The discussion of the impact of the Web in the last 20 years and predictions of what it might look like in 2030 has continued with many bloggers.  I am tracking the conversation in a wiki document in the new Innovation & Research community on the EMC Community Network.  Andrea Meyer wrote a great post on the topic and introduced me to Jim Todhunter of Invention Machine, who agreed to have a discussion on the impact of the Web on Innovation.

JIM TODHUNTER | CTO of Invention Machine

→ Invention Machine is a innovation software company. Its technology, Invention Machine Goldfire, helps companies deliver the right products the first time and makes innovation a repeatable, sustainable process. Jim discusses building the high performance innovation organization on his blog.

Stuart Miniman: Looking at things through the lens of innovation, how has the Web changed business and innovation in the last 20 years?

Jim Todhunter: It has had a huge impact, especially in these times where we are still struggling to get out of this global financial crisis.  The importance of innovation as a mechanism to build value for companies is becoming greater and greater.  The web has become vital infrastructure for innovation by creating an environment of pervasive information.  As an example, a client of ours, a plumbing company needed to take lead out of pipes.  Through the Web, they found a solution from another country, which solved their problem and led to a partnering opportunity.

SM: I love examples of how the barriers of geography and industry are broken down to allow information and ideas to be shared everywhere.

JT: This leads to the second area where the Web has a huge impact on business and innovation.  This is the notion of connectedness; business to business, business to consumer and consumer to consumer.  We can see a lot of this in the expansion of social media platforms.  This is helping customers in the notion of open innovation where businesses can bring external constituents into the process of innovation.  The Web has become an infrastructure platform for global innovation where the long tail of information that  consumers build can be leveraged.  For example, a customer of Invention Machine, Leggett & Platt, has created a 70/30 plan where 30% of their innovation is created from sources outside of the company [see Leggett & Platt podcast].

SM: I saw a great episode of Frontline which discussed the changing impact of the Web.  Over the decades, people have considered that technology has been a force of removing people from communicating.  We are now at a point where technology can be leveraged to pull people together and allow us to be interconnected.

JT: Absolutely, the volumes of information that are being created as people are pulled together is immense.  People need to not only generate information, but use tools to be able to process the information.

SM: We’ve seen many changes in the last 20 years, what do we think the Web will look like in 2030?

JT: I think that the current trends of bringing consumers more directly into the environment will continue.  The Web will fade into the background and become just another service, like phone service, which we use without considering how it works.  The consumer experience will take the lead role.  Task based applications will allow people to do things without having to think about how they are done.

SM: Will this help innovation or will technology become so pervasive that people won’t have any knowledge and will be so consumed that they won’t be able to think of innovations?

JT: I think that the needs of consumer will be put first and the technology will serve the consumer.  In business, the Web has become a disruptive platform for redefining the way that different classes of companies do business.  This has not only had a positive impact on businesses, but on consumers.

Listen to the full 6 1/2 minute interview with Jim Todhunter here (click the play button below) or on Cinchcast.

______________________________________________________________________________

What are your predictions for the future of the Web?  If you are new to this site and interested in continuing the discussion of innovation, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Today, I had the pleasure of participating on Wikibon’s FCoE: Fact vs. Fiction call.  In case you weren’t sure of the power of social media – even for a niche discussion of FCoE, a bunch of bloggers promoting the event had the call beyond the 200 line capacity of the system.  If you weren’t able to be part of the call, the audio is now available (click the play button below).

A number of posts are being created on the Wikibon site to summarize the actions that should be taken based on the discussion.  It’s a collaborative effort, I did the vendor actions post:

On February 2nd’s FCoE Fact vs. Fiction call call, we discussed that one of the key benefits of FCoE is that there is a robust vendor ecosystem including server, operating system, network and storage vendors. The creation of the technology includes new standards in both storage (T11) and networking (IEEE and IETF). There was some concern from practitioners that FCoE could be plagued with some of the interoperability challenges that have historically been found in the FC market.

As vendors are looking to move customers along the adoption curve of FCoE, they would do well to consider both the historical challenges of the industry as well as the long term goal of flexibility that customers are pursuing.

Action Item: Vendors that are serious about FCoE will do more than just give lip service to the development of solutions. They should actively engage in the creation of standards that will allow for vendor interoperability. They will also create robust documentation including reference architectures.

