Do you ever look at a bird or a tree and wonder “I wish I knew more about it”? I’m useless with birds. Probably even more useless with trees. In some ways it is strange: I could close my eyes and name more trees and more birds than many other people, I have an excellent vocabulary in that context. But when it comes to connecting the word with the real thing, my knowledge is poor.

I used to tell myself it was because I grew up in a concrete jungle. But after a few visits to India I realised this wasn’t true, every city I visited had its fair share of trees and birds and plants and flowers and fruit and I didn’t know which was which.

Now, as I grow older, I live in hope. I live in hope that soon I will have the tools to do something about my ignorance. In fact I look forward to a time when I can indulge myself and learn about all the things in nature I know so little about it.

Some time ago I was looking through the iPhone app store and I noticed this:

iBird Explorer. Everything you always wanted to know about birds, sitting there in the palm of your hand.

Well, almost everything. Because tools like iBird can sometimes have what I’ve heard described as the dictionary problem. If you want to know how to spell something, where do you go? The dictionary. And what do you need to know in order to use the dictionary? The spelling of the word. Mmm-hmm. Don’t get my drift? Imagine someone wondering how to spell “diarrhoea”.

So I thought to myself. IBird Explorer is great, it’s a fantastic looking app, and I’ll buy a copy as soon as they have one for Berkshire or Southern England or even the UK. But wouldn’t it be nice if we could merge the functionality of iBird with that of Shazam?

I love Shazam, I’ve enjoyed using it ever since it came out, in the days when all you had to do was call 2580 and point the phone at where the music was playing. As they say on their site:

That’s what I want to be able to do. Identify a tree or a flower simply by pointing a phone at it and tapping “tag”. Identify a bird simply by letting the phone hear its call and tapping “tag”.

It’s going to happen. Sean Park, an erstwhile colleague and a good friend of mine, used to wax lyrical about the “future”, a time when everyone had powerful devices in their hands, devices that could be used to crowdsource information about all kinds of things, starting with the weather and climate. He saw the power of GPS-meets-camera-meets-computer-in-your-hand a long time before it became real. Well, that future is here. Now.

We spend too much time worrying about all the Big Brother things that can happen to us because of the Web. CCTV Nation, that sort of thing.

Have you read the papers recently? Don’t you think we’ve had enough bad news for a while? Don’t you think, perhaps we’ve had a teensy bit too much bad news? Just a teensy bit?

So I’m going to spend time dreaming dreams and seeing visions, of the things that could be, of the things that could be soon.

Like having a Shazam for birds and trees and flowers. When the power of portable computing meets the power of ubiquitous connectivity to do more useful things.

And it’s not just about birds and trees. It’s about cars and planes and dogs and cats and fruit and flowers. Yes, and people too. Which raises all kinds of privacy questions, but we might as well get used to answering them. Because it’s going to happen.

Point. Click. Press “tag”. Get the sound or image analysed. Match the pattern. Get the answer.

[Incidentally, today we can talk about sound or image. Tomorrow we will be able to add smell and texture to that list, as sensors get cleverer.]

As Linus’s Law says, Given Enough Eyeballs All Bugs Are Shallow. It’s not just about code, it’s about information in general. Sensors everywhere, connected to that great database in the sky. Point. Click. Get the answer.

Some of the reasons I look forward to my retirement. To a time when I can learn more about birds and trees and flowers.

Following Suw Charman-Anderson’s post on the subject some months ago, I committed to writing a post about a woman I admire in technology, and to publishing that post today, March 24 2009. So here goes.

I never realised how hard it would be. Hard because there are so many women I admire in technology: I landed up with a shortlist of over 25.

But that didn’t seem reasonable. So I worked on whittling it down. And it was hard. Really hard.

I wanted to write about my wife, whom I admire greatly. We’ll be married 25 years this September. I wouldn’t have amounted to anything without her. I still won’t amount to anything without her. But I guess it would be stretching a point to claim she’s in technology just because she’s married to me and she puts up with me. Thank you Shane.

