How to make the Massive Tech Show into a massive tech show

April 26th, 2008 Posted in Business Law, Communications, Information Technology, Privacy, Video Games, Virtual Worlds

I’ve been critical of the Vancouver Massive Tech Show both here and on Tazzu. I’ve branded it as boring, uninspired, a waste of an afternoon, and anything but either massive or a show.

I’ve been challenged to propose something better, so here I go:

People don’t go to Massive to get names of web designers. They don’t take off their afternoons to compile lists of Internet service providers. And most don’t see Massive as a show of potential clients to whom they can hand their business cards.

People go to shows like this to see what’s new and exciting about the information technology industry. They go to see - and maybe even to try - information society’s potential. They go in the hopes of seeing some ghost of the “wow” of the dot-com-boom era; they go hoping to see that “Web 2.0″ and all the other buzzwords are more than buzzwords.

I’ve compiled a list of 12 concepts and issues that could deliver the wow. I’ve also started thinking fo activities that would engage the guests while presenting some of those concepts and issues - better than could be done by this year’s mechanical bull, Dance Dance Revolution, and Guitar Hero III.

1. Content Management Systems

Forget SEO. Think CMS. SEO is a publicity strategy. CMS is a paradigm. CMS is the idea of separating design and content for a website. It then incorporates the easy maintenance of the content and the modification of the design into the administrative tool. It is modular, scalable, and very flexible. Examples of CMS are Joomla! and Drupal.

2. Net Neutrality for Businesses and Throttling

Unless you are a telecom or cable company, you have to buy your bandwidth - you can’t just create it. Telecom and cable companies lay infrastructure, thus creating bandwidth, which they seel retail to consumers and wholesale to ISPs and other resellers.

By now we are all familiar with the Bell bandwidth throttling scandal. At least, it’s scandalous to me, to Prof. Michael Geist, to the roughly 2000 members of the Stop the Throttler group on Facebook, and to the numerous others who have been raising a stink through every media channel they can.

Since Massive has lots of ISPs and resellers as exhibitors, maybe bandwidth throttling and net neutrality for businesses should be part of the show.

3. Wireless Data Mobility

There were more Blackberries on people’s hips at Massive than in an acre of backwoods thicket.

Bell Mobility was at Massive. They sell Blackberries and airtime to use them.

Research in Motion was not at Massive. They invented the Blackberry.

Forget data plans from the cell companies. We can get that information from their web sites or from a mall kiosk.

Bring in Research in Motion, Apple, Palm, and maybe even Nokia, Ericsson, and Motorola. How about a quarter of the floor being used to pit their prototypes and visions against each other? How does each of these visionary companies see the future? What’s coming in terms of bandwidth, rich media content and streaming, security, etc.?

4. There is no more ominous and imminent threat in law and technology than the erosion of privacy.

With all our data being digitized, and then shared and stored digitally, we are looking at becoming a much more communist, open, and collective society than we had planned for. Openness is good when it refers to government and corporate transparency. Openness is good when it leads to accountability on the parts of those who hold power. But when it is the other way around - when those who hold power also gain access to information to which they should not ethically be privy - we have a serious problem.

The law has favoured corporate interests in the name of economic prosperity; the law has lately favoured government interests in the name of national security. It is time that the law favoured the individual in the name of privacy, for the benefit of long term sustainability of our society. Technological protection measures erode privacy faster than the law can enjoin their prevention and faster than their circumvention can become widespread.

The dissemination of confidential information cannot be undone with the facility with which it propagates.

Rather than seeing privacy as the antithesis of information industry, it should be seen as an opportunity for innovation! Where are the companies creating secure online identification tools? Oh, right - they’re right here in Vancouver and without any profile at Massive.

5. Mega mergers and acquisitions

Everyone has their pet arguments about this, and often they have to do with simplistic impressions of company profiles, the information technology industry, and who is dominating whom.