Footnotes: See EMC’s FCoE Techbook (http://www.emc.com/collateral/hardware/technical-documentation/h6290-fibre-channel-over-ethernet-techbook.pdf) and Emulex’s Convergenomics: The Converged Network Solutions Guide (http://www.emulex.com/solutions/convergenomics/convergenomics-guide.html)

Disclaimer: I work for EMC and Emulex was involved in organizing the Peer Incite Review Call on FCoE.

Please let me know if you have any additional questions on FCoE or topics that you think would be good for a blog post or video.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

The celebration of the Web at 20 years in ON Magazine has been getting nice coverage around the blogosphere.  Gina Minks called for me to give my answers to the 3 questions which I had blogged about and interviewed other on, but not answered myself:

• How has the Web changed your life?
• How has the Web changed business and society?
• What do you think the Web will look like in 20 years?

The Web in my life

Growing up in the pre-Web days of the 80’s, I was drawn into the world of computers.  At college in the 90’s, I carried around my Eudora email disk and got on the Web using early versions of Netscape.  I thought it was really cool that I could visit early websites and get basic information on some of the companies that I was interviewing with.  I remember showing my girlfriend (now wife) some of these websites, and her reaction was that it seemed like a toy and why would anyone waste their time on that.  Of course, her first job a year later was designing websites.  Technology moves fast.

The Web has changed my life by extending the network of people who I can keep in touch with.  In the early days of the Web, first email and later instant messenger allowed me to keep in touch with friends and family over distance.  Now, with the help of social media tools, I can stay connected with a much larger number of people.  There are cousins, friends in far away places and former co-workers that I likely would lose contact with if it wasn’t for LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.  The little updates that you see about their lives fill in the gaps in time between when you actually get to talk to them or see them.

The Web in business and society

The Web has greatly increased the velocity of information and reach of business.  Companies share information and compete in a global marketplace that is greatly enhanced by connectivity of the Web.  The Web gives us the opportunity to access lots of information about all topics.  On the other hand, there is such a deep amount of information about topics that it is easy to not get a diverse view of the world or to get lost in a sea of noise.

[For a bit more, also see the discussion that I had with Louis Gray in my last post which he transcribed.]

The Web of 2030

With all of the changes that we’ve seen in the last 20 years (or even the Web 2.0 explosion in the last 5 years), it’s difficult to guess what the Web might look like in another 20 years.  According to Nicholas Carr’s book, The Big Switch, Google’s initial goal was to help improve the way that people think (and it looks like his new book discusses whether Google is making us stupid).  In the future, computers should understand our environments and provide information based on semantics [see EMC's CTO Jeff Nick's discussion in ON Magazine] rather than searching in computer code (Boolean search, hashtags, etc).  I’m not saying that in 20 years that we will be able to link our brains into computers (sure, the Matrix is a fun movie, but not the future that we want).

While the technology of voice recognition has been around for many years and showing only modest progress, within the next 20 years, we may be able to simply talk with computers (to quote Scotty in Star Trek IV, “a keyboard, how quaint”).  Live video between people will continue to play a larger role in how we interact with each other as bandwidth increases.  It’s my hope that computers and the Web can continue to increase the ability to gather and utilize information as well as connect people.

____________________________________________________________________

To continue the conversation, I am tagging Natalie Corridan-Gregg (EMC), Aneel Lakhani (works for IBM, speaks for himself) and Andrea Meyer (Working Knowledge) to continue the #20years discussion.

UPDATE: For all of the posts on this topic, including the responses from Natalie, Aneel and Andrea – see the document on the EMC Community Network.

EMC’s thought leadership publication, ON Magazine, has a great new issue celebrating 20 years of the Web.  In the issue, there are full interviews with Bob Metcalfe (co-inventor of Ethernet), Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web).  There is also a great collection of shorter interviews with industry luminaries who were asked the following three questions:

• How has the Web changed your life?
• How has the Web changed business and society?
• What do you think the Web will look like in 20 years?

Here are two additional viewpoints to continue the conversation from the magazine.

See Me, Hear Me, Touch Me?

LOUIS GRAY | EARLY ADOPTER

→ Through his blog, Louis leads the way in exploring gadgets and technology on the web.

The Web has become the universal source for information for practically any topic at any time, regardless of its source. It has also grown into the leading venue for communication with friends, colleagues, family and strangers. The Web has undone the traditional formats of scheduled information flow and has reduced many barriers that were geographically or class based.  It has also allowed direct access to the authors of information in real time.  As these barriers decrease, so to have some of the long held (now antiquated) barriers related to transparency and what information is valuable to be shared.

