The Future of Web Apps is....User Ownership of Social Nets

Yesterday Simon Torrance of STL and I ran the Digital Home event at the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm event. In essence it was broken into 3 sections, focussing on the silver surfers, eHealth and new business models:

(i) The Digital Home and Silver Surfers - we had very good talks from speakers in the Telco, Advertising (Ogilvy) and Media (Sky) world about the opportunities for serving the 55+ community. We will write these up in more detail later, but the thing I am left with after this - as I am whenever I look at the demographic thing - is that I just don't understand the focus on youth - there are far less of them, and they have far less money. It's almost as if the entire Ad/Media complex is stuck in a 1960's timewarp when that is where the boomer generation were young, but that big bulge is 50+ now.

(ii) eHealth - again some great presentations which we will write up later, the real aha here is most of the technology is available, the issue is getting a bunch of parties with totally different motivations to actually work together.

And this is where something started to get very interesting for people who are interested in how Social Networks will play out. A presentation from Cybermoor about the Alston Moor healthcare started it rolling.

In essence, in the UK anyway, getting collaboration between government, corporates and health service has been hard, despite the massive service and financial saving benefits potentially obtainable. However, the threat of closure of the local hospital shifted mental models enough for collaboration to begin, but what was really interested was that the outcome - the aggregation service - was operated by a not-for-profit Social Enterprise (Cybermoor) because this was the only entity which was sufficently trusted by healthcare providers and patients.

We then kicked off the "revolutionary business models" session and the OnseNet (Our Net) story emerged - for those not aware, this is small a part of Holland (Nuenen) which has hooked up nearly all its citizens to a big broadband pipe. OnseNet is owned by its customer as well, and yet again it has worked because it is trusted by the people, and the government felt it could invest in infrastructure owned by such an entity. OnseNet took 75% of the local Cable operators customer away, as well as reducing costs of distributing various social services.

After that we had Alcatel-Lucent going through how its MyOwnTV platform worked in the town of Lommel in Belgium, where a community TV/triple play service has been piloted for a year (2006/7) - yet again, the community nature helped its implementation and made the (user and community) generated content and services more trusted, and relevant.

Finally Intel took us through their ideas for the "Contract PC" - essentially PC rental rather than PC purchase, and it can be subsidised by various players (possible pre-loaded by the service provider) to reduce costs, so the c 1/3rd of people in the UK who do not have PC's can get them. Its a good start to teh conversation, and I can imagine other approaches (now the One Laptop project is selling into the OECD too)

To be sure, none of this stuff is easy, but as readers of this blog over the last year will know we have been very concerned about how trust and privacy will really work in social nets once they are scaled up from more than toys for early adopters, and these examples seem to be very interesting and point in some interesting directions.

By the way, I found out later how hard it is to have a sensible conversation about this stuff, as it tends to cut straight across the current political divide - I was trying to explain this at an event later and was rebuked and told to "leave my politics at the door". (I was talking about the cost benefits at the time, I think he was a Labour guy but I'm sure a Tory would have been as upset by the social enterprise nature of ownership)

I was gobsmacked and couldn't think what to say at the time.....but thats what blogs are for so here goes:

Politics? This isn't about f*cking Politics - this is about Economics, and Social Policy, and our Future - its about how to be able to afford to live a good lifestyle as well as compete with very large countries who are not spending anything on social services and whose wages are a fraction of ours. Its about embracing the opportunities of the next comms revolution.

Clearly one of the main requirements for these sorts of debates is to be able to get them aired in apolitical environments, where minds are held wide open.

(PS politically I've been Green since the time it was nerdy rather than cool, if anyone wants to know)