This is a cross-post from my recent article in Forbes:

I often hear executives struggling to understand the power and promise of mobile devices as it relates to their business. “I would never want to receive an ad on my phone for nearby pizza,” they say. Or, “The iPhone is a small percentage of the phone market. What does it have to do with my business?” This is a bit like looking at the emergence of the railroads in the 1800s and saying, “I have no interest in going to Chicago. What’s the big deal?”

Here are a few ways in which mobility matters:

With mobility, coordination replaces planning. As communications protocols accelerate to real-time (think Twitter) we are seeing more work processes move to approaches that favor just-in-time coordination over advanced planning. It is more efficient and more flexible. In software development, this is called the Agile approach where developers code in short, iterative loops, constantly processing the feedback to refine the end product. In product development, this is Fast Cycle Time. In organizational design, this is real-time collaboration and the flattened organization. In the Army, mobile communications are reconfiguring the traditional command-and-control hierarchy, pushing decision-making to the soldier in the field who has the most information about the situation at hand. The implications go beyond military maneuvers. With a workforce able to remain in real-time contact anywhere, possibilities emerge for new management techniques and an increased role for employees.

As we find ourselves tied to mobile devices, coordination will increasingly become the organizing principle that defines how we get work done; we will become a network of spontaneous gathering, loosely coordinated agents in constant contact.

Mobility is not about phones and it is not about computers. Most of us don’t consider how much sensing intelligence is packed into a smart phone. The iPhone is a rich portable computer with on-board sensors capable of gathering huge volumes of data. Specifically, it is a location-aware (GPS), motion-aware (accelerometer), directionally aware (compass) visually aware (camera that can gather visual input of the immediate environment), sonically aware (microphone and speakers), always-connected (wireless or 3Gs) handheld computer. In short, the iPhone does a whole lot more than display information. It is an environmental sensor.

This is an enormous leap forward when our devices are not only connected but actively accepting input from the world around them. We can track our own behavior, monitor our own health and get things done together (e.g., crowdsource maps of our neighborhood). At the far end of the spectrum, the iPhone is being used as a medical diagnostic tool. Doctors without borders, indeed.

Meet your new laptop. Apple has not only opened a programming interface that allows developers to create applications that reside on the iPhone, the company has recently opened up the hardware interface. This means that, soon, attaching a keyboard and screen (among other things) to your iPhone literally will be a snap.

The staggering increase in processing and storage capacity per-square-inch, allied with the development of flexible OLED screens and palm-sized projectors, will allow our mobile devices to do more than our PCs. The mobile device is headed to dethrone the laptop as the de facto standard gear for knowledge work.

The new marketplace here, there and everywhere. Much of the future of commerce will lie in micropayments made at the exact moment of impulse or need–from music to subway tickets and so on. Smart phones now have bar code and QR code readers that allow the phone to act as a scanner (to find the exact product), research assistant (find the best price online, check product ratings) and shopping agent (buy the product on the spot). If you are a retailer, you are now facing a customer with more choices, information and bargaining power than ever before. You will need to rethink your value beyond simply carrying inventory.

In the developing world, where technology constraints often inspire innovation, people are forming alternative currencies, mainly in the form of sharable minutes on their mobile devices. This means, for example, that I can transfer 10 minutes of talk time to your phone in exchange for something of equivalent value–say, a spare part or carton of milk. The most basic peer-to-peer exchange of funds has already gone mobile in certain parts of the developing world.

Getting things done. Mobility is about how your customers are increasingly getting things done–from shopping to reading to wayfinding. Understanding how mobility will change your customer is key to understanding how you will stay relevant.

If you are a product manager, or in R&D, what can the iPhone teach you about product design? What can mobility developments in Africa teach you about constraint-based innovation? If you are in marketing or customer service, what can your younger employees teach you about your next customer? Consider doing a bit of reverse mentoring and prepare to be stunned.

If you are a senior executive, ask yourself how you plan to handle the management challenges as your workforce gets even more disconnected from workplace.

Staying informed about the incredible work occurring at the margins is one of the keys to getting to the future first. Don’t write it off. Embrace the big idea. If you want to talk about it, call me on my mobile. It knows where to find me.

