While researching my new book ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, I had the good fortune to speak with over 50 connectivity thought leaders. I’m using my blog to periodically share some of the insight that didn’t fit into the book.

In this excerpt from my interview with Paul Sagan, president and CEO of Akamai Technologies, which provides managed services to power the performance and delivery of rich media online, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications over the Internet, we discuss the path to ubiquitous connectivity, obstacles to its growth, and how connectivity is accelerating human evolution.

Paul Sagan, President & CEO of Akamai Technologies (c) W. Marc Bernsau

How is connectivity changing over the next five to 10 years? What’s happening to the network from where you sit?

This is a consumer answer to your question, but I do believe this change will help power business things, too. We’re starting to see the Internet becoming television, replacing the giant gorilla in the home. Call it the HD Web, if you will. You will be able to get competitive quality, variety and control over your ‘IP television’ (that’s an incomplete term, but I don’t yet know what to call it) better than you get with conventional TV today. At Akamai, we are starting to deliver live TV streams of HD-type quality, using the term “HD” loosely. A majority of viewers are now selecting the higher-quality video streams over the lower-quality ones.

We handled the NCAA March Madness [U.S. college basketball playoffs] on the Web for CBS this year, as we have for some years now. This wasn’t the first year that they had cable-network-size audiences. We served hundreds of thousands of live simultaneous viewers, but for the first time, a majority of those viewers selected video streams of 1 Mbps bandwidth or greater. That’s a stunning milestone. And that’s in the U.S., where the potential audience has very low penetration of FiOS-quality broadband to the home.

You could argue that’s not ‘true’ HD, not Blu-Ray quality, but it’s more than watchable—after two beers, you can’t tell the difference, and maybe that’s always how college basketball is watched. ‘Two-beer HD,’ maybe we should call it.

What that means to me is that the Internet is now a challenge to TV. If you extend broadband growth out three, five or even 10 years, it’s still a pretty short horizon. TV gets fundamentally changed, and from there, so does gaming and all home entertainment. That is a sea change in the economy. All of home entertainment was completely analog until not that long ago! That affects all sorts of businesses.

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When researching my new book, ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, I was fortunate to interview more than 50 thought leaders in connectivity. Their input was invaluable and their ideas, advice and examples provide very rich context for the Anywhere vision. I’m sharing selected book interviews through the blog.

In this excerpt from my interview with Axel Haentjens, senior vice president Marketing, Brand and External Communications for Orange Business Services, Haentjens provides his take on how the upcoming ubiquitous connectivity revolution will change how enterprises do business, both internally and with their customers.

What do changes like pervasive connectivity and embedded IP in broader devices mean for enterprises?
I have been in the communications business for 15 years at France Telecom [FT]. In 1995, it was very clear that the desktop had to be connected. Now we’re at the point where we have laptops, BlackBerrys, PDAs, and more. So in the last two to three years, you could access documents and e-mail through a PDA from everywhere — from a train, on holiday, etc. For Orange [FT’s key brand], that translated into a huge success for our Business Everywhere tool. We have more than 1.3 million users.

But this year, we see something else. We’re now at the point of pervasive reachability, where you need to talk to people using various means that are all integrated. We ought to be able to start one way, and then move to another.

And it’s not only human connectivity.

Right. There will be five times more objects to connect than people, at the very least. There are mature applications today in tele-monitoring, fleet management and tracking goods. Orange operates mobile networks in 28 countries, including 15 countries in Europe today: 15 percent of our mobile B2B revenue is already M2M. It comes from SIM cards embedded into devices either for fleet management or remote monitoring, and it’s growing at a rate of about 20 percent per year.

Clearly tele-metering is ready. You’ll find security companies doing it, utilities also, and energy companies doing tele-measuring for gas and electricity. We see a lot of apps in vehicles, helping to manage thousands of trucks via geo-location and route optimization.

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When researching my new book, ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, I was fortunate to interview more than 50 thought leaders in connectivity. Their input was invaluable, and their ideas, advice and examples provide very rich context for the Anywhere vision.

I wish we’d had room to incorporate more of our interviews in the book — but with the infinite capacity of the Web, I’m sharing some of them here.

In this excerpt from my interview with Dr. Robert Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet, founder of 3Com and general partner of Polaris Venture Partners, we discuss the path to ubiquitous connectivity, obstacles to its growth, and how connectivity is accelerating human evolution.

Bob Metcalfe (c) Marcin Wichary

Universal, ubiquitous connectivity—yes or no?

Of course it will become universal. The only exception is the normal one.

What’s that?

Well, if you look at that famous picture of the Earth at night, you’ll see huge swaths of black—for instance, most of Africa.

That’s a pretty big exception.

Right. So it’s a question of time. Impatient people say the digital divide is a condemnation of technology—that it’s nothing short of criminal that we haven’t reached everyone yet. I say, ‘Au contraire. Don’t blame me for not getting them connectivity yet when you haven’t gotten them electricity, roads and clean water.’

You sound like you take it personally.

