Think Quarterly - 04 Speed (UK Edition) by Think Quarterly

DY REEADY EA ADY READY RRRE DY S T E ADY, GO! S T EADY, G O ! STEA DY, G O! STEADY, G O STEADY, GO!!

T H I N K Q UA R T E R LY

Welcome to

T H I N K Q UA R T E R LY The SPEED Issue

06 THINK SPEED

Speed. The world is getting quicker. Processing power is increasing at an exponential rate, new technologies are being adopted faster than ever before, and social media is allowing people to make instant connections – we may even have found a particle that travels faster than light. The acceleration of everything will unleash new opportunities for businesses, but it will also raise new questions. How will we respond to consumer expectations as the demand for instant access to everything intensifies? How will we keep pace in a world that moves at web speed? At Google we’re obsessed with speed – it’s why we think of ourselves as one of the engines of the internet. This issue of Think Quarterly is inspired by the rapid rate of change we’re seeing in the world today. Whether we’re learning about the incredible experiments at CERN’s particle physics laboratory in Switzerland; gaining an insight into Britain’s broadband future with Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt; or meeting the innovators getting our education system up to speed, the articles in this issue get to the heart of why speed matters. You’ll also find unique insights from within Google itself. Director of New Products Astro Teller reveals how we’re getting ready to meet the challenges of this new era, while search guru Urs Hoelzle shares our very own Gospel of Speed. I hope you enjoy the issue – the first since I moved into this role. As ever, please don’t hesitate to share your own thoughts and insights with us, either on the content of this book or on how we can partner with you better.

Dan Cobley Google MD for UK & Ireland

08 THINK SPEED

b y TC O Lo n d o n

VIRAL VELOCITY

Nick

Clark

BROA OR BUDBAND ST by by H

enr

2 2 8 1 24 2 1 2 E 8 G A P

THE GOOGLPEEED : T H SIG ER GOSPEL OF S N I E UTIVETER HEU C by Urs Hoelzle E X E LF-DI i k RO M a t t B o c h e n s yH

ope

-Fro

DR FOR IVING CE

CONTENTS

NIC O S PER OL SU SCHO Noble b

ic yR

har

DING N A R B MIND IN alvis by Tj

30 30

KE-UP: TECHNOATTAA VIZ AD b y TC O Lo n d o n

aco W

8 3 36 35

T HE TOR HI-TE TOI CH by L SE esli e

l l Se l

b y Wi

r thy

b y C a ro l i n e M c C a

EK tep

son

tro Te

ller

D SPEEEAMS R OF D by As

a h ra d

RECODING THE CLASSROOM by Andrea Kurlan

Jar vi

nni

T HE

by P a ul G u

NOT S O FAST by Je ff

FIRST IN, FIRST OUT by Cyrus Sh

hen

56 60 6 6 52 60

DG E

LE NOW n Fra

TH by

50 50

lin

Ber

40 42 46 THE OF SL JOY OW

HTML5... 4... 3.. 2... 1... GO! .

NI SI DE

CONTRIBUTORS

URS HOELZLE

RICHARD NOBLE

Think Quarterly represents the collective mindspace of journalists, academics, experts and industry leaders from around the world. Some are Google’s homegrown visionaries. Others lend their outside perspectives. All tell stories that you won’t ﬁnd anywhere else.

Urs Hoelzle was one of Google’s ﬁrst 10 employees. Now he serves as Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure, and has the distinction of being a Google Fellow. Urs oversees the design and operation of Google’s hardware infrastructure as well as the development of the services and tools used by the company’s engineers. Fingers point to him as the reason there are so many dogs allowed to sit under their owners’ desks at work. Urs evangelises about Google’s Gospel of Speed on page 18.

Richard Noble is an adventurer and entrepreneur. he has undertaken trans-Africa and trans-Asia expeditions, created the world’s first distributed taxi transport aircraft and high-performance hullform technology, achieved the first ever supersonic land speed record and regained the world land speed record. Richard leads the BloodhoundSSc team heading for mach 1.4 on land, including its innovative education programme which is being run through 4,700 schools in the uK and in 211 countries worldwide. Richard reveals more on page 30.

10 THINK SPEED

WILL SELF

LESLIE BERLIN

ASTRO TELLER

JEFF JARVIS

Will Self is the author of eight novels, five collections of shorter fiction and six non-fiction works, including Walking to Hollywood and Psychogeography. A prolific journalist, broadcaster and commentator, he lives in south London, types his fiction on a manual typewriter and gets around by bicycle. And while no Luddite, he cheerfully admits that he wouldn't miss the internet or the web at all if it were to disappear overnight leaving only a faint smell of burnt rubber. Will extols the peculiar joys of going slowly on page 42.

leslie Berlin is Project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford university. She is the author of The Man Behind the Microchip, a biography of Intel co-founder and microchip co-inventor Robert Noyce, and has also contributed a monthly column on innovation to the Sunday Business section of The New York Times. As a historian of high technology, she appreciates the importance of speed; as a somewhat plodding runner, she tries to convince herself that it is overrated. leslie reveals why being first isn’t everything on page 46.

Dr. Astro Teller is Google’s Director of New Projects, working to help the company explore potential new business areas that could impact billions of people. He has successfully founded ﬁve companies, including BodyMedia, SANDbOX AD and Cerebellum Capital, and holds numerous US patents related to his work in hardware and software technology. He has a PhD in artiﬁcial intelligence, moonlights as a novelist and screenwriter, and makes a mean margarita. Astro dares us to dream big on page 52.

Jeff Jarvis is the author of the books Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live and What Would Google Do? He directs the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism, blogs at Buzzmachine.com, tweets at @jeffjarvis, and can be found on Google+ at +Jeff Jarvis. He talks so fast that even New Yorkers have trouble keeping up, and his own grandmother complained that she couldn't understand him. Jeff questions whether we’re really as fast as we think we are on page 66.

contact thinkquarterly@google.com the articles appearing within this publication reﬂect the opinions and attitudes of their respective authors and not necessarily those of the publishers or editorial team. thinkwithgoogle.co.uk/quarterly © Google 2012 11

E x ec u t i v e Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer, Director General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (better known as CERN), explains why the slow work of science is fundamental to our fast-moving world. Matt Bochenski P o r t r a i t s b y Sam Christmas Words by

Insight 13

ver since Tim Berners-Lee programmed the world’s first web page at http://info.cern.ch/ in 1989, we have lived in a world of CERN’s creation. “That changed the way we worked and, of course, the way the whole world communicates,” says Professor Rolf-Dieter Heuer from his office at the institute’s sprawling headquarters in Geneva. As CERN’s Director General, Professor Heuer is responsible for running an organisation that has transformed the fabric of our society, adding rocket fuel to the pace at which we do business, make connections and manage our lives. The World Wide Web may be CERN’s most famous legacy but its influence goes even further. From new types of medical treatment to advances in solar energy and the advent of cloud computing (an offshoot of CERN’s grid system, which allows scientists

2011, the institution’s total budget amounted to almost £700 million, all of it from countries whose citizens are feeling the pinch of a major economic downturn (the UK contributed 15 percent, or £105 million). How does Professor Heuer make the case for CERN when there are so many more immediate issues to resolve? While it would be cool to know more about the origins of the universe, don’t the member states have a responsibility to solve their own problems first? “People are asking, ‘Why do we need science? We should take care of the business of daily life first’,” the professor concedes. “But if people in past decades had thought that way, we wouldn’t have the society we have today. Everything depends on science – this is what we need to communicate to people. I think it’s working because the general public is realising not just how fascinating science can be, but what can come out of science in terms of knowledge and, at some stage, the betterment of society.”

“We never actually said we broke Einstein’s relativity theory. We made a measurement which released a very interesting, nearly unbelievable result.” to collaborate on experiments from anywhere in the world), the fundamental science conducted by CERN’s brilliant physicists is reshaping, well, just about everything we do – and everything we know. ut what is this factory of imagination that houses mysterious laboratories and accelerators beneath mountains? CERN was founded in 1954 as a multinational effort to advance our understanding of the universe through experimentation in high-energy physics. The work is financed by 20 member states, whose largesse most recently birthed the Large Hadron Collider – CERN’s superstar accelerator, where opposing particle beams of protons are thrown around a 27km circuit before smashing into each other at something close to the speed of light. The purpose of CERN, says Professor Heuer, “is to gain more knowledge, because science is the centre of everything.” But this knowledge comes at a price. In

14 THINK SPEED

The role of the Director General is to be the face of this message and to act within the organisation as everything from “chancellor, to foreign minister, interior minister and prime minister”. By his own admission, Professor Heuer is part scientist (he is currently on sabbatical from the University of Hamburg), part businessman and part politician – although he prefers the word ‘diplomat’. “Despite its global nature and its international standing, we are able to keep politics out of CERN to a large extent, and this is why we are successful,” he says. Then there are the operational challenges of running CERN itself, where 10,000 visiting researchers outnumber full-time staff three-to-one. It is Professor Heuer’s job to integrate this collection of brilliant individuals and instil in them a sense of shared purpose. “You can only run an excellent infrastructure if you challenge the people that run it intellectually,” he says. But it’s also about striking a balance between

personalities – between “the future Nobel prize winners” (aka ‘the thinkers’), and “the guys who are able to bring ideas to fruition” (aka ‘the doers’). And it’s not just the scientists – you also need “those on the engineering side who can turn the successful ideas into instruments”. The practical value of CERN’s research has seen it forge close links with the private sector, but perhaps not close enough. “Quite a few people who have visited CERN have said, ‘Look, your management has a different angle to the management in private enterprises, why don’t you learn from one another?’” Professor Heuer reveals. “It’s a good idea in principle, but the truth is we didn’t find the time yet.” ‘Time’. That’s the word on a lot of lips at CERN, ever since the results of a remarkable experiment were published in September 2011. OPERA, in which a neutrino beam of subatomic particles was fired from Geneva to a laboratory in Italy, 730km away – apparently travelling faster than the speed

required to solve inconsistencies in our understanding of the universe]? We know all its properties except that it exists, but by the end of 2012 either we will find it – and that will be a discovery – or if we do not find it then we will exclude it from our theory. That would also be a discovery because for the first time our ‘Standard Model’ of the theory of the cosmos would have a big hole in it. It would lose one of its four legs.” hese are heady days for CERN – and also for the rest of us. Faster than light travel, God particles, hadron therapy, radioisotopes, vacuum-efficient solar cells… Both CERN and the public are being repaid for their patience – indeed, one of the ironies of research conducted by smashing particles into each other at unimaginable speeds is that the results take years to filter through. “The world is moving so quickly that people are

