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Mashing up Reality: A Guest Blog by Nortel’s Visiting Fellow
I’m pleased today to host a guest blog from well-known industry thought leader Dr. Andrew Lippman. Andy, one of the founding directors of the MIT Media Lab, is half-way through a year-long sabbatical with Nortel as our first (but certainly not last) Visiting Fellow. The possibility of Andy doing his sabbatical at Nortel was explored by both sides during our Technical Conference last year, during which MIT hosted 300 of our top engineers for an evening event. A professor of Andy’s stature taking a sabbatical to work for a corporation is quite unique and says a great deal about Andy’s opinions of Nortel and our vision.
Among our key objectives in bringing a visionary like Andy into Nortel was for him to bring an outside perspective into the company and to challenge our technology community, on an on-going basis, to think differently. He's making a strong contribution and we’re delighted to have him with us.
Andy Lippman
Some ten years ago I saw my first mashup. At the time, we at the MIT Media Lab, sponsored by Nortel, were also working with Federal Express, and they had just put package tracking on the web. At the same time, they were tracking the users who tracked them. One day they noticed that they were getting a lot of hits from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Now, why would the good citizens of Grand Rapids want to track so many packages - what was generating the traffic?
It turns out that Steelcase is in Grand Rapids, but that alone didn’t explain it. Steelcase doesn’t typically ship office furniture by Fedex. But what they do send overnight are all the keys that people have lost to those filing cabinets and that absolutely, positively have to be delivered the next day. Steelcase had written a program to scrape the Fedex site, grab the delivery information, and insert it into its own web site to support its customers, who wanted the ability to track the information directly on the Steelcase site. Now, of course, mashups are the order of the day, and a future where much of what is on the network is a malleable resource rather than a top-to-bottom service is pretty obvious. But, in the 90's it was a dream.
Where will it go from here, and when? Here are two quick thoughts that might spur some further thinking. These thoughts arise from interactions with the people at Nortel combined with a history at MIT. Both are more hip than you might think.
First, it seems clear to most everyone that in very short order the wireless devices we carry will opportunistically tune into any resource that is available to do whatever business needs to be done. The notion of a single "account" tied to the device is about as tired as the black rotary dial phone. Some of these resources will originate with carriers who transport data over great distances on your behalf, but many will bypass them. Carriers will provide some of these valuable services but, as a minimum, they will provide high-capacity pure pipes.
Much of the traffic will be local and will not use a large area network at all. It will be based on context and place - terms with meanings far deeper than the simple words imply. One of my students at MIT, Nadav Aharony, is building protocols for social, proximate networking that allows you to pass messages and tasks between friends as you run into them. Membership is not solely based on who you are, but on what groups and activities you are engaged in. Nadav (with others) has built a demonstration called "snap and share" that automatically migrates a group photo to the cameras of everyone who is in the picture and their families. We have all been in such shots before, where we nominate one person or a passerby to take our picture, and they have to do it with at least five different cameras so that each owner has his or her shot of the whole gang. With snap and share, one picture will do. In fact, we might as well all stand in front of a camera that is already poised in the environment, and just grab the image from it. Nadav's network also would let you know if one of your online dating possibilities is in the bar that you just entered, or pass along literature to your cohorts at a convention. His point is that you yourself are a wandering suite of services and data that you want to distribute among individuals and groups that you know, without prior arrangement, potentially without your intervention, and often without uploading and downloading it. He is exploring the informational value of just bumping into people. In Nadav's lexicon, you are a carrier.
Other resources in the environment are just as interesting. We ought to be able to tap into supercomputers in the walls that do things for us that are a bit too complicated or power-hungry to do on a handheld device. Translating a phone call from one language to another, for example, will take a while to be efficient on a portable device, but it is easier for a machine that has a better sense of context; think of the subtitles in a movie - they are better done when you know what the movie is about. Likewise, you can't easily hold up your phone and pick out the violin in an orchestra much less identify Josh Bell as the player, or aim your camera at a group and count the people it sees, much less whether your wife is in the shot. These are things that can be done with help from other computers and other mikes and cameras. We ought to be able to mashup reality and have our portable tell us that if we head for checkout counter number three from where we are, we can make our purchases and get to the bus stop in time to catch the bus that is three blocks away and will get us to the train station on time.
My second thought is that this future is arriving far faster than any of us thought even as recently as a few years ago. It used to be that we worried about disruptive technologies. Fifteen years ago, a hallmark of the Media Lab's style was that we built highly cost-ineffective technologies just to see what they could do. We figured they would eventually be affordable. We showed the distant future. Now, everyone anticipates and expects change. The disruptor is the speed of change, not the fact of it. Consider how quickly YouTube revised television and news, things we had researched for twenty-five years. Or recall what Napster did to the recording industry overnight. In other words, disruption is not the disruptor, its rapidity is.
My explanation is that the "clockspeed" of society depends on the age at which we are introduced to the dominant technology of the time. When that was the automobile, society churned on a 16-year cycle -- that's the age when you got your driver's license. Intelligent communications dominates today, and we are introduced to that at age three. You know this if you have two children who went through high school three years apart. One was pre-Facebook and the other was post. Their experience is so vastly different that they can barely talk to each other. In other words, society adapts and evolves far faster today than it did in the past (and it is being driven by the kids...)
From what I've seen so far, Nortel seems to have gotten the message. They are not just listening to kids, they are hiring them -- close to 500 new engineers in the last 15 months alone. Inside the company, they call them "new-grads," and they are simultaneously trained and sincerely listened to. Some of them are experimenting with techniques that take reality, spatiality, and personal context, and mash them into services and communications that are defined on-the-fly, are personalized and automatic. John wrote about the tip of that iceberg when he described a virtual "Global Information Session" a couple of weeks ago. What he didn't tell you was the real action occurred after the presentations, when about 100 of us remained in the space. We bumped into each other and had private and group side conversations. In less than an hour, we had become at home in a world that didn't exist and caught up with buddies that were time zones away. How long before whole companies become mashups like this?
IT and communications are becoming one discipline, each learning from the other. What was once an IT function is now a product definition, and there are no more plain vanilla users. Today's workers live by mashups, invent solutions on-the-fly and don't wear the strait jackets that once were the order of the day. Tomorrow's workers won't distinguish between corporate life and social actions. Their VPN is everyone they know. And tomorrow is just 12 hours away. Watch this space to see how we will make this future happen.
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April 22nd, 2008 at 3:30 pm from John Roese’s Blog » Blog Archive » Public and Private Networks: One or Both in the Future?
[…] Ultimately, we will make real-world mashups that tell you when to head for a market checkout line so you can catch the bus that is now three blocks away and will get you to the train station on time (something I talked about in my last guest entry). […]
May 27th, 2008 at 2:15 pm from Nortel Blog: John Roese’s Blog » Blog Archive » A Sense of Place: Guest Blog by Nortel’s Visiting Fellow