In many ways, the Web has virtualized the physical. We have largely replaced physical communication with online messaging. We have reduced much of our commerce in exchange for online commerce. Travel to meetings and retailers has been largely reduced thanks to the Web and collaboration tools. Not only has society learned to turn to the Web for everything from news to business to entertainment, people have also become creators of content and entertainment themselves. They are producing videos for YouTube, writing insights on blogs, and staying connected to a broad network of connections by sharing photos on Facebook, Flickr or other sites.  We have gone from a very traditional, private, society to one where people don’t blink about sharing their every meal, location, or spending habits.  Some have chosen to livestream their daily activities, or broadcast their most embarrassing moments for thousands or even millions to see.

Any predictions on where the web will go in 20 years will be wrong.  If you look backward 20 years, you will realize how little of an idea we actually have about what is to come. At this point, as communication gets faster and information is more accessible in more places in higher quality, it seems that the only real limits are physics and our own imagination. As the underlying components of the Web, including servers, software, networking and processing improve, so to will the potential for new ideas. Full-length movie downloads were just a concept only a few years ago, and now we don’t think twice about streaming them from Netflix or ordering them from iTunes to our Apple TV. What’s to say we can’t continue to see this maturation in the next two decades as our own activity becomes faster, lighter, mobile and connected? Will we have devices that carry, in our pocket, or in our headgear, the entirety of the world’s publications or videos ever published? Can we virtually meet with people from different locations and share the same experiences, including touch, taste and smell, without us being in the same geography?

Listen to the full 9 minute interview with Louis Gray here (click the play button below) or on Cinchcast.

Search and Find

HUTCH CARPENTER | VP of Product at Spigit

→ At his job and through his blog, Hutch explores the impact of technology on business and innovation.

The Web and Web 2.0 have allowed us to share our thoughts and to create a robust on-line resume through tools such as blogging and Twitter.  Traditionally, people are reviewed based on their previous jobs; I was able to showcase my critical thinking skills through blogging, which allowed me to move from banking to high tech.  Before I started at Spigit, I wrote a blog post about ideation and brainstorming which included a mention of Spigit.  A customer linked from my site to the company site and requested a demo, this got me visibility with Spigit’s CEO.

The biggest impact of the Web on business has been search.  Search has changed the way that people find information.  Rather than using periodicals and trade references, you can get a broad selection of targeted results through the Web to meet your needs.  Many interactions have gone digital, which helps businesses and individuals spread their message.

In the future, the Web will increase the connectivity between technology and people.  I’ve written about Paul Saffo’s predictions [also see an interview with Paul Saffo in the ON Magazine] about how robots and sensors will change how we live in the future.  Social web logic – the tracking of topics and people – will continue to increase the utility of search.  There will be increasing visibility and importance to online reputation.  I guarantee this though: Robert Scoble will be testing the outer limit of whatever it is.

Listen to the full 7 minute interview with Hutch Carpenter here (click the play button below) on Cinchcast.

What are your predictions for the future of the Web?  Post your comments or record your thoughts using Cinchcast.

Please go to the complete issue of ON Magazine by clicking the cover below.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) is still a hot topic in 2010.  My expectation is that in 2010, FCoE will have strong growth (of course, growing by high percentages is easy when you start with small numbers) and that as more server options with FCoE become available that we will start to see FCoE expanding many FC environments. From a standards perspective, T11 FC-BB-6 is working to “add details” to the current FCoE environments; while the exact goals are not completed, they may include distributed FCF functionality (enabling multi-hop) and direct connectivity of end nodes (removing the requirement of a switch).  People should understand that even when we have multi-hop and end-to-end configurations, that it will take time to grow the scope of solutions.  In 2010, we are unlikely to see an all-Ethernet FCoE configuration running thousands of nodes in a single configuration.

As part of the extending the solution to you, there are some upcoming events where I will be speaking on FCoE.

FCoE: Fact vs Fiction hosted by Wikibon

The first event will be a conversation hosted by Wikibon.  I will be joining Nigel Poulton, Dave Graham,  and others to discuss the realities of the technology, share what we are hearing in the marketplace and answer your questions.

Please join us and participate in the conversation.

Date: Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Time: 12:00pm – 1:00pm ET (9:00am – 10:00am PT)

See the Wikibon site for more details on the call.

Ethernet Summit

The Ethernet Summit is a 2-day event put on by the Ethernet Alliance, this year’s is February 24-25, 2010 at the Wyndham Hotel in San Jose, CA.

