INSERT: i Rohit Khare
"You can start to innovating, and as soon as you prove where the value is, you might actually and cut yourself as an entrepreneur because you've now shown where the gold lies."
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INSERT: ii Mike Bainbridge
"You are allergic to penicillin. Do not give this person penicillin. That's fine and that's the business rule. But if I'd trying give them penicillin how does that substantiate itself in front of me."
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INSERT: iii Daniel Weisman
"The Chinese government actually doesn't tell Google or anyone else, what sites to block."
So, should you blame the Chinese government for internet censorship?
What has business logic to do with a doctors "bedside manner"?
And are Web 2.0 mash-ups the route to just fools gold?
Business, Society and the Internet from the 15th International World Wide Web Conference in Edinburgh.
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Hello.
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I'm Peter Croasdale. And welcome to the final programme in this series of conference podcasts.
Over the last three shows we've heard about the semantic web, grid computing, internet research and various bits of W3C standards.
In this last podcast I thought we'd broaden the scope - and look in a bit more detail at business, health and society - some of the key themes of the final day.
INSERT: 1 Patrick Sheehan
"People who want to scale businesses they use some server farm somewhere. You know, all the infrastructure is pretty much on tap. So, it seems to take a lot lot less money to start a business now. And to me that a profound difference from the first time round where we would invest, we the venture capitalists, would invest huge amounts of money in people who where struggling to get their systems to work. And even then they didn't frankly, which was part of the problem. Now we see companies starting up with a 10th of the money. People starting up with £250,000 or so, who can get businesses rolling. They can build big communities and they can see growth in all sorts of dimensions. Now we come to the worrying part, often those dimensions are not very tangible. They’re communities - is that today's equivalent to eyeballs? And some of those things still need to be tested. But the growth rate of the companies are very impressive. In my session we had three companies, and I'll just pick one of them Fotolog which hasn't raised the huge amount of money. I think they mentioned, in venture capital terms, they raised $5 or $7 million to get to where they are. Which is the 76th most popular website in the world. Now that's pretty remarkable really. And they have 14 people in their company. Now they had to scale up from eight. This is not the Internet as we used to know it. And with that they've got huge community and with that they come begin to monetise it and create real business. That kind of fascinating. The bets are smaller, and as investors were very attracted to capital efficient businesses, in our jargon. There’s the second thing which I think is quite different: we may be pass over without noticing so much. There's a big cultural difference now, that we all use the Internet, I say all, most of us use the Internet quite regularly and we become accustomed to it. Kids use it. This is different. The Internet has had hundreds of millions maybe billions of dollars spent on marketing and education and we all understand it and we didn't in quite the same way before. One of the other companies was a company called Peerflix which does DVD trading. And I can explain it that way, but if I went back six years and said we have a company that does DVD trading over the Internet. I’d have a completely blank look. So essentially there is less money needed, that we need to spend to understanding and that enables the sort of viral growth. So, Danny the CEO of that company he didn't spend any money on marketing, which is remarkable - but it works.
Croasdale: So there's a maturity that started come into play as far as the technology, the services, even people's interactions with those services -- but the still the creativity from the business community to create something.
Sheehan: Right. There's a maturity of infrastructure which allows people to create businesses rapidly and relatively cheaply. But there's still a delightful immaturity of business model and that's where some of the opportunity is really. If those models were truly 100% baked they probably wouldn't be disruptive enough. So they are difficult businesses for investors to really appraise or understand, but they're still exciting and it's a very interesting area for us. 3i has a very global venture capital practice and equally encouraging if your European is we’re seeing these companies here in Europe. Which, personally, is very nice. (laugh)"
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Now fundamental to the Web 2.0 concept is the idea of mash-ups. Rohit Khare, Director of CommerceNet Labs talked about the risks and rewards of doing business between the cracks of other companies business models. And one mash-up that had caught his imagination recently, currently in private alpha testing, was - FlySpy.
