GigaOM » connectedness

Uber, Data Darwinism and the future of work

Om Malik — Sun, 17 Mar 2013 23:04:58 +0000

A year ago, I hosted a small conclave of fellow (early) explorers of the post-html Internet. And while we are not of the SnapChat generation, most of us grew up connected. There were some who helped build the gear that runs the post-1999 Internet, and some who built the space ships. A neuroscientists who studies mobile and online behaviors, a digital musican and a music enterprenuer; data nerds, visual designers and an infrastructure wizard who streams happiness one stream at a time. And then there was me, who starts the day connected and ends it connected.

Connectendess — which is state of always being connected to the Internet and thus to people, things, life, work, commerce, love, hate and anger – is the single thought that dominates my mind, and it defines how I view everything, how I evaluate everything. It is my telescope and it is my microscope. I don’t see the world in silos called mobile, broadband, browser, app or television. Instead, it is all about being in the state of connectedness. I wanted to pick their brain about how the state of connectedness was going to change the future and redefine society itself.

While there were dozens of takeaways from the day-long idea fest, here’s what has stayed front-and-center in my mind: the challenges of the connected future are less technical and more legislative, political and philsophical. The shift from a generation that started out un-connected to one that is growing up connected will result in conflicts, disruption and eventually the redrawing of our societal expectations. The human race has experienced these shifts before — just not at the speed and scale of this shift.

The coming intellectual and societal upheaval brought on by the state of connectedness is aptly reflected in the recent fracas between Uber, a San Francisco-based personal transportation platform, and the freelance army of drivers who man its cars. They were protesting what they thought was unfair treatment by the company. ”They’re running a sweatshop with an app. They don’t have the balls to come down and talk to us,” Raj Alazzeh, a driver with SF Best Limo and a spokesperson for the drivers, told Liz Gannes. “Uber chooses to call us partners for their tax benefit. If they called us employees, they’d have to cover us all.”

Follow-up stories including comments by Uber co-founder and CEO Travis Kalanick seem to indicate that the protesters are drivers whose accounts were deactivated because of passenger feedback. It is easy to understand Travis’ standpoint – our customers don’t like these drivers, so we are cutting them out. And I can understand the drivers’ point of view: They have never been rated and discarded like this before, and are rightfully angry.

Are we ready for a Quantified Society

However, if you look at the story from the context of just Uber, then you will miss the real narrative. This isn’t the last time we will hear about it — there are more Uber-like companies with on-demand workforce. There have been incidents on AirBnB.

That last comment by Alazzeh resonated with me because it encapsulates what work will be in the future and what the next evolution of labor unrest could be. And it also highlights a problem we have not thought about just yet: data-darwinism.

In the industrial era, labor unrest came when the workers felt that the owners were profitting wrongfully from them. I wonder if in the connected age, we are going to see labor unrest when folks are unceremoniously dropped from the on-demand labor pool.

What are the labor laws in a world where workforce is on demand? And an even bigger question is how are we as a society going to create rules, when data, feedback and, most importantly, reputation are part an always-shifting equation? (Reputation, by the way, is going to be the key metric of the future, Quora founder and Facebook CTO Adam D’Angelo told me in an interview.)

At present we rank photos, rate restaurants, like or dislike brands, retweet things we love. But if this idea of collaborative consumption takes hold — and I have no reason to think it won’t — we will be building a quantified society. We will be ranking real humans. The freelance workers — like the Uber drivers and Postmates couriers — are getting quantified. The best ones will continue to do well, but what about the others, the victims of this data darwinism? Do they have any protection or any rights?

I admit I don’t have any answers. And while I am as much of a techno-optimist as the next blogger, I don’t even know where to start. I do think it is important for us to start talking about what the etiquette of a connected and a quantified society will be.

I will use myself as an example. I would say, on most days, that I live up to my idea of a normal online citizen — living online like I do offline. I try not to talk about my family. I am an active Uber user. And I take every opportunity to provide feedback. But I don’t take the ratings system lightly, regardless of whether I’m giving someone one star or three stars or five stars.

Just as I am not shy about awarding five stars for timeliness and quality of service, I am happy to chastise, too. And I do the same for every service I typically use — Postmates or TaskRabbit or AirBnB or Exec. What if I give someone a wrong ranking? Given how often we are likely to rank and rate in the future, will wrong ratings even bring about any sense of guilt?

It is the 21st century. We are more narcissistic and more self-absorbed. Does human decency and sense of fair play shift to the online realm as well? It’s hard to know. I mean, we have seen some of the nicest people in real life turn into a baboon’s backside once they are online and are anonymous. Authenticity in a world where we are trying to play a role in a movie starring us takes on a entirely different hue.

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The new guard: Look at who is buying technology companies now

Om Malik — Tue, 08 Jan 2013 05:00:31 +0000

A few days ago, I pointed out the inevitability of the Internet and how it was going to play an increasing role in the companies that have traditionally not been classified as technology companies. Those companies — big and small — are going to find it difficult to find a future without utilizing technology. And that means embracing mobile, cloud, data and the state of connectedness.

