Grant Cerny

Preamble

About 15 years ago I spent a couple years writing a thesis about the emergence of multimedia representation from the 18th to the 20th centuries as a force of cultural change.   Put simply – the fact that when creators mixed imagery with language, meaning became more accessible to the educated and (importantly) the illiterate, and opened new avenues of thought to create more opportunity – or in many cases, to fight oppression.   I didn’t know it would be that relevant to whatever I did next as I left academia, but fate led me to creating the next generation of connected products on the web, and as I have recently learned, representational theory and case studies from former centuries demonstrating the effect of representational technique on society, is more relevant to what we are experiencing today, than I ever would have expected.  Much like the “Human Condition” – it doesn’t change, it just repeats and adapts itself to present conditions…

At this point I’m hung up on two things that would seem dichotomous:  the future, and the immediate now.

The “immediate now” is more than the concept of moments fleeting every moment.  At this point, the concept of “NOW” has been popularized by connected devices to mean access to immediate information, as it happens.   This access is not ubiquitous, but the principle is demonstrated, and more and more, culture is adapting to wanting “nowness” in many contexts.

On the other side of the dichotomy I am focused on the future because I want to predict how these dynamics will trend into future opportunity.  I’d like to create a business in providing the vehicles wherein businesses flourish in the future economies of data exchange, spanning many dimensions of relevance, whether they be semantic, geospatial, social, temporal, or some other dimension I haven’t thought of yet.

The Global Brain

At this point, the people of Earth are sufficiently connected and communicating in real-time that the Earth begins to resemble a global brain, creating new inferences by the pulses of information we pass to each other, actively and passively, and the results that ensue in real life.   Each person a neuron, each connection, a synapse.

We can see that in the past centuries certain tools and technologies have activated communication patterns, let’s call them “thought patterns”, when they enabled connections or synapses between motivated peoples, communities. concepts or prospects.  This has increased in velocity, at orders of magnitude, from the 18th century to the 19th, and from the 19th, to the 20th.  This adaptation/corruption of Moore’s law, or the approximation toward vertical asymptote, looks probable also in this case, for the 21st.  At some point on reaching vertical, profound change may happen (this is where I go scifi, the rest is all logical).

What have we been doing to actuate this increased pace of development & capability?  Regardless of the century, we have been using available toolsets to iterate on the current extensible connections, which can further grow, branch, and reconnect.  As human brains grow and develop, so do cultures eventually follow at one order greater, and where cultures and empirical forces prevail, organisms also adapt.  At various degrees of magnification, the rebranching and growth of possibility happens in child development, in community growth, in cultural development, and it happens ultimately in the evolution of species.

If you haven’t seen this video, it illustrates the concept, somewhat spiritual, of our place in a spatial cosmos, and infinitely extensible, even without reference to the time dimension necessarily.  It’s 70s Nova stuff, never gets old, just like The Miracle of Life, which moved me in the Expecting Parents class 7 years ago.

Powers of Ten http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2cmlhfdxuY

Let’s try to get practical, if possible.

So, we are now at a place where the availability of connected data makes a global brain, or a semantic web, an actual and tangible prospect.  However, many, in fact I would guess most, areas of global consciousness (datasets) are willfully disconnected – they are “dark”.  Those dark areas are not subconscious, they are just unconnected, unharnessed regions.   Why are they dark?  In most cases, I think, because owners of connectable data are not ready to connect them.  They fear the loss of advantage by making their advantagous data available for connection.  These are dark, but high-potential areas of the global brain.

My thesis is that creating an environment wherein owners of tight-held data become encouraged to open up their data with some, perhaps flexible, assurance of reciprocity, will yield a greater benefit to all via a larger potential in the global brain.

My suggestion to accomplish such willingness to open up datasets, is to create an open specification and platform for data exchange, which rationalizes all contributing datasets where possible, and allows undefined data elements to be added and where possible subsequently rationalized as well, against the specification.  It would then create a controlled marketplace for exchange of proprietary data, which would be metered not on a one-to-one basis, but on a one-to-many, creating a mutually-beneficial collective.

So, I have a big announcement in Grant Cerny land.

In the beginning of any given year there are all of these prophets, false- and otherwise, who rally to make predictions for the upcoming year.  What they’re all looking for is the “next big thing.”

I had a few ideas about what the next big thing for 2010 would be, which informed my judgment as I found myself personally preoccupied with my own next big thing since December 2009.   Fact is, last December I made the very difficult decision to part from the AOL mothership, wherein I’ve grown, and built, and helped build, and where I loved and was loved by many, for the past 5 1/2 years.  My decision is a personal one; I am as bullish for AOL as ever, and even today spent an hour on AOL Music’s CD Listening Party devouring the new RJD2 album… AOL’s leadership and strategy is strong, and as a leaner, now-public company, I believe AOL will thrive.  But I knew that for me, even so, there was a “next thing” banging around in my head, and I took some time to think about what was a “next big thing.”

