too enthusiastic about exchanging “paper ads dollars by online cents.”
After disruption, is the resulting market smaller or bigger?
U.S. Print Media went from a $72bn peak in 2006 to $42bn in 2011. Where has all that money gone? Online, right?
According to GroupM, online ad revenue in US in 2011 was $34.5Bn (*). You make the numbers and that means that the size of Print Media + Online combined add to $76Bn. Around same market size as in 2006.
Roughly, you could conclude the combined market of “disrupted + disrupting” has not de-materialized the industry.
Jobs: A collateral damage of disruption?
The most visible effect in jobs is the change in skills and preparation. New jobs online require more preparation than those in the old industry. And for sure they need different skills.
Disruption due to new technologies often creates inflation in preparation. The lowest rank worker in the new industry will require far more preparation than in the previous one. E.g. Less skilled jobs like printing operation or distribution are replaced by technology. If you are a junior journalist you are now in the lower ranks, in the sense that the jobs less skilled than yours are all replaced by technology. You need much more preparation to be a journalist than to be a guy in the distribution chain.
On the other hand, a system like Adsense enables a bigger crowd to benefit from advertising. Now if you are a junior journalist you can join the Long Tail of bloggers and be self-employed. Online ads, combined with indie publishing, are the foundation of the Digital Renaissance we live in.
How does print media respond to that?
Sadly enough, we have the example of France, where print media lobbies politicians to tax the innovator, in order to protect the status quo and delay the inevitable. As RIAA already demonstrated in the music industry, trying to stop change with lawsuits is not the best way to deal with disruption.
* Google makes 95% of revenues from Ads and U.S. represents 46% of their worldwide business. As Google reportedly has 44% market share in U.S. online ads, numbers are consistent.
You will find more statistics at Statista
Chrome has revolutionized web browsing. It has evolved the web in 3 years more than in the previous 10. ChromeOS, though, has failed to challenge the PC and laptop status quo, in part because it was conceived before the iPad era, in part because you resist to have a machine that is almost useless when offline.
But the area Chrome would revolutionize is the TV, and this is where Google opted for the Android-based Google TV. A mistake.
The TV and the Web are made to each other, and a ChromeTV would have much more impact in the TV industry than what Google TV might have. Why?
- A Web browser is something that any TV-set manufacturer would integrate without the legal issues of a platform like GoogleTV, owned by Google and tied to potential content rights and other patent issues.
- HTML5 and CSS3 provide a superb framework to develop compelling apps for big screens like TVs.
- The TV-set is “fixed” by nature. If it is connected, it will always be connected, unlike a laptop or tablet. Therefore you can live with just a browser on it. No need for a proper proprietary OS.
- The Web also on the TV? What else can Google dream that would better fit their search and ads business model?
The chart via Business Insider seems conclusive on the Google versus Facebook war of who is more relevant for online advertisers.
When people want to buy something they go first to Google. Full stop.
If I want to buy a bycicle to go to work I will go first to Google or Amazon and research. But what if I discover in Facebook that my friend just got an ebike from China, and I did not even know electric bikes existed? What if Facebook shows a banner on a brand of eBikes close to my friend’s post?
The chart neglects the value of discovery. How important is for marketers how people discover their products?
Google is king on search, but social media is king to discover new things. That is gold for advertisers too. Not sure if $50bn worth of it though… At the end I might still search the ebike on Google and check the reviews in Amazon.
Comparing Chrome and IE9, I can only wonder whether Google engineers are genius, or Microsoft has lost its edge.
I fell in love with Chrome since it launched in 2008. It was so much faster, with a minimalist design, the single box for search and URLs, the start page with the most visited pages, the sandbox concept…
IE9 is the confirmation that Google’s vision of the browser was bright. So bright that Microsoft simply copied it… 2.5 years later. Only it is not yet there. See IE vs Firefox vs Chrome.
Chrome software updates are almost invisible to the user. The first installation is also pretty fast. I wonder how Google is able to do all those installs/updates without ever asking to restart the computer.
I just installed IE9 at home. During install IE9 lists all running programs and services that may conflict, and asks to close them all to avoid restarting the PC. I agree to close them all, but surprise surprise, after installation is done I am asked to restart the computer because IE8 had some component still running!! How come I had to re-start Windows7 when I install IE9 and no re-start with Chrome? What is the trick? Are Googlers so much smarter than Microsofters?
This chart from WSJ might give a hint of where the brightest talent choose to go.