“Everything depends on science – this is what we need to communicate to people.”

of light – left the science community scratching its head, and the rest of the world wondering how soon it could purchase time-travelling Deloreans (“Maybe a few decades,” is Professor Heuer’s conservative prediction). The result was eye-catching because it ought to be impossible: according to Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. “We never actually said we broke Einstein’s relativity theory,” cautions Professor Heuer, choosing his words with the precision of a true scientist. “We made a measurement which released a very interesting, nearly unbelievable result.” That measurement is now being sceptically cross-checked by a number of CERN’s sister laboratories in the US and Japan. ‘Wait and see’, is the message. That’s not to say Heuer isn’t an optimist. “In 2012 I can promise a discovery,” he announces boldly, shortly after explaining why scientists should never promise that they’ll make discoveries. “You know the Higgs Boson [the so-called ‘God particle’ whose existence is

asking for answers when we don’t have the question yet,” Professor Heuer admits. “For that reason we now have the neutrino – so that we can give the answers faster… [This, it transpires after a brief silence, is a physicist’s idea of a joke.] We would like to get the results faster but it takes time, and I think people understand that.” Public education is the final, and perhaps the most important, aspect of the Director General’s role. For Professor Heuer, it’s about lowering the threshold of the conversation so that more people can take part. But he also wants to use other means to engage the public – “Like the interest of artists in our work. After all, at the very beginning, art and science started as the same thing. Bring them back together and the public might say, ‘Oh, this is how you can see science.’ Once people start talking about it, you have progress in understanding and accepting it.” That is how Professor Heuer and the maverick minds at CERN will give science back its soul – and propel the world one step closer to warp speed

18 THINK SPEED

ick a query, any query. ‘Weather, New York City’. ‘Nineteenth-century Russian literature’. ‘When is the 2012 Champions League final?’ Now type it into a Google search box. As you type, we predict the rest of your query, comb through billions of web pages, rank the sites, images, videos and products we find, and present you with the very best results. The entire process takes, in most cases, less than a tenth of a second – it’s practically instant.

If it isn’t, we’ll suffer. Our research shows that if search results are slowed by even a fraction of a second, people search less (seriously: a 400ms delay leads to a 0.44 percent drop in search volume, data fans). And this impatience isn’t just limited to search: four out of five internet users will click away if a video stalls while loading. But even though the human attention span has become remarkably fickle, much of the web remains slow. The average web page takes 4.9 seconds to load – in a world where fractions of a second count, that’s an eternity. The web has become a critical hub for politics, schools and entertainment. Every

business is a digital business; large or small, local or multinational. So why is it okay for a web page to take five seconds to load? There are 476 million internet users in Europe, and if every one of them has to wait five seconds, we just wasted 75 years of their time. ‘Fast is better than slow’ has been a Google mantra since our early days, and it’s more important now than ever. The internet is the engine of growth and innovation, so we’re doing everything we can to make sure that it’s more Formula 1 than Soap Box Derby. Speed isn’t just a feature, it’s the feature. We have one simple rule to support

‘Fast is better than slow’ is a cornerstone of Google’s philosophy. Here, search guru and SVP of Infrastructure Urs Hoelzle, explains why. Words by

Urs Hoelzle Adam Simpson

ILLUSTRATIONS by

this Gospel of Speed: don’t launch features that slow us down. You might invent a great new feature, but if it slows down search, you have to either forget it, fix it, or come up with another change that more than offsets the slowdown. We have what we call a ‘fixed latency budget’, which is sort of like a family budget. If you want to go on a nicer holiday but your budget doesn’t stretch, you need to cut back somewhere else. This simple concept drives legions of Google engineers and product managers to do some pretty amazing things. It’s why, when you do a Google search from some remote corner of the world, your results are most likely served to you from nearby. We work with internet providers everywhere to cache data in local facilities, with the objective of making Google nearly as fast in San José, Argentina, or San José, Costa Rica, as it is in San José, California. It’s why we have live performance dashboards on big screens in many of

20 THINK SPEED

“The internet is the engine of growth and innovation, so we’re doing everything we can to make sure that it’s more Formula 1 than Soap Box Derby. Speed isn’t just a feature, it’s the feature.”

our engineering offices, so that teams can see latency levels across our services. It’s why, when we fail to live up to our principles and things start to slow down, we call ‘Code Yellow!’ and direct all engineers and product managers to drop what they’re doing and work on making stuff faster. Speed is simply part of our engineering culture. Of course, it doesn’t really matter how fast search is if, when you click on a result, you immediately move back into the slow lane. That’s why we invest so much in helping the rest of the web speed up, too. Google Analytics measures a site’s speed and how it impacts engagement. We’re spearheading Page Speed, an open-source project that helps webmasters speed up their sites – it can even re-write pages to boost performance. We’re also experimenting with a Page Speed Service that automatically accelerates page loads without any code changes required. Just route your page through the service and it gets faster.

There’s lots of other things we’re doing to make the web faster, including working with the web community to update standards like HTML and TCP/IP alongside core network protocols such as DNS, TCP, SSL, and HTTP, or improving the speed of JavaScript. Our open-source Chrome browser is now six times faster than when it shipped three years ago, and pre-fetches certain web pages during searches so that when users click on those links they load instantly. Other popular browsers such as Firefox, Explorer and Safari have all upped their speed since Chrome entered the race. And earlier this year we announced plans to build an ultra-high bandwidth fibre network in Kansas City, giving its citizens internet access that’s more than 100 times faster than most Americans enjoy today. Our hope is that, like Chrome, this project will motivate other internet providers to crank it up, too.

“At Google, we don’t plan on stopping until the web is instant, so that when you click a link, the site loads immediately or a video starts without delay. What amazing things could happen then? What else could be invented?”

All this speed makes a difference. When Edmunds, a leading car review destination, re-engineered its insideline.com site to reduce load times from nine seconds to 1.4 seconds, ad revenue increased three percent, and page views-per-session went up 17 percent. When Shopzilla dropped latency from seven seconds to two, revenue went up seven-12 percent and page views jumped 25 percent (by the way, they reduced their hardware costs by 50 percent). When you speed up service, people become more engaged – and when people become more engaged, they click and buy more. Even so, we need to set our expectations higher. At Google, we don’t plan on stopping until the web is instant, so that when you click a link, the site loads immediately or a video starts without delay. What amazing things could happen then? What else could be invented? I don’t know. All I can say for sure is that we want to get to that future, fast

Viral Velocity ARTWORK by

22 THINK SPEED

Joe McDermott

24 THINK SPEED

In an exclusive interview, Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, argues that a superfast broadband infrastructure is key to Britain’s economic future.

Words by ILLUSTRATION by

economic headwinds continue to buffet the City, Britain is more desperate than ever to wean itself off its traditional dependence on financial services. Jeremy Hunt, the Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport, believes the time is right for the burgeoning technology sector to pick up the slack. To deliver the next generation of digital services, however, the country needs to beef up its broadband infrastructure. The minister’s job is to deploy tactical investment, cajole the private sector and energise the debate. He believes there has “Never been a secretary of state as ambitious as I am over

Nick Clark Jonathan Calugi

broadband speeds.” Ambitious is right; Hunt has promised to deliver the best broadband network in Europe by 2015, with 90 percent of the population receiving supercharged speeds, whether at home or at work. Independent studies suggest that a superior broadband network helps drive economic development, whether it is delivered by fixed-line, satellite or mobile devices. While Hunt admits his own drain on the network only amounts to the occasional catch-up programmes on the BBC’s iPlayer, or downloading newspapers, he believes that with the right digital backbone, services will spring up that will keep Britain at the forefront of the internet revolution over the coming decade.

Think Quarterly: How high is broadband on your list of priorities? Jeremy Hunt: It is right up there with the Olympics and one or two other areas as being one of my highest priorities. I have a meeting every week about superfast broadband with key members of my team and Ed Richards, the Chief Executive of Ofcom. I think as a result of that focus we have made extraordinary progress. We started with one of the slowest broadband networks in Europe and we are on track to have one of the fastest. There is, however, more work to do. What is your broadband like? [Laughs] Not brilliant actually, but that’s not the reason for my focus. Did you have an interest in broadband before taking over the brief ? I had real interest in it when I worked on my own business for 14 years before becoming an MP. That was a publishing operation that turned into an internet business. I’ve always thought the UK has a real opportunity to develop a technology sector that is at least as important to the economy as financial services. And at a time when we are trying to reduce our dependency on financial services, this is an ideal opportunity. 26 THINK SPEED

What was your view on the Digital Britain report commissioned by the previous Government? It wasn’t a bad first stab. I just felt it was unambitious; in particular, the big aspiration for broadband policy was a universal 2Mb connection. I was told we did not even have enough money to fund that. But we have been able to build on that and 90 percent of people in the country will be able to receive superfast broadband by 2015. Is there a specific speed target you have in mind for Britain? At the moment, ‘superfast’ is defined as more than 24Mb download speeds, which is a huge step up from the 6.8Mb that is the average download speed at the moment. I’ve also tried to influence policy thinking that today’s superfast broadband is tomorrow’s superslow. So while 24Mb may seem superfast now it is not enough to say, ‘That’s the end of the story.’ Is your ambition to create the best broadband network in Europe by 2015 still on track?

Absolutely, and when we say ‘best’ we mean a combination of price, coverage and speed. Those are the three key factors, and I’d like to demonstrate that if we take those together we are the best in Europe. Coverage is really important. What I have come to realise in the last year is that takeup is just as important. It’s not just how many people can get 100Mb, it is how many people actually want it. Take-up for the fastest speeds has still been relatively low. Is the plan, ‘If you build it, they will come’?

People won’t come if the price is too high, so you have to have a strategy that makes superfast broadband available at affordable prices. I want to make sure the UK is the place where the most exciting products and services are developed. In that situation it is a case of ‘build it and they will come’. Give developers a superfast network with a customer base that’s accessing it, and we’ll begin to see a host of new applications; higher education, teleconferencing, gaming… All sorts of things become possible. What is your role? I want to energise the agenda. Otherwise we’ll be making the same mistake with broadband that we made with rail; where we’ll end up opening our high-speed rail link from London to Birmingham 45 years after the French opened the TGV.

What is your role with the companies looking to invest in a broadband network? My job is to challenge all the companies who are involved in that market. They’ve got big investment programmes but my job is to say, ‘Yes, but… We really appreciate what you’re doing but what is the next step?’ What do you see as potential obstacles? Investment is a massive challenge for any company in this market, as well as helping the City to understand how strategic this is to a modern economy. Digital infrastructure will become the hub of innovation and investment. There will be real returns for investors. That is an argument that still needs to be won. Are the rural regions keen to install superfast broadband? There’s a real understanding, particularly outside of London, that getting good broadband speeds is vital. We have invited local areas to come up with their own broadband plans. We’ve had an extraordinary unleashing of entrepreneurialism. In Cumbria, I met a farmer who is looking at digging up his own roads so he can lay fibre to his farm. We’re trying to create a structure that allows that local enterprise to flourish.

