NYTimes writes:

Eric von Hippel, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, argues that a huge swath of innovation can be traced to elite consumers whom he calls lead users. These imaginative and technically adept consumers spot a need and invent a solution, often changing whole industries, from sports to software.

"Needs emerge, and users scrounge around and find something," Mr. Von Hippel said, "or tools and technologies emerge, and people figure out how to use them."

The evolution of short-text messaging on cellphones is an example of consumers putting technology to an unforeseen use.

So how are consumers shaping technology markets? In all sorts of ways, of course, but two markets that seem particularly intriguing are cellphones and the emerging field of social-network software.

Markets, it is said, are a conversation - producers, consumers and others have a voice. And consumers are using technology to change the conversation.

Signs of the shift abound. An example is the rise of Weblogs, or blogs, which are essentially online bulletin boards for discussion and polemics on any subject the blog owner deems worthwhile. Political blogs are the best known, but other blogs focus on industries and products. And influential blogs can shape market perceptions.

WSJ writes about how more power-hungry features are coming on to the cellphones, and the need for more powerful batteries:

Most battery makers put the average annual percentage gains in energy density -- the amount of power crammed into a battery -- at below 10%. Optimists believe breakthroughs could result in a total of 40% to 50% gains over time. Others caution that lithium-ion technology is approaching its physical limits.

Meanwhile, new generations of multimedia phones are consuming increasingly more power than standard cellphones, especially when bright screens and heavy data transmission are involved.

Makers of computer hard drives and microchips faced similar problems and so far have managed to keep extending the apparent limits of the technology. But over the next decade or so that will likely end, and researchers will need to come up with some new approaches to data storage and processing.

There is some hope that methanol-filled fuel cells, which can provide five to 10 times as much energy as the average rechargeable battery, will help solve the power crunch. But none of the manufacturers expects them on the mass market for a few years, and even then there are big questions about their price, size and safety.

So, technology companies are doing what they often do best, squeezing incremental mileage out of old technologies. This is the unglamorous bread-and-butter side of places like Silicon Valley. With multimedia cellphones, it means manufacturers are pushing for more energy-efficient chips. It means fine-tuning software to minimize unneeded power consumption. It means adjusting display brightness and colors on the fly, because dazzling, power-consuming images aren't needed to display the number you're dialing, for example.

Researchers are also looking beyond the handset to innovations such as "smart" antennas that use tricks to reduce the power that phones consume in sending voice and data signals.

ACM Queue has an interview with Microsoft's Peter Ford:

In addition to the PC IM systems and suppliers, you have the wireless carriers and their suppliers in the overall ecosystem for communications and IM... I think the reason why the systems that we have for IM today are different from what you currently see in wireless systems and proposals is that the endpoint, or the power of the endpoint—the PC that people are sitting in front of—is so high and the functionality you get out of PC-based IM systems today includes new capabilities such as presence awareness across the network with your peers...This is different from what you get in the mobile-phone space today, where the working concept is "always on," and you're always reachable. In the milieu of PC-based IM today you actually have a fairly rich presence system where you can indicate "I'm out to lunch," or "I'm away for 15 minutes, I'll be right back." So I think that one major difference is that you have much richer notification to your peers, your buddies, your contacts.

Over time users will demand [inter-connectivity], so you can imagine it working out in different ways. One way would be that a new standard emerges and everyone just moves to it. Or it could be, one of the existing standards—XMPP/Jabber versus SIP—basically becomes the winner. There may be interim solutions: I'd be shocked if vendors did not build, just as they did with e-mail gateways, ways to interoperate between those two communities.

The IM world is probably in a little bit better shape than the e-mail world. The reason I say that is, in most of the IM systems you actually have some notion of who the user is, who's logged in, unlike e-mail systems, which were really designed for broad open communication and didn't worry too much about user authentication up front. The e-mail world is busily grappling with that as a result of spam. But once you have authentication in the system, it usually is easier to get to some kind of private communication channel or end-to-end package, based on that authentication.

I actually think things like whitelisting, which is ubiquitous in IM, will actually become far more common in the e-mail world.

Esther Dyson has some words of caution about this emerging field:

There's a real danger that the whole field and its potential for supporting human connections could be irretrievably tarnished by privacy issues -- either as a result of policies that leave people feeling exposed by the aggregation of data, or by security breakdowns, resulting in some kind of informational oil spill.

For now, no one online social network has enough heft to matter. But these issues will inevitably arise when the services approach critical mass. Consider the undercurrents of discomfort already swirling around Google because it is perceived to control the content we see. Imagine a service that controls information about people, even if it only runs algorithms.