I have an old friend – let’s call him Dick – who successfully created mind-numbingly complex financial instruments during the best of times (2007) and the worst (2009).   One area where Dick has shown particular genius is in dealing with event risk and hedging against future calamity.   One such product Dick modeled – but never deployed – played up the notion that news –from politics to personality news –  follows a “sentiment frequency” from trough to crest.  At the crest, the news is dominantly favorable, at the trough, unfavorable.  You can’t stay on top forever goes the old saying and Dick realized that your fall (or rise) was more predictable than one might think.     By combining sentiment mining with some complex math you could assess (1) the status of an element in politics, celebrity news etc.  (2) the duration of its placement in the frequency and based on those two factors, the likelihood of a change on the frequency spectrum.   In other words – when your star was at its zenith or nadir and where you were headed next.  It was a crude instrument but when trading against the future – it was accurate above 50%.  Enough to earn money.

The punchline is that being in or out of favor in the news is not purely driven by business strategy or tectonic market forces.  The logic of the news is driven by our collective appetite for change.   The longer you have been on top, the more likely it is that the news will go against you.

The current poster child for this phenomenon is Google.

Google has ridden the crest as long as it could and now it has lost control of its own image.  The pundits must take it apart.   It is not a matter of truth, facts or profit and loss.    Perhaps the end of the love-in came with Jeff Jarvis’ business equivalent of hagiography “What Would Google Do?”   When your brand is a stand-in for Jesus, I mean really – where else can you go?   There followed a series of articles that took direct aim at Google.    These articles ranged from the insightful – Anil Dash – to the reductionist – Scoble parsing one sentence from Eric Schmidt as biblical prophecy governing all of Google’s efforts.

My point is not whether the analysis is “true” or not.   My point is that the tide of sentiment has crested in 2009 – and Google will slide into the trough of negative speculation in 2010 just because… well – just because it makes for good news.   I predict some anti-trust rumblings towards the end of the year despite the fact that Google (having learned from Microsoft’s mistake) has a big presence in D.C.

Google will be the Bee Gees of 2010 Tech and the fearsome wrath of the news cycle is upon them.     To quote those same mighty pop-smiths “Tragedy – when the feeling’s gone and you can’t go on – it’s tragedy.”

I have been working for a few months on a Radar post titled “Anonymity is the Fifth Estate” –I have been buried in work and haven’t been able to pay it the attention I believe that it deserves.

The core premise around Anonymity as the Fifth Estate is this:

Journalism, as the fourth estate ensures that the actions of the powerful are made transparent to the public. As its counterpart, the ability to organize, communicate and coordinate political group action with anonymity is critical to maintaining a free society.  In other words, anonymity is crucial to having a public willing or able to do anything about what journalism uncovers.

While we have been wringing our hands over the loss of newspapers this year, I fundamentally believe that journalism will come out OK… I can’t say the same for the prospects of remaining anonymous in civic life.

The mix of sensor tracking, facial recognition technology, GPS in every mobile phone, the increasing ubiquity of surveillance cameras in urban centers, and the massive consolidation of identity brokers such as Facebook and Google make anonymity increasingly difficult – online or off.

Corporations from Sprint (who gave away customer data 8 million times in one year) to Facebook, (whose new privacy policies have been roundly criticized) are in it for business – not high-minded civics.

The convergence of online consumer tools that trade off of identity and location doesn’t bode well for privacy and anonymity in civic life.   These tools encourage sharing as a core part of their model.   Sharing and making your information public encourages network effects which are core to Web 2.o business models.  Network effects lead to winner-takes-most markets (aka monopolies) in a market (the internet) that has 1.7 billion members and growing.

I predict that in 2010 privacy will come into its own as a uniquely 21st century concern.  What will it take for that to happen?   Two things:

First, a first class Tiger Woodsian privacy breach.  Not sure what that means yet – but I would imagine it to involve Facebook, third party holders of your publicly identifiable information (every quiz you ever took knows just about everything about you and your friends) and some cross-hack into a financial services firm.  Call it identity theft 2.0.  Mi

Second, the emergence of a  clearer language to describe privacy.  Just as the Eskimos famously have seven words for snow – we need a more refined language to speak about this issue.  Privacy is vague and means different things to different people.   Law follows language.  I once read an essay that until “date rape” was in the common vernacular it was hardly a prosecutable crime.

What do you think about Privacy?  Is it overrated?  Am I an alarmist?

Subscribe to this video podcast via iTunes. Or, you may download the file.

