Is 3D a Distruptive Technology?

Last year at CES 3D was everywhere. This year at CES there was very little mention of it.  One can buy 3D TV but most people that I know never turn on the function.  I personally have 2 TVs with 3D capability, but have never used it.

3D doesn't seem to fit the definition of a disruptive technology.  It is not something that emerging markets are using and the big players all have it, so it is not something that appears at this time to create new markets or displace established ones.

Is it just too soon?  Is 3D a sleeping technology waiting for the right application of the technology to make it really take off?  Ot is it just another technology that can be used when special effects are desired.

I was at the dentist the other day and he had a 3D machine that took a 3D image of your tooth.  Similar to a CAT scan for you mouth.  Maybe 3D is a niche market today, but will it break out into something bigger?

Are the requirements for special glasses holding it back.  Will glasses-less 3D catch on better?  Or do we have to wait for Google glasses to make 3D available for any and everything?

What do you think?  Will 3D be disruptive?

What Will Be Disruptive in 2013?

In 1995 Harvard Business Review published "Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave"
by Joseph L. Bower and Clayton M. Christensen.  This article addressed one of the most consistent patterns in business, i.e. the inability to stay at the top of their industry when tecnologies or markets change.  Ultimately, these authors posit, the problem is that they stay too close to their customers.  The result of this closeness is that investments are strongly influenced by existing customers.  The technology they could have invested in was not wanted by their customers - until their customers wanted it, and then it was too late.  The technologies that enter through emerging markets are ignored, because existing customers don't want it, and the emerging markets are too small to address.  The technology in the emerging markets are also often not as good as what currently exist, but the rate of improvement is often faster than that of existing technology. 

"For example, although personal computers did not meet the requirements of mainstream minicomputer users in the early 1980s, the computing power of the desktop machines improved at a much faster rate than minicomputer users’ demands for computing power did. As a result, personal computers caught up with the computing needs of many of the customers of Wang, Prime, Nixdorf, Data General, and Digital Equipment. Today they are performance-competitive with minicomputers in many applications. For the minicomputer makers, keeping close to mainstream customers and ignoring what were initially low-performance desktop technologies used by seemingly insignificant customers in emerging markets was a rational decision—but one that proved disastrous."

 The Harvard Business Review Blog published on January 10, 2013: "Disruptive Trends to Watch in 2013"

"The pattern that simple, convenient, low-priced solutions would grow from humble beginnings to create and transform industries had not yet been identified."

But, that excuse no longer applies.  Many have built on the work of Clayton Christensen and have identified the critical phases of disruptive technology:

1. Conception. When a disruptive idea is first born, typically far away from the market's mainstream. In these early days, there typically are a range of companies experimenting with a new model, fighting to figure out a sustainable business model.
2. Coming of age. When at least one of the would-be disruptors crosses from the fringes to more mainstream applications.
3. Crossing over. When the disruptor becomes the mainstream. Sometimes this shift results in the whole-sale replacement of the previous market leader; sometimes it creates a completely parallel market (which typically ends up being larger than the previous market due to the democratizing power of disruption).

The article goes on to identify those technology in 2012 that have proven disruptive and predict four technology that will be disruptive in 2013:

1. 3-D printing
2. The Internet of Things
3. New healthcare business models
4. Low-cost, online, competency-based learning universities     

These are all worth watching and have been suggested by others a potential disruptive technologies of the near future.  What do you think?  Will these be disruptive?

Disruption in Your LIfe

Disrupt has the following definition from The Free Dictionary:

1. To throw into confusion or disorder: Protesters disrupted the candidate's speech.

2. To interrupt or impede the progress, movement, or procedure of: Our efforts in the garden were disrupted by an early frost.

3. To break or burst; rupture.

 

Disruption occurs in all areas of ones life, not just in markets and technology.  For example, marriage is surly a disruption in your lifestyle.  Children not only disrupt, but they are a disruption in your lifestyle as well.  Changing jobs can be very disruptive, sometimes resulting in a complete change in you career.  

 

Are they good, or bad?  Maybe both at the same time?  Whatever they are to you, they can be the catalyst to make changes that are both sustainable and better for you.

 

Disruption in technology can destroy markets and create new ones almost overnight. Disruptive technology is a term coined by Harvard Business School professor Clayton M. Christensen to describe a new technology that unexpectedly displaces an established technology.  

 

My interest is in why and how do these occur.  What have been the disruptions in your life?  What disruptive innovations have you experienced.   Let me know how you handled these.

