[NOTE: I am writing a new book called Age of Context with Robert Scoble. We hope it will be ready at the end of September. This is a draft introduction. It will be changed several times before we publish the book and what we want the most is feedback from our readers. Please comment here, on my social networks where I am ShelIsrael, or by email at shelIsrael1@gmail.com. If you have any ideas for this book, please let us know.
This book is financed by corporate sponsorship from Rackspace, Autodesk, Microsoft Bing, EasilyDo, Mindsmack, BetaWorks and an anonymous individual who contributed $5000 in the name of charity:water.]
Introduction. Storm's Coming
In the 2005 movie Batman Begins, the caped guy appears out of nowhere as Commissioner Gordon is taking out his trash. He delivers a cryptic message: “Storm’s coming.” Then, just as suddenly as he appeared, he is gone.
We are no caped crusaders, but we are here to warn you there is a storm coming. It has already started. There will be tumult but, when the disruption subsides, life will be better.
This imminent storm is no natural creation. Instead, it is being created by thousands of people, some of them the world’s smartest technologists and business strategists. Some work for tiny startups; others represent the likes of GE, Walmart, Heineken, the NFL, Apple Computer, Nike, Oakley, Google and Qualcomm, to name just a few. They are investing billions of dollars in technology that will change the world, including your particular part of it. They are forward-thinking decision makers in banks, the military, government, health, robotics, space exploration, marine biology and many other categories.
These companies are among thousands of organizations worldwide who are changing the lives of people as varied in their needs as: skiers who wear goggles that give them realtime information as they careen downhill; paraplegics who use robotic arms powered by their own brainwaves; stadium fans who order food and beverages via a mobile app and get delivery in express lines; and technologists who reduce energy costs by billions of dollars a year by chatting in a social network with jet engines in flight.
This is a storm of change and it is extremely powerful. It’s already upon us and is growing ever more powerful as you sit reading these words. It is going to change your work, your life and the lives of the people you love or just casually meet online or in the real world.
Superstorm
In The Perfect Storm, author Sebastian Coe describes a rare but fierce weather phenomenon, caused by the convergence of three meteorological forces, creating what is called a perfect storm. Such natural occurrences happen about once every hundred years—or at least until recently. They cause 100-foot waves and 100 mph winds.
Perfect storms change the face of the land when they hit. At first there’s havoc and debris. Then there is rebuilding. The landscape heals, and very often the places hit hardest end up better off than they were before the storm hit.
Our storm is comprised not of three forces, but five. They are not natural. They are technological, and they’re already causing havoc and making waves. As separate entities each is already a part of your life today: mobile devices; social media; big data; sensors; and location-based services. Together, they have created the conditions for an unstoppable perfect storm of epic proportion.
Each of our five forces is growing exponentially in mass and velocity. But that story has been told. What is new and different is that these five forces are converging into one great superforce, one whose impact will be far greater than the sum of its parts.
This superforce will change work and life for most people in the developed world so fundamentally and universally, that we believe it will usher in a new age.
We call it the Age of Context.
View from the Fence
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel are two veteran Silicon Valley journalists, covering two interdependent communities. Picture them sitting on a fence looking out in opposite directions.
Scoble looks out at the tech sector, where he spends much of his time talking with innovators who build little chunks of tomorrow for the rest of us. Collectively, they give Scoble a good look at what technologists are building for tomorrow.
These days, he is hearing considerable use of the buzzword context. Investment dollars are pouring in. Big companies are recruiting contextual technologists by the truckload. New products are coming to market at an accelerating rate. There is great excitement.
On that side of the fence everyone seems to know what we are talking about when we say Age of Context.
Israel looks out upon the other side of our virtual fence. He writes and consults for the business community and in business publications such as Forbes. He talks a lot to business people who are interested in how technology can help them to make customers happy and their companies more profitable.
He is not seeing much excitement. Most business people are still trying to push rocks up the hill into business recovery. They know little or nothing about contextual technology. They don’t think about how contextual tools and wearable computers will make them more efficient and acquire them more customers and sales. No manager we know has pondered what they should invest in context to make their quarterly fiscal goals.
But they will and it will happen sooner than many people realize. In fact it is imminent.
When the tech community is this unified in focus, and excited about what they are building and introducing, it follows as surely as the day follows the night that technologists make waves that invariably land on the shores of business.
They invent the stuff that the rest of us use.
Sitting on the fence, Scoble and Israel are currently in the eye of a superstorm. The business community may sense nothing, but the winds of fundamental change are blowing at them. Bracing for it is wiser than trying to evacuate.
Like the good folk of Batman’s Gotham City, the best option for you is to brace yourselves for this storm of change and prepare to ride it out. It will be followed by good times in a new age—the Age of Context.
What is Context?
Context is about how we relate to everything around us.