For me that is one of the more exciting developments over the last few years and it should excite everyone in the technology ecosystem, especially startups. Traditionally, the buyers for startups have been the big tech companies themselves — Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and sometimes Amazon and Apple. Sure Cisco would pony up some big dollars or HP would get drunk and blow its cash on something, but the big buyers for the web-and-oriented startups have usually been big web & mobile giants.

Now we are seeing the emergence of a group of companies who seem to be hungry buyers for technology. Just take a look: we are not even ten days into 2013 and we have already seen had two big acquisitions by what we in the Valley don’t see as technology companies. Avis bought ZipCar for about $500 million and today Athena Health announced that it was spending about $293 million on a doctor-focused app/service called Epocrates.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of this in coming months. Why? The reasons are not that complex actually. Typically the tech giants buy startups (loosely speaking) in order to acquire talent and in very rare cases, technology (like Apple buying Siri). But for the most part, the motive behind Internet giants’ buying frenzy is mostly about finding the right people to keep competing with their rivals.

The big non-technology companies have similar needs but they are in much more desperate need of this makeover. Not only do they need the talent, these traditional corporations need a new technology-centric way of thinking if they need to evolve their business models for the post iPhone world.

Today a retailer like Macy’s or Walmart can get by on the strength of their scale and might. However, if in the future they need to combat Amazon, they need to adopt internet business practices and use data intelligently. My colleague Derrick Harris recently wrote that big data technologies, at least for now, are like manufacturing robots — helping people do things they do, faster, at a larger scale and cheaper than alternatives.

A physical retailer of tomorrow would somehow have to create a compelling app experience and use that data, geo-location information and buying habits to offer in-store discount (or a shopping experience) that is highly customized to an individual. If they don’t — well, Amazon or someone like Amazon is going to get my dollars.

Today it might not seem obvious, but a year or two from now, companies big and small are going to realize that emergence of mobile and other newer technologies are going to redefine the a business experience. As Ed Aten in a guest post pointed out this weekend, all businesses are now 24-hour operations. “The offline world is filled with friction, inefficiency, incomplete information, tedium and excess capacity,” he wrote. And that also means inefficient businesses and other edifices of a different era.

Think of this way: Today, a problem with your local Starbucks isn’t localized. Thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the internet is the new weapon of mass complaining. Price checks conducted via mobile apps are going to become a default behavior, especially as a whole generation of internet users (natives) grows up to become the next big consumer group.

To be clear, I am not saying that the traditional companies will stop doing what they do. It is just that they need to do it much more smartly, using technology and understanding that the internet is as much a business reality as say outsourcing or scale. A friend explained it best when he said that the U.S. auto industry in the 1970s and 1980s suffered because of process innovation at their Japanese counterparts. The state of connectedness is a similar kind of reality for businesses — all of them, including those in technology industry.

So startups, the next time someone asks you, “who is a potential buyer?” Just say, “We don’t know. It could be anyone.”

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Yves Behar: Connectedness is what design does best

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 18:25:58 +0000

How important is design for this age of connectedness? Connecting the world is what design does best, said Yves Behar, speaking at the GigaOM Roadmap 2012 event on Monday. Behar, the CEO of fuseproject and CCO of Jawbone noted that “disconnected products in marketing and execution is what people hate. The look and feel of things give them identity. Design is actually the connectedness between all these disparate parts.”

One of the biggest factors impacting design choices right now are the needed changes due to touch interfaces found on everything from phones and tablets to household appliances. “Touch is magical,” said Behar. “It doesn’t remove the notion of tactility, which is important to design. How does something feel or respond when you touch it, for example.” The touch experience brings us back to “finger painting” by making the user experience more personalized and intimate. Going forward, design will be impacted more and more by how you can affect the world with your hands.

So who’s doing design right? Behar called out Microsoft and Nokia for their modern, contemporary design approaches combined with products. “I’m not sure that Microsoft’s Surface will work out, but I like where Microsoft is going; they’re moving away form skeuomorphism and thinking more about touch,” said Behar. From a user experience and user interface perspective, both companies are making good progress. The UX and UI are connected to the experience in a way that makes the product appealing and useful.

While touch is a new device design aspect, so too are software upgrades. “Self-healing is now part of design thanks to firmware that improve physical aspects of a device. The Jambox speaker, for example, has been made louder due to a software upgrade.” I’ve seen this first-hand as new features have been added to the Nest thermostat that add functionality without requiring a physical design change.

So what’s the hardest thing to design? “Wearables,” according to Behar. “I see lots of glowing Apple logos here in the crowd on the back of laptops. You can’t have wearables with such flashing things.” Indeed, Behar points to eyeglasses as a good example of design: Once wearing them, they almost become invisible to the wearer, bringing only needed functionality.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and a video recording of the session follows below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Connected world: the consumer technology revolution

Thu, 10 Nov 2011 08:01:08 +0000

Connectivity changes everything. That’s the credo driving just about every corner of our day-to-day lives. As human beings, we are now connected to one another through not just our social networks but also our cars, the books we read, the albums we download and even our own health and wellness habits (to name just a few areas). With that in mind, GigaOM Pro has singled out certain areas in the technology industry where we see this shift to constant connectivity taking place most drastically.

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