This week, the international digital innovation conference LeWeb took place in Paris. Belgian blogger and internet fanatic Clo Willaerts was there. In this post she will zoom in on three visual ecosystem models that were presented during the keynote sessions.
Jeremiah Owyang: 2015 will be the year of the crowd
Jeremiah Owyang is the web strategist par excellence. A couple of days ago he launched the updated version of his Collaborative Economy honeycomb, which is all about sharing (or, in my opinion, renting out) some of your most valuable assets: your time, your vehicle, your home property or even your office space (that last one is an interesting one: how do you handle confidentiality? But we digress).
- Cryptocurrencies. Whenever you hear this obnoxious term, people usually simply mean the bitcoin ecosystem – just like some people insist on using ‘microblogging’ when they really mean Twitter. In Owyang’s model, the examples are bitcoin, dogecoin, namecoin, litecoin, peercoin.
- Crowdfunding. Kickstarter and Indiegogo obviously, but also Ourcrowd, Funding Circle, CircleUp, and Pave.
- Moneylending. Kiva, for example, but also Upstart, Prosper, Zooa, GreenNote, and Lending Club. I heard that Lending Club is going public next week, so this probably means that peer-to-peer money loans are becoming mainstream.
- Startups will emerge and overcrowd each hex in the honeycomb –yet funding and execution will dictate winners.
- Mature platforms launch APIs – beyond Uber – resulting in a flurry of growth, analytics, and Collab Economy software suites.
- A global debate about user safety, online privacy, sharing of data will wage.
- The crowd demands startups share value with people –new ‘open source’ software and coops, emerges to offer a solution.
- Disrupted governments and large corporations, realize they must adopt –mainstreaming the movement.
J.P. Gownder (Forrester): wearables buyers are most excited about wristbands
The second metaphor to help you make sense out of the digital economy is Forrester’s 5 Urgent Truths in the Wearable Space. If this reminds you of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, this is probably not a coincidence. According to Forrester, consumers are most excited about wristbands (42%) over earbuds (21%) and glasses (18%).
Wearables are a plural noun for a reason – eventually they will move beyond the shiny new object status and become part of what American venture capitalist Fred Wilson called a personal mesh: collecting and delivering data about you, to you. The question I’m asking myself is: how will we manage, and who will manage all of these data? James McQuivey, also from Forrester, talked about wearables as being some sort of natural evolution from smartphones. According to McQuivey, smartphones (including their sensors and the data they collect) will explode and spread back into the world. Interesting metaphor, but a bit too violent and chaotic to me.
David Rose: enchanted objects will change everything
The third and last digital ecosystem metaphor I learnt about is David Rose’s periodic table of Enchanted Objects. Rose prefers this term instead of ‘the Internet of Things’ (and to be honest I can’t blame him for that).
- Ambient umbrella. Definitely the device with the highest coolness factor this year at LeWeb.
- Ambient orb: information super summarised to just one dimension, like a colour.
- A door bell with a unique ringtone for every member of the family.
- Proverbial wallets: the less money you have in your bank account, the harder it becomes to open the wallet.
- Vitality glowcap: a cap that glows when you need to take your meds.
