People, places, technology, and such

I was checking some locations on the Indian Yahoo Maps web site, and I realized that they have implemented landmark based directions.

For those that have never visited India, the concept may need some explanation: in Indian cities street names are almost useless: only some of the main roads have recognizable names, and even in those cases there are no signs displaying those names. Smaller streets do not have names, or if they have them, usually add to the confusion (there are whole neighborhoods full of numbered main and cross streets that do not seem to follow any predetermined pattern). If you add the fact that building numbers are almost inexistent, it is almost impossible to find a place only with the street name and number.

The solution is a landmark based address system. Basically, when you give somebody directions on how to get to some place, they are based on a series of landmarks, usually well known building, such as temples, official buildings, shopping centers, or any other specific street features that stand out. Any address is useless unless it includes the corresponding set of landmarks.

The consequence is that the mapping and directions applications that had been developed with the more regular American or European street systems in mind were useless for Indian cities, and they had to adapt to the specifics of Indian street systems and support landmarks. Yahoo Maps implementation is not perfect: it provides landmarks when giving directions from one place to another, but it does not allow you to include a landmark in an address (at least it has not worked for me…); but, with all its limitations, it is a step forward to adapt mapping and GIS systems to local needs

On one side, this is a clear example on how technological solutions have to adapt to local specific conditions, but this development also opens questions about the influence of technology on habits and attitudes: as GPS navigation, mapping software, and related technologies become more popular in countries such as India, will hey change the way addresses and directions are given?, does the inclusion of certain landmarks in a system such as Yahoo Maps say something about the relevance of that specific building?, who determines that a certain building and or site is a landmark?.

I can imagine, in the future, corporations, shopping malls, and other commercial sites paying for the inclusion of their corresponding locations as landmarks, and if that becomes a source of revenue for this type of services, is it possible that landmark based systems are also implemented in mapping services for other places?, and would that change the way we think and model our cities?…

I’ve been back to Bangalore for a couple of weeks on a business trip.

I usually get quite a lot of questions about India when I get back from these trips. India is second only to China on attracting attention of business people and the public in general; but usually, the knowledge about the country and its economical, political, and social conditions is heavily mediated by the media news.

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog entry from India about how western media usually approach the economic and social evolution of India in the last years, linked to the growth in IT and IT enabled services, and the stereotypes and cliches that are common in this type of analysis.

The authors description of a typical article about India seems to apply only to the English business oriented media. In Spain, in the last month and a half, there have been only two news bits about India in El País (my preferred local newspaper, and, discounting its political prefernces, a quite reliable source of information). One of them was quite a lengthly article about sati, the ancient practice of widow inmolation in the husband’s funeral pyre. The article headline talked about the survival of this practice in today’s India, and only when you got into the fine print you read that two cases have happened in the last couple of years and, in total, since independence in 1947, about 40 cases have been registered (remember that we are talking about a country with a population of more than 1 billion). The other was a short clip about the election of a woman as the country president, the first one to occupy the highest (but with very little real power) political position since the country independence in 1947.

The common thread of the stereotypical article about Indian economic growth and the Spanish generalist media coverage about India is the focus on what makes the country different, while downplaying any development that may approach it somehow, even if it is just a little bit, to the concept of developed countries.

However, those development and changes exist, and even if they are small steps, the huge size of the Indian population male them very relevant. For example, in terms of technology evolution, the widespread diffusion of mobile phones usage has open lots of possibilities for new applications and use models that very few companies seem to be tapping in (the major exception I know about is the work that Nokia is doing to understand mobile phone usage in developing countries and that Jan Chipchase captures in his blog).

A few years ago, C. K. Prahalad popularized the concept of The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid. Maybe we should also start talking about the Future Innovations at the bottom of the pyramid…

The text literally says: For the exclusive use of the Fire Brigade.

In the urban landscape, as in technological innovation, there is a constant tension between the originally intended usage of artifacts and spaces, and the creative modes of use that grow out of the daily interaction with them.

There are two approaches to this tension: the coercive approach, designing in a way that prevents different usages (mis-usages?) and, when design by itself is not enough, adding norms and rules, and the extensive approach, enabling, by design, the capability to add new modes of use that can extend the original intent.

Both of them have advantages and drawbacks: it is very difficult to completely prevent different usage models unless you resort to a heavily normative (policed) system; the best technological example being the completely unsuccessful attempt to prevent the sharing of music and, in general, content on the internet. But it is also quite difficult to ensure that the proliferation of new modes of use does not have a negative impact on the capability to deliver the original intended functionality…

One of the interesting consequences of all the noise around Web2.0 is all the renewed interest in social networking. If you read some Web2.0 evangelizers, or if you just google ’social networking’, it may seem that the whole concept has just been invented a couple of years ago with MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn, or any other of the zillion sites that are, more or less, trying to get attached the social networking label.