2009 was the year that everything received a “social” prefix; social media, social web, social business and so on. I wanted to ask John Hagel – co-chair of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge – for his take on the significance of the term and its importance for business.
John starts with a great quote, “in many respects we are going back to the future:” the Internet began as a social tool with early bulletin boards that connected small groups with shared interests (mainly academic researchers).  Then the Worldwide Web came along and the population went boom. Millions of people flooded the system to look at basically static content… With the rise of social technologies like blogs, social networks, Twitter etc. we are just now rediscovering the web’s inherently social capabilities.  John goes on to talk about the value of social networks to connect people and surface tacit knowledge and the concept of serendipity on the Social Web.

This is the second in a series of interviews conducted at the Web 2.0 Summit last month.  First interview with John Hagel on the Real Time Web is here.  These interviews originally appeared as part of The Future At Work series.

Cross-posted from Forbes: I just finished watching the video for Red Laser, a real-time bar code scanner that works on the iPhone (video below the fold).     Just hold the camera-eye over the UPC code and get ready for results to show up from Google Product Search or Amazon.   Then begin reading customer reviews, comparing prices etc. The clue to forecasting the future is to watch the trendline – not the snapshot.  Redlaser may be a bit clunky right now, not everyone has an iPhone etc.  That is the snapshot.   Here is the trendline:   We are becoming accustomed to using our phones in-the-moment to answer all manner of questions (who was the actor in that film? and so on).  This small behavioral change has huge implications as more and more of our physical world finds its data-doppleganger online:

• How long before we can scan any food product and know more about its ingredients than the misleading label tells us?
• How long before every in-store customer seamlessly moves online to the vast Internet marketplace to find the rock-bottom price and bargain with the store manager?
• How long before every object’s identity in the physical world can be referenced to a super-set of attributes such as reviews, ingredients, price comparison, carbon rating etc.

This referencing need not be through a set of UPC codes that you consciously scan.   Just as your computer can access the Gracenote database to identify the artist, tracks and times of a random music CD that you put into your drive,  we are heading into a time when any experience will likely be passively cataloged (movies you are watching, music you are listening to and so on) for later reference. This has quite a few implications: (1) I think these technologies will accelerate  a race to the bottom on pricing as ever more shoppers with a mobile do product and price-comparison at the in-store point of sale. (2) Thus service and experience based products will become even more critical to a retailer’s success. (3) Product (or service) quality will increasingly trump crafty advertising as the only sustainable advantage once customers have instant access to more reviews and information from peers. 4) Environmental and other cause issues will be of increased importance as consumers will find it easier to live out their values in their product purchases. (5) Personal data – your location, wayfinding through the mall, product searches and even your exposure to ambient types of advertising (did you watch that commercial?) will be captured via your mobile device.  This is already happening in simple form via IMMI (be afraid) for those willing to get a free mobile device in exchange for being tracked 24/7. Overall I believe that these technologies will empower people by giving them more access to valuable, peer-created information.  However, these last predictions (or rather observations on the growth of what is already taking place) should cause a healthy amount of anxiety about personal privacy.  I have committed a fair amount of time writing about these issues on O’Reilly Radar.  Like all powerful technology the benefits need to be framed within a structure that protects our ability to act as free agents in the world.

I recently began experimenting with a new web publishing service called Posterous.   I love it.  Here is why:

Posterous begins with something nearly everyone knows how to do (email) and uses that as the basis for web publishing.   Just address your email to post@posterous.com and Posterous does the rest – it creates your account using your unique email address (no more long registration forms), it formats your blog post (subject title is the blog post title – body copy and contents are the post itself).   It carries some very intuitive business logic that works for 90% of the blogs you want to post — for instance when you attach photos it automatically creates a photo gallery.  Include a YouTube link and Posterous embeds the video into your blog for you – and so on.

I don’t think that these modifications are small improvements -  By dramatically lowering the barrier to publishing, (if you know how to email you know how to post to the web) there will likely be a whole new group that becomes active.  To understand my point just look back at the blogging phenomenon itself.

Blogs didn’t create anything new – they made an old activity (publishing to the web) easier.    That change, or more precisely, lowering the “cost” of publishing in terms of effort and barriers to participation  is HUGE.    Posterous  will be successful because it makes web publishing even easier than traditional blogging.

It has also been interesting to see how this change of method creates a change in nomenclature.  Most people I have met who deal with Posterous do not refer to what they are doing as blogging (just as bloggers needed a new name for their activity despite the fact that it wasn’t new either) they talk about posting to “My Posterous” or other variations.   When you change the way people do an old activity – that old activity gets a new name.