What about in the rest of Europe? The EU has a target that by 2020 half of the population should be accessing 100Mb. I’d love Britain to be the first country to do that. It’s not implausible but we have a lot of work to do. Is broadband a basic human right in the twenty-first century? I’m nervous talking about ‘human rights’, but I do think it is a modern essential. The evidence is very strong that actually older, disadvantaged, more rural and remote groups of people benefit more than those in the cities. It may also be the thing that stops the depopulation of villages. I met an 80-year-old woman who said that, thanks to broadband and the internet, she wasn’t lonely anymore. In terms of isolation, access to medical services, getting your shopping delivered and being able to learn online, it is totally transformative

28 THINK SPEED

Martin Whitmarsh, Team Principal of McLaren Racing, reveals what it takes to succeed in the world’s fastest motor sport. Words by

he McLaren Formula 1 motor racing team is a British success story – and not just in sporting terms. It’s an engineering colossus whose Surrey-based, Sir Norman Foster-designed Technology Centre is at the very core of its high-achieving, resultsdriven attitude. You’d be forgiven for thinking that this otherworldly HQ housed an unapproachable management. Yes, the building and its contents – including the historic machines and numerous trophies that line the reception atrium – will take your breath away (think Stanley Kubrick-meets-Bond villain lair), but the extraordinary operation within is run by a band of enthusiasts who are referred to by F1 fans simply as ‘racers’. Chief among them is 53-year-old Team Principal Martin Whitmarsh. Articulate and friendly, he is also, as you might imagine, supremely focused. It’s a job requirement in a sport where it’s not just the cars that move at astonishing speeds.

Henry Hope-Frost |

P OR T R A I T b y

Whitmarsh’s team of engineers will make over 1,000 iterations to the 2011 McLaren MP4-26, sinking countless hours into the elusive quest for the fractions of a second that could make the difference between victory and defeat. Before joining McLaren in 1989, Whitmarsh was Manufacturing Director at British Aerospace. It was an industry in which, he says, “It was very hard to communicate what we were doing and improve relations.” Now, of course, he could scarcely be more visible, appearing trackside on race days to a global audience numbering in the hundreds of millions. There’s nowhere to hide, and that openness percolates through McLaren’s entire operation. “In Formula 1 there is an openness that is unique, certainly from a business perspective,” Whitmarsh admits. “The Group encompasses 2,500 massively talented people who are highly motivated, but they are all human so they – we all – make mistakes. We try to be the best we can, of course, and to innovate.” How do they sustain that innovation over a gruelling season? “We are a very focused group of enthusiasts who all contribute to the common goal: winning Grands Prix and World Championships. The connection between people and end result is tangible. I’m rarely at my desk,” Whitmarsh continues. “I’m more often than not found in the workshop talking to engineers about car upgrades for forthcoming races. Our drivers expect me to know what’s happening.” That attention to detail would certainly win the approval of Whitmarsh’s predecessor – Group founder Ron Dennis

Greg Funell

– whose presence reaches out across the Technology Centre from his ground-floor office. No detail was ever too small to escape his notice – even the air pressure in McLaren’s on-site canteen is specifically designed to prevent the smells of cooking escaping into the atmosphere outside. As the F1 season closes, Whitmarsh’s attention is turning to McLaren’s activities beyond the racetrack, where McLaren Automotive is winning plaudits for its MP4-12C supercar. “The objective is to be superior to the likes of Aston Martin, Ferrari, Lamborghini and Porsche, despite having no heritage when measured against them,” he admits. But they won’t get there on their own. “We have many hundreds of partners involved directly in the process of building and running the Formula 1 operation, and that has allowed us to diversify our range of other businesses,” Whitmarsh says. “Our electronics division is a world leader, supplying the two biggest race series in the world: F1 and NASCAR. McLaren Applied Technologies, one of our subsidiary companies, works closely with the Premiership, Heathrow Airport, the Tour de France, the England rugby team and the International Olympic Committee. We are very fortunate that our technical expertise and human-performance experience helps drive these exciting collaborations.” But Whitmarsh’s true passion will always be Formula 1. How does he explain its enduring appeal? “It’s about brave young men competing in the world’s most advanced cars,” he says. And when you put it like that, it sounds obvious

Richard Noble, Project Director of Bloodhound, the British attempt to set a world land speed record of 1,000mph, argues that inspirational engineering projects can help the UK reclaim its place as a global technology pioneer. Words by

Richard Noble Matthew Lyons

ILLUSTRATIONS by

ver driven at 650mph? At that speed, you’re travelling one mile every five and a half seconds. That’s fast, but not fast enough. A mile every 3.6 seconds: that’s the magic 1,000mph mark – and we’ll be there in 2014. Is it self-indulgent madness? I don’t think so, because the global benefit will be an entire generation waking up to the much-needed creativity that comes with mathematics, technology, science and engineering. Delivering the MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh International Television Festival in August, Eric Schmidt criticised British education for its “drift towards the humanities”, and suggested we need to “bring art and science back together”. Only then can the UK compete on a global scale with a new generation of digital entrepreneurs. I agree – and the land speed record can be just the project to do it.

The UK has held the world land speed record for 27 years. We were the first to go supersonic in 1997, but now we’re ready to go faster. The new car, Bloodhound SSC, is both jet- and rocketpowered, has 135,000hp, and is the result of 30 man-years of intense research, advancing the science of computational fluid dynamics and design optimisation on a scale that previously would have demanded brain time measured in generations. The project has a great affinity with the web. When the British media denied us coverage of the Thrust SSC build in the ’90s (they said their readership would never understand the technology), we decided to pursue our own publicity online. We believed that the British media was 180-degrees out of phase – the public loves technology – and sure enough, the data proved us right. The 800 technology pages on the Thrust SSC website received 59 million visits and 300 million page views in 1997. Not only did we catch on to the power of the web fast, we built a global community that made a real difference to our success. When we had difficulty securing the 250,000 gallons of jet fuel we needed to get the team, support equipment and car to the Nevada desert to start our record attempt, our community bought it for us at a rate of 30,000 gallons a day. We were very proud to deliver them the new world record with a supersonic bang. oon enough, of course, there was a challenge to our record and we had to respond. So our driver, Andy Green, a former RAF fighter pilot who works for the Ministry of Defence, fixed a meeting with The Minister, a man very keen on his motor racing. He liked the idea of the new car, but the conversation hit the rocks when we asked for the most advanced military fighter engine to power it. As we were about to leave the meeting, however, The Minister suggested that there was something we could do for him. “The Ministry of Defence is

32 THINK SPEED

seriously short of engineers,” he told us. “We need to look back at the Cold War years when the kids were excited by incredible British aerospace engineering, with new prototype aircraft developed every year. I need a new, iconic British engineering project run through all the schools to deliver us a new generation of engineers.” Eager to advance our engine prospects, we would have agreed to anything. And that’s how it started. According to the OECD Programme for International Student Assessment, British education is in decline. The 2006 Leitch Review of Skills, an independent report commissioned by the Labour government, found that our manufacturing skills are mostly held by 40-60-year-olds. In 20 years, the aircraft industry will lose 20 percent of its highly skilled workforce. Take up on IT courses is falling through the floor. But reversal is possible – back in the 1960s, the NASA Manned Space Program stimulated a massive increase in PhDs, from 12,000 to 32,000 a year in a single decade. Today, we don’t need expenditure on that scale, just a highly stimulating project and a mature, distributed media – and now we have both. So it is possible: the Minister might have his new generation of engineers after all. Why did our engineering skills go into decline? Probably because the country focussed on its service industries, while engineers had little in the way of exciting projects that could stimulate schools and colleges. After all, wind turbines and electric cars don’t exactly set the pulse racing. But Bloodhound does – and it can maintain that high degree of stimulation right the way across all levels of education. As the project came together, the schools began to sign up; we’ve now got 4,500 on the books. Our strategy is simple: to deliver an open project with no patents, and to live share all design and performance data. There have been 2,300 downloads of our CAD drawings suite to date. Could this mean 2,300 car clones? I hope so: open competition is ideal. Right now, we’re into car build, and it’s tough – technologically similar to building a highperformance jet fighter. Our small ‘Skunk’ team is flat out and actually in need of more engineers – but we’ll roll out in December 2012 for high-speed runs in 2013. Are we doing this with public money? No chance. The finance comes from global sponsors and private donations, and as we’re into 250 percent growth in

“Wind turbines and electric cars don’t exactly set the pulse racing. But Bloodhound does.” 33

34 THINK SPEED

stagflation, we must be doing something right. The financial pressures are frightful, but the Brits always find humour in appalling situations – in this case, it comes from the expressions of disbelief on the faces of commentators who predicted the project’s failure. The key is our flat company structure in which everyone is empowered. We make fast decisions, move quickly, and are cost effective. The result is innovation on a grand scale. Just ask the engineers: 10,000rpm wheels; hybrid rockets; TO; CFD; ALM; DOE – it’s all there. xactly 5,558 miles due south from our UK headquarters, the Northern Cape government in South Africa is getting the Hakskeen Pan desert ready for Bloodhound. We need the flattest place on earth and 3,000-feet altitude so we don’t have the dynamic problems of sea-level air pressure. Even so, at speed, the Bloodhound has to withstand 12.5 tonnes on every square metre of bodywork. If it fails, we’re in serious trouble. As I write this, the NC government

has just removed an entire causeway, and has 300 local people picking up 24 million square metres of surface stones. It should be ready by Christmas, which gives the desert a year to consolidate. There is one more amazing opportunity. We’re learning that new data and technology enable us to create far lighter and better optimised structures for the car – ones that are rewriting what we thought was possible (the same is happening with the new Boeing 787). We’re now in a unique position to share these new learnings. The Google-backed Khan Academy showed us how. A former financier-turned-web education guru, Salman Khan found that disciplined students learn faster and more thoroughly online than in class. When Bloodhound makes its record attempt in 2013, we’re going to immediately download 500 data channels from each run. Of course, all that data will be wasted if the followers we have in 211 countries don’t have the education to enable them to understand, predict and share the project engineering with us. So we are working with Southampton University to create our own online academy – turning the entire programme into a gigantic global online educator. The final challenge is to link our worldwide followers through social media. And that’s how we’ll get our 1,000mph car!