Obviously, as much as you try to upgrade them with the 2.0 version number, social networking is not only about those web sites, but rather an activity quintessential to human nature. Social networking is about linking and relating to other people and how to use those relationships to acquire and share knowledge, to get things done, or just to enjoy them. Technologies and technological artifacts do mediate in social networks (actor-network theorists would say that they are part of the social networks…), but no technology, and specially no trendy name applied to a tecgnology, can change the fact that we maintain links with other people and that we use those social relations tor multiple purposes.

The study of social networking is not something new either: in the early sixties Everett Rogers studied the process of diffusion of innovations and concluded that between adopters plaid a key role in the speed at which innovations were accepted, or rejected, by users; and in the seventies, Mark Granovetter published his seminal paper on the strength of weak ties in social networks, that opened the field of social network analysis.

But although social networking is a natural human activity, its characteristics and effects are completely mediated by specific cultures. In Maximum City, a book about Bombay (Mumbai) writen by an American of Indian origin (an NRI), Suketu Mehta captures very well the difference in importance and meaning attached to social networking in two different cultures: India vs the US (and the UK):

There is very little you can do anonymously as a member of the vast masses. (…)It has to be one person linking with another who knows another and so until you reach your destination; the path your request takes has to go through this network. You cannot jump the chain by going directly to someone who doesn’t know you connected only by the phone line. Then it becomes a buyer and seller transaction rather than a favour. A friend went from Bombay to London and told me she was horrified that she could spend an entire day (…) without ever needing to make a personal connection.

Technologies (telephone, e-mail, Web2.0,… ) can mediate the formation and maintenance of social networks, expanding its reach and increasing (or diminishing) the strength of certain social links. It is also very probable that the adoption and use of certain technologies will help changing the cultural values and meanings associated to social networks and how they are used. But that does not mean, as it may be inferred from some of the media hype, and as much as some marketing gurus may like it, that social networks are not specific internet sites or features added to web services.

(The worst example I’ve seen of the misappropriation of the social networking concept and term is the title of an article in cnet: Ten reasons social networking doesn’t work. Of course, it talks about some reasons why some of the web sites dubbed as social networking sites do not stand to the expectations created)

Through Nicolas Nova’s blog, I got access to a paper on infrastructure and ubiquitous computing. The point that authors try to make is that infrastructure, defined as ‘the structures that lie below or beneath the surface of applications and interactions’ plays a key role in defining how we experience and interact with the world.

What I found more interesting is how the authors do not focus only on what we would call technological infrastructure. Infrastructure is not only about power supply, broadband connections and wi-fi hotspots, but also about space and things that populate it, about the ways we interact with, and the meanings we attach to them.

This conceptualization of infrastructure is aligned with Latour’s view of the agency of objects. Objects play a role in the course of actions, they participate, as actors, in the formation of associations. But these associations are difficult to trace except in specific moments when they are rendered visible: when there are innovations, i.e. new object types or modes of interaction are created; when they are approached by users unfamiliar with them, or when they stop working (due to accidents, breakdowns, strikes…). These are exactly the situations in which infrastructure becomes relevant: when there is some change in it (innovation), when it is approached by somebody not familiar with it, or when simply it is not working any more, at least as the user would expect it to work.

New applications, new technologies, new artifacts, can change the strength of some associations, and maybe create new ones. In that process, part of the underlying infrastructure is going to become visible and relevant again, it is going to evolve and change, as the innovations and the way we associate to them adapt to it, and finally become themselves part of the infrastructure.

In the last months I’ve had several times a dejavu feeling. All this web2.0 noise is starting to sound more and more like the .com thing nine years ago.

On one side, it is a little bit deceiving: am I so old to tell yarns and anecdotes about how insanely money was made and lost those days?. But looking at the past is also a good way to reflect on what is going on, and question whether past lessons have been learned…

All these thoughts come because I’ve just read an article on the Lessons from the Las Bubble, and I found some of the ideas really interesting.

One of the best points is when the authors talk about network externalities and exponential growth. They rightly point out that the fact that you have an internet based business model does not imply that you are going to have network effects. Network externalities are not about the technology you use to build your service, but about the way users use it and value the social network that is build on top. And that was one of the mistakes repeated over and over again in the .com era. There are no network externalities to draw from in a internet based retail store, as there are no network externalities in setting up a brick and mortar retail store.

But that should not be a problem for Web2.0, isn’t it?. Since Web2.0 is all about social networking, that mistake will not happen again: we are definitely going to have network externalities and, consequently, exponential growth. Wrong!!!