Sure. You can’t talk about connectivity without talking about Metcalfe’s Law, so how much more personal can it get? It’s not my fault there will be tribes that don’t get connected.

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ANYWHERE the book talks a lot about a future with many more connected devices than those we know and love today. So when I signed our book deal at the beginning of last year, I said it would be a terrible irony if we couldn’t ensure that the book would come out both in hardback and e-book versions simultaneously.

And that was the plan… but e-book publishing is still a bit new and a few technical hiccups stood in the way.

No surprise that I had to withstand a few gentle gibes during our webinar last week, when a few of you pointed out immediately that the Kindle version wasn’t on offer yet.

But as of this weekend, the Kindle version is now available from Amazon. Kudos to McGraw-Hill for pushing this through. We had a quick look at it Tuesday; while you sacrifice a few of the chapter opening graphics, it’s all there and quite readable.  How very Anywhere.

Just in time for Yankee Group’s e-reader forecast, coming out later today!  More ANYWHERE e-book developments are in the works; I’ll post more on this later.

I got a rude awakening early this morning: the ice and snowstorm that blew through Massachusetts last night knocked out our power. That meant we had no lights, no heat, and no running water (darn those electric well pumps!).

But, like in Emerging Anywhere countries, even though we didn’t have power, we did have Internet access via our mobile phones. And that strange disparity—the ability to call people and access information from the rest of the world when we didn’t have basic infrastructure services—provided personal emphasis to stories I’d recently read in the news over the weekend.

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Thanks to everyone who joined us in the webinar today, officially launching our new book ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity Is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business. For the discussion, I was joined by five terrific thought-leaders in the connectivity space:

• Glenn Lurie, President, Emerging Devices, AT&T
• Walter McCormick, President & CEO, U.S. Telecom Association
• Paul Sagan, President & CEO, Akamai Technologies
• Sriram Viswanathan, VP, Architecture Group, Intel
• Nigel Waller, Founder & CEO, Movirtu, Ltd.

A special thanks to each of them for taking the time to chat about Anywhere and illustrate their own business’ opportunities and challenges. If you missed the presentation, the replay is below–I would be delighted to hear your thoughts.

The webinar runs about an hour: audio (mp3) and slides (pdf).

As I’m heading down to New York City for a mobile technology investor event after CES, I was pleased and proud to see Scott Kirstner’s kind praise of Yankee Group’s Anywhere book printed in today’s Boston Globe. After helping out on weekends and off-hours for most of the last year on the book, ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business, it’s a treat to see that all those hours weren’t in vain. One of my favorite excerpts was:

I asked Green to highlight one of the counter-intuitive ideas from the book — aside from the notion that we’ll all be linked to the network through all kinds of new devices.

Green said that the old notion of a product being finished when it is sent to a customer is becoming obsolete. “Anywhere” products can evolve over time, thanks to software updates sent wirelessly. “Think about the Roku box,” Green said, mentioning a set-top box that can stream movies from Netflix. “That can get smarter over time, because it has a persistent connection to the Roku people. That’s a wake-up call for enterprises, which need to ask, ‘How do my products continue to evolve, and what are all the new paths I have to reach the consumer through all of these devices,’ whether it’s the Roku box or the Chumby or a connected blood pressure monitor?”

Green’s new book is a major marker that Yankee Group, founded in 1970, is now a reinvigorated player on the tech forecasting landscape.

Thanks Scott. We’re blushing (and clearly happy to see that conclusion).

However, as if to emphasize Emily’s point of nothing ever being done, I saw that the printed version of the Globe article and the online version blog entry are slightly different. The Innovations blog entry adds another couple of paragraphs to what was printed in this morning’s paper:

It’s interesting, I think, that neither Yankee founder Howard Anderson or George Colony, Green’s old boss, provided blurbs for back of the new book. Green tells me she didn’t ask either one for an endorsement, though she says Colony encouraged her to write the book. Instead, the quotes come from CEOs at Sprint, Nokia Siemens Networks, and Young & Rubicam.

Green is planning to do a book event at the Borders in Downtown Crossing later this month; the date isn’t set yet, but it should appear here once it is.

In my opinion, there’s no mystery about the choice of the promotional book blurbs: Emily gave preference to executives whose businesses are living and dying by Anywhere, instead of those forecasting it. Said another way, letting Sprint CEO Dan Hesse and Young and Rubicam North America President and CEO Tom Sebok speak about the book kept us from breathing too much of our own analytical exhaust.

And the book signing? That’s easy: it’s on January 26 at the Borders Downtown Crossing between 1 and 2 pm.

But you don’t have to take my word for this; you can hear Emily and some of the Anywhere luminaries interviewed for the book discuss this and other topics in the Anywhere book launch webinar on Thursday, January 14 at 11 am EST. Sign up here to attend; after all, you can join the conversation from pretty much Anywhere.

We interrupt your New Year’s resolution-making for an important announcement. ANYWHERE: How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business (McGraw-Hill) is officially shipping from all major booksellers.

