#CUTC notes from Open Text keynote

The speaker was Eugene Roman from Open Text.

About 10% of the crowd has heard of Open Text. Eugene’s job is to change that. Started at Waterloo from two professors. First project was to put the Oxford dictionary online. Made the first internet search engine. Largest ECM vendor as of 2007.

We live at a critical time in the tech business. We don’t have to worry about wireless devices, that’s been done. Laptops are there. Ubiquitous internet connectivity is there, but expensive. What we need to worry about is content.

What does Open Text do? They connect many platforms. Oracle, SAP, Office, Siebel Oracle, Exchange Server, etcetera. How to manage all this information.

Enough about the company. Now we’re welcomed to the digital world. Dr. Donald Chrisholm said that in 1979. Was given half a billion dollars to build the first digital phone switch. We’re in a world of instant communication, a world where information is power and is frictionless. A boundaryless global village. A world of highly useful, amazing and at times useless content. Mr. Roman’s gift: the glocal effect. Global and local at the same time. Immerse yourself in a region’s local content from anywhere. If you don’t understand that, you can’t understand the future of connectivity.

How can information be useless? Spam, SMSes from your ex. Information is like cholesterol, both good and bad. The world isn’t simply a digital world anymore, it’s a digital content world. Ever thought about what is the root world of technology? Greek word techne. It’s the Greek word for art. The great artists of the times were considered great technologists. Sometimes we forget this, but now content is coming back among technologists.

Digital disruptors. Easy prediction: everything that can be digital, will be digital. Yes or no? Yes.

What’s fun got to do with making money? Infotainment, entertainment, it’s all content.

We see appliances that create content, and content that creates appliances. Do you want to be in the content or the appliance business? Generally companies that are good at appliances are bad at content, but they’re great at presenting it to you. The actual success of the iPod is not the device itself but the ecosystem for the content. Devices lead you to deal with warranties, content is fire and forget. Produce once and replicate infinately.

Books are becoming obsolete. Digital can help you be green. Content today is dominated by GEMAYA: Google, eBay, Microsoft, Amazon, Yahoo, AOL/Time Warner. These are disrupting traditional communications and entertainment. Pick your content providers carefully. $13 billion in advertising revenue in the top 4 portals, $6.3 billion for Google’s US online advertising revenue in 2007. All of this is from vapour, in the content world.

Mixed media becomes rich interactional content. Did Gutenberg understand this? Have we thought about 2020? Students usually only think ahead to the next beer. But even if we tried, it’s so far forward it’s hard to think about.
We’re disadvantaged for this digital disruption because we have been bathed in bits. We have to learn from the time before to help us take advantage of the time that comes. First internet, don’t think DARPAnet, think morse code lines. First messaging infrastructure in the world, it moved the world from month-long international messages to seconds. Book to read: The Victorian Internet. Takes about two hours to read. It will change your life. Caused Eugene to think “everything that can be digital will be digital.” We live in the moment, with all our devices we have a mind block, unable to imagine life without our devices. Thinking about the Victorian internet will help us think of how the world will change in the upcoming digital evolution.

We are the millenial prosumers. We always have a computing device on us. Twenty eight years ago this was unthinkable. Computing is now a commodity. Getting into hardware now is the wrong end of the curve, it’s explosive growth is over, content’s is about to come up. How did Gutenberg understand rich interactional content? Ever seen a Gutenberg bible? Here’s what Eugene saw. Printed pages, also the effect called “illumination.” After they printed it they sent it to an artist to highlight and colour letters in major paragraphs with colour lettergrams and pictograms. An “illuminator” used gold ink, red ink, etcetera. The illuminators understood the human condition and how to get attention. Humans live on interesting things.

In the past, creators were few and readers were many. Now creators are many and are close to one to one with readers. “Copies and Seconds” is the next book we ought to read. The Xeography machine (photocopier) was the next age after Gutenberg. He figured it out in the year 1959. He made $150 million the year after he completed his invention of 19 years, and then donated it to American universities. “Chester never needed very much. He was all about giving back, especially to students. They are the future.” Why would he invent Xerography? He understood that many words would matter. As a patent clerk he used to hand reproduce things. Then the reproducable picture came along from Kodak. Digization is the link. The next link, Rochester in New York. Chester was from Rochester, Kodak started there as well.

There was a mixing of blood between Xerox and Kodak. There’s something about people that learn from eachother. Make sure that your company works in a good ecosystem.

Kodak is an excellent case study in a company that could have owned the digital age but did not. It was hard for their business model to change from silver on plastic, which they could charge a great deal for, to bits, which are free.

Massively reproducable interactable rich content is worth billions of digital bits (priceless.)

Content is evolving with bandwidht and personalization but there are no rules. No governing body of the internet beyond commercial interests and loose associations. This is good and bad. Alephs will change your world. Memexes. In this world of search and knowledge, we did not predict the rise of Google. People who studied memes could see that Yahoo would have been superceded by Google, though.

What makes Google, Google? Graph theory! Sergei Brin learned it from the University of Moscow, the best computation school. They had to think differently because they did not have much in the way of computing power.
Web 2.0 is extremely rich media disruption. Everything that is digital can be captured, clicked, used. Metadata matters. Clicks matter. Everything matters. Everything that is digital can be tagged. Unfortunately, e-mail is still the killer app. 75% of all digital knowledge is in e-mail. One day of e-mail is equivalent to ten world wide webs. The Blackberry is an e-mail appliance. Now they need to make the transition from e-mail to rich interactional content. They need to attach with a content provider.

How did Apple become Apple? Read “I, Woz.” They understand the Wozniak effect. It’s the only story of a true inventor in the modern era. What does ipod stand for? Internet protocol on demand, according to Eugene. They took the power of the internet and they made it highly useful in your pocket. E-mail still matters and will continue to matter. SMS will continue to matter. The problem with e-mail is liability. An e-mail that a company sends can get a company into a lot of liability. One of the products Open Text makes is the ability to back up and index e-mail. Particularly useful when seven years from now you get e-mail subpoenaed. If you don’t produce the ancient e-mail, an executive gets a contempt of court charge.

What did Carver Mead of Caltech say? Listen to the technology and find out what it is telling us. One real key: high fidelity. Think about it. Why is it important? CDs were cheap. Sony created minidiscs. MP3 players came out. The problem with MP3 is that it’s a lossy compression. Apple still managed to pull knowledge out of Dolby to make the iPod high fidelity. The quality of ipod earbuds on an ipod were roughly twice as accurate than anything else on the market with base earbuds or headphones.

Eugene’s quote to us: The global digita village is about extremely rich, highly interactional content.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Open Text Introduces New Versions of Desktop, Thin Client Content Viewer Solutions (newswire.ca)
• Open Text Extends eDiscovery Offering (newswire.ca)