How long until very specialized dedicated devices are replaced by applications and procedures surrounding multi-purpose personal devices – or put another way, when will the solar-powered dynamic parking meter be replaced by the mobile device parking payment app?

Using this example as illustrative, these dedicated devices are quite expensive, and what they really amount to is:
- a database with user and admin/overseer reporting
- a user interface, acceptance of funds
- storage/retrieval for funds by admin

Old-school parking meters (coins, one per parking spot) have user and admin reporting that is the same little mechanical flag system, and that is in the same place as where the user’s vehicle is parked. Their user interface is very simple and easy to understand, and the funds collection is very cumbersome requiring an individual visit to each one to collect.

Most of us have seen variations, updates and improvements on this (though some have also spent several minutes stuck behind someone who was having trouble figuring out some new variety) like “pay and display” the paper on the car dashboard, the “4 in 1″ meter with numbered spaces etc. Some of them allow nearby remote monitoring capabilities for parking enforcement, faraway monitoring, solar power, etc etc but it strikes me that dedicated hardware is cumbersome and unnecessary when this problem could be addressed by specific software running on smart client devices. At some point, it becomes economically desirable (when considering not just this problem but many others that face us every day and that are either grudgingly borne – like lining up for things – or inefficiently addressed by single purpose solutions) to give out devices to people.

With the database and the backend of a payment system in the “cloud”, all that’s left is the right user interface which can live on the user’s smart device. And is subject to the kind of rapid innovation that can happen in software and is harder to happen in hardware. The revision and update cycles are much faster – and boom, you’re “checking in” to your parking space and paying for it on your phone. Imagine: “Rob just got a parking ticket on Sansome street.” Status updates will never be the same! Well, perhaps we won’t choose to share that little fact, but I’d love to see these ‘boring’ services exposed to some serious connected innovation.

The “singularity” is the tipping point where every single person has a smart device because the cost/benefit of provision of the majority of public and private services make much more sense with them, instead of without them (e.g. for equivalent functionality, cost of giving a device to everyone who doesn’t have one already is < cost of dedicated devices in aggregate), and probably there are penalties for not using one and/or services are not provided to those who lack devices. Think social networks matter now? Just wait…

I will spend some future posts further analyzing my thought process around this, but it is wholly clear to me that we are shifting to smart clients, software- and network-driven that will next change the actual physical architecture of where we work, play and live.

As I was listening to a member of Congress saying something on the radio this morning, it occurred to me that the more online sources (wikileaks.com for example) or news stories, or previous statements in newspapers aggregated by online services, or twitter postings or for some people, foursquare.com checkins… The more this info is out there, the harder it becomes to LIE, to say misleading and untruthful things.

Perversely, however, this means that those (sociopaths?) who are able to lie convincingly, with impunity, and/or can use these sources for misdirection, will become much more powerful. The more powerful the perceived environment for lying becomes, the more powerful the gifted few who can do it well. One of the most important gifts for these people may be that of justification/convincing themselves that what they are doing is ultimately for the good… And unfortunately, though it would be nice to believe they will get found out or nipped in the long-run, we know that’s not necessarily true.

Reversion to the mean helps us understand that long streaks of good fortune, on average will not persist. But just as a run of 6 heads in a row doesn’t by itself constitute an unfair coin, so luck and self-delusion can sustain liars for far longer than we can always predict.

My post on InternetEvolution.com about Fractional Expertise and on-demand expert networks.

My wife remarked to me that the prices of Blu-Ray players had come down very quickly, more quickly than she remembered for other similar technologies like DVD players. Apparently is it pretty close and bluray might be slightly cheaper but that makes sense – the ability for a technology to get to scale via expanding various distribution channels, outsourced manufacturing that can make it cheaper, faster etc. will make these changes happen ever more quickly.

With digital goods this is probably magnified by an order of magnitude because the costs of reproduction are far lower (even though writing software does take time as we all know!), effectively zero for the copying or redistribution of some digital items.

2010 we are going to see some amazing developments and changes, and the pace will accelerate even further.

I’m excited about what Michael Singer and the team at InternetEvolution.com are doing – and my first post for them came out today, check it out here.

Moral hazard is the prospect that a party insulated from risk may behave differently from the way it would behave if it were fully exposed to the risk. Moral hazard arises because an individual or institution does not bear the full consequences of its actions, and therefore has a tendency to act less carefully than it otherwise would, leaving another party to bear some responsibility for the consequences of those actions. (wikipedia)

I was chatting with Scott Rafer this morning and his observation was, we are not in a cycle, this is a sea change. Everything has changed, and we all need to realize that. It’s not going back to the way it was. Not only in the online advertising world that is my day job, but everywhere ->

There are very few riskless islands in business and life anymore; everything has a profound degree of connection to many other things. Every risk- and leveraged action banks and investors have taken on has a consequence as we have seen, and will unfortunately continue to see. One of the things I’ve started to think a LOT about is the incentives that  each person and company I deal with has in any given context. While we are all connected, we each have a slightly different frame of reference and that shapes how we react to situations.

The point of this ramble – beware of things that look too good to be true. The costs will get parceled out eventually; and the timing and magnitude of that is what might really hurt.

Zero is a part of the name of this blog – I’ve always been fascinated by it and combining it with something that these days is the cause of much consternation for people – the “Economy” giving it its capital letter due – seemed strangely appropriate. In a lot of areas, we need to go back to zero, go back to first principles, to our founding assumptions.

The wikipedia entry on zero ends with several quotes, one of which is:

The point about zero is that we do not need to use it in the operations of daily life. No one goes out to buy zero fish. It is in a way the most civilized of all the cardinals, and its use is only forced on us by the needs of cultivated modes of thought. Alfred North Whitehead

When I think about the economy, there is seldom something that stands on its own without reference to something else. It is hard to determine a zero point, a starting point with no dependencies. Even if I start a brand new company making something new, there are always other people, services and things to depend upon that I need to utilize. This makes the creation of something easier to do – we don’t have to build all the supporting services like banks, roads, paper, etc. from scratch in order to create something new – we simply take these things for granted and build something new as a derivative on top of them.

So perhaps it is unreasonable to look for absolutes, but rather we can think about relative zero’s, local minimums, starting points within a greater context. And so it goes…