INSERT: 2 Rohit Khare
"Flyspy is a way to chart where airline fare prices are going. Usually you decide "hey I need to go on this day, I need a return on this day and I know the airport" - and then you can go to a travel agent and they’ll tell you what the flights are. This gentleman had an idea saying actually a lot of time people say I don’t quite know - I want to go to Tampa next month and you say here’s the city pair, I’d like to go for a couple of days and you get back what looks like a stock chart, of, you know, here are the prices. And you see the peaks around midday and it dips around the weekend. Except when you going to Florida, in which case it peaks at the weekend and dips in the middle of the week. And it captures a bit of the imagination. And you think, boy, they are so many more things you could do with this kind of data if it were available. So many more places people can travel and...but wait. Now you're standing astride – you’re not mashing up data that you really, kind of, have a right to use. That airline fare data is a well-known and very expensive black box. Not until a few years ago it cost a dollar a look-up. And so, there's something in industry called a look to book ratio. So they depend, the airline reservation systems, on people developing user interfaces that back in the travel-agent-green-screen-terminal days would prevent you really doing more than 12 look-ups before you buy a ticket. The idea - as you call on the phone a professional agent would only look at a couple of flight combinations. Then the Internet came along and started edging towards this is now unheard of number of hundreds of look-ups per searcher. Because, you know, how many people come shop and abandon the cart and don't buy it. Here’s a fella who is going to blow it all apart by saying here’s a user interface that requires doing one month times a couple of durations times a couple of cities! He's doing hundreds of inquiries of the system every time someone casually goes shopping. So very clever new reuse of the data, but not one system is set up for. And if they are to charge him for doing his look-ups the way they currently do, it would wipe out the little industry niche. He currently lives because it's under the radar. It's alpha, he's got a lot of relationships being to happen there. Just think about that from time to time. There's a lot of data which you can start innovating and as soon as you've proved where the value is you might actually undercut yourself as an entrepreneur, because you've known shown where the gold lies. Because if you're going to do something innovative that remixes it and find value in between the cracks of two other peoples businesses models how can you be assured that the people on either side of that crack don't squeeze you out back out of it."
INSERT: 3 Andy Mulholland
"The web actually changed something more than people think. And the thing it actually changed for the IT profession was it was the first time a true benefit for standards was ever seen. Prior to the web we talked about standards is an industry, we liked the concept, but there was no real driving reason for doing it. What happened when the web appeared was for the first time people saw that if you standardised, you to get your message across to other people, a lot of other people, and by the way wasn't that expensive. So suddenly businesses picked up the message that said, proprietary, the way we do things round here with inside the closed walls of our business, and we use IT in a proprietary way and we modified it quite a lot. Suddenly they picked up an alternative message and said, there’s a different world. And if you use IT in a standardised way you can address a world that is outside too. Now since business only do three things: they buy something, they add value and they sell it - two of the three are clearly outside and IT has had not a lot to do with those two.
Croasdale: There's a huge amount of discussion at the conference about the semantic web. How is that going to impact business over the coming years?
Mulholland: I am extremely interested in the semantic web. And as soon as I say that to anyone the challenge that comes back is, well what is it and why are you interested? I have a very simple explanation for this and that’s over the last few years, anyone will agree with me when I say that the amount of e-mail you get has gone up. It’s gone up to a point where you actually usually complain that you can't actually do the day job. To which my usual comment is, exactly what do you think your day job is? And what you will then usually realise is, your day job has increasingly become automated by IT, and that what is really happening is you are there to be an exception handler. And what you're actually doing is using e-mail to handle exceptions. The trouble is there is the kind of version of Metcalfe’s law here, which has around networks, that say the more people on networks is the greater the value. Well actually what's happening is, the more people on networks the greater the value of the interchange and the greater the consequences on individuals of the sheer numbers of interchanges. So instead of IT being used to automate process and take cost out. Currently, collaboration IT and communication IT, is actually putting costs back in terms of people having to handle e-mail. Where’s the link to the semantic Web? Well, some of the things will be better handled by you, but many things a machine could handle, if it was semantically aware enough to take the thing apart and understand what was being meant. So when you think about this one very logically, you realise that we have to find a way of breaking the cycle, which currently means too much of what we do is based on human interfaced IT. You realise it’s all human intensive. What the semantic web gives us as a way of forking that and sorting out the difference between what should be and could be handled by semantically aware machines and processes from what clearly is a first example of something and it does need some human intervention."
