 Well, hello there and happy holidays. I am Mark Risen Hopkins and we're doing our year-end predictions and reflections and trans spotting and all that stuff and today I am joined by John McRae who you may have known from his stint at Comcast and tuner fish working on Mostly video and social right John. Yes, right at the intersection of social and TV, right and And so we've talked many times and you we's when you were still doing them with with the other Social activity streams folks. We were running your your your videos that you were doing with Chris and Joseph Smarr Everybody in that web TV. Yes. That's right So you've got a pretty I mean a pretty interesting I think Every time we've talked pretty interesting perspective on the future of tech and I mean because those are those are full Folks that that you hang out with that are always working on the future of tech not to mention you yourself Doing some pretty innovative things. So I'm always curious to hear your perspective on what we're going to see in the coming year So and you you've recently put out your blog your yearly predictions post So why don't we talk a little bit about what you think is coming up? Sure, I think the first of all, it's really looking at the consumer side of things not at the enterprise But it's a really exciting time in the consumer tech space I've been in Silicon Valley for a few decades and I've gotten to see big waves and big troughs and Right now my biggest prediction for 2012 and beyond is that we're actually seeing something I've never seen before which is not one or two big waves but actually four distinct waves happening at the same time and Amplifying each other's effects when they all come together and those four individual waves are Three of them are really about computing and where and how it happens and so those are Not surprisingly mobile And cloud which a lot of people are talking about but also this emerging wave of Connected devices right and the fourth of the waves is social Which is certainly the topic that's been central on my blog and back in the day with social MTV But I think these four waves come together in a transformative way that enables Essentially radically better consumer services Radically better as a result of those consumer services being able to know way more about you than has ever been possible before And I think of that really constituting a mega trend Which for one to a better term. I'm calling pervasive personal clouds Where pervasive is Sort of multiple meanings it's available to you everywhere at any time And it's also arising out of a pervasive kind of computing That's less about what's happening on your desktop and more about what's happening in your pocket on your head Or in some enormous data centers that you have no idea where they're located right Well, I mean it's so we still look at angle I mean the reason why we got into enterprise is well first of all a lot of us had like some You know latent untrumpeted background in enterprise so we could speak intelligently about it But we found that after having covered Social and and like kind of the consumer tech for so long that we found it was a really good predictor What was going on in the enterprise world? I mean it's it's it's been like to the to the letter you could almost like EMC's biggest You know marketing shift in the last two years was they were talking about you know Journey to the private cloud when no one else was really talking about cloud in the enterprise space and now they're their motto is Big let's see was it the intersection of big data and Private cloud or something like that basically they're they're they're following the the trend lines of consumer Almost like a two-year lag time what was hot in consumer and social space And then this is true for not just EMC, but all the other you know players in that field So it's it's always interesting to see Like VMware this year VMware's big keynote presentation at VMworld was talking about connected devices and the Making sure the experience was consistent From from an IT provisioning perspective as well as a workflow perspective from the the mobile device of choice to the desktop wherever it may be located whether you know if they're a telecommuter or if they're in the office or if they're in multiple offices and So you know everybody's considering these things that we've been talking about for Several years in our space right in the consumer space Well, and it's certainly the case that as we talked right before the call It's like the implications of all of this is an explosion in the amount of data that has to be Processed in some way. It really is the the age of big data finally is arriving and the explosion in number of Connected devices is just going to ratchet that up by orders and magnitude so you've you've been In kind of the startup space as well as when you were acquired by Comcast you kind of had a taste of what a large enterprise functions like so you and it was a kind of at this pivotal time when you know Smartphones were were taking root So what was the attitude going in and you know now that you're you're Moving on to your next venture. What is the what was the attitude shift like towards like to bring your own device trend there? Yeah, well, I would say At this point I will not speak for Comcast of course I've left the mothership But I would say that you know that the notion that devices like this are Not just a nice convenience, but are a radical agent of transformation. I think that's actually pretty well understood now That you know particularly the TD landscape everything is becoming a screen and People want to be able to watch what they want at any time on any screen one of the things that I Started to get excited about recently and make a little mention of it in the blog post is these devices there You know, they're a personal computer in your pocket way cool liberating