Age of (Insufficient) Context

I was in Chicago when the Red Sox won Game 6 of the World Series. There was muted interest in that baseball savvy town. Change Red to White and you would have had a  very different vibe. Earlier in that week I read a column in Baseball Nation which called the Series, “annoying”.  The writer argued that if you're a fan of one of the other 28 teams, it was an annoying combination.

I got the “annoyed” feeling a few times as I read The Age of Context. Scoble and Israel kicked off the Age of Conversation with their Naked book a few years ago, and have the opportunity to do the same as sensors and analytics reshape every industry. But they focus a bit too much on consumer applications (in fairness in stadiums, in healthcare, in stores, in taxis – so personal life widely defined), and that mostly from their personal Bay Area experiences. In that sense they come across as fans for a “local team”, with the associated self-adulation that brings.

This summer I had a chance to interview auto industry execs in Japan and Germany and invariably the Google autonomous car and Tesla came up. I heard admiration, but hardly any quaking in the boots. In fact one of the execs said “Vinnie, my car has supported assistive cruise control (and associated radar and smart software) since 1999”. So different than the adulation you hear for both companies in Silicon Valley.

On a trip to Germany, I saw a trainload full of Czech made Skodas. So, on a trip to Prague I asked about how the company has kept its engineering prowess even through decades of communist mediocrity. I was impressed to learn the company has been using wearable technology in its shop floor for years now. You talk to a number of first responders in many US cities and elsewhere and you hear about the Golden-I wearable helmet. The authors spend quite a bit of time on Google Glass which is generating plenty of excitement, but is hardly the first wearable technology.

Then there is the enterprise focus. I am reviewing an advance copy of The New Killer Apps by Chunka Mui and Paul Carroll, and you can see the contrast in how they cover the Google Car. In several chapters, they look at impact on “carmakers, their dealers, rental car companies, body shops, insurers, health care providers” of driverless cars – by their estimate “$2 trillion in revenue each year in the United States alone”

Or talk to GE about the convergence of sensors and analytics and they will rattle all kinds of impressive operational and other metrics around their wind turbines, locomotives, aircraft engines, medical equipment and other complex machines. They have an entire market strategy built around what they call the Industrial Internet. Talk to even a “laggard” industry like railroads and you hear about trackside sensors and related algorithms for predictive maintenance. These are few industries which are not already leveraging the Internet of Things.

The other area which should have got deeper coverage is Privacy, especially since they highlight the term on the cover. Post NSA disclosures, it would have been nice for them to push their access to Google, Microsoft and other tech vendors to get a better understanding on how data protection is evolving. Sure, we blame the NSA but the breach happened at these vendors. And for them to showcase some of the debates around  the privacy v. profit  that must be raging in every vendor as we share even more data via our mobile devices, cars, medical devices and household appliances.

The book is very readable with lots of examples – but  it could have been much richer if Robert and Shel had used, pardon the pun, a broader context beyond their consumery, SV lens.