Glossary Wheels

Hybrid Rocket

TO (Topological Optimisation)

CFD (Computation Fluid Dynamics)

ALM (Additive Layer Manufacture)

DOE (Design of Experiments)

Bloodhound wheels run at 10,500rpm and the radial acceleration is 50,000G. Thus, a one-kilo bag of sugar on a wheel rim will exert a radial force equivalent to the weight of a 50-tonne road truck.

A rocket motor that uses a solid fuel, but which is dependent on a liquid oxidiser for combustion. The oxidiser flow can be cancelled in order to safely terminate combustion.

A structural software optimiser which, when programmed with all loads the selected structure has to bear, progressively removes unneeded material, thus reducing the final structure to the lightest and most efficient compatible with the given loads.

An advanced finite element software programme, which analyses subsonic and supersonic airflows. Bloodhound software uses 100 million space elements. It was used on Thrust SSC and was qualified with parallel rocket model testing.

3D high-speed printing using metals. It eliminates the need for hand skills and manual tooling.

A revolutionary optimisation analysis programme that’s used on Bloodhound to run and review a large number of CFD progressions and determine the final layout.

Our brains make brand-influenced decisions at the speed of thought. Follow these five golden rules to make the selection process work for you. Tjaco Walvis I l l u s t r a t i o n b y Boja Bomaque Words by

We make brand choices subconsciously, algorithmically and fast (we’re talking milliseconds). And although we can veto decisions once they enter our conscious awareness, consciousness is not the driver of our choices. We’re not irrational – our brain seeks to satisfy our goals and needs in the best possible way, maximising reward and minimising energy, costs, efforts and risks – but it’s from the subconscious that we make brand-influenced decisions. How does the process work and what does it mean for marketers seeking to get their brand in pole position? A useful way to think about it is this: our brand choices are analogous to the way that Google selects websites – the brain follows a fixed algorithm to pick the brand from our memory that best fits our needs. Five principles summarise the main implications for marketers.

Reward From the brain’s perspective, brands promise rewards that deliver on our subconscious cocktail of goals. To make choices, our brain integrates a range of elements into a valuation. Deciding between something simple like a Frappuccino or a Fanta means considering factors like taste, previous experiences, relative price, your energy level, your thirst, the time of day, the humidity, the temperature, etc. Whichever brand comes out on top gets selected. Instead of worrying about classical attribute differentiation, marketers must focus on creating a relevance edge – being substantially more rewarding than competitors. This is difficult, because 36 THINK SPEED

the subconscious goals brands must deliver on are, well, subconscious. Steve Jobs captured the point in his reply to a question about the market research that Apple undertook for the iPad. “None,” he said. “It’s not the consumers’ job to know what they want.” The best approach is to think like a customer.

Repeat Brand associations are stored in our long-term memory. These memories are considered in the quick valuation our brains calculate when making a choice. But as memories decay if not regularly reactivated, marketers must continually reiterate both a brand’s promise and the proof that it delivers. Advertising is, of course, one of the best ways to refresh brand memories, especially among light users. As a result, advertising generates sales even when the brand’s sales volume remains flat or, worse, when volume is decreasing.

Under-Promise; Over-Deliver Our brain keeps track of the difference between the promised reward and the actual experience. Based on that difference, it adjusts its valuation of the brand, meaning that if your brand promises the world, deliver the moon. When our reward centres get more than expected, they naturally want to return to the source of that experience again and again. Like a benign drug, marketing can benefit from this mechanism.

Participation We create thousands of new brain cells every day – especially in areas related to learning and memory – but exposure to participatory environments can double the number. The result is that brands we interact with are easier to remember and are therefore more likely to receive a higher memory ranking. Nike+ is perhaps the most dramatic example of how a static product was transformed into a participatory experience, more deeply embedding the brand in users’ memories.

Reach with Meaning Around 50 percent of sales generally come from 80 percent of buyers – this is called the ‘Pareto distribution’ (and has recently been reaffirmed in Byron Sharp’s How Brands Grow, OUP 2010). It means that to grow, advertising must reach the large numbers of lighter users who deliver 50 percent of volume but seldom think of the brand. This may explain why mass media such as TV and radio are still popular with advertisers. The biggest help marketers can get from digital media companies are means to reliably reach the entire customer population of their category. The oneon-one nature of social media can make them very effective at the micro level. But to grow, brands need mass penetration. The best digital advertising delivers this reach but does it while retaining that personalised relevance

40 THINK SPEED

html5 is the

web language that promises to put the magic back into your digital marketing. Here’s how... Words by

Caroline McCarthy Andy Gilmore

ILLUSTRATION by

A great digital campaign lifts content off the screen, presenting the user with something that almost amounts to magic. But creating these experiences has typically been anything but magical, thanks to plugin, download and different version requirements, and the reality that many users will encounter endless lag times rather than the promised enchantment. The solution to such problems, if you believe the hype, is something called HTML5. It’s the most recent version of the language that built the web, one which, not long ago, was only capable of producing basic images and text. Blending ‘traditional’ HTML with functionalities once reserved for more advanced languages like XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, it’s thrilled the digital world

with its potential: plugin-free video players; local storage and caching; and lightningfast load times eliminating lag. Best of all, HTML5 can be carried over to smartphone browsers, too, meaning that you may no longer need to develop an arsenal of apps for different platforms. More complex species of videos, games and interactive experiences can now come straight to the browser – no downloading required. For developers, marketers and users alike, this is big news. “There are lots of features of HTML5 that can speed up the performance of web apps, resulting in a much better user experience,” says Jan Kleinert, a Google developer advocate who specialises in HTML5 and its use in the Chrome browser. “Users want web apps that are beautiful and interactive, but they also want them to be fast.” So what’s the catch? As with any new technology, there will be teething problems. For one thing, ‘HTML5’ has already started to become a (misleading) label for anything cool in the browser that doesn’t require Flash, potentially leading to confusion and a lack of understanding. “Marketers are interested in HTML5 but often toss the name around without knowing what it really means from a technical perspective,” says Hashem Bajwa, director of digital strategy at agency Droga5. “Marketers who care about their online content should also care how it gets presented technically. Understanding the

role HTML5 can have on marketing requires a broader understanding of how your content gets developed, deployed and maintained online. HTML5 isn’t a singular thing, either – it works with many technologies like CSS, JavaScript and geolocation to really bring things to life.” So it’s worth getting educated, something which the site HTML5Rocks.com is designed to help accomplish. Learn about the temporary red tape: many users, for example, will need to upgrade to a modern browser for the full experience, which means that any marketer looking to undertake an HTML5based campaign or site makeover would do well to get up to speed with the technology. Are your users likely to be using browsers that are up-to-date, or ones that haven’t seen a revamp since the <blink> tag’s heyday in the HTML2 era? Beyond that, is there real substance to your campaign, or is it just an array of shiny effects? “It could be considered confusing, but one can positively focus on the fact that people actually care,” says Tom Uglow, a London-based lead in the Google Creative Lab. “The idea of a new generation of HTML being embraced as a unique selling proposition is pretty cool. HTML5 has created a sense of optimism that is uplifting for designers and developers alike. That’s a positive for the internet and, more importantly, for the user. It doesn’t matter too much as long as it drives the web forward.”

HTML5 in Action Nike Better World

Games for Cats

Toyota Prius Projects

Financial Times

World’s Biggest Pac-Man

nikebetterworld.com

gamesforcats.com

toyotapriusprojects.com

ft.com

worldsbiggestpacman.com

A blend of bold photos and animation makes this guide to the trainer brand’s philanthropy and sustainability initiatives jump right off your monitor.

US cat food brand Friskies created these games to give kitties a way to play with tablet devices. Using HTML5 instead of native apps ensures they can purr on every platform.

Bright, eye-popping visuals that create the feel of an interactive drawing board give shape to the story and development of the hybrid car brand.

It was big news in the digital world when the Financial Times ditched its mobile apps in favour of an HTML5 experience that has earned nearuniversal acclaim.

Agency Soap Creative built this experience for Namco Bandai’s beloved ghost-munching game. Users are encouraged to create their own mazes and add them to the grid.

42 THINK SPEED

The Joy f Slow Broadcaster and journalist Will Self on why slowing down can offer a shortcut to happiness and productivity. Words by

he other evening I went to the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London’s South Bank arts complex to see a performance of the American composer John Cage’s ‘4’ 33”’. The piece is justly celebrated as a landmark of the avant-garde classical repertoire, and I cannot believe that there was anyone in the audience who wasn’t aware of what to expect. I myself was looking forward to ‘4’ 33”’ as a sort of psychic palate-cleanser. It had been the usual fraught day – I hadn’t suffered from hunger, bodily distress or emotional anguish, yet there had been a steady accretion of stress as the condition of twenty-first-century mass urbanity infiltrated my being.

Will Self |

illustrations by

Craig Redman

The dodging of traffic on busy streets, the avoidance of eye contact with my fellow citizens, the influx of emails and text messages and phone calls, each one demanding a response or an action. I live directly beneath the flight path into Heathrow Airport, and even if I try and impose a sense of monastic calm on my household (difficult with adolescent boys in residence), at 6am every morning I am awoken by the echoic groan of intercontinental jets hunkering down over the city and preparing to void themselves of frowsty travellers. It’s a noise that brings with it all the intimations of a wider world of hunger, bodily distress and emotional anguish. At the Queen Elizabeth Hall a rather dweeby-looking man walked on stage to the accompaniment of dutiful rather than rapt applause. He took his seat at a grand piano and opened the lid. He laid his fingers on the keyboard and then… nothing. He depressed none of the keys, he played not a note and apart from moving his hands to his lap and then back to the keyboard again about halfway through, nothing at all happened for the next four minutes and 33 seconds. As I say, I had been happily anticipating ‘4’ 33”’ as an opportunity to listen to the silence and to meditate, so allowing the day’s crumpled thoughts and impressions to blow away into the void.