INSERT: 4 John Davies
"We're using semantic web technology to describe medical vocabularies, ontologies if you like, sets of terminology with thousands of concepts. And by using semantic Web technology, which is formerly based, we can check consistency of those concepts and how they are related to one another. And more than that we can use the semantic web technology to do some reasoning. So, take the example of the nurse querying a patient record an asking, “has this patient got a nut allergy?” If the record records that the patient actually has an almond allergy, let's say, then the system can infer that an almond allergy means a nut allergy. So that could be a life-saving situation. A very simple inference step to take, but only made possible by the use of this semantic formal technology. So we using semantic technology today, but beyond that we are looking at applications in the areas of knowledge management, where people are currently overloaded with information, and also in this area of information integration that I been talking about earlier. So, we're using it today, and we see great possibilities in the future of this technology."
INSERT: 5 Mike Bainbridge
"It's the personalised care, but it's also the personalised view, depending on who I am, what the context is, where I'm working, perhaps even what the time, as to what I see and how the information is brought to me. Because we know that there are business rules. So, you're allergic to penicillin, do not give this person penicillin. That's fine, and that’s a business rule. But if I trying given them penicillin, how does that instantiate itself in front of me. And those are the sort of interface standards that we need to look at both from a clinician point of view, and also from a role point of view. Because, if you have a modal dialog box with a focus on ‘cancel’, the ones really infuriates you. It will have an effect. It will stop you. It will break the chain of the conversation. And this is another area we have around the imposition of a third party in the consultation, which is the screen. But if that modal dialog box breaks what's going on, that may be important. Because it's going to stop you doing something bad. If in another system that's just some nice little slide-in slice of toast at the bottom right hand corner stays and then fizzles out, in a very gorgeous new style. Then even though it’s the same business logic that brings that one up and the modal dialog, they will have different weights. And we have to go through the ergonomics, and the values that people put on this, to actually work out what’s the right thing to do in that situation, for you, this practitioner. Because, it may be that that one always stops you just sliding in and it doesn't destroy the consultation. Because that's the important thing. And a very different thing that medical computing has to all business computing. Because all business computing is transaction largely between you and a keyboard and a screen. Were as medicine’s about me talking to you and translating and empathising and examining and all the rest."
INSERT: 6 Paul Walsh
"If you are to go to Google, for example, and do a search on something like breast cancer. The search results would come back and they will be listed ordinarily. The difference is, each search results, each hyperlink, would have a little icon beside it. And that would provide the user with more information before entering the website. And we’ve used the system is known throughout the world, we call it the traffic light system. So, for example you may see a search result with the green tick. That says this site is independently verified by somebody. And when you click on that tick, you'll get a certificate that tells you more information. Which could be, its child friendly, it's about breast cancer, and therefore the word breast is appropriate. Or, may be appropriate. An orange tick represents a website that is making claims about its own web site. It’s saying, hey we're not providing medical, or we’re are providing medical advice, but we think you should trust us because... but it’s not necessarily independently verified. A red box with a ‘x’ in it means that is not labelled. Or it is not making claims by itself, it’s not been verified. That is not to say it shouldn't be trusted, but were providing more information to the users. They may not want to trust that. And then a black box if something is known to be fraudulent, or phishing, or spamming. So we would then allow people to blacklist that. Taking it a step further, we’re putting the same functionality in the tools preferences. So that users will be able to filter out websites that don’t meet their criteria. For example, people with certain disabilities would be able to filter content based on the type of of web sites they would want to see. For example, they could check a box in preferences, that says, increase the size of text. And therefore all the websites on the web that have that capability will be highlighted in the search results. Or, they may want to filter out all the websites that don't have the capability. So, we're trying to help create and stimulate an open standard. And in fact, the method I'm talking about is currently being reviewed on a group within the W3C to make it a formal method. And in fact we’re going to propose that it replaces the old W3C recommendation. It's a system called ‘PICS’, which Internet Explorer currently uses for filtering content. But it's not very flexible. You know, somebody’s either over 18 or under 18. What's appropriate for a 14-year-old teenager in Germany may or may not be appropriate for a 14-year-old teenager in the UK. And also the method of trust that I'm talking about can be applied to an entire web site or a subsection of the website. Because only certain pages might be inappropriate. So you may not want to block the entire website which is what current systems do today."