These systems are collecting personal data with relatively simple who-knows-whom links -- but even that is not so simple: Who is not acknowledged by whom? Who is the best networker? Who refers turkeys? Who has long-term relationships, and who can't keep his friends? Moreover, the issue is not just explicit entries in a contact database. The data includes frequency of contact, who replies to whom and how promptly, who is bcc'ed and so on.

Beyond that, there are services that assemble other types of information, such as its members' uploaded files and published articles, to create what vendor Spoke Software blandly calls "dossiers." The data in the dossiers isn't sold, but it is used to derive information about connections, which is sold.

At the end of the day we will have private aggregations of data more rich and interconnected and personal than any government ever dreamed of ... and of course this data will be readily available, just as data from credit card companies, merchants and airlines is today.

Finally, I have to ask what these tools do to the old, low-tech concept of friendship. In some way, with their numbers and lists and classifications, these services can subtly make a social network into a trophy collection. Technology has made it easier than ever to count your friends -- but that doesn't mean you should.

Gary Lawrence Murphy writes about the problem of aggregators accessing RSS feeds and the resultant increase in network traffic that it causes for the feed provider:

If your feed works, if you are successful in attracting subscriptions on a global scale, if you do it right, you are doomed.

As friends tell friends, as links lead to visits which lead to subscribers, the snowball rolls on towards that day like last Friday. RSS may have the potential to be a saver on bandwidth, but when you are getting hit once an hour or more by thousands of sites, 24,000 extra hits ads up, and it's all the worse when so many are using broken clients that ignore the caching rules.

Tom Hoffman writes:

Let's take half a step back and look at the architectural design of the weblogging apps that seem to have the most traction these days (leaving aside hosted services like Blogger). In generating a frequently-updated page, like a blog, there are two primary strategies, which of course are often mixed and cached in various ways.

Create a database and a system of templates for HTML and RSS that plugs in current values "on the fly" as the pages are requested. Zope works this way. Slash does. I think Frontier/Manila does, but I really don't know; and I bet Drupal does, based on the nature of PHP, but that is a guess. I'll open comments so you can chime in if you know.

Create an application that takes user input, creates or re-creates the appropriate HTML and RSS docuements and places them on a web server to be served up by a standard web browser. Radio and Movable Type both work this way (although few people run their own Radio Community Server). Blosxom can swing either way, but feels like it because of its overall lightweight architecture and extensive use of the filesystem instead of a database.

I think one of the subtler messages we can pick up from this "revolution" is that systems that de-emphasize complexity on the server side are driving a lot of the growth we're seeing.

As I interacted further with Atanu, I began to see the commonalities in the SME and rural spaces. Both are large, invisible markets (opportunities), both are victims of co-ordination failures, both can leverage technology for their betterment but need much more than just ICT (information and communication technologies), and in both cases, entrepreneurial ventures can start in India and then be expanded to other similar emerging markets.

As I thought further, I started trying to build a mental model which could address both of these problems. Therein lay an interesting process of thinking on how to actually solve a problem. The key lies in looking at the totality of the problem – getting to the root. What are the core causes of the problem? Here, one needs to separate the effects from the causes. Then, start thinking about the solutions that need to be implemented to address the causes. Finally, put in place a roadmap to implement the solutions. It is not as easy as it sounds! Thinking broadly and deeply is perhaps one of the hardest things to do – we tend to want to start doing something quickly, rather than spend time contemplating on what to do. But unless we have thought enough and come up with solutions to address the core cause, we are not going to get anywhere.

This is where my weblog has come in useful. Ever since I started the weblog in May 2002, it has become a platform for me to think and air my views on different topics. I started the blog for a selfish reason – to force me to make reading a daily part of my life. This is one mistake I had done in the years that I was managing IndiaWorld – my reading had become narrower and narrower as time progressed. I did not want that to happen again. So, I decided that if I had to write and link to interesting articles every day, it would also put the discipline of reading. And that is exactly what has happened.

Along the way, something else happened. People started reading my weblog, and writing back. This started a feedback process for the ideas. More importantly, it become a way to meet up and share ideas with people. Today, the blog posts, including the Tech Talks, have become the single most important platform for both meeting new people and generating fresh ideas, both of which help refine the models that are being created to address the two problems that I have discussed.

There has been another theme I have touched upon often in my writings – that of entrepreneurship. It is entrepreneurs who make dreams come true, as they imagine worlds beyond the resources that are available to them. They are willing to climb over slippery rocks in their quest of creating a new future, one that is yet unknown to others, but which is clearly visible to them. Enterprise is what built America, and enterprise has the potential to rebuild a new India. The SME and rural markets present opportunities for entrepreneurs to come up with solutions.

Tomorrow: Open-Source Ideas