Posterous holds a lesson about innovation as well. If you were to have asked me and, I believe, many others, if there were room for another contender in the personal web publishing space I would have said, not really — it is a crowded, and well-advanced market.   I would have been wrong.   Posterous went back to the drawing board on nearly every process – from registration to publishing process.  They cut away all the feature creep that makes other products attractive for more advanced users but add  useless clutter for the vast majority.   There is always room to rethink the way we approach our business models and our business processes.   This is the big and inspiring lesson I draw from Posterous.

Murphy Goode, a Sonoma County winery, set up a promotion that looks great on paper:

We want to hire a social media whiz (your title will be “Murphy-Goode Wine Country Lifestyle Correspondent”) who will report on the cool lifestyle of Sonoma County Wine Country and, of course, tell people what you’re learning about winemaking.
Did we mention that the compensation was $10,000 per month Plus accommodations in a beautiful home in picturesque Healdsburg, a popular vacation destination in our neck of the woods. Working hours are flexible. And all you have to do is experience wine and good living, and then tell people about it.

MG then set about having candidates publicly apply.   The whole world was invited to vote on potential candidates.   The campaign seemed to be doing well in terms of attention and media and candidate interest.   Then yesterday Twitter lit up.  Not Good(e).  Bad.  Apparently the top vote getter by a 2:1 margin (@martinsargent) wasn’t included in their first cut of 50 candidates.   Voters felt robbed – and said some nasty things…

It is hard to get clear about what actually happened.  I didn’t call Murphy Goode and their website isn’t very helpful in helping understand the terms and conditions of their selection process.  What is interesting to me is how yet again, if the general circumstances are accurate, this whole situation could have been avoided so easily.  The operative word in the term social media is “social.”  When you get engaged in social media you need to abide by a simple social contract.  A contract that is so simple in fact that many people engaged in the complexity of business tend to overlook it.   What is this divine mystery?

Respect people’s time and attention the same way you would if you actually knew them in a social context.

People feel cheated because Murphy Goode asked for their time and attention – solicited their opinion – then seemed to ignore the overwhelming majority of opinion.   Boil this down to a social context.   Would you have a few friends spend a lot of time debating and then voting on which movie to see and then ignore the major vote-getter completely?   I don’t think so.   Remember, the stakes weren’t even as high as a movie here.  This was the top 50 — not the  final winner.

So where next for Murphy Goode?   Will this damage the campaign or their brand in any significant way?

I don’t think so.

The Social Media crowd tends to see itself as the center of the universe.  And gets quite giddy during any flexing of its (admittedly rather small) muscle.  It is also a pretty self-righteous group of lumpen-digerati.    I don’t think this maneuver will have a major impact on the bottom line.  That said it must be a bit painful and surprising to those at Murphy Goode.  I am sure they are having anxious meetings over how to respond.    If they are trying to reach influencers now via this 6 month campaign many of the same people they wanted to have spread their message (social media infuencers) will either obstruct or ignore them.    Also, in the search driven world, this has the potential to generate a permanent, findable record of discontent when searching for Murphy Goode.   Mostly, this is just a simple lesson in common sense.   I suspect it will be forgotten fairly quickly – but was eminently avoidable.

“We know what we do.  We know why we do what we do.  What we don’t know is what what we do does” – Michel Foucualt*

@lucatoledo reminded me that it is the 25th anniversary of French Philosopher Michel Foucault’s death.  I have been sitting on this short post that was originally going to cap my series on The Digital Panopticon.   So, on the occassion, and a bit unpolished, here it is.

Discussions about technology largely focus on immediate utility.  They rarely address the larger effect that technology might have on the individual and society.   So it goes with the social media phenomenon – we are absorbed in very granular discussions of use (what it is, why it matters for commerce and how to gain advantage from it) and abuse (Twitter addiction leads to the break up of  Jennifer Aniston and John Mayer etc.) while a much larger drama is unfolding as a consequence of these technologies – the changing notions of identity, society and government.

We need to get better at figuring out “what what we do does”.   What are the consequences of living in a totally networked society?   What will be the new equilibrium we reach on identity, privacy rights, work-life boundaries etc?
The Social Nervous System we are building makes it possible to create a smarter world.   From sensor based infrastructure management like the smart grid, to deep text mining  to assess market sentiment (what the cloud of conversations means for your company) and the social graph.  But  smarter is not necessarily better.   Better is a blend of technology with foresight and ethics.