Many options suggested themselves to me, including major media, startups, consulting, and entrepreneurship.  I put my toe into a few of these options in the past month.

Where I landed, though, was a somewhat familiar place — KickApps!  I’ve been working with Mike Sommers and Alex Blum over the past few years to try to find the right cocktail of KickApps with AOL, and so already had a great understanding of the platform and the people.  After some quick thought, it made a whole lot of sense.  Yes, starting in February I’ll be joining up with the KickApps team to push the next phase in the social media revolution.  I couldn’t be more excited.

KickApps is positioned with the platform and the capabilities to superserve all web publishers including enterprise to entry-level brand marketers, small business owners, individuals and communities of all varieties, with all of the core publishing, social, and media capabilities needed, with no need for an IT staff to stand it up.   In addition they have already fostered a huge developer community – critical to expanding reach and innovation.  And there is much more potential as well in connecting inter-community data with connected, non-KickApps datasets.   KickApps has done a hell of a lot in the past 3 years or so but I’m looking forward to doing a lot more.

For those who know the focus I put into working on data availability and community engagement (AIM integrations in Streampad with Dan Kantor, the Music Usage Database, message boards & comments social syndication, 3rd party delegated authentication, Love.com) and the real-time web (Love.com, Relegence-powered newstreams, etc.) over the past year and change, know that for me, the “Next Big Thing” on the Web really is enabling the global brain of social consciousness to be more quickly and consistently connected – to increase the saturation potential in the world we all live in, and to deliver to each one of us tools enabling us to extract the most from our four dimensions of experience –  semantic relevance, social relevance, geospatial relevance, and timeliness — with maximum effectiveness in minimum time.  The NOW Generation is now, like right now, or as my South African ex-housemate Erich Maritz might have said some 12 years ago, “not just now, but now now“.

For right now, I’m confident that I know what the next big thing is – and ready to make it bigger.  It’s an irresistible opportunity to join with a very talented team, with a very effective and proven platform, and be a part of what I am sure will be a great success in 2010 and beyond.

I am now migrating west* from the Blip.tv moving party.  Mike Hudack and his team sure know how to pick an office space and throw a party.

You enter the office and it’s comfy chairs, brick walls, screen projection, make your way past a large floor of production desks (which were shielded for the party by big taut colored fabric dividers), then to the far side where there is a big space.  Music was spun by YouTube DJ, George (I didn’t get his card so don’t have his last name), playing an awesome mix of electronic and nostalgia, and everyone I talked to agreed with me that the music was right on.  I wanted to hook in my laptop and download it, it was that good.   Moving on:  then there’s a Scandinavian-style kitchen, with a beer tap, which was flowing with microbrew provided by Six Points Brewery.  Then you move further beyond the kitchen and there’s an elevated stage, with windows that look north up Lafayette.  Perfect for preparing product presentations, perfect for embarrassing karaoke, or anything else toward which a stage lends life.

What’s more, Blip is doing great business, and all the best in video were there to celebrate and network.  I met guys from Boxee and TubeMogul and a new group called Branded Evolution.  Hundreds of folks I didn’t meet.  Well done on the office move, Blip!  And thanks for the party!

* “migrating west” is a newly-coined vanity expression for commuting home on NJ transit to New Jersey.

Today we completed the migration of all of AOL / MediaGlow’s networked branded media destinations from an internal / legacy platform to the enterprise Brightcove solution (with of course some customizations). Many allnighters and countless concall minutes invested, brought to a very satisfactory head.

It was a mammoth undertaking that was primarily led by others too numerous to name – but to whom we owe extreme thanks, especially to some of the leadership which was changed inadvertently in midstream.

I have to say this is one of the most impressive executions I have seen in any company I have worked in, and – along and ranking with Live8 – tops during my nearing on 5 years at AOL.

… plenty of work to hit tomorrow of course! The backlog is strong

I’ve been through a bunch of video transitions since I started working in AOL Music & AOL Entertainment’s many different incarnations from 2004 to the present day.

We transcoded catalogs of video from NSV (Nullsoft Video) to Real (yuk!) and QuickTime (for Macs which at the time nobody had) to Windows Media Video (only slightly less yuk!) to WMV DRM’d video (yuk squared!) and finally to Flash Video (aaaaaah).

Now that we have a great video format and pretty hot quality, we are optimizing for cost in the CMS and player arena. As such, converting from internal solutions, to Brightcove’s enterprise solution. And tonight, we are starting the launch sequence for converting all of our asset management, ingestion, metadata handling, playback, and all associated dependent systems.

It’s a big and kinda scary transition, but we have had the right amount of preparation, and everyone is on point. Things will go wrong – I have no doubt. More to come.