Open Gardens

This post brings together my thinking from a number of different areas in response to many questions at conferences/blogs etc

The Business models for Open Mobile/Converged media are converged services based on Attention and metadata ..

To expand on what this means ..

a) Attention and especially the co-relation of metadata from various media formats(old and new) – is the main business driver for ‘Open’.

b) Different media formats (like TV) will adopt this to greater or lesser degree.

c) It is also the vision of Google to understand and leverage as much metadata as possible without ‘controlling or restricting’ the user.

d) This metadata can be used to create better services(by that I mean more personalised, interactive services)

e) As users and the other media formats (like TV) understand this vision a bit more, there will be increasing demands from users for controlling their own profile

f) Hence, see Google’s initiatives of allowing users to influence advertisements based on profiles

g) There may be a model for a completely independent third party or user managed vault for the lack of a better word that keeps the profile. Attempts have been made in this direction for a while including OpenId to some extent(esp. Open Id 2.0 which has attributes) and more recently Myid.is

h) ‘Mobile’ of course fits in very well in this due to capturing content at the point of inspiration, context aware content etc etc

i) Increasingly we are seeing a new trend of ‘consumer’ technologies/developments which influence enterprise(unlike the other way round). Ex Cloud(hotmail), social networking(facebook), mobile – all originate from consumer and go to enterprise.

j) This will mean that these developments – Cloud, Mobile and Social networking will act as a bridge/glue across various other means like TV, Enterprise etc.

k) The common thread that unifies Cloud + Mobile + Social networking will be services – driven by attention and metadata.

l) I see an extension of the ‘mobile’/'TV’ stack as follows. taking example of Android

Chipset + OS + App layer(Web/Dalvik) + network + Cloud(web and mobile) + Social networking/Cloud

This is one of the key ways I ‘differ’ from the traditional telecoms view i.e. I see the whole Web + Mobile + TV ecosystem as one – and with metadata(call it Web 2.0/Mobile Web 2.0 et al – as the unifying glue). That’s why specific technologies and Mobile developments don’t excite me too much if they are not interoperable at EITHER the network level OR the service level. In contrast, Twitter fits the interop model at a service /platform level – hence powerful

Example:

1) Mobile payment is not exciting unless it has a chance to be ubiquitous – which it will be at a service layer(for which it will be decoupled from the network)

2) Location took the same route

3) Emerging platforms like the Internet of things will also have the same service – metadata model

4) The ability to harness metadata and the influence of that metadata on new, converged services will be the REAL differentiator for businesses

So, ‘Open’ goes hand in hand with ‘Metadata’ (and consequently attention leading to better services)

m) I see ‘social networking’ as the topmost layer of the ‘stack’ which spans both Telecoms and Web(and also ultimately TV)

n) This will mean that data portability will be an important component(as will be the ability of users to maintain their own profiles) and we will see the definition of ‘Open’ move from open standards/Open source to a wider definition of Data portability . (Which ties to attention business models)

Two things

a) I blogged about Variant of APML for mobile devices. Also see the work on attention.xml from tantek Celik and others

and

b) See Alex Iskgold’s 20 thoughts on attention

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