So then I thought about my first job. My first break came from a woman, Wendy Marlow, who hired me into Burroughs Corporation three decades ago. She was an ex-journalist like me, in fact I wouldn’t have dreamt of applying to a computer firm except for the fact that Wendy went and placed an ad in what was the UK Press Gazette. She encouraged me to dream big dreams, and backed me when I needed the backing. Thank you Wendy.

And my first boss there, my first boss ever, was a woman, Liz Jackson, who worked for Wendy. Between Wendy and Liz they somehow managed to manage me, mentor me, bend me, shape me. I still have immense fondness and admiration for them, because again I wouldn’t have amounted to much without their help. Liz had the harder job of having to deal with me on a day-to-day basis, to coach me and to correct me. Which was hard. [But probably not as hard as having to put up with my playing Board Cricket with her husband Warrick, who’d invented this amazing board-based ultra-realistic cricket game. So amazing that it took as long to play as a real-life Test…. ] Thank you Liz.

My biggest mentor in tech is also a woman, Esther Dyson. Release 1.0 was pretty much a bible for me, and PC Forum was an annual retreat, and for me neither would really have existed without Esther. She didn’t just influence the way I think, she also made sure that I “always made new mistakes”. Thank you Esther.

Then there’s the person who encouraged me to start writing this blog, Julie Meyer. [In fact The Kernel for This Blog was written for an event Julie was putting on]. Julie introduced me to Niklas Zennstrom when he was on the verge of launching Skype, and there were some fascinating conversations with him and her. She also introduced me to the works of Carlota Perez, whose seminal Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital continues to influence me to this day. Julie also got me into thinking about microcredit at a time no one else was, and mobile payments before they became common currency. A key influence and a good friend. Thank you Julie.

So as you can see I’ve been really blessed. My wife. The person who gave me my first job. My first boss. My biggest tech influence and mentor. A big supporter and encourager.

And then there’s all of you, so many women I admire and respect and am proud to count amongst my friends. You know who you are. Your name is Legion, for you are many.

And this is my way of saying thank you to all of you. And to Ada Lovelace. And Suw for giving me this opportunity.

I’ve probably been in love with San Francisco ever since I saw Bullitt as a callow youth. Soon after that I became a Deadhead and the love affair grew; all this without ever having visited the city. Then, maybe two decades ago, I did for the first time, and had the opportunity to visit City Lights. And that, given my love of books, was that. Done deal.

Now, as of today, I have a new reason to keep returning to San Francisco.

Dosa. As in the restaurant on Fillmore named after the South Indian dish dosa or dosai. Absolutely fantastic. Worth going there just for the selection of dosas there:

I went there tonight as the guest of good friends Sabeer and Tania Bhatia, of Hotmail, Live Documents and Nanocity fame. Tania, a Calcuttan like me, told me that the Habanero-Mango Masala Dosa was a must-have. And it was. Absolutely delightful. Good dosa, thin and papery without tasting like cardboard, a fresh potato filling that wasn’t too mushy and liquid-y, a habanero-based sauce to die for, all accompanied by coconut chutney and sambar of a very high order. My starter, the north/south samosas, was also pretty good, but not in the same class as the dosa.

Sadly, the other dish that Sabeer and Tania raved about, the mustard halibut, had done a lateral arabesque off the menu. I hope it returns, at least long enough for me to try it once.

But in the meantime, if you get the chance to go to Dosa, go. It’s worth it.

[And speaking of City Lights: I’ve just found out that Lawrence Ferlinghetti is about to turn 90 next week. And only this week my 17-year old son asked me to get him a copy of Kerouac’s On The Road, which I went and did. I couldn’t find my reading copy. The only other copy I have used to be Robert Pirsig’s; he chose to bind it together with Baron Munchhausen. I found the potential juxtaposition of On The Road, Munchhausen and Zen And the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance too tempting to miss.]

Is value really created, or is it bestowed?

People have used phrases broadly equivalent to “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” for millenia. Margaret Hungerford is considered to be the first person to have used the precise phrase in print (in 1878, in Molly Bawn). James Joyce, pictured above, referred to the phrase and its use by Hungerford in Ulysses, page 701).  William Shakespeare sought to evoke something similar when he wrote “Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye” in Love’s Labours Lost.