The fact that some of the technologies collected under the Web2.0 name enable the formation (I should say the facilitation) of social networks does not mean that any venture in the Web2.0 world is going to build one. It is not about social networks, it is about the value of they provide to users.

There have been lots of serious studies on how social networks are formed, used, and, at the end, valued by people. Social networking is a natural human activity, not something that was invented a couple of years ago by MySpace or Flickr. The fact that these two business (and a few others) have been very successful at using the human tendency to interact with other people to extract an economic profit does not mean that any venture that talks about network externalities in its business plan is going to be as successful and profitable.

Standard wars are, probably, one of the better studied cases in technology and innovation management textbooks. There is no serious book in these areas that does not cite the VHS vs. Beta case, as a paradigm of how non technical issues play a key role in the evolution of technologies. This is a concept that is, very often, difficult to assume by pure techies that think that the best technology, best using some quantifiable measure such as speed, image quality,…, is the one that should win regardless of the environment. Market, society, culture… are concepts that are easier to describe than to measure (and, consequently, predict), so they should not appear in the engineer’s drawing board.

But standard wars are here to stay, as one of the modes in which conflicts of interests around technology definition and evolution are deployed and, in most of the cases, closed, with winners and losers.

And they are important: can anybody think that internet, as the network of networks, would have evolved to the Internet we know today if the ISO/OSI standards, and its underlying centralized model, had won over TCP/IP in the standards war over computer networking protocols in the 1980s?. Usually, there are high stakes in the game (benefit, control, power,…) and the winner takes it all.

And that’s why standards wars are fought with all the weapons available, and in the Internet age, that means, of course, the Internet itself. Standard wars are as much about perception than technology, and Internet is, today, one of the best mechanisms to build or destroy perceptions.

One of the standards wars that is very active these days is the one over standards for document file formats. It has been going on for a couple of years now, with different contenders and fronts: Microsoft with Open Office XML (OOXML) vs. IBM and OASIS with OpenDocument Format(ODF) on the office document front; Microsoft with XML Paper Specification (XPS) vs. Adobe with the Portable Document Format (PDF) on the fixed document front.

As in any standards war, different companies and interest groups are trying to push their standard as the one that better meets customer needs, which usually means the customer needs that can be met by their own standard. The difference is that, in this case, the battle is not only being fought in committee meetings, ballots over draft specs, or corporate alliances. Blogs and wikis have are the places where all the tricks (some of them clean, some of them dirty…) are being played, trying to change the perception of the different technologies at stake.

In this framework, the latest news about Microsoft paying somebody to change the contents of the wikipedia article on OOXML to make it sound more positive, and the reaction that it has caused shows how, for good or for bad, Internet has become an important medium to influence the shaping of technology.

For some this may sound positive: more democracy in the technology shaping process, while for others, it may sound really unsettling as more and more non technical issues will influence what gets designed and implemented. Welcome to the standards wars in the Internet age….

So, here I am, starting my second adventure in the blogosphere…

Some visitors may already know about Ven y Dime Cómo Vives, the blog (in Spanish) where my wife and I write about the experiences of an expat family in Bangalore. After a few months of posting, I guess I’m hooked on the idea of writing for some (mostly unknown) audience, and I have decided to try a different experiment. My purpose is to write about stuff more related to my work and my professional, and academic, interests.

I suppose that means that I need to explain which are those interests: I have been involved in technology development and innovation for more than 15 years, mostly in the software area, directly working for, or indirectly interacting with, some of the leading technology MNCs. If I had to summarize my learnings during these years in one phrase it would be: technology itself is only a 10% of the total equation. There are lots of other factors: economic, social and cultural that play a key role in the development, success and adoption of new technologies and innovations.

That’s how I got more and more interested on the interactions between innovation, technology and society and I started a PhD in STS (Society and Technology Studies). Sadly, the PhD work has been parked for the last year and a half, first due to some family changes that kept me quite busy, and then because I decided to take an assignment to work in Bangalore, India in setting up a new development group.

The experience has been great, both from a personal, experiencing a very different culture and way of life, and professional perspective, learning how to deal with knowledge transfer, remote research and development models, and building capabilities in a brand new team. Actually, lots of the concepts and ideas that I learned from my PhD courses have been quite useful for this assignment.

So I have decided to blog about some of these topics: innovation, technology, society, globalization, culture, and their interactions.

Whenever you venture into a new project there is some anxiety about what is going to happen and how it is going to evolve, but I think that I’m going to enjoy this one, at least as much as I enjoy my other life in the blogosphere… Lets see what happens!

A final note: Pardon our Appearance!. I have just started the blog and have not had much time to customize the template. I expect to have some time in the next few weeks to give it a more atractive, and personalized, look