Jun

4

Identity is the New Money

Filed Under B2B, Big Data, Blog, data analytics, data protection, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, Search, semantic web, Uncategorized, Workflow | 1 Comment

Everyone in my world knows that I am as old as Methuselah, except Waitrose . As I pass around the store zapping the barcode on my groceries , I know that the wine and beer , when I reach the pay station , will trigger a call for a human staff member to visually categorize my grey beard as ” licensed to drink alcohol ” . This petulant annoyance at a petty delay resurfaced in my mind while reading Dave Birch’s excellent new book , ” Identity is the New Money ” ( London Publishing Partnership ” Perspectives ” series , 2014 ISBN 978-1-907994-12-8 ) . This should be in the travel bag of every information marketplace manager this summer . It is the very best restatement I have seen of the arguments supporting the idea that the credit card is about to diminish in influence , and that as soon as it has been replaced by identity resting upon the smartphone mobile wallet , cash will rapidly follow it too . And that mobile wallet , an API generating activity , not an app , is fundamentally about our identity management and the way we express our identity . Birch’s thesis now has real credibility , and he is able to illustrate it with case studies from around the globe . His new world bears no resemblance to the things that he used to talk learnedly to me about 20 years ago . Then we speculated ( or he speculated and I listened !) about Mondex and its ilk . A whole generation of software never flowered – until the Smartphone , key change agent here as elsewhere , came along .

The classic of them all is now M-PESA , the cash-and-cardless system which has been so successful in Kenya . Run by the mobile phone operator Safaricom ( part owned by Vodaphone who are also the operators elsewhere in East Africa ) this has become the lifeline money transfer system for much of the region , a way of creating country-city transfers that branch banking could not effectively accomplish , and a way of establishing identity , and with it trust , where it was difficult , outside of village society , to establish it before . But , as Dave Birch makes clear , there will be losers as well as winners . The Mobile Wallet could well take banking out of payments – leaving banks simply as a part of the lending cycle ( and not the most lively there , either , if his comments on Zopa and its rivals are borne out in time) . And then what happens to credit rating in the transactional data slipstream of mobile wallet transactions . Our record will , so to speak , speak for itself . I have argued for a long time that the “big” data risk to credit rating is much greater than the opportunity – it exposes the low value-add of much of the current marketplace – but here I can see a real possibility that rating could become a mobile wallet application very easily indeed . He finds much to admire in PayPal’s increasing incursions into physical commerce , and joyfully lays into the idea that Bitcoin is the answer because of its anonymity . Indeed , like cash it has a degree of anonymity , but this comes about because the log of exchange only indicates ownership to an encrypted key . Anyway , cash seems to me more corrupt than not ( though I had to smile at his stories of adult services vendors in the US using Amazon gift cards as currency with complete anonymity – what a brave investigator this man is !) His insight however on the future of cash is surely sound – we will replace it with thousands of exchangeable objects that are useful or desirable to each individual : ” Here in London we already have the Brixton e-pound . The Local Exchange Trading Systems ( LETS) from physical communities and the platinum pieces and Facebook credits from virtual communities will surge and merge , forming a panoply of private currencies that will make trade more efficient . Why save dollars for your retirement when you can save kilowatt-hours or calories ?”

Even a selective and space – constrained discussion of the book demonstrates that there is much here for anyone who aspires to trade on the network – even if you are trading data or information . What is harder to convey is that this short book is densely packed with argument ; written , praise be , in English of a straightforward and intelligible sort ; has every technical concept explained , and has a breezy and enjoyable good humour that typifies the author himself . Small wonder that he is one of our most revered Telco and payment systems consultants . I can also add that when cash and the credit card follow the cheque into the network twilight , we shall not be publishing books like this at all, and it is no surprize to see how much of this came from Dave’s blog ( http://tomorrowstransactions.com ). And now I have to go – the car is on a parking meter and , having already used the parking app ( universal now in a London where meters are diminishing – since no one has cash enough) to increase my time allowance remotely I have now exhausted that allowance as well as my readers .