in and of itself, but What I'm so excited about is how many different kinds of functions are now embedded in this one device? Essentially because of the sensor payload So it's becoming an all-in-one device that's replacing a bunch of otherwise single-purpose things like your point-and-shoot Camera or your your camcorder your walk It's increasingly going to become your wallet and with an extension maybe a cash register if you're a merchant and The next wave, but I'm most interested in is is this actually is a form of identity Yeah, you basically should be able to With your permission have this thing light up a personalized experience for you Wherever you are whether that's in your living room looking at the 55 inch screen or out shopping the world should When you want them to know who you are be able to do that electronically Seamlessly without you having to log in with something so and this this trend this would transition perfectly I think it's that you're you're a bit about the personal cloud Which is also by the way something I'm kind of passionate about personally But I wanted to talk a little bit more about like connected devices and what that means because it's more than just the The hub which is I guess the mobile mobile phone or the tablet for most people What what are you talking about when you when you speak about like the connected devices? There's a whole like network of stuff that goes to yeah So that I think the biggest irony for me as I started exploring the space is on the one hand This thing is taking on the functions of dozens and dozens of different devices At the same time It's not doing away with the emergence of other devices in fact. We're entering a new golden age in which compute devices Come start to come in all shapes and sizes because Moore's law allows us to make Not only a computer in your pocket, but now a computer a specialized computer that soon will be able to fit into a button on my shirt one example of that is This is the zeo sleep monitor which Essentially takes the functionality of a sleep research center which you in the past would have to go in and get some clunky big device hooked up to you, but you can wear this comfortably and Connected with your smartphone and essentially get a recording of your sleep Whether you know kind of minute by minute light deep rem or ache It's just one example of a connected device this one that I can wear. There's also the Fitbit and the jawbone up right is that I'm stuck basically wearable computing Becomes feasible now. Yes as well as taking the same kind of small Computer that talks to the network and embedding that in your refrigerator or I think the sexiest device connected device in the space is from New startup called nest where they've essentially taken on the sleepy home thermostat industry and Apply Apple kind of design sensibility in fact the guys behind it are Folks who are involved in the design of the iPhone and iPod. Okay, and so it's you know Instead of being a dome device. It's hard to use It's it's as sleek and smart as an iPhone and you can interact with it over the network Is that there's actually a bunch of starting to see it there's a bunch of stuff That's really kind of cool in that space. There's two devices that I've got my eye on one is is a app or as a little device from I Saw a Kickstarter glasses that via Bluetooth. I mean you can put prescription lenses in which is good for people like you and I that you can turn it it's a Camera that's made by the the makers of flip and it communicates via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi with your phone or your computer So yeah, totally hidden and it actually looks like a real not nothing like big and bulky actually looks like regular glasses and The other one which I saw Rumors of in the New York Times this week. He probably saw it as well is the Google glasses or the Google goggles But they say also look like legitimate glasses that give you the heads up display Which really I think heralds a new era Possible a new era, you know where everything social is connected, you know 24-7 to an augmented Reality or augmented thinking really? Yeah, and you know a lot of this stuff We've been talking about or reading about in science fiction for a long time What's changed now is finally more laws brought us to the point where it becomes economical to Feasible to build at a small size and economical to the manufacturer these truly embedded computers Interesting little data point, which is you know a few years ago typical ISP Would see in any given home typically one Or two or maybe three IP nodes Because it's basically a couple of desktop computers right already. That's now somewhere around six or seven and It's about to explode Because of these various devices and that's part of the reason why we've had to move To IPv6 so we're running out of namespace and so it really is this I've never seen anything like this You know cloud all about computing in these data centers You don't see anywhere and you have no idea what the computer is, but the computers are all connected to the network and Mobile putting all the power in my hands and then compute that's connected to the network disappearing into the fabric of our home and fabric of our shirts and jackets coming up so fascinating so the that and that's kind of definition of the pervasive personal cloud that you've mentioned in your post then now I Mentioned this in the email when we were talking last week or this week, but I've been talking about the using the term personal cloud for a couple of years, but when I first envisioned it or Was thinking about it in terms of the living room experience and very much centered around Entertainment and where you store it and all that mess and at the time I think it was spurred by you know, of course, I'm sure you read Mark Cuban's famous blog posts and he had talked about the his vision