Which generated more public fear? Google’s acquisition of YouTube, or the possibility of Microsoft subsuming Yahoo!? What is the reality behind these deals? What is the impact on the marketplace and on innovation? We often fear that a concentration of large players will lead the IT industry down the same road as the recording industry, but it wasn’t that long ago that people dreamt of creating an innovative startup in the hopes of being acquired by MS or Adobe or whomever at a healthy profit. Is that still a feasible model? Are there genuine reasons to fear all mega m&a events, are some good for the industry, or are most good and therefore to be encouraged?

6. Ubuntu. Linux Comes Home.

GNU and Linux have been stalwarts of computer trade shows for years. They have also been almost exclusively the domain of server- and developer-level users, and 31337 hobbyists. Linux didn’t have the user-friendliness or support necessary to supplant Windows or MacOS in even a minority segment of the ordinary user (both personal and business) market. Until now.

Ubuntu is easy to install, robust, free, and relatively highly compatible with a wide variety of popular hardware. It’s potential could be unleashed by much wider use, and the seeds for that popularity could certainly be sown with some quality promotion at a really big IT exhibition.

7. Blogging - Wordpress, Typepad, Blogspot, and more

The ambit of blogging - the so-called “blogosphere” - has spread in many directions: from personal diaries, similar to Open Diary and Live Journal pages; to corporate journals, intended both to market “what’s new” materials and to humanize the business; to academic and professional bulletin boards, less polished than formal papers but more frequently updated and therefore often more immediately relevant; to amateur journalism, which itself covers an enormous spectrum.

There are several software platforms for blogging. Blogs can be hosted on independent websites or on free ones. Blogs create their own networks through blogrolling (optionally categorized link lists), trackbacks/pingbacks, and syndication which leads to aggregation.

8. Syndication

The inherent openness of the Internet allows for syndication of any content put there. Two syndication technologies are RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and podcasting. RSS allows subscribers to receive content feeds into the collector/readers (called aggregators) of their choice. Podcasting is the Internet media equivalent of VCR (or TiVo) time-shifting using a media player and a web “broadcast”.

Content moves around, independent of the design in which it first appeared. Sometimes the aggregator provides the end-product; sometimes it is an intermediate step — like a wire service to a newspaper.

9. Intellectual Property

Statutory protection exists for copyright, patent, and trademark. Common law also protects copyright and trademark.

Copyright protects artistic and literary works (including computer software). Patent protects inventions (and, in the U.S., methods). Trademark protects logos, slogans, et cetera, that uniquely brand a company and its products.

As IP regimes are reformed to keep pace with an information society, the following questions are being asked:

First, is the “limited monopoly” created by the regime carved from the public domain, or are user rights merely exceptions carved from intellectual property?

Second, what are the limits to using license contracts — both negotiated and pro-forma — to extend the regime’s protection into the public domain?

Third, what will the impact be of the contractually-enable release of more material into the public domain (though with caveats) through the GPL, Creative Commons, and other open source licensing schemes? How can this benefit the industry?

10. Knowledge and Employment

Finding the generally accepted principles of loyalty to one’s employer insufficient, most employment contracts now feature non-disclosure, non-competition, and IP assignment/waiver clauses.

Are these clauses enforceable? How can they be made to more than a scare tactic?

More importantly, are these clauses necessary? Are they perhaps detrimental to innovation and this industry?

11. vBusiness

As more and more businesses set up shop in virtual spaces, new perspectives arise on transaction issues, from profitability to liability.

When and where do transactions take place when the parties negotiate through avatars, the products are data, and the consideration is a virtual currency-equivalent?

How does one virtualize an existing brick-and-mortar business?

How does one create and grow a new vBusiness?

How does one shield a vBusiness from liability?

12. The “wikisphere” — distributed collaborative everything

Who is participating? What sorts of businesses are creating user-created collaborative content?

Should your business have a wiki?

What other wiki-type sites are foreseeable and possible?

How can a wiki be profitable? Will liability concerns cut into that profit?