As I have written before, “It is very possible that just as the development of the neuron enabled a proliferation of new, sophisticated life forms we are developing the next equivalent, the social neuron that binds us into a new, larger social organism.”   I believe the Social Nervous System spells profound and protracted changes to every aspect of society, economy and government.  We should be asking questions that live up to the scope of the change we see around us.   We should not limit this conversation to academia.  This conversation should be social (pun intended).

This is my biggest argument around social media commentary– there is not enough critical questioning – it is one giant echochamber of early adopters focusing on a narrow set of issues – New marketing, new PR, or better business as usual…  Most of those talking (myself included) are also making a living doing the talking so the deck is a bit stacked (see – The Evangelist Fallacy for more on this).
At bottom, no one is quite sure of where things will shake out – what the benefits and consequences will be.  While I am generally optimistic (see Why Business Needs to Get Social) I am aware that the theory of things (what I believe a thing is for) often misses the effect those things have in the world… We should always have one eye on “what what we do does” for therein lies the true significance of any technology or institution.

In the meantime you can catch me giving it up on the Social Web (@jmichele)…

(Image from @schuschny’s blog post on Foucault)

During my study of classical Chinese it would take hours of contemplation to really get to the root of a poem.   That was the point.  It was a meditation proposed by the poet for consideration by the reader.  As with philosophy, poetry is a time-intensive practice that requires deep focus and concentration.   Twitter, Friendfeed, Facebook and the host of real-time-web feed services belong on the opposite side of the spectrum.  They are quintessentially distraction-based media;  shallow on context and truncated into staccato bursts of conversation…  These media play off of a very real psychological factor known as operant conditioning, the addictive need to return over and over in hopes of a reward (a great link from Scoble perhaps?)…

The dominant revenue model of the web today – the ad that urges a click -  embeds distraction into interface design.   The more clicks you take – the more Google makes in ad revenue (distraction pays).   This is not to say that social media doesn’t have extraordinary value – it does – It is at  the heart the emerging social nervous system.   Yet,   The ability to pay attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation of business leaders.  As the zen phrase says, “eat when you eat” meaning, give each thing you do all of your attention.  You will be rewarded from it.    Lately I have been getting back to pen and paper brainstorming.   Away from the computer.

I am constantly fascinated by the myriad “small” changes the Internet is causing in our lives and how these changes, when writ large across society, are totally transformational.   This is one of the network laws I frame as “Small is Big” – In the network all things begin small (the individual, the faint signal, the single message) and roll up through collective action (the viral pass along, the “Digg“) into a swarm of biblical proportion (Obama’s donor list of 13 million).   Here is another example. To get to this example, first take a moment to think through this exercise.   You are back in junior high.  You get a very unremarkable assignment:  Write a paper on the three branches of U.S. government and highlight how the executive branch has changed over time.  How do you complete this assignment?   If you were like me – you would:

1. Head to the library and try and find a generic reference book
2. Look it up in your home encyclopedia – and get a two page (at best) summary.
3. Ask mom and dad for their “expertise” (mine, by the way, had none but they still helped out)
4. Call your smart friend on the telephone with a plea for help

All during this assignment you are copying sections from the encyclopedia in long hand – taking notes from mom or dad – and assembling your paper. Now consider the way this same assignment was completed last week by my friend’s son Jaime.  Jaime is 13 years old. Jaime logged into Facebook and began an instant message chat with three friends working on the same assignment.  Each was using Google to find  excerpts from magazines, newspapers articles, historical archives, university websites etc.   Each friend was sharing the choice links they found via the chat window.   When Jaime found something useful he did a simple cut and paste into a Word Document that was open in another window. Now take a moment to think of how powerful this experience is – and how much it differs from how you and I spent our formative years learning how to learn.  (1) Jaime is working collaboratively, with friends and (2) accessing a repository of documents that were completely out of our reach when we were in junior high.  (3) He is multitasking across several programs and lines of communication at once. (4) Jaime simply uses cut and paste to begin organizing his draft – moving text from primary sources to his personal paper. All of this represents a radical acceleration in productivity,  and shifts working time from mindless task (copy chunks of text in long hand) to  creative and collaborative thinking (what does this text mean in relation to the assignment I am completing, what do my friends see as valuable).  Small is Big:  Imagine this shift multiplied across the hundreds of millions of students like Jaime that are working in a new way – both procedurally (computer based) and behaviorally (collaborating). This shift is occuring not only in our schools but also in our work and home life.