for the future of entertainment, which was that everything is stored on the cloud and You just download it on demand and license it whenever you need it Which I everybody in the blogosphere thought was a ridiculous idea Of course now you have Netflix and Hulu and all these other things that maybe maybe wasn't so crazy but My idea was that you know, it was kind of the the Microsoft paradigm I did accurately predict that the Xbox and devices like it would be the center of Video consumption in the living room when it came to alternative type media and some regular media, but I was thinking more that People would be building their own, you know I mean because my thought was that you've got this stack of DVDs and the stack of CDs Maybe not so much CDs, but DVDs for certain, you know that you can basically condense down to you know One or two hard drives. Why would you have a personal media server in your house for that? And that has failed to happen But the the personal cloud Certainly has come to fruition and in both your your description and in mine When it comes to services like, you know, the boxy box or the Roku or the Xbox or even the PlayStation and the Wii where not only is this this console or or Video playback device that wasn't even didn't even exist a few years ago is now The center of interactive and non interactive entertainment in the living room Yeah, and and I think they so they're in my view. There's kind of at least two dimensions to this Cloudification one is that you know is the stuff that I'm going to get access to Available to me from the cloud and that's sort of like cloud 1.0 this the stuff that got me excited in writing this blog post is the Implications of taking that and then mashing it up with these other trends the ability to know I'm me So personalized that experience that you deliver and with social layered in there essentially now I wish they should any service should know Who you are where you are? What you like who your friends are what your friends like and on and on and on and be able to essentially create for you a Radically better more personalized service and where it gets interesting to me is it's essentially a new equation Around privacy. It's it's a little creepy to think about anyone's service provider holding not only my data and content, but also this ever-growing mountain of usage data and social data But my prediction is we will Increasingly be happy to hand over that data in exchange for more personalized service greater control for both And so I talked about different different sectors of personalized clouds where that balance of power might be Might be different in one than in another Well, I mean this brings up one of the eternal social web TV conversations you guys just to have this open versus silo, right? So I am interested in your prediction of Where that lays maybe not next year because I think that's probably too short of a timeline to say the science will get settled But maybe the next five years is something like APML or activity streams going to take roots and Allow that attention data to transcend any single network It's a really interesting question and I I think in the blog post I I don't get down to quite that level of the detail but where we're all interested in is kind of Just the nature of things to deliver a great service in 2012 and 2013 will increasingly mean that the service provider gets that it's a world of cloud and mobile and Connective devices and social and is trying really hard to give you not a dumb Service but a completely personalized adaptive ever smarter service if service providers are going to do that the equation will have to be between user and service provider That there's this assumption that it's okay for all of that data to go to the service provider, right now Will that data ever be Something that the user could actually take from that provider and bring to another one Doesn't matter what the technology is the answers Essentially know the service providers first of all they're gonna it's gonna be such a mountain of data and they're clearly Going down the cloud path Not just to give you better Service but to lock you in that is the strategy in cloud is to Create an ever more personalized experience That makes it harder and harder for you to move from apples cloud to Google's cloud To Amazon's cloud. That's the game. I get it and what I've found in thinking it through that was interesting I hadn't discovered is They kind of counterbalance to that is being played in part by Facebook and there might be others who play in the space but right now the action that I think is interesting is watching what's happening is Spotify and Hulu and Netflix and a few others make what could be a devil's bargain in that they're Connecting their services up to Facebook in such a way that taps all of these trends and enables viral spread through social discovery and Faster growth of these services in exchange for letting all of that really valuable potentially proprietary data that is the source of cloud lock-in Yeah, so flow through Facebook and into their data vault and Emerging AI engine right which ultimately could be the Disintermediator it could be the the methodology for enabling the user to move from one Cloud lock-in vendor to another so it's really kind of ironic But yeah, as you mentioned that this this goes back to something we both said at the beginning of the talk here Is that there's big data right? What's the big driving technology behind big data today? Is technologies like Hadoop and no sequel that allow It's kind of a different approach to deciphering Data that's not structured and kind of it makes me think about like all the conversations We've all had regarding these different like opens open data structures like APML and activity streams We're trying to define a format for data so that everybody can use the data, you know across different