In similar vein, in 1910, Charles Mann and George Twiss (in their book, Physics) raised the question “If a tree falls in a forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?”. More precisely, what they actually said was:

When a tree falls in a lonely forest, and no animal is near by to hear it, does it make a sound? Why?

Again, the concept evoked was not new even then. George Berkeley, a 17th century Irish philosopher, raised a similar question in his theories of immaterialism, summarised as “To be is to be perceived”.

[My thanks to stock.xchng for the photograph.]

Throughout my life, I’ve  heard the phrase “Perception is reality”, particularly at work. [When I was younger, I used to feel its usage was egregious, and I had to restrain myself from saying “But the perception is wrong. Plain wrong. How can you say that it is real? It needs to be corrected, that’s all.”]

I can hear you saying “Well that’s all very interesting, JP, but just where is all this going? What point are you trying to make?”. I’d better get on with it then.

It’s like this. For some years now I’ve been wrestling with the implications of our moving from “scarcity economics” to “abundance economics”. Maybe I’m getting obsessed by it, I cannot tell. You tell me. But when I look at issues to do with DRM and IPR, I think to myself “scarcity versus abundance”. When I see institutional pushback on social software in enterprises, I think to myself, scarcity versus abundance. When I see government immune systems keep finding ways to circumvent “freedom of information” legislation, I think to myself, scarcity versus abundance.

My thoughts on this probably go all the way back to Cluetrain. [I find it hard to believe it was all of ten years ago. Incidentally, there is a special, updated, 10th Anniversary edition due out later this year. Couldn’t be more timely.] More recently, they’ve been influenced by all the discussions around Vendor Relationship Management.

And this is where I am at present. I think that there’s a shift taking place everywhere, a shift that strikes at the very root of industrial-age “value creation” concepts. I think that these concepts were meaningful when monopolies and oligopolies were common, a consequence of ownership of factors of production in the industrial age. Scarcity was often real, or at worst could be manufactured through hoarding or cartels. The creation of value was closely tied to the creation of scarcity.

The World Wide Web celebrated its 20th anniversary last Friday. We live in a digital age: it is no longer that simple to create scarcity, particularly when the asset in question is digital in nature. Anything that can be copied will be copied. As I’ve said before:

Every artificial scarcity will be met with an equal and opposite artificial abundance

[There’s a simple way to avoid all this. Make sure the asset is never available in digital form. But then you have to give up the idea of making money “selling” the asset in digital form.]

Physical things become scarce. Digital things become abundant. That is their nature. And when things become abundant, I think we shift from an era of value creation to one of value bestowal. Value is no longer created as a result of scarcity (real or artificial); value is bestowed upon something by the purchaser, the viewer, the listener.

Which is why we have phenomena like Kutiman. Amazing stuff. Here’s his wikipedia entry, and here’s where you can find the videos he’s made. But what’s really telling for me is this statement on the website:

Now that’s “abundance economics” in action. “Check out the credits for each video – you might find yourself…”

Scarcity economics is being attacked from many directions in the digital space. People are realising that, as something commoditises, “ownership” decreases in value. So suddenly access becomes enough. This spawns a series of useful business models such as LendAround and Spotify.

There will always be a premium paid for real scarcity. Creators of valuable things will always be able to receive reward for the value they create. But the marketing and distribution models associated with real physical scarcity cannot be imposed that easily on the digital world.

• Not because everyone’s born a criminal, wanting to “steal” “content”, whatever that might be.
• Not because everyone has stopped wanting to be part of an “audience”, whatever that might be.
• But because value is bestowed, not created, in an abundant world.

Does this mean that many things that used to be expensive will now become free? Not necessarily. The only things that will tend towards “free” are those things that were abundant in nature (i.e. digital and copyable) yet were artificially constrained to being scarce.

I’ve written about this before, but it’s worth repeating. Kevin Kelly, in his seminal article Better Than Free, does a great job of showing us how to make money in such environments. His thesis is fairly simple: if you want to make real money, find something that’s not easily copyable. Or, when things are abundant, make sure your business model is about the new scarcities that emerge.

It may not feel like it, but we’re moving to the Age of Abundance. Value is going to be bestowed, not created. And our business models will have to reflect that. And our laws. It’s just a matter of time.