There will be a full day of FCoE where I will be presenting the origins and status of FCoE.  The keynote of the day is Silvano Gai, who literally wrote the book on FCoE.  Claudio DeSanti, Chairperson of the committee at T11 that defines FCoE, will be giving the technology overview and there will be a panel discussion including members from Emulex, HP, QLogic, NetApp and Cisco.

In addition to the FCoE coverage, I’ll be looking forward to getting the latest on the networking industry including plenty of information on 40/100 Gb Ethernet.

For more details on the conference including the full agenda and registration details, see http://www.ethernetsummit.com/.

EMC World 2010

If you see my posts from last year, EMC World has always been one of my favorite weeks of the year.  The conference is May 10-13th in Boston.  My presentation last year was the top attended for the entire conference, so the bar is set high for this year.  My presentation for this year is entitled Converged Data Center: FCoE, iSCSI and the future of storage networking.  It’s always a great sharing of information with so many people that I look forward to seeing.  For more details and for registration (there are some great gifts available if you register by February 28th), please click the graphic below.

Please post any questions that you have and let me know if you’ll be at any of the events listed.  If you are new to this site and interested in continuing the discussion on storage networking, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

There have been so many people that have inspired and encouraged me that I’d like to be able to give a personal thank you to every one of you; since this is a bit difficult, I thought I would do even better and send you all a personal holiday greeting from the President of the United States – just click here.

Maybe it’s because I watched the holiday greeting from the President, but I’m very hopeful for 2010.  I’m looking forward to 2010, where one of my activities will be to bring information and people from EMC’s Innovation Network outside of the firewall where we can share and discuss with a broad audience. What are you looking forward to in 2010?  The Olympics?  The final space shuttle missions?

To get you ready for the new year, here’s a calendar widget from EMC’s thought leadership group which you can add it to your favorite site (click the “Get & Share” button):

Wishing you a happy and healthy holidays and new year!

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

On December 15th and 16th, Cisco will be hosting a virtual trade show to highlight the Journey to the Virtualized Data Center.  Cisco has brought together 11 partners to share with you the best ways to solve the toughest data center challenges in networking, storage, applications, and physical infrastructure technologies.

Chris Carrier, Director of Marketing for EMC’s virtualization practice and I will be doing a Live Chat (Tuesday, December 15th, 1pm Eastern, 10am Pacific) from the EMC booth in the virtual trade show.  In addition to the top ten considerations for virtualization from Chris and the top ten considerations for networking from me, we look forward to answering your questions.

It’s been a busy year in both the networking and virtualization spaces; as we wrap up 2009, we hope you’ll take the opportunity to join us for this discussion.

For more on the conference, see Cisco’s Data Center Networks blog and register at the DCoF site.

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on storage networking, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

I saw TweetClouds from Hutch and thought I’d post my cloud for the last year

According to Tweet Cloud, these are my most frequently used words over the last year:

1. blog
2. post
3. fcoe
4. thanks
5. nice
6. social
7. media
8. world
9. cisco
10. innovation
11. video
12. time
13. cloud
14. people
15. looking
16. business
17. facebook
18. bloggers
19. friendfeed
20. forum
21. vmware
22. week
23. live
24. conference
25. storage
26. google
27. lots
28. check
29. hope
30. list

Interesting that Google (Wave, etc), Cisco and VMware all make my list, but not my own company (EMC).

I also compared this year list to the last six months and found that more tech topics trended up – cloud (#3) and vmware (#7) and more general social media (FriendFeed and Facebook) dropped off the list.  It’s good to see that for the most part, my Twitter Cloud does match my Twitter bio topics – social media, innovation, storage networking and virtualization.  I was a bit surprised that “thanks” dropped off the six month list; so in case I haven’t said it enough, Thank You for everyone who has stopped by or had conversations on line.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

How do you determine what blogs to read?  There are millions of choices and most people reach a point where they either become inundated with too much information or they stop adding new sources.  Of course, if we continue to go to the same sources, we will be finding less new ideas.

Finding and sharing the best blogs

I read plenty of articles and there are a small percentage of blog posts that I read that I would like to be able to go back and read again or reference in blog posts.  After reading articles from Louis Gray about Google Reader, I learned that not only can I keep a history of the articles that I enjoyed most, but I can also share the links with others.  I find that one of the best ways to stay energized with blogging is to keep reading different viewpoints, and by looking at the shared links of friends, coworkers and bloggers, I could read the “expertly filtered” articles from many more sources than I would ever have time to read.