One of the final key note speakers of the Conference was Daniel Weitzner from the W3C. Now, he's their Director of Technology and Society activities, and provided an amazing insight in to the government Internet policies that we in Westernised democracies simply take for granted. And talked in detail about China's Internet policies - in the context of those assumptions.
From there he explored the real challenges that Internet companies face when doing business in China. He picked on Google as his main example - for the simple reason that their principles about transparency have been implemented with such clarity.
INSERT: 7 Daniel Weitzner
"Google's aim is to provide as much information as possible to users. And that when they don't provide information, when they suppress certain information, they try to tell users why. They tell uses that information is blocked. They try and tell the rest of the world when information is blocked. And they have principles also about protection of privacy, and the rule of law. Google in discussing these principles though has pointed out that it’s very difficult for them to apply these principles fully in China. And the main reason is that Chinese government considers the fact that a particular site has been filtered or blocked, to be a state secret. State secret laws in China are a very serious set of laws. If you're convicted in violating the laws against state secrecy you are in some sense a different category than normal criminal law. The penalties are very severe and there's great concern about violating these laws. Now the interesting thing with the situation that Google finds itself in, and everyone finds themselves in China, is that while the Chinese government has declared that the identity of the block sites are state secrets, the Chinese government actually doesn't tell Google or anyone else what sites to block. They provide some general guidelines which are actually know. But then leave it up to the companies, to the service providers, to decide what precise information to block. So, even though Google, in this case, decides that are going to block this site but not that site, they are precluded under Chinese law from saying what sites they actually have blocked. This is a real challenge, as you can see. And I think it underscores the difficulty of how things will progress in China. What we see with Google services in China today is that they don't actually follow all these principles. They do have a note at the bottom of their search page saying that some search results have been removed. But they don't provide any information about exactly what is removed. At the same time though, there are a variety of researchers in the computer science and human rights community who are working very hard to try and figure out what sites Google and the other service providers actually do block. There is a group called ‘Human Rights In China’ which publishes lists of sites that are found to be blocked. The Harvard researchers publish lists of sites that are found to be blocked. And their hope is that by shining light on the kind of censorship activity that’s going, that they will be part of putting constructive pressure on China to change its policies. So, is this kind of transparency going to help? Well, I don't really know. I want to leave you with one thought about how things may proceed in China, and why I think it's important to proceed with this kind of engagement but nevertheless with as much transparency as is possible. So, with that hopefully optimistic note, I'll just say that, I think that we can see that there's a tremendous tremendous challenge to the way the way used to the Internet and Web operating posed by China and other countries that take this sort of approach. But that perhaps if we can get on the right side of change in China. If we can deploy the transparency mechanisms that are really made possible by the Internet and the web, that we can be part of the process of positive change."
If you've got this podcast out of sequence and would like to listen to any of the others - then go to - www2006.org - and look for the link to the podcasts in the main navigation. There's also a wiki there if you'd like to place any of your thoughts on this series up for comment.
This programme was produced for International World Wide Web Conference Committee by Bright Indigo.
But – from me Peter Croasdale - until the next time -
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Goodbye.
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