Of course, I appreciated that the silence wouldn’t be total – I expected ambient noise: the rumble of the tube trains underneath the concert hall, the rustle of clothing, the susurration of a few hundred people breathing in a confined space. But what I didn’t expect was this near-frenzy of coughing, groaning, yawping and yawning. I could hear the sproing of seat springs as people fidgeted and scratched – then there was the laughter. At first just isolated titters, then actual small gales of merriment – and all this because there was nothing to distract them, no amusement, no entertainment but what was between their own ears.

ahatma Gandhi famously said, “There’s more to life than simply increasing its speed.” Yet as I sat there, concentrating on my own stillness, it occurred to me yet again that 43

for many people the pace of modern life really does affect them like a dose of amphetamine – which means that when it’s withdrawn they suffer similar symptoms: irritability, inability to concentrate, lassitude and depression. In many ways there’s nothing more irritating than a Damascene conversion along the lines of, ‘I used to be a speed-freak but now I take life oh so slooooow…’ But I’m not about to ask you, dear pushed-fortime reader, to abandon it all for the life of a meditative mendicant, toting a Habitat begging bowl and strolling from town to town in unflattering yellow robes. Nevertheless, in the past decade or so since I stopped driving everywhere in excess of the speed limit, leaping on and off intercontinental flights, working 16 hours a day, and generally doing the best I could to increase the speed of my life, I’ve adopted some strategies – and that’s all they are – that I believe make negotiating all the hurlyburly of an accelerated existence that much more bearable. John Cage’s ‘4’ 33”’ stands as emblematic of these strategies because, paradoxically, many of them don’t take up much time at all – or, rather, the time they do take up couldn’t be usefully employed anyway. Slowing the pace of life isn’t, in my view, a form of downsizing (whatever that may be), but rather a way of increasing enjoyment, awareness and productivity.

y slow days begin at the beginning with a school run conducted on bus and by foot, and continue with a morning entirely free of electronic communication – no phone, no mobile, no computer at all in fact. If, like me, you’re an urban dweller, a car isn’t a luxury – it’s largely a status symbol and a kind of hut-on-wheels, in which you sit 44 THINK SPEED

to grab a little me-time. Indeed, most car commuters say that the reason they drive to work is because it gives them some time alone. Maybe, but it’s time alone sopping up tension through the steering wheel as you engage in the slo-mo game of chicken that is driving in jammed streets. Walking and cycling are both modes of transport that allow for an exact timing of journeys, so if you have to get somewhere punctually they’re desirable. Public transport, by contrast, encourages a certain fatalism: it’s out of your control, so why not sit back and use the ride profitably to do something else? Longer train journeys

“Most car commuters say the reason they drive to work is because it gives them time alone. But it’s time alone sopping up tension as you engage in the slo-mo game of chicken that is driving in jammed streets.” I find ideal for sustained work (I once wrote most of a novel travelling around Germany by train), but even short rides can be used profitably once you make the mental adjustment. I find alternating the two methods involves exactly the right combination of self-will and determinism we need to accept the truth of our position in the world: some things we have dominion over, but mostly we are in thrall to the Goddess Fortuna. For knowledge workers like you and me, I believe that sustained periods of wired existence can be usefully contrasted with complete radio-silence, hence the mornings spent with pen or manual typewriter

and paper, rather than succumbing to the glittering allure of the VDU screen. Computers linked to the wide world by Wi-Fi seem to promise the user all kinds of efficacy, but what they can’t produce – yet – is ideas. Disciplining oneself to compose ideas offscreen takes some doing for those of us who came to maturity playing the plastic piano – it took me two or three years – but the dividends are a greater harmony of thought, and a deeper intensity of concentration. When you know you can’t be distracted, and there are no displacement activities a keystroke away, then you’ve no choice but to knuckle under. When you turn to your allotted period of screen time, it too becomes more focussed and effective – no, you don’t need those real deer-hide oven gloves available from Lapland.com. No, you don’t. Then there’s ‘4’ 33”’ of silence. Again, I’m not saying you need a mantra, or a guru, or an exercise regimen – simply taking a short time to be quiet can be a vital restorative, setting yourself and the world back into some sort of meaningful equilibrium. I’d be being disingenuous if I said that these small strategies were the only ones I’ve employed this past decade – in fact, my search for a slower and more placid lifestyle has led me in radical directions others blanche at. I regularly walk 20, 30, 40 and more miles through cities. I find that turning up for a business meeting and telling the CEO you’ve come to see that it took you a day’s sustained physical activity to reach their office concentrates all minds wonderfully on the matter to hand (or foot). I also have considerable time for that adjunct of the slow movement – localism. When you start to walk a lot more, you inevitably begin to examine your immediate environment with closer attention, and so the values of community and meaningful work – as against distant call centres – begin to gain greater purchase as well. But perhaps that lies in the future for all of us. For now: thank you. If you’ve got this far, even if you’ve mostly disagreed with the ideas I’m setting forth, you have at least given them some sustained – and almost certainly quiet – contemplation. How much better that is than the audience at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, most of whom I could’ve cheerfully – and slowly – throttled

46 THINK SPEED

Conventional wisdom suggests that speed to market is crucial to business success. But the history of Silicon Valley contains stories of second-placed competitors who ultimately triumphed over their speedier opponents. We go in search of insights from the archives.

Words by

ertain fables offer wonderful business lessons. The Emperor’s New Clothes reminds us not to be blinded by power. While the mouse that pulled the thorn from the lion’s paw contains a lesson that even the mightiest may some day be saved by small and loyal friends (or customers). I’d like to propose another tale to add to the business canon: The Tortoise and the Hare. You remember this one – a

Leslie Berlin |

illustrations by

Noma Bar

tortoise and a hare agree to a race, the hare speeds off, hits all of the mile markers first, arrogantly lays down to rest, and ultimately loses to the tortoise, who has adopted a slower, more considered pace. While we often hear about the importance of being first to market, the history of high-tech innovation teaches us that being first isn’t everything. Apple wasn’t first with the graphical user interface; IBM wasn’t first with the PC; and the World Wide Web wasn’t the first internet protocol.

In some cases, second-place winners succeed because they have the opportunity to learn from the shortcomings of their predecessors. In others, the companies that come first are too far ahead of the market. And nearly always, the mere passage of time – and the relentless march of Moore’s law – can make the difference. So here, for your entertainment and enlightenment, is a pair of lesser-known stories of tortoises beating hares in highstakes business races. Sit back and read at your leisure

Venture Capital Today, Silicon Valley is the world headquarters of venture capital, but the first venture capital company in Silicon Valley, founded in 1959, was not a success. The founders of Draper Gaither & Anderson (DG&A) – Generals William H. Draper and Frederick L. Anderson, alongside attorney H. Rowan Gaither – were brilliant risk-takers with connections at the highest levels of American finance, politics and business. They boasted a stellar list of savvy investors, and were wisely located near Stanford University, with easy access to advanced technology and educated engineers and scientists. DG&A was the first venture capital firm to focus solely on profits for investors (earlier firms aimed to improve regional economies), and the first to use the limited partnership model (in which partners’ primary compensation comes from a percentage of profits, rather than a salary) that is now standard throughout the industry. But even these assets could not compensate for the difficulties DG&A faced simply because they were first. Venture capital was largely unknown on the West Coast in 1959, and entrepreneurs were wary. One junior associate recalled driving from small company to small company, begging CEOs to please, please take some money. Moreover, because DG&A was essentially inventing modern venture capital, they made mistakes. They took all their investors’ money up front, which meant DG&A needed to put it to work as soon as possible to protect the fund’s internal rate of return. The result was a scattershot investment approach in areas ranging from glaucoma drugs to camshaft bearings. But even as DG&A struggled, the

48 THINK SPEED

younger men who worked there were taking notes. When they left, these men – Pete Bancroft, Bill Draper, and Don Lucas – did things differently. They took investors’ money in several tranches (called ‘capital calls’), and invested it only when portfolio companies hit certain predetermined milestones. As venture capital became an established part of the financial ecosystem, the generation of investors that followed DG&A could pick and choose from a much larger pool of entrepreneurs eager for funding. The names of the companies they backed might ring a few bells – Sun Microsystems, Oracle, Netscape, AOL…

Handheld Digital Assistants In the late-1990s, Palm’s PalmPilot – a ‘personal digital assistant’ featuring a calendar, datebook, notepad, and address book – was all the rage. The cool factor came from an innovative method of entering data: using a stylus and writing in a special script called ‘Graffiti’. It sold two million units in three years. The PalmPilot supplanted a device called the Newton MessagePad, made by Apple. The Apple Newton could do everything the PalmPilot could, but it never captured the market in the same way. Why? Critically, the Newton had problems with handwriting recognition – the joke on the street was that the only handwriting the Newton reliably recognised was its own project manager’s. The PalmPilot flipped the Apple model on its head. Rather than teaching the device to recognise a wide range of styles, Palm would teach a wide range of people a single way to write. Watching

Apple’s mistakes gave Palm the confidence to gamble that people would modify their behaviour to fit the needs of a machine – if the modification brought them really cool technology. Palm learned another thing by watching the performance of the Newton. At 18cm high and nearly 2cm thick, it was too big. Palm designer Jeff Hawkins wanted to build something smaller – something that could fit in a shirt pocket. To determine the right size, Hawkins spent months carrying a block of wood in his pocket, pretending it was a handheld computer. Every time he set up an appointment or recorded a thought, he mimed entering the data into his block of wood. Once he decided the block was about the right size, it became the model for the PalmPilot. Of course, now another 15 years has passed, and the screw has turned again. When it comes to handheld devices, sales of Apple’s iPhone have eclipsed those of Palm’s smartphone. In other words, we’ve witnessed the tortoise and the hare reconfigure themselves for another lap of the circuit. o these stories imply that speedto-market means nothing at all? Hardly. Business guru Jim Collins points to three scenarios in which being first ‘virtually guarantees a sustainable advantage’: if you can secure ‘ironclad patent protection’, set a proprietary industry standard, or use your lead to establish such a beachhead that even if better options become available, your customers will find it ‘too much of a hassle’ to switch (the QWERTY keyboard is the example he offers). If none of these scenarios apply, you might think twice about surging ahead. Let the hare make a few mistakes. If history is any guide, the time spent thinking, learning and watching may ultimately mean you win the race

Frank Stephenson designed the Ferrari F430, Maserati MC12 and the 2001 MINI. Now Design Director at McLaren Automotive, he shares the trends, technologies and principles that drive his thinking. 50 THINK SPEED

When I was in the Caribbean a couple of years ago I fell in love with a sailfish. I bought one, got it taxidermied, then sent it down to the Formula 1 department and had it painted like a McLaren racecar. But before we did that we scanned it for data. We found that the scales create little vortexes of air so that water doesn’t touch the fish when it’s moving at speed – it just runs over a boundary of air and the vortexes pull the fish forward like in suction. We can use that for the areas around the duct, where we have to pull in a lot of air. That procedure has never been ‘invented’, yet it’s already out there in nature.

About seven or eight years ago, people started asking whether hybrid or hydrogen was going to be the new fuel technology. But there’s something dark here – there are many small companies that have built hydrogen and air compressor engines and all the prototypes have been bought by major companies, which have kept them secret.