It has to do with what we take in with our five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell, and how what we perceive with them affects the situations we find ourselves in. It influences the choices we make, based on what’s going on around us and what we expect or want to do next.
Context has to do with why we wake up smiling when sunlight creeps into our bedroom and why we shiver in the cold or withdraw our hands from fire. Some of it is learned and some of it is instinctual.
We think of context as a particularly human trait, but it exists in all living things. A common form of moss grows on the wet, shady side of a rock. When you flip it over, the moss starts moving over to the new damp side. Moss has no brain, so how does it know where and when to move? Somehow it senses change in its environment and adjusts accordingly. You may call it instinct, or common sense and all living things seem to have some degree of it.
Computers are not living things. They have historically lacked even a smidgeon of common sense. But, over time we’ve added more humanlike capabilities such as memory or logic. This made them extremely useful at many things. They have become indispensable tools for calculating and correlating; designing buildings or rockets. They have become great at making bad photos look good; they can store, search, communicate and do lots of other useful stuff.
But until very recently, not one computer had the good sense to wake you up early because it snowed last night and you’ll need a little extra time to get to work, or to anticipate when you’ll want another beer at a football game, or that you should see a doctor because your heart beats irregularly during exercise or that jet engines in flight need tweaking to be more efficient.
Yet all that is happening today. And much more just like it. Emergent technologies are making our computing devices more intuitive. They sense changes in the same way as moss on a rock; but they respond much more quickly. They are coming to understand the patterns of the humans that carry them. They know where you are and what you are doing as you roam about, and they can predict with increasing accuracy what you may need to do next—then do it for you.
Through the use of many different types of sensors, our mobile devices now emulate four of our five senses. Camera sensors give them eyes, and microphone sensors serve as ears; capacitive sensors enable them to feel our touch on their screens. They understand many of our tastes, including our preferences in food and beverages, because we teach them what we like by what we write in our social media conversations. In fact, they may understand our tastes in everything better than most of the people closest to us.
They can’t yet detect fragrance—but our guess is that it is coming, and sooner than any of us might think.
The state of the art is about to take a giant leap forward. As we write in February 2013, Google Glass has not yet shipped but it has received a ton of attention. It is the most likely candidate to be the flagship of a whole new generation of technology that is hands-free because we wear it.
Google Glass will be a flagship for contextual wearables. They will know when we are walking, skydiving, running, skiing, surfing, sleeping or watching TV. They will give us data and alerts in the context of what we are doing. They will understand our words and gestures, as well as our little taps and blinks.
They are not alone. There are already over a dozen wearables on the market with many more coming. We have written an entire chapter on them and it explains how these uber-contextual devices will change your life for the better.
There really is a big storm coming and we want to help you prepare for the challenges of the changes it will foment. We want you to be ready for the new stuff that can feel pretty freaky on first encounter, such as:
- Sensors watch you as you stand in front of a retail shelf. When you look at a particular box, a screen on the shelf makes you a promotional offer.
- Glasses will look up detailed information and reviews on the products as you look at them.
- Better, smarter and more integrated calendars, email and social media;
- Cars that will know where we want to go next, use the best routes, and eventually drive us there, while we catch up on our work or our social networking.
It’s Alive!
Did you ever watch any of those John Malkovich ads with Siri that Apple used when the voice-responsive personal assistant software debuted? In one, the actor sits relaxed by the fireplace, listening to opera, chatting with a piece of software in an Apple iPhone. They have a warm relationship. He seems happy he’ll be spending the evening at home alone with her.
As it turned out, Siri at the time needed to improve a lot before it worked as well in reality as in the ad. These days Google Now, and Google Voice Search, competing software for the Android platform, perform better, according to users who have tried both. But what we think is important to note in the ad is that it showed a person and a device involved in a very personal relationship. Not only that, very few people seemed to find it odd when the ads were running.
Siri, Google Now, Voice Search and a plethora of new and promising mobile apps are becoming extremely personal assistants. They are starting to know us better than the people who are closest to us. They are beginning to take over the minutiae in our life, helping us to adjust on the fly to the surprises and changes that put speed bumps into our days.
The key to what makes these products so game changing is that, because they understand the context of what we are doing, they can predict what we want to do next with eerie accuracy. These anticipatory systems work tirelessly on our behalf.
They stay focused when we space out. They are more loyal than the family dog because they pay attention to our needs and not theirs. They stay focused on us even when a squirrel runs by. Anticipatory system filters know when to alert us to an important change and shield us from noise that can wait until later.
They understand our natural language, so we don’t need to become computer programmers to tell them what we want.
Freaky Factor
There is however, one significant catch. This new stuff can be pretty freaky when you first encounter it. Some people have this sense it’s watching and, perhaps, spying on them for the benefit of someone connected to their device from the back end.
