Dominiek.com

Thanks to Google Maps, I can make some late-night pancakes! (That’s panneNkoeken for you Dutchies) After I felt the sudden urge to make them, I went to the nearest convenience store near my girlfriend’s house. This convenience-store franchise called ‘Sunkus’ (pronounced as Sunkss) is one of many Japanese to-go grocery franchises. The Sunkus, marked on the left, didn’t have any more eggs (tamago), so I only bought milk (gyuunyuu). After leaving the Sunkus I was about to walk to the convenience store at the station, called Lawson (marked in blue, top left). Then suddenly I remembered the Google Maps image of the neighbourhood showing a new, unknown convenience store. After walking to the east for a few seconds, I began seeing the 7-eleven sign (marked right). Here, I could buy eggs after all.

Now, why am I taking so much effort to illustrate what just happened? I want to show you two things.

A: In the Tokyo Metropolitan Area there is a convenience store in at least every 500 metres. Often these convenience stores are franchised, laying the eggs for a huge distribution network. The most common franchises are: Lawson, 7-Eleven, AM-PM, Family Mart, SunKus and Newdays.

B: Interestingly, Google Maps has visualized these convenience stores. It really makes me wonder why they either gathered the information or bought it. Is it just to provide information to the Google Maps users? Is it a hint of their Gmaps advertising service? Do the convenience stores pay to put their franchises mapped?

What happens when you take A and B and try to mash them together in the context of convenience?

I’ve just finished this book: The Search. This book by John Battelle is about the search industry. All of us in the western cyberspace know the great success of Google. According to Battelle (not to confuse with the Battelle organization) the success of Google is a result of some big changes in the Information Age. The Web is growing more and more towards a collective organism, creating petabytes of data. Battelle talks about therecent ‘Force of the Many’, which I also observed in my paper on Web 2.0, creating an emphasis on the communication and data/content of web applications. Google’s main business is redirecting users (demand) to the right information (supply), making advertising on Google one of the most effective ones.

All this information creates a lot of search problems, which have been solved for only 5% now. This means that there are still a lot of technology and business oppurtunities out there. One of the oppurtunities on the web is gathering data and combining it with other data. A nice example of this can be found in the recent ‘Mashup’ phenomenon. Mashups are about combining data (sometimes through scraping/crawling it) and creating a new service with it.

Battelle’s book handles search from both a micro and a macro perspective, respectively these are Google as a company and one of these cool quotes:

All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected. But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships. A timeless interval was spent in doing that. And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy. -‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov

Some of Battelle’s statements can be quite speculative and even philosophical, but they’re interesting to say the least.

I’ve found some interesting similarities with another book I’m reading ‘The 8th Habit’ by Stephen Covey. This self-help book appears totally unrelated, untill you read chapter 2, ‘The Problem’. Covey states that there are five ages in the human cultural evolution:

In each transition to the next age it is very important to adapt to new ways of thinking. For example, farmers that adapted Industrial Age thinking survived and became much more productive. In our current Knowledge/Information Age we miss out on a lot of productivity because of Industrial Age thinking (thing mind-set). A top software developer can be 1000 to 10000 times more productive then average software developers.

As you can see in the above illustration, Covey suggests the 5th age to be the ‘Wisdom Age’. Covey doesn’t give any further information about it other then: ‘and finally, an emerging Age of Wisdom’. I’m really puzzled about this ‘Age of Wisdom’ and it’s relation to a web that indeed already holds all knowledge. Is the ‘Age of Wisdom’ the means to access this knowledge, the ability to learn learning?