Every car in history has had a windscreen wiper, but recently I went to an Air Force place and asked them why modern aircraft don’t have windscreen wipers. I was told that they have this very inexpensive technology, which means absolutely nothing sticks to the windscreen, but nobody uses it in the automotive industry. What if we use this technology in our cars? You might put out of work all the windscreen wiper companies and windscreen washer fluid companies, but that’s the cost of innovation. Whenever you take a new direction you’re always going to sacrifice something.

We have a very small team. It’s similar to the concept of a kitchen with a lot of cooks; you get a really spoiled soup. The more intense the atmosphere can be, the more interesting the products are going to be.

When you see something that works, it’s beautiful. I mean, you wouldn’t redesign a horse because it would look better if its neck was shorter. At McLaren, the concept we’re heading towards is pure efficiency – we’re looking to build a vacuum, shrink-wrapping the surface of the model across the hard points. And by creating something efficient – something that functions perfectly – we’ll have created something beautiful.

McLaren doesn’t just build cars. We make stuff for hospitals and scientific research. It’s beneficial for mankind.

We’re connected to a lot of companies around the world that expose us to new materials, whether it’s a new fabric, alloy, plastic or rubber. Our role is to work out how we can use these materials – is it going to be beneficial to us?

People criticise McLaren for having no purpose other than to satisfy the desire to have something unnecessarily superior. But the whole point is to filter the technology down. We make a hypercar, a supercar and a sports car. The hypercar uses a carbon fibre tub that used to cost £100,000. In the SLR we got it down to £30,000. For the 12C it was £6,000, so more people are getting the benefits.

Last Christmas, I went to a company in London that is developing holographic technology. I’m sitting on this couch and a guy and a girl start doing modern dance. This goes on for about three minutes, then the guy from the company asks, “Which one is real and who’s the fake?” I was like, “What?!” The lights were on and they were indistinguishable. I was blown out of my mind.

The traditional way of designing has been to draw fast pen sketches, but a lot of students now use digital rendering to create a design in a 3D data model. Digital allows you to be more risky because you don’t have to worry that you’ll spend hours on a drawing and have to throw it away and start all over again. Speed is important – now you can try thousands of ideas where before you could only try one

52 THINK SPEED

easy to make fun of the past. Remember when Thomas Watson, the head of IBM, said that the world would only ever need five computers? How about when DEC founder Ken Olsen declared, “There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home?” Or when Bill Gates decided that 640K was all the memory a PC would ever need? Never mind that these stories are apocryphal; we repeat them because they ring true. When you first used a computer, saw a PC, went to a website, or picked up a mobile phone, did you imagine that these devices would someday be able to do even a fraction of the things that we now take for granted? Probably not, and since ignorance loves company, we take comfort in believing that brilliant people like Watson, Olsen and Gates were just as short-sighted as the rest of us. Even if, in fact, they weren’t. There’s no shame in exhibiting a failure

of imagination; it’s a trapping of human psychology. When we come up against things we can’t forecast (for example, what would we do with 1,000 times more computing power in our phones?), we assume that if we can’t imagine it, it isn’t possible. That’s because we think in a linear fashion, subconsciously projecting our current pace of progress into the future. But technology is changing at a non-linear pace. Progress is speeding up, which is why, as Larry Page said at our Zeitgeist conference (paraphrasing Bill Gates), “People tend to overestimate what can happen in the next year but underestimate what can happen in the next five.” While we can’t rewire our tendency to think linearly, we can train ourselves to recognise when that tendency is kicking in and consciously overcome it. This is sort of my job at Google. I work on a team that tries to find new opportunities to use major technical break-throughs to solve problems that could affect billions of people.

Technology is progressing at an exponential rate, but are we thinking big enough to take advantage? Astro Teller, Google’s Director of New Products, is determined to rise to the challenge. Words by

Astro Teller Celyn Brazier

Illustrations by

start by thinking about what should be possible. How do we make that call? We know that computing power, bandwidth and storage are either getting better or cheaper. Information is ubiquitous, and data that used to be locked up in thousands of silos around the world (in universities, businesses and governments) is now moving online and becoming widely accessible. These factors are leading us to a critical point: the rate at which computers are getting better at understanding semantic information (language, symbols, images, even facial expressions) is increasing. In other words, they’re becoming very smart, very fast. If we assume that these ‘exponential trends’ are set to continue, we can stretch our minds to consider incredible advances. We do this by applying a powerful but simple rule of thumb: if a human can do it, so can a computer. This helps us differentiate between things that are impossible (like time travel) and those that are just really difficult (like selfdriving cars). In computer science terms, a human consists of two video cameras, a pair of microphones, four actuators and a remarkably powerful CPU; and we manage to drive cars just fine. Why would we think a robot couldn’t? Once we decide that something is possible, we look at whether or not it’s useful. This is a critical step. There are plenty of technically challenging things that would be completely useless in real life. But if you believe that something is both possible to achieve and, once realised, would be tremendously beneficial, it becomes a fairly simple equation. Consider those selfdriving cars again. Does it take a bigger leap of imagination to believe that they will someday exist? Or that they won’t? We bet that they will, and get to work. Another good example is GPS. Twentyfive years ago it was possible to determine an object’s geographical position outdoors within 25m, but it only seemed useful for 54 THINK SPEED

“Imagine that the world’s most powerful supercomputers are a thousand times more powerful, and you can use them whenever and wherever you want. What will these new capabilities unleash?”

military and marine applications. Even 15 years ago, consumer uses of the technology, such as maps with navigation, or location services like Foursquare and Google Latitude, were difficult for most of us to imagine. Today, of course, GPS is a ubiquitous consumer application. I can look at the map on my phone and it shows with 25m accuracy that I’m standing next to my car on the Google campus in Mountain View, California. But GPS isn’t done. We now know that it’s possible to improve accuracy to 2.5m and to locate positions indoors as well as outside. But is it useful? We think so. How about the next two orders of magnitude? It should be possible, we believe, to pinpoint geographic location within 25cm, and perhaps to eventually whittle that down to 2.5cm. As for usefulness, many people can’t see it, but I’m betting that these potential improvements in localisation accuracy will turn out to be every bit as valuable as the previous steps. I just can’t say exactly how. So what’s next? Fortunately, when you live in the twenty-first century and are in the imagination business, speed is your friend. Imagine that your PC, laptop, tablet or phone is a thousand times more powerful. Imagine the wireless or wired networks that connect it to the internet are a thousand times faster as well. Imagine that every bit of recorded information that has ever been created is available online, while trillions of sensors around the planet are creating exabytes of new data every second. Imagine that the world’s most powerful supercomputers are a thousand times more powerful, and you can use them whenever and wherever you want. What products or services will these new capabilities unleash? Could we develop software systems to read long papers and provide an accurate executive summary as fast as a search query is answered today? Sure, why not? That sounds incredibly useful. Could computers write their own software based on a system designer’s natural language specifications (‘Please take this app and develop different versions to run on the most popular consumer platforms’)? Absolutely. If something rides the rails of exponentially improving computer and data power, and if its benefits are sufficiently powerful, it is likely to happen – whether we can imagine it today or not

Are early adopters the key to marketing success? Or do they just distract us from the customers that really matter?

Words by

Cyrus Shahrad Matthew Green

Illustrations by

56 THINK SPEED

In September 2007, Apple dropped the US price of its new 8GB iPhone from $599 to $399. A cause for celebration, one might think, but not for those devotees who had camped outside Apple stores three months earlier to be the first to own the new contraption. Apple forums were flooded with messages of frustration, with Steve Jobs eventually posting an open letter on the Apple website offering $100 store credit and acknowledging that life in the technology lane was ‘bumpy’. Jobs was nodding to what many call the ‘early adopter tax’ – the idea that those who buy into recently launched technologies run the risk of feeling cheated when prices drop, as they usually do. That’s not the only problem with adopting early – there are also the bugs associated with early versions of new products, as well as the chance that the technology in question may be quickly usurped by another, as HD DVD was by Blu-ray. But they’re risks that early

adopters consider worth taking for the potential rewards of being one step ahead of their peers. Nor is the early adopter purely a product of the digital age. The term dates back to the 1957 Iowa State University PhD of Everett M. Rogers, who studied the diffusion of new technologies such as hybrid seeds and chemical fertilisers among farmers. The results formed a bell curve of adoption against time that showed a slowly yielding resistance to change: the bulk of the bulge made up by early and late majority adopters, the two tapering tails comprising laggards at the far end and early adopters at the front. Rogers’ findings were quickly applied to other forms of technology, and the early adopter has since been considered a holy grail by marketing firms – a young, cool, risk-oriented individual capable of spreading the word about new products and helping iron out creases in early versions.

Yet some have begun to question the validity of the early adopter model in the emerging technologies market. John Gerzema of BrandAsset Consulting argues that blind faith in the formula is causing 90 percent of technology companies to target 10 percent of the population, focussing their marketing on young, socially mobile ‘digerati’ who he claims are increasingly irrelevant. Instead, he talks about the ‘long tooth of technology’; a generation of greying geeks who are perfectly capable of uploading photos of their grandchildren to Flickr, thank you very much. “The majority of Facebook and Twitter audiences are over 40-years-old,” says Gerzema. “You’re dealing with people who have worked in and around computing for 30 years – 15 of them online – and who are completely at ease with technological innovation. It’s no longer safe to try and demark the early adopter demographic by age alone.”