All new significant technology has always caused discomfort when first introduced. There were people still using horse-drawn buggies 50 years after the affordable car was introduced. For many years people walked right past ATMs because they trusted the tellers inside more than they trusted machines.
This time, the freaky factor may be amplified and prolonged. After all we are talking about the humanization of gizmos, and that does feel a bit like science fiction.
Do we really want to get up close and personal with something we carry around in our pockets and purses? Do we really want something originally used for talking with people in real-time to alert those at our next meeting we are running late because of road congestion?
Do any of us really want to spend a comfy evening by the fire bantering with Siri or any other piece of software? Just how personal will we get?
These are good points. Popular books have been written condemning the personalization of Internet sites and, for the most part, they have been factually accurate. But we feel they have told only one side of a big issue. Age of Context intends to give you the other side, the one that argues the more your personal technology knows about who you are and what you like, the better it can serve you and make your life better; the more it can make your customers happier and, accordingly, your revenues bigger.
Of course, there is a dark side. Yes, bad things can and do happen. Abuses in social media are well known and documented. Facebook and YouTube have both been involved in unfortunate ways in both suicides and murders. This reinforces the reality that online, as well as in the real world, you need to be careful what you say and who you trust.
On the other side of the equation, every day more than a billion people go online and do not commit suicide, nor do they get victimized in any way. In fact they have a pretty good time, engaging in countless useful and interesting experiences. And online has improved business relationships in enough ways to merit a whole book on the subject.
People come online to buy, play games, flirt and espouse theories of love and hate. They conduct a great deal of business there as well.
When social media first came in, there also was an extended period of fear and loathing. There are still some remnants. Some companies chose not to join the conversation and were left behind. They didn’t go where their customers went; they didn’t attract young new people to come work for them. A great many of those companies got smaller and less important as the world moved rapidly forward.
The contextual superstorm means big change, and many people are fearful of change. The faster it comes the more it freaks them out. The more dramatic the change, the more cautious they become.
One such monumental change was the automobile. At first, most people stuck to their buggies. Manufacturers advised early adopters to understand the principals of torque and warned that these driving machines were too complex for women to drive.
But cars got faster, cheaper and easier to use. Still, there are dangers to them. In 2011, there were 2,239,000 people injured and 32,367 people killed by cars in the US.
Based on those statistics why would anyone take the risk of driving or going anywhere near an automobile?
The answer is simple; the benefits far outweigh the risks. And the probability that nothing bad will occur to you far outweighs the possibility that something will. Besides that, cars are very often the best option for getting where you want to go. If you decided not to use them, you could survive. But you would live in a world far smaller than would otherwise be available to you.
Technology moves relentlessly forward. There will always be someone warning Dr. Frankenstein there are things people should not mess around with. So far, in history, there have been very few cases where they have been right, and those instances usually involved weapons of mass destruction. We think a pair of glasses that brief you on the person in front of you may be a little bit eerie—but they are hardly going to wreak mass destruction.
You can choose to opt out of the coming changes. Many will at first but, over time, most will adjust. If you choose to opt out, the greatest danger you will face won’t be your mobile devices spying on you. It is that you will be left behind in the modern world.
Who are these guys?
We are Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. We both live and work near Silicon Valley. We’ve been hanging out in tech circles for most of our professional lives, much of it as journalists who spend many, many hours talking and interviewing tech newsmakers. Scoble has become one of the world’s best known and respected reporters of tech innovation. Israel has provided reports and analysis for private business and as a freelancer to BusinessWeek, FastCompany, Dow Jones and most recently Forbes.
We promise to discuss ourselves in the third person voice as little as possible.
We have collaborated several times. Our biggest success, so far, was a book called Naked Conversations: How Blogs are Changing the Way Business Talk with Customers, which came out in the first week of 2006. Naked Conversations concluded by declaring that what we now call social media was bringing the world into a new age, one we named the Age of Conversation. We believe the term accurately describes what has happened over the past seven years for people in most places and businesses still surviving.
We don’t think the conversational age is ending, but it is morphing rapidly into something new, bigger and more profound. In this new era, now beginning, our relationships with our technology will become far more personal than has ever been the case. Our devices will know us better than our most intimate friends do today.
This dramatic and rapid evolution of the relationship between people and their machines places us at the dawn of yet another new era, one we are calling the Age of Context. The changes will be more significant and fundamental than occurred in the previous era.
We are writing this book to tell you what is happening right now, all around you, and what will be happening next. We hope you take it in “context” and that it will help you adjust to the changes in your work and your life.
We also hope you will find it fun to read. We tell you many stories about some amazing people and uncanny devices. We hope also to convince you that embracing this new technology is very much worth the trouble.
Once you get used to it, the new stuff is extremely cool and very useful. Perhaps our key message should be--try it. You'll like it.
Robert Scoble
Shel Israel
February 2013