networks It may not it may turn out that it doesn't matter, right? These devils bargains means that there every every, you know, or maybe not every but different silos will have different chunks of the attention data and Because it's becoming such a mess everyone's got their own proprietary data format They're using internally everyone just relies on unstructured data sorting techniques To kind of level the playing field like well We don't have access to the data structure, but we can scrape and we can scrape and analyze and figure it out You know using Hadoop or flumes or whatever it is, right? Yeah, so I think there's at least one or two more blog posts to come to think How all these things are gonna play out, but I now actually just gotten really excited about things. Yeah. Yeah Well, it's it's great and given where your heads at it's gonna be interesting to see where you land next or what What world problem you're gonna try to solve with? The next startup. Yes. Yes Well, yeah, I think so much of this You know what I like to do when I'm in between start-ups is take a look at how the world is now Where are the waves where things heading? Because it's a heck of a lot more fun to jump on to an emerging big wave that it is to Kind of slosh around in the trough, right? One of the other things I want to touch on which I also Post was a bit of a voyage of discovery, which is in that world in entertainment in particular We saw this, you know the cloud vendors going for lock-in versus Facebook as a potential disintermediator the other one that really is exciting to me is looking at digital health and the the emerging various Sub-clouds personal health clouds that are there which are not being provided to us by the people who Fix us when we're broken the health industry is not Doing this but they're they're the individuals are now able to begin to change the balance of power between patient and medical Institution and industry as a result of a bunch of different things that are enabling us now To get our hands on a lot more data about our own health and fitness And I you know I mentioned the the sleep monitoring, but that's like one of a dozen or more things You've also got like 23 in me and all the DNA monitoring services that kind of fit into that equation as well That's right. So 23 in me. I think of this, you know Personal genomic cloud. I did some work recently with a company called your future health Where I had my blood drawn and tested against 70 different variables And this company has been doing this for like 30 years Funny little fact when you go in with a symptom to your doctor and complain about a problem They may order blood work To try and figure out what's wrong That will be tested against some standard test and say hey Are you within two standard deviations of the mean? Well, that mean has been slowly moving over the last 30 years as America has gotten less fit So being within two standard deviations the mean is ever less meaningful information these folks have what may be the world's largest database of Blood data across 70 factors correlated with gender age weight height and blood type So they know that for a person like me my magnesium level is Alarmingly low even though it fits within what the doctor would say is normal Okay, and so there's this change in the balance of power between patient and health industry Interesting very interesting, so yeah, I mean these are I mean I've that's one kind of blind spot for me Is I haven't kept up with the personal health space, but I know it's like constantly evolving around me I just just by the acts of my 23 and me user So I see all the kind of stuff on the forums and the boards and whatnot, but I don't have Don't have the time to investigate, but it's very interesting stuff and it's it's always so At least with with the sir want my service 23 is I'll strike so striking to me How well they utilize a lot of the principles of social and crowd sourcing and whatnot to arrive at the data in ways that I think Medicine and science hasn't in the past me because it's voluntary Surrendering of you know data points, and then they're just taking their technical experience The social experience and applying applying those principles to it Well, and it's just it's a great area for you for use of the cloud So the more people that use the zeo sleep Monitoring system the larger the data set that zeo has to look at what normal is and You're having my data Compared with anonymized data again correlated with other factors like age begins to let us Understand stuff that previously was not possible. So it's actually kind of the cutting edge of science Yeah, it's it you know going back to you know, this is this is this is perfect perfect way to explain the Outside of the narrow entertainment scope the the connected devices and personal cloud Health is a great way of doing it because it's not only interesting and fun to toy with but it also has very valid and you know Advancing of humanity type applications Yeah, and you know, I saw that ring that Zuck recently got The jawbone up. Yes, I was can't wait to be able to send all of this data through Facebook So again back to like, you know, who are the who will be the the keepers of the cloud And will be the hubs that will essentially have a replicated version of that data set to Essentially do some kind of value at on top of which which actually this this is a theme that we explored a little bit in 2011 which is How increasingly the term privacy and security are becoming interchangeable? Because Just going off of like the last few headlines with Facebook Mark Zuckerberg had a small problem with Facebook and in terms of privacy settings and his personal pictures were released out to the public You know, that's fine and dandy when it's pictures of him, you know posing with the head of a bison or playing around in the back yard But you know when it's