Nor is it just the age of the audience that’s changing. As emerging technologies move online, many offer simple pointand-click enrolment for volunteer early adopters, removing the barrier that once complicated being ahead of the curve. There’s also less importance attached to early adopters in helping remove bugs and glitches, with widespread acceptance of a ‘version-one-point-something’ culture facilitated by rolling online updates. And the early adopter’s voice is less instrumental in spreading the word: in a world of increasingly compressed feedback loops – where news of Beyoncé’s pregnancy can generate 8,868 tweets in a single second – word travels fast, with or without the early adopter’s vocal approval. As always in the field of emerging social media, the challenge is to adapt and evolve, and that’s especially true in an industry like fast moving consumer goods (FMCG), where the products themselves can’t be converted into information. B. Bonin Bough, global director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, has adapted the model by turning PepsiCo itself into an early adopter, spotting powerful social platforms amid the raft of emerging technologies and finding innovative ways to help them promote products that traditionally relied on physical interaction. One example is a recent partnership with location-based networking application Foursquare, which saw customers who ‘checked in’ at Hess service stations rewarded with a combination purchase of Lipton Brisk iced tea and Frito-Lay potato chips for $1.99. Hess got a 500 percent increase in foot traffic, while PepsiCo saw a 47 percent rise in the sale of its promoted products. The success of such ventures led to Bough initiating the PepsiCo10 programme, an open call to emerging technology companies to present their ideas to a panel. The 10 winners have received investment from PepsiCo, while PepsiCo stands to gain by championing the technologies to further ‘unlock’ the relationship between its products and its most technologically savvy customers. “Our strategy has been to capitalise on early adoption as a competitive advantage,” says Bough on a whistle-stop trip to London. “Part of our success is due 58 THINK SPEED

“Early adoption once constituted a genuine groundswell behind an innovative product or service, but it’s now something co-opted by marketing departments to create queues at product launches.”

to putting ourselves in the position to spot ground-breaking technologies as they come down the pipeline; another is having the stomach to make bets, and not being afraid to experiment with things that might fall short.” All of which suggests that PepsiCo is happy taking on another of the risks that famously dogged early adopters in the past: that they might cast their lot with a Friends Reunited rather than a Facebook. As the number of such technologies increases exponentially, some argue that the kudos of being first on board has been replaced by credibility for being the first to abandon ship. Greg Behr and Billy Warden of GBW Strategies coined the term ‘first dropper’ in 2010 to describe the sort of person who deleted their social media account the moment it became cluttered with ads, or ditched their old music service as soon as they realised they could get more reliable recommendations from a rival. “Early adoption once constituted a genuine groundswell behind an innovative product or service,” says Warden, “but it’s now become something co-opted by marketing departments to create queues at product launches. The first droppers are taking back their status as discerning consumers, and are refusing to have their tastes dictated to them by any individual brand.” Blogger Cory Doctorow is a noted example. In 2010, he posted an article entitled ‘Why I’m Not Buying An iPad (And You Shouldn’t Either)’, which – while far from derailing the Apple production line – generated healthy debate among its usually devoted fan base, and got numerous executives hot under the collar. All the more reason, claims Greg Behr, for companies to start monitoring the movements of first droppers the way they once did early adopters. “Companies have to develop to survive, and knowing when your customers are going to start leaving and why gives businesses the chance to evolve before it’s too late. The problem is that marketing agencies still want the excitement of the early adopter, as the negative message of the first dropper isn’t easy to swallow. We feel first droppers are more valuable barometers of opinion than early adopters, but whether companies will want to listen to them is another matter.”

60 THINK SPEED

Though our world is changing, the spaces in which we teach are stuck in a time warp. According to some forward-thinking experts, only by embracing new technology and ideas can twenty-first-century schooling stay up to speed with the kids. Words by

Andrea Kurland |

illustrations by

Oliver Jeffers

or nearly two centuries, schools have been tasked with turning underage citizens into a singular workforce capable of tackling, and moulding, tomorrow’s world. But here’s the thing: if the world we live in looks nothing like it did three decades ago, and even less like it will three decades hence, is it right that the classroom of today would be instantly recognisable to your mother, your mother’s mother, or your constantly networking, mobile phone-obsessed daughter? It’s hardly revolutionary to say we’re living through revolutionary times. How we work, communicate, live and learn has been transformed by the information age spawned by the internet. But while we intuitively weave new tools into our

everyday lives – blogging, tweeting, texting and using Google as if by instinct – inside school walls, it’s like they don’t exist. Thankfully, kids are a resourceful bunch. When it comes to knowledge that matters in the real world, they know that most answers are simply a collaborative click away, existing as they do in the open, participatory spaces that we all inhabit online. But isn’t it about time our classrooms caught up and started moving at web speed? Faced with a complex future, some educational thinkers aren’t afraid to accept that in order to move forward we need to dissect the old system and erect a new vision in its place. These key lessons can help pave the way.

Professor Cathy Davidson knows how to handle change. Speaking from her office at Duke University, where her classes include ‘This Is Your Brain on the Internet’, she’s blasting through the information ages that have transformed our world – from the invention of writing in ancient Mesopotamia, to Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web. “Almost everything we know about school was designed for the late eighteenth century, when the invention of steam-powered presses made books available to common people,” she explains. “Partly, it was about social control; how you take this massive group of people that are becoming literate and educate them for the industrial workplace. [Now] here we are, in this fourth information age where everybody can broadcast themselves, and we’re still working with a top-down, hierarchical system.” In her book, Now You See It, Davidson explores how our brains have adapted to the digital age, despite our long-standing anxiety over speed and information. ‘Early critics of the car, for example, simply refused to believe they could be safe because, after all, human attention and reflexes were not created to handle so much information flying past the windshield,’ she writes. Yet our brain is not static – it adjusts and adapts and ensures we keep up. So concerns that seem rational today often appear ludicrous tomorrow. “People say crazy stuff about how the internet is ruining attention and young people’s memory,” says Davidson. “But only five percent of the brain’s energy is used when we switch from one task to another, whereas when you focus in a specific way, which is what the traditional education model thinks attention should be, you’re actually excluding everything else.” This disconnect between the mediocre brain we think we have, and the astonishingly adaptable one embedded in our skull, has kept our education system tethered to an outdated archetype. 62 THINK SPEED

“Every child should be learning code. They should learn how to work collaboratively, and manage a project. All of those intense skills are similar to the world of learning kids experience online.”

In her book, Davidson calls it the ‘assembly line’ model that both ‘offers uniformity and suffers from it’. Its cornerstones are standardised grading and curricula that stifle creativity. ‘Everything about school and work in the twentieth century was designed to create and reinforce separate subjects, separate cultures, separate grades, separate functions, separate spaces for personal life, work, private life, public life, and all the other divisions,’ writes Davidson. ‘Then the internet came along.’ As she explains today: “We’ve spent the last 100 years teaching ourselves how to have a kind of individual, task-oriented, specialised attention. Now we’re living in a world whose wonders are based on collaborative, open, contributive, iterative, group interactive, contradictory, conscious, constantly evolving thinking.” It’s a world that requires new approaches – ones that get away from monolithic teaching practices and embrace a studentcentric philosophy. And it’s already happening. Khan Academy, an online ‘school’ hosted by YouTube that combines 2,500-plus tutorial videos with exercises and real-time data on student performance, has been working with Los Altos School District to embed their resources into the school day. Far from dehumanising learning, the idea is to ‘flip the classroom’. With teachers assigning videos as homework, and working on problems with smaller groups during class, students are able to progress at their own pace. So, is it a case of adapt or die? “I actually don’t think you need to put one penny of tech into the classroom in order to do a far better job of teaching kids how to think for this era,” says Davidson. “Every child should be learning code, even if it’s just to know how the system works. They should learn how to work collaboratively, how to work in groups and manage a project. All of those intense skills are similar to the world of learning kids experience online.”

Whenever Professor Sugata Mitra unveils his latest findings, traditional educationalists start quaking in their boots. For proponents of repeat-after-me learning, the words Minimally Invasive Education (MIE) are not welcome. Revolutions seldom are. In 1999, Mitra set up an experiment that would subvert the principle of hierarchical expertise underpinning education – that for one person to learn, another must teach. While working for global education company NIIT, he installed a computer in a wall in Kalkaji, New Delhi. He discovered that, when left unsupervised, children from the surrounding slums could learn to use it by themselves. “It isn’t unbelievable now,” says Mitra. “But we have to throw our minds back to 1999; people used to think that computers needed to be taught to children. I thought that might not be the case.” Having proven his hypothesis, Mitra rolled out more ‘Hole in the Wall’ experiments across India, Cambodia and Africa. Each one delivered the same surprise. “We had stumbled on some kind of universal learning mechanism. Naturally, a second question arose: if children can teach themselves to use a computer, what else can they teach themselves? And that led to a whole set of experiments, which is currently saying, quite unbelievably, that groups of children given an internetconnected computer can teach themselves almost anything.” Things hit a crescendo when Mitra set a group of Tamil-speaking village children the ‘impossible’ task of learning the biotechnology of DNA replication – from English material, without a teacher. “In three months they were up to speed with my control group at a posh school in New Delhi,” says Mitra. “My next question is: can children learn to read by themselves? It’s a short little question, but one that will turn education on its head if the answer is yes. If a child can teach himself to read and then he’s exposed to the internet, does he need anything else?” After 12 years of experiments, Mitra has turned the theories underpinning MIE into physical spaces – pods, known as SOLEs (Self-Organised Learning Environments), in which groups of children can search the internet unsupervised. “The absence of a 63

64 THINK SPEED

teacher can be a pedagogical tool,” explains Mitra. “Before you start teaching anything, you give the learners a chance to see if they can do it by themselves. If they can, you move on. It’s as simple as that.” Likewise, in Davidson’s classes, the teacher is no longer the only expert in the room. “I’m using the principles of open web development,” she explains. “Each week, two students are in charge of the class; they read what’s on the syllabus and then decide whether they’re going to teach that or choose something different. Everybody is guaranteed an ‘A’ if 10 assignments are judged satisfactory by their peers. It’s a constant process of learning how to grow from one another’s feedback, very much in the way that you learn from online social networking. You don’t know who the conduit of information is, but you learn to trust people because they’re good at passing on information. That’s turning the education system inside out. That, to me, is the world we live in now.”

“The phones students have in their pockets are often more powerful than the computers in school,” says Geoff Stead, Head of Innovation at education consultancy Tribal. “Before banning them, just think: in any future job, would you expect to be able to contact people wherever they are? That’s the world we’re preparing our kids for, so it makes no sense to pretend that phones don’t exist. Our mantra is: don’t use phones as a channel to push content; use them as a tool to engage and encourage learners to do things.” Stead knows that mobile tech is enabling social change because he’s seen it firsthand. Through M-Ubuntu – an initiative that’s using inexpensive mobile phones to introduce 600 South African students to project-based learning – and an app-based literacy programme targeting McDonald’s employees, he’s helping disengaged learners to become re-engaged.

But it’s not just about empowering learners – empowering teachers through technology is the new mantra. The Google Faculty Institute (GFI) is just one initiative targeting grassroots educators to get the revolution off the ground. “The aim is to affect deeper pedagogical change by collaborating with pre-service teachers and faculty members from the education departments of 19 California State Universities,” explains Maggie Johnson, Google’s Director of

“The phones students have in their pockets are often more powerful than the computers in school. It makes no sense to pretend they don’t exist. Our mantra is: use phones to encourage learners to do things.”

