Supernova 2004 took place this week at The Westin Santa Clara, right in the heart of Silicon Valley. I have been wanting to attend this conference for years but up until now there has always been a calendar conflict. Supernova is a unique technology conference focused on the decentralization of software, communications, and media. As with most conferences, the value is mostly in catching up with friends and colleagues in the industry and sharing insights. There were approximately 200 innovators, technologists, journalists, company CEO’s and up-and-coming stars in attendance. The topics discussed included social networking, WiFi, web services, voice over IP, digital identity, broadband media, and much more.
Kevin Werbach, CEO, Supernova Group is the organizer and host of Supernova. He kicked off the conference with an excellent overview about how the world is becoming more decentralized. The first speaker,Tom Malone, Professor, MIT Sloan School of Management put a lot more meat on the bones of the topic.
Tom’s opening example of decentralization was Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, which now has 200,000 articles. Wikipedia is available in multiple languages and is the preferred encyclopedia for a growing number of people. Anyone in the world with access to the Web can literally update the content. Like all wikis, you simply click on one of the web pages and you can edit it. You would think that this would make the encyclopedia useless. However, there are many people who follow the changes that are made, and if they see something wrong, they can fix Over time the content achieves creditability.
Professor Malone then gave an interesting perspective. In the "beginning" there were hunters and gatherers who lived in groups called bands. About 12,000 years ago kingdoms emerged where much larger groups came under the control of Kings and emperors. Roughly 200 years ago Democracies emerged. What caused this evolution was is the increased flow of information. The emergence of kingdom was enabled by writing — the King could write something and have it distributed throughout the kingdom. The printing press allowed for a much greater degree of information flow and lead to the formation of democracies.
Similarly, businesses have evolved from small proprietors to centralized corporations. The third wave of change in business is now underway due to the Net, inexpensive long distance, etc. and this wave will enable much more decentralization of decision making. One form of the decentralization Tom talked about is "loose hierarchies". These will have bosses but much will be delegated. Democratic companies will emerge which allow employees to actually vote on decisions. The third form of decentralization will be based on markets. For example, contractors come together to form a structure for a particular project and then disband. Internal markets may emerge that allow one part of a company to do business with another part of the company. This is not a new idea — in fact the idea of transfer pricing has been around for decades — but it may reemerge as Tom is suggesting.
There is much more about all of this in Tom’s new book, The Future of Work: How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life.
The next speaker was Ray Ozzie, CEO, Groove Networks Inc. and inventor of Lotus Notes. Ray gave some interesting examples of how military teams in Iraq are using Groove software to capture information from field observations and share it with commanders and others on a peer-to-peer basis. Ray was then joined in a panel moderated by Christopher Allen, Founder, Alacrity Management. The other panelists were Esther Dyson, Editor at Large, CNet Networks, and Mena Trott, CEO, Six Apart (the maker of Movable Type, which I use to post my blogs). It was a far reaching discussion about social software, blogging, and related topics. Some people in the audience expressed disdain for social software because they feel it imposes on their privacy and at times puts them in a difficult position of declining to be someone else’s friend. LinkedIn is the classic example. Some people feel it is empowering while others feel it is imposing. Personally, I participate in LinkedIn and feel it is a good concept but for someone who has been around the industry for decades and is already "connected" with many people, it is of limited use.
After the break there was a panel called "Syndication Nation" that included Tim Bray, Director of Web Technology, Sun Microsystems, Paul Boutin, Contributing Editor, Wired, Scott Rosenberg, Managing Editor, Salon.com, and David Sifry from Technorati. Most of the discussion was about blogging. Tim Bray expressed the view that external blogs are "much more interesting" than intranet blogs, but I chose to disagree with him on that. In my opinion, blogging inside the firewall of enterprises is a great way to leverage knowledge across the organization. See the blogging section of my blog for stories I have written about this.
Just before lunch, Alan Ganek, VP, Autonomic Computing at IBM gave a very interesting talk about how complexity of systems and networks is increasing and how autonomic computing can apply intelligence to help make things simpler. I wrote a story about "virtualization" where I attempted to make this very complex topic simpler to understand.
After lunch, the conference room was divided in half so that two breakout sessions (panels) could be held simultaneously. I participated in the "Connected Work" panel, moderated by Amy Wohl, President, Wohl Associates. I was joined by Ross Mayfield, CEO, Socialtext, Peter Quintas, CTO, SilkRoad, and Jp Rangaswami, Global CIO, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein.
It was a very lively discussion about how people use various Internet-based tools to gain productivity in their work. Amy set the stage by asserting that information tools have moved from from formal to informal, from "installed" on the PC to services on the Web. I agree with her — there are a lot of "disruptive" trends taking shape. Ross asserted that integration of the weblog and the wiki is taking place. There was somewhat of a debate about the effectiveness of wikis. In theory it is a great way to collaborate but Amy and I both thought some people do not want to post their views on a web page, either because they don’t totally trust all the participants or that they are sensitive to their relative level in the hierarchy of the organization.
Some in the audience voiced the strong opinion that one of the big inhibitors is that many don’t realize that the issue is generational. Young people don’t use email anymore. I agree with that but also believe that as young people get more responsibility in their careers they will find that they need to document their activities — not just use instant messaging.