Object storage predictions for 2013

Object storage predictions for 2013
Object storage is an on-again, off-again topic.  But, now it appears that object storage will be a game changer for cloud storage, big data analytics, and mobility which requires that the metadata be stored along with the data.  For object storage to take off in the corporate market, there has to be a standard interface for application vendors to write to. Object storage is the solution for organizations that deal with extreme amounts of unstructured data.

Disruption, Again, by the Automobile

The arrival of the automobile was a disruptive technology, replacing whole industries that had grown up supporting horses and buggies.  A recent post in Wired byThilo Koslowski suggests that the automobile, aka, the car, has become the ultimate mobile device. 

"“Connected vehicles” are cars that access, consume, create, enrich, direct, and share digital information between businesses, people, organizations, infrastructures, and things. Those “things” include other vehicles, which is where the Internet of Things becomes the Internet of Cars."

One might ask when such vehicles might become available?  The prediction is that within the next few years companies will begin announcing plans for advanced automotive technology products.  Google has received permission from the State of California to test autonomous vehicles.

What type of disruption could one expect?  If we look backwards and see that the automobile replaced the requirement for one horse per person.  One automobile also replaced the requirement for several horses per buggy.  With the American love for the automobile, we have regressed to one or more cars per person.  But, the younger generation may change this.

"These tradeoffs are even more important to younger vehicle owners (18- to 24-year-olds) than older ones (54+ years). The younger group is more likely (30%) to choose internet access over having a vehicle (compared to just 12% of the older group), and about the same percentages are likely to use a car-sharing service as an alternative to vehicle ownership. "

So, car ownership may change.  One can envision that taxi cabs may not disappear, but become autonomous vehicles that are called when needed.   One can envision a tiered transportation system from individual autonomous cars at the high cost end, multiple person shared vehicles, such as Vans, in the middle, and busses with fixed routes as they are today, but moving autonomously.

If one spends a few moments thinking about the potential, there will be a large shift in the types of services available to the public.

The Comming Disruption of Big Data

The predictions have been coming for some time that Big Data will make a tremendous impact in our Digital Universe.  I made a presentation back in 2008 to an FFRDC that suggested to them that this was an area they should start looking into for their government clients, but it didn't get much traction then (may it was just me?).

Steve Todd recently posted that a recent issue of The Economist indicated that three technology trends are enabling machines to become more prevalent:

• The new version of the internet protocol (IPV6), with an address space of 128 bits, provides for 340 billion, billion, billion, billion unique addresses.  The current protocol, 32 bits long, supported only 4.3 billion binary addresses.
• There has never been enough bandwidth to support wireless M2M data streams.  Over the past year, new 4G networks have rolled out to accommodate smart phones and pads.
• Cloud computing has collapsed the unit cost of storage.

The interaction of these trends are what disruption is all about. These trends, along with the growth in analytic visualization, will allow any organization to mine the data that collected an an accelerating rate and quickly respond to nascent indicators of interest.  New product and services will meet the immediate needs of crowd-sourced requirements.

Security In Your Digital Life

Let's talk about a different kind of disruption today - how your digital and personal life is disrupted by those who might attack you in some way, whether physically or digitally.  We recently had some friends who live in a retirement setting in a gated retirement community.  This facility has the type of security you would want people to have who might be less able to protect themselves.  But, they were robbed.  If you have ever been robbed you know how invasive and disruptive that can be.  But, they were robbed not just once, but twice.  Treasures acquired over a life time were taken.

The second robbery took all of their important papers that contained their wills, etc.  The potential for ID theft is now very real to them.

Physical protection is relatively easy - locks, alarms, protective services - but none are foolproof.  To protect my property I only have to worry about access to that property, which is usually located in one place, maybe a few places.  But digital protection is much harder.  Much of my identity information is scattered around the country depending on someone else to protect that information.  I have no control over how, or if, they do anything to protect that information.  I can implement digital protection on my computers and servers, but even that depends on the manufactures of those devices and software to have a system that works and is kept up to date against the rapidly changing methods used by those who would digitally attack you.

Information Assurance (IA) is a hot topic these days.  Standards have been developed by NIST and others.  But, these are only lacklusterly followed by many, leaving them easy targets.  But, like physical security, digital security is not foolproof.  If you want to be absolutely secure, then you have get rid of anything that someone wants to take from you.  Digitally, that mean unplugging your computers from the grid.