Education and University Relations. “The hope is that we can build a new breed of teachers who move into the system with a completely different way of thinking about technology.” This summer, GFI gathered to discuss how technology could be used to transform the classroom from lecture hall to conversation space. But that was just the start. Ten grants were awarded to projects worked on by a team of several Fellows, each designed to reach fruition in six to

nine months. “One project I really like is a four-week curriculum to teach pre-service teachers how to program on an Android device using App Inventor – a tool that allows non-technical people to build mobile applications,” says Johnson. “One of my favourite things is that it’s scalable – it can be dropped into any educational technology class anywhere. Not only does it take the mystery out of technology, it also gives these new teachers a chance to get their students engaged.” Finding ways to engage students has always been education’s holy grail, and for Ewan McIntosh it’s as critical as ever. Through NoTosh, the consultancy he founded to “cut the crap from creativity gurus”, he helps teachers adopt the principles of ‘design thinking’ that come naturally to tech start-ups. By engaging students as problem-finders, not problemsolvers, says McIntosh, we can catalyse a wave of social change. “Teachers are beginning to realise that the old way, as well as not producing great examination results, is producing youngsters who simply don’t enjoy school,” he says. “A disengaged learner is more likely to become a disengaged citizen, and that’s far more costly than investing now in thinking about how we grab students’ attention. Nothing engages a person more than a project they came up with.” ehind school gates and university walls, forward-thinking educators are turning insights like these into learning spaces that dovetail with the way we live and communicate in the twenty-first century. What the future looks like is still anyone’s guess. But as long as education keeps accelerating towards it, the generation that gets to see it will have the skills to flourish. “The final catalyst will be when teachers have students – 17- or 18-year-olds – who don’t know a ‘before’,” concludes Davidson. “Young people who say, ‘I don’t care what came before; this is the world I live in, this is the world you live in, so how can we make it work for us?’ Once you get past the ‘before’ and ‘after’, you hold the world accountable in a different way, and you hold institutions accountable in a different way. I think that’s when change happens exponentially.” 65

66 THINK SPEED

Not So Fast ccepted wisdom has it that internet time moves quickly; that we are living through change at an unparalleled pace; that our modern minutes are but 10 or 20 seconds long. But what if our progress is not as speedy as it seems? What if we are only at the bare beginning of the disruption now underway? Consider Gutenberg time. The printed book did not begin to take on its own

form until 50 years after its invention. At first, printers mimicked scribes, with fonts designed to look like handwriting, while printing itself was promoted as automated writing. “They appear not to have perceived the printed book as a fundamentally different form,” writes Leah Marcus in her essay Cyberspace Renaissance, “but rather as a manuscript book that could be produced with greater speed and convenience.” They simply didn’t see the possibilities. Nor do today’s media companies – not fully, not yet. Look at how they’re using the web and new platforms such as the tablet. They’re still attempting to replicate legacy forms, content, business models, industrial structures and control: old wine in new casks. Newspapers, magazines and books all remain recognisable as such online. Just as the form of the book didn’t evolve quickly, neither did society around it. Elizabeth Eisenstein, author of the definitive work on Gutenberg’s impact, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change,

writes, “One must wait a full century after Gutenberg before the outlines of new world pictures begin to emerge into view.” John Naughton, a columnist for the Observer, asks us to imagine we are pollsters in 1472, 17 years after the first printed Bibles (we are only about that far away from the introduction of the commercial web ourselves). On a bridge in Mainz, we ask citizens how likely they think it will be that Gutenberg’s invention could: a. Undermine the authority of the Catholic Church b. Power the Reformation c. Enable the rise of modern science d. Create entirely new social classes and professions e. Change our conceptions of ‘childhood’ as a protected early period in a person’s life “Printing did indeed have all these effects,” Naughton states, “but there was no way that anyone in 1472 in Mainz (or

It feels like the internet has made us faster than ever, but are we in fact lagging behind the opportunities presented by technology? Words by

Jeff Jarvis |

illustrations by

Shout

anywhere else for that matter) could have known how profound its impact would be.” The internet, I believe, could prove to be every bit as disruptive as the printing press, reshaping not just media – for the internet is much more than a medium – but almost every industry and social institution. Of course, there’s no way to know that for sure. Dan Gardner’s book Future Babble argues that expert predictions are uniformly worthless. But then, the very idea of an expert on the future is absurd. Still, we must try to imagine the edges of possibility so we can make better strategic decisions in business, technology, policy and education. If we assume that the current disruption has already occurred at broadband speed – and so we must be nearly through it – then we will plan based on what we see around us now. But if instead we assume that ‘we ain’t seen nothin’ yet’, then we will seek out greater disruption and unforeseen opportunities. We will protect flexibility, invention and imagination so we may pivot as we see the future’s true shape emerge. Indeed, we may want to hasten change. In a 1998 Rand Corporation paper, The Information Age and the Printing Press: Looking Backward to See Ahead, James Dewar argues that our information age will be marked by unintended consequences, so the sooner we recognise, embrace and adapt to them, the better. The wise course then is not to try to forestall change (to slow or stop it through regulation), but to accelerate it through openness and investment. So imagine that change. Start with the idea that technology leads to efficiency over growth in numerous industries. See retail: drive down a commercial highway in America and you will pass countless empty big-store boxes that don’t seem like they’ll ever be filled. Chain retail – invented only a century ago by The Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company – appears to be losing to the efficiency of internet sales and consolidated distribution. Many companies are unable to withstand the pricing transparency the net affords or bear the cost of redundant staff, real estate and inventory. The entire supply chain is upended by disruptors from Amazon to Kickstarter.

68 THINK SPEED

In the delivery industry, postal services in many countries are facing devastating shrinkage as email and social communication make extinct the very notion of a letter; as transactions become too inefficient and expensive to conduct on paper, as marketing finally shifts from mass mailing to targeted relevance. Yet communication flourishes.

“The wise course is not to try to forestall change (to slow or stop it through regulation), but to accelerate it through openness and investment.”

Newspapers and magazines are struggling to adjust to a new media economy built on abundance rather than control of scarce time or space. Now news is beginning to mimic the end-to-end architecture of the net as witnesses share what they see with the world. Journalists must ask how they

can continue to add value to an information flow that no longer relies solely on them. Health, design, marketing, finance, manufacturing, insurance, energy… Every one of these sectors is just beginning to witness the upheaval the net brings. Government is already being disrupted, of course. Wikileaks demonstrates the folly of secrecy. The Arab Spring is unseating dictators. Icelanders are rebuilding their economically wrecked society by rewriting their constitution via Facebook comments. But I wonder whether something even bigger is afoot: will we rethink even our notion of nations and thus of societies? Does the net enable us to make new societies that cut across boundaries? I wonder whether that is a lesson of the hashtag revolt, #occupywallstreet; that institutions – in which we have less and less trust – are replaced by networks; that society, too, begins to mimic the architecture of the net. Perhaps I’m going too far. But then again, perhaps I’m not going far enough. A group of academics at the University of Southern Denmark argues that we are emerging from the other side of what they call ‘the Gutenberg parenthesis’. Before Gutenberg, knowledge was passed mouthto-mouth, scribe-to-scribe, changing along the way with little sense of authorship. Inside the parenthesis, with the press, knowledge became linear, permanent, more a product than a process, with clear ownership. More than five centuries later, they say we are emerging from the other side of the parenthesis. Now knowledge is again passed along, remixed as it goes, with less sense of ownership: it’s process over product. In his upcoming book Too Big to Know, David Weinberger sketches a vision of knowledge that is too big for libraries, institutions, or our heads. “Knowledge is now the property of the network,” he writes. “The smartest person in the room is the room itself.” This change in our mental map of information affects our cognition of our world, the Danish academics argue. So more is changing than merely industries and institutions. Our social norms and societies are up for grabs. How we understand the world around us is evolving, and change that profound doesn’t happen quickly

70 THINK SPEED

Guest columnist Paul Gunning, CEO of Tribal DDB Worldwide, extols the virtues of marketing at speed. Welcome to the real-time revolution. Words by

Paul Gunning |

eal-time marketing is set to dominate almost every facet of our industry. Consumers are not only moving quickly across platforms (between MySpace, Facebook and Google+), but on to new devices with startling speed (think one million iPhone 4Ss sold in a single day). It’s now imperative to find methods to connect with consumers in realtime, and that means we need to invent ways of doing our jobs faster than ever. It’s obvious today that our goals of yesteryear were somewhat linear: utilising research; coming up with insights on behaviour that we could leverage with a solid strategy; showcasing the concept with award-winning creative; and parsing the results a quarter or two after the campaign ended. How things have changed. While we’re still probing research and drawing findings from focus groups, we are simultaneously monitoring consumer sentiment and performance in real time. Using technologically advanced tools such as Radian6 and Sysomos, we’re witnessing the brand conversation as it happens, and

ILLUSTRATION by

Adrian Johnson

reacting to our consumers by crafting advertising around those insights. That advertising is being conceived and crafted faster than ever. And while technology is a key enabler, underpinning the shift in pace is also a shift in culture. We are impelled to move faster because we know we have to. What used to take weeks is now delivered in days, if not hours. The danger then is that speed might cause us to stumble – but we must ensure against mistakes when it comes to our clients’ brand value. We’re now developing the confidence required to produce high-calibre work in a shorter period of time. You must trust yourself and your team to deliver. And it’s not just about producing the work: the media environment in which it may run is also dominated by real-time information. Take the trading desks: the notion that we can target with amazing accuracy, auction the price in the blink of an eye, and flight the creative to match needs is one of the most intriguing recent advances in the advertising industry. If you’re not practicing in this environment yet, or at least considering how the agency functions must change when these platforms reach the required scale, I’m not

sure you’ll be competitive. Keep in mind, while the internet inventory is the first in, all media – including TV – will follow. Next we must consider the 24/7 consumer mindset. DVRs, apps and gaming consoles are all important in this real-time atmosphere. But the smartphone, and, more specifically, the smartphone in a retail environment (with its message flexibility and the allure of geo-location), is what will make the world change at a scale I’m intrigued by. Knowing a customer is nearby, and having an opportunity to beam into their car or pocket with a qualified message, is irresistible to advertisers. Once in store, product comparisons, how-to guides and a multitude of interactive experiences come to life, all revealing what consumers are actually doing and how advertisers can cater their messaging to them contextually. Real-time information is omnipresent in every section of the marketing funnel, in every function of the advertising agency, and in the consumer’s media usage patterns. What are you doing to harness these trends? How are you recasting your role? Is it an opportunity or will it just frustrate your enterprise? Think about it – but not too long. You only have seconds to spare

LONG FLIGHT AHEAD Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s time to cross the Bridges â&#x20AC;&#x201C; a fiendish test of logic. Each circle containing a number represents an island. The object is to connect each island with vertical or horizontal bridges so that the number of bridges equals the number inside the island. There can be up to two bridges between two islands, but bridges cannot cross islands or other bridges. There is a continuous path connecting all the islands. Can you find it?

72 THINK SPEED

1/2500