Blogging was a part of every question and every answer. Some said that blogs that have thousands of readers are more important than blogs that have only a handful. Certainly, both types are important. Amy cited an example where five doctors are collaborating through a private blog, working on a cure for cancer. That would certainly be important!
There was great expectation expressed in the audience about integration. One person asked why we had so many separate "channels" — email, IM, wikis, VoIP, blogging, etc. An historical look at how the Web has evolved should give comfort that it will all come together, I would say over the next couple of years.
The "Digital Identities" panel included Marc Canter, CEO, Broadband Mechanics, Andre Durand from Ping ID, Dick Hardt, Founder & CEO, Sxip Networks, and Philip Rosedale, CEO, Linden Lab. This panel was very relevant, interesting, and controversial. There was general agreement that multiple ID’s and passwords are a huge problem. Each of the four panelists had a unique perspective and some elements of the solution. Nobody yet has the complete answer. I am optimistic but impatient on the subject. See the series I wrote about Security & Privacy. Marc Cantor was quite vocal about the possibilities of The Friend of a Friend (FOAF) project which is creating a Web of machine-readable homepages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do.
The "Spam and the Future of Email" panel moderated by Stowe Boyd was the most controversial of all the panels. The moderator was Stowe Boyd from Corante Research. Panelists were Karl Jacob, CEO, Cloudmark, Greg Reinacker, CEO, Newsgator, and Toni Schneider, CEO, Oddpost. Stowe made a pitch that email was really "bad", it’s future was over, and that we all should "abandon our inboxes". He proclaimed that IM and video chat will completely replace email. I completely disagree with almost everything he said and expressed my point of view as part of the audience participation. Email has been negatively impacted by spam but the usefulness and utility of email is still terrific. Karl Jacob, ceo of Cloudmark, made the point that when we have solved the spam problem (his company is doing a great job of it), that email will continue to thrive as a medium. He further said that other channels of communication such as IM and blogs will be integrated with email, not replace it. I completely agree.
Unfortunately, the panel did not get to spend much time talking about spam, because Stowe was on a "mission" to evangelize IM. Greg’s view was that spam can in part be eliminated by companies using blogs instead of email newsletters. Good point, but unfortunately, it doesn’t make much of a dent. Karl talked about the future of email in a positive way and expressed much optimism that spam will be brought under control. I completely agree — as I have written in the public policy section of patrickWeb many times.
The last panel of the day, moderated by Doc Searls, Senior Editor at Linux Journal, was "Fighting the Distributed Wars". Panelists were Tara Lemmey from LENS Ventures, John Robb from Global Guerillas, and Ambatipudi Sastry, CTO and Co-Founder at PacketHop. John Robb is working on a book about "next generation terrorism". His thesis is that terrorists are moving to a new approach whereby they plan to cause massive destruction of infrastructure. The "global guerillas" are becoming very sophisticated at identifying and destroying large chunks of pipelines, electrical generation facilities, etc. With very small budgets and no casualties they can cause huge negative impact on global markets. Bin laden’s main contribution was the establishment of a donations network that provides the funding. The individual terrorist cells are small — less than 150 people — and the actual action groups are typically only five people. The operational security being used by the cells has been so tight that there has been very limited penetration by coalition forces. It was a sobering discussion.
Ambatipudi described how the incompatibility of various communications systems is the major inhibitor to deal with terrorism — both before, during, and after attacks. Using mobile mesh networks and standards-based technology, interoperability can be achieved. It was a very technical discussion but Ambatipudi offered a very positive and optimistic outlook.
Tara co-chairs the technology committee at the Markle Foundation Task Force On National Security In The Information Age. The task force is doing the hard work of figuring out how to create an information network that prevents terrorism and protects the security of the homeland, while preserving the civil liberties that are a fundamental part of American values. This is no small challenge but the foundation has assembled some of the best thinkers in the industry to work on it.
Nobody left this last session in an upbeat mood, but nevertheless, everyone moved on to a "Get Connected" reception hosted by IBM. It was an excellent networking experience and was enjoyed by all.
On Friday morning, Kevin offered a broad perspective on the commoditization of software and then introduced Jonathan Schwartz, President and COO, Sun Microsystems. Jonathan impressed me as being a very smart, with-it, person but very much on the defensive about Sun. I think he has a very difficult job.
The first panel of the last day was "Exploding the Enterprise", moderated by Phil Windley, Associate Professor, Brigham Young University. The panelists were Gordon Eubanks, CEO, Oblix, John Hagel, Author and Management Consultant, John Hagel and Associates, LLC, Darren Lee, CEO, NextPage, and Halsey Minor, Chairman, CEO and Founder, Grand Central Communications (and founder of CNET).
Unfortunately, I had to leave for New York before the panel finished. There was much more to come during the day. I was particularly interested to hear what Niklas Zennstrom, CEO and Co-Founder, Skype had to say, but alas, I had to leave. Visit Supernova 2004 if you are interested in more details about the conference.
I will be giving a talk at the Waldorf Astoria next week and will share more about that event later.