your health data, you know, right some people care and some people don't some people like Jeff Jarvis It well, yeah, I'll just you know throw out there all my ontology Oncology reports, but some people like I don't want, you know, my my spousy let alone it if everybody on Facebook Oh, yeah, when you get into the health data, it's working out to the privacy equation changes quite a bit It's not real implications for whether you can get insurance or not. Yeah, let alone the financial implications of it, correct? Yeah So Interesting times ahead, huh? Absolutely I think the interest I'm whether you're a consumer or someone creating a service for consumers or a company creating better technologies for handling this Tsunami of data that will need to be intelligently stored and access the process Well, I mean so I mean this is kind of an interesting question because the type of stuff that we're talking about here Is it some point? I mean it looks almost as if the consumer and enterprise markets are collapsing into each other because a lot of the application we're talking about a Lot of the the use cases we're talking about are kind of transcend either either direction, right? I mean we're talking about organization of big data sensor sensor points. I mean that was one of the things that led Let us into into the storage market initially and then the broader enterprise market was we were talking with some folks over at SAP and What they were calling? I can't remember the term they were using for it I think they were just using it kind of a generic enterprise. He's sounding set of words But it was basically the stuff that we've been talking about calling the Internet of Things the example They were giving was that I think it was Boston Harbor or something like that Was able to improve efficiency and you know greenify their operation by putting Sensors putting little RFID tags on all the crates So at any point at any time they could tell you where everything was they weren't relying on word-of-mouth or some Some teamster having written it down on a clipboard and it got into getting entered into the system So they were able to improve their efficiency vastly when this is the type of stuff that we've been talking about when we speak of the Internet of Things and all the sensors that we have on our different devices I mean, it's the same volume of data being generated and the same problems being tackled by you know Google and Facebook and Yahoo when they're you know trying to organize a mountain of data Isn't that the same problem that enterprise is faced with today? Yeah, I mean I again, I'm not as much an enterprise guy, but I would say that certainly It perhaps absent to some degree the social piece Enterprise is going to be as big a bigger player around tapping this new compute layer of Cloud combined with radically distributed tiny little sensor devices Combined with a workforce that will be carrying around mobile compute. So yeah, you know that Internet of Things will Will transform Supply chain And any kind of large-scale global operation is radically different and better when you can have every piece of it And connected with a little wireless sensor, right? Well, I mean that and you know The thing that changed in our space I can tell you from from our editorial in last two years is because the price of storage has gone down so dramatically that Enterprise no longer discards data like they used to and so that also has contributed to the need I think for this stuff But it and that I think it may be even more analogous to like the search quandary or the search Algorithm problem that Google and others try to solve which is you know being able to have every Data point possible accessible at a keystroke from all points on the planet, you know Which this is something that I think is more broadly familiar than maybe the stuff that we try to tackle with social and cloud But it is definitely I think in my opinion. I think it is I think it's turning into kind of a flattening flattening of Consumer and enterprise into one another or perhaps maybe the consumerization of IT as some put It's it's seem seeming to look a lot more like each other in my mind Well, what one of my favorite startups recent times is called hip chat guys that used to be at Plaxo and They're one of these rare cases of you know a three-person startup offering You know cloud-based collaboration software that does not suck Yeah That can be adapt, you know adopted in the enterprise by a small team and then can spread to The whole organization and can spread to partner organizations. Anyway, they're seeing viral Distribution viral spread of a an IT solution that you have to pay for and You know, I've been involved in enterprise sales and marketing and you know viral was not the term I would use for you know, the US government procurement process Planned Boeing or General Motors as a customer and now they're so it's beautiful to see that enterprise IT market is starting to have a lot more of the flavor of better consumer-like tools that People in the enterprise can adopt without Some guy in a back room having to go through a eight-month approval cycle, right? Well, it's all very interesting stuff John. I thank you for taking the time to sit and discuss it with me Is anything else anything else that you have pressing that you want to you want to mention to everybody before we Let them experience 2012 for themselves No, but you know go check out the real McCray comm because now that I'm No longer inside a big corporation. I feel it's time to blog more. Yeah, it's always it's always fun to have Have have it have some time to express yourself when you're down on the trenches is hard to blog a lot, so The real McCray comm and of course you'll be able to find this on silicon angle comm and silicon angle TV and Happy holidays everyone and we'll see you in 2012 Have a great new year