May

26

Sitting on the Platform

Filed Under Big Data, Blog, data analytics, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment

In the past week I have attended two MarkLogic World events, one in London and the other in Amsterdam. Your modern software company greets its clients these days in football stadiums (Arsenal and Ajax respectively). Audiences of publishers are large and getting larger – over 500 attended the two events. And enthusiasm grows as more and more data, and content-as-data, owners begin to realise what they must do if they are enable themselves for the age of data. While MarkLogic is not the only platform which can accomplish that enablement, it is by far the most prevalent in “Big Publishing”, and its recent price policy change now brings it into the range of medium-sized and niche players. Adding semantic analysis brings even closer the notion that this type of platform can be instrumental in helping us to ever faster, customer-responsive, new product development, and reminds us of the hassle that many content-providers still suffer in bringing together diverse data streams, created at different points in time within different logical structure, in order to develop new solutions demanded in the market.

It is not hard to get enthusiastic about all of this. It comes on the back of the growing fashion for NoSQL databases, of which MarkLogic is probably the leading exponent. It comes at a time when the visible problems of the relational database world are becoming more important than the historical virtues. This poses problems, and timing issues, for the industry giants (Oracle, IBM, SAP etc). But the last two weeks made one thing very clear to me: those remaining publishers who still think that they can build and maintain their own underlying platform structures are living in a dream world. This game is moving away from them and into a speed of development and complexity of tools that makes it improbable that you can stay competitive and profitable without utilizing a third party solution of this type. This is demonstrated to me by the worry of CTOs in Europe about whether they can recruit enough MarkLogic proficient staff quickly enough.

My interest in all of this derives both from trying to measure how the industry will modernize itself in the face of data-driven demand, and work I have done with MarkLogic on how they present themselves as a solution-vendor. And in the latter role I found myself wondering at these meetings about our ability to reach a common language. One which allows software players to use their own images, but express them in terms that the CTO and the CFO can understand. At present so much of the dialogue of the software vendors is specialized to the world of the CTO and CIO. In publishing we have to engage the people who write the cheques, and while I have regularly in this column pleaded for a greater effort from senior management to really understand something about the software on which their businesses are based, I also feel that vendors must extend their efforts to find a language of communication that makes it easy.

It starts with the very word “platform”. Something on which everything sits? Yes, indeed – but what. In my view, for example, platform without search is a non sequitor: how can you re-use differently structured or unstructured data without it? Or interrogate third party data? Then again, I am with those who define “platform” in enterprize terms. Surely we cannot go on addressing our business as publishers in a series of silos. If the platform carries our data, then it must carry it all – customers, sales, usage, performance as well as product and content, so that the solutions that we build come out of all that we know. And this means that the platform must be addressable in a number of ways: it interested me to see MarkLogic, so long in the XML/XQuery world, now enabling Java and JavaScript.

But if we are worried that their are no standard descriptions of a “platform”, it is even more worrying that the whole world of semantics is now beset by a thorn hedge of imprecise language. And when I commented on this to friends and colleagues, they all, to a man, asked how I would explain it. And since I heard these terms first at a lecture by Tim Berners Lee on SPARQL some long years ago, I share their timidity about departing from the sacred canon. But we really do have to do more than try to persuade the CEO that even if he does not understand triples and triple stores, it will all be all right on the night! So try telling him how to teach a machine to read – vital if is to understand how other machines write in a M2M age. Surely you would start by creating a specialized word list – followed by a lesson in basic sentence structure so that machine understanding of subject/verb/object was on the ground floor of the learning process. And when you had a vocabulary and a way of understanding the positioning of a word in context, and lots and lots of those positional contexts, you next need some rules which allow you to infer meaning in context. Lo and behold, we have built triple stores, taxonomy, inference rules and ontology and still never defined RDF!

The purists will hate this, I know. And I am almost certainly over-generalising, simplifying too much and generally getting it wrong. But my point remains: if we are to carry this next stage of the software revolution which is driving change in our industry then we have to find the words to express it to the Board, and despite the huge amount of re-platforming taking place amongst the 500 or so publishers that I have sat with in the past two weeks, we do not yet approach an explanatory language.

Footnote: One linguistic innovation – bitemporality! Introducing MarkLogic 8, “bitempoaral” was used as a term for dating content arrival and subsequent access, a problem that I have always encountered in forays into legal data (What law was in force then? etc) and in compliance datasets (Did they have the information? Did they look at it at the time or subsequently?) This is a very valuable additional resource and again indicates a vendor listening to its clients, but I hope they never have to defend this miscegenated term before an audience of lawyers! OK, I know it is the correct expression in the SQL world, but when we speak to the CEO please can we call it an Audit trail?

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