If you enjoy my blog posts, you might have interest in the items that I share since they are part of the inspiration for what I write.  If you would be interested in my shared items and use Google Reader, go to Sharing Settings (which you can go find a link to at “Your Stuff” towards the top of the left bar) and in the “Find people sharing in Reader” put stuminiman@gmail.com.  For other feed readers or to see the shared link page, you can go to this link.  [Note that making connections through Google accounts can also allow you to connect via Gmail, Google Chat and Google Wave]

I addition to sharing through the Google Reader interface, you can also use the bookmarket to share any item that you are reading around the web.  There are other options for sharing such as social bookmarking and Twitter – and if you can, I recommend using multiple options – but only in Google Reader can you read the full articles and share them from a single screen.

Whether you are an active blogger or reader of the web, it is a simple thing to share articles.  It not only helps to promote the best articles that you find, but allows your contacts to spend less time in finding some great resources.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com

Last week, Steve Todd and I heard Gary Hamel challenge modern companies:

How do you build an organization where innovation is everybody’s job?

How do you build an organization that INSPIRES extraordinary contributions?

This week, EMC held its third annual global Innovation Conference.  For some background on the event and the contest, check out my previous posts.  It has been amazing to watch the growth and reach of the conference.  The first year was a single site, the second year was a single site with some remote participation, and the third year was over a dozen “globally local” conferences: two one-hour segments broadcast from India and the rest of the day was different at each site.  Not only are dozens of hours of material be posted internally (EMCers can find the Innovation Café here), but some information is being shared externally through blogs, photos, videos and soon on the ECN site.

Contest Winners

One of the primary components of the conference is to celebrate the teams of innovators and their submissions, and to choose the winners.  As a conclusion to the selection process, all three top winners this year were ideas that the selection committee, rather than the community, moved into the semi-finals.  The second place winner was a combination of two similar ideas (one of which was popular in the community voting).  The “People’s Choice” award was a tie between an idea from India and an idea from Cork, Ireland; not surprisingly, both of these ideas reached the semifinals through community voting.  Beyond the winners, I know that many people were inspired either by having feedback on their ideas, or even by being able to review ideas from others. The community involvement in voting greatly broadened the visibility of the contest and conference around the globe.

Day of Innovation

We had a stacked day which, thanks to much help from many people, went very well.  The innovation contests have helped to move towards Hamel’s goal of engaging everyone in innovation.  This can’t be done without strong support from senior management.  Here is a short video from some of our executives discussing innovation and the innovation conference (we were especially pleased to get a few words from new EMCers Pat Gelsinger and Frank Slootman):

The day was anchored solidly at the beginning (Vice Chairman Bill Teuber) and end (EMC RSA Division’s president Art Coviello) with live EMC executive presentations.  Polly Pearson spoke about how innovation is a brand value and key piece of EMC’s culture.  Our keynote speaker was Dave Ritter of InnoCentive whose presentation on open innovation resonated strongly with us.  Completing the rest of the day was not one, not two, but three panels (as my esteemed colleague and this year’s third place winner, Dr. Dave Reiner would say: two’s company, three’s a cloud).  The first panel was on how we are innovating locally (which includes how we connect globally); see panelist Jamie Pappas’ blog for more on this.  The other two panels were on cloud computing from the business and technical points-of-view.  Judith Hurwitz (consultant, analyst and author) and Wayne Pauley (EMC) did a great job of moderating panels which covered a lot of ground and went beyond some of the hype and blue-sky thinking of cloud.  Even though this was an internal event, we invited Judith Hurwitz and Christofer Hoff (Cisco) to give additional perspectives and to help keep us from talking in an echo chamber.

After the conference, about eighty of us got together to discuss the ideas of the day.  Gina Minks took some video for me, capturing some of the discussion.  For me, the highlight of the conference was that there was so much passionate support to put on this event.  “Innovation” related activities can brings out the creativity, passion and initiative of people for more than a day.

As a final note – a special thanks to Mary Henderson who took my offer to help out with this year’s conference and turned that into an amazing (if exhausting) journey of putting together the local event (with lots of help from her and some of our events experts) and help out the global team.  I know that I learned a lot and made new—and strengthened old—connections.

If you are interested in continuing the discussion on innovation, please consider subscribing to this blog.

Stuart Miniman

http://blogstu.wordpress.com