[As a one-time resident of the great city of Philadelphia, PA, I was delighted that the first reported in-store sighting of the book was at the Barnes & Noble in Rittenhouse Square, Philadelphia. ]

Our official launch of the book is on January 14th, with a webinar where I’ll talk about the book with some of the thought leaders who contributed to the research.  Sign up to join me here.

Keep up with all our doings around the book’s official launch by checking the book’s website, where we’ll be posting book signing events, reviews, and other launch activities.  Plus, because we did so much research for the book that we weren’t able to include in the book itself, we will be augmenting the website with in-depth interviews and resources over the next few months.

If you’re a YG client, you can read this recent report I wrote based on book interviews with two creative entrepreneurs bringing Anywhere opportunities to emerging markets.

Happy 2010 to everyone. We all managed to make it through 2009. Now let’s get back out there and build the Anywhere Network.

Consumer research is great. Just when you think you could be smart enough to predict the answers you’ll get, consumers surprise you. Which is the whole point of asking, really.

Browsing the most recent results of our monthly survey of North American consumers about device connectivity, I came across two data points, each interesting enough on its own but fascinating in opposition.

Exploring connectedness in the North American home, we asked about connected devices — the ones we have and the ones we want. Of over 3,000 consumers who own one or more devices among a popular collection of consumer electronics technologies (HDTV, set-top boxes, digital cameras, e-books, PNDs and the like), we asked them if the items they own were equipped with connectivity technology. That is, could they be networked to a wireless router in the home, for instance, or connect to the net directly?

The first surprising result: while most of those owned items aren’t connected, and some are, a good quarter of the responses for each device was “I don’t know.”

It’s OK; I’ll wait while that sinks in for you.

“I don’t know” if my digital camera is connected?  If my netbook, set-top box, or HDTV is connected? A typical “don’t know” response rate for simple technology questions in a panel like this might be closer to 5%. But the lowest “don’t know” response was 17%, for e-book readers. The highest “don’t know” was a shocking 42% — for set-top boxes!

Something is seriously wrong with both the marketing and the user experience for these devices for such a large proportion of recent buyers to be unable to answer this question. I wonder if the very question created confusion for those consumers. They may have said to themselves, “Gee, is it? Maybe it ought to be — that is, if I was smart enough to buy the right one. Maybe I just didn’t notice.” You almost could picture respondents making a mental note to check their device the next chance they get.

The second interesting data came when we asked consumers with specific plans to buy one of these products in the next 6 months whether they would be looking for connectivity as a feature. Notwithstanding the uncertainty about the stuff we have already, the appetite for connectivity came through loud and clear. About 30% of consumers with purchase intent said that connectivity is at least an 8 in importance on a scale of 1 to 10. Including those who gave it a 6 or better, the responses swelled to 60% affirmative. This is consistent with the behaviors many of us have begun to exhibit around technology: we want our things to be as mobile as we are.

[The interesting question then: how many of the consumers who didn't know if their current technology is connected are among those who prize connectivity in the products they haven't yet bought? Stay tuned; that's a bit of analytical finesse we'll do and I'll share in a follow-on post.]

That’s the demand side: enthused but muddled. What about the supply side? I ‘ve railed at the consumer electronics sector for at least a year, complaining about a paucity of device innovation in the face of a looming opportunity to completely reinvent the sector with entirely new devices and experiences.

I’m not alone. I chatted the other day with Steve Tomlin, the founder of Chumby Industries, a guy who is very smart about connected devices and who helped in the preparation of our book. The company recently came out with the Chumby One under the key CE $100 price point, now back-ordered through the holidays. What’s his take on the CE sector’s response to the connectivity opportunity?

“It almost seems as if everyone is waiting for Apple to eat their lunch all over again.” Tomlin’s referring of course to the rumored Apple tablet product.  ”They’re competing with an imaginary device, and assuming they’ll lose badly. And it could be true: maybe people with Kindles will end up looking like dorks whenever that comes out.”

But what about netbooks–this year’s early success story in new connected devices? “I don’t get netbooks. They’re the same as laptops–processor, screen, memory, the same stuff. The important distinctions among consumer devices are not in the components. They are in the use cases–what you expect to do with them.”

His take on many devices is that they don’t enable the passive, sit-back use cases we frequently want. In that context, the netbook isn’t much different from a smartphone, about which he complains, “A smartphone isn’t anything for you at all until you tell it what to be. But a Chumby was designed to be a passive experience. It is not a desktop full of icons waiting for your attention to be useful. When you’re not telling a Chumby what to do, it still knows what to do. You turn it on, and it happily marches along.”

Where are the next opportunities for the CE sector? ”The kitchen. It is the staple idea of all futurama thinking, but there is a real hub opportunity there for photos, the family calendar, recipes, visual voicemail, etc.  And the home phone is clearly due for a complete overhaul anyway– it has hardly changed in the past 10 years while all this evolution has hit the rest of our devices. There are something like 10 million total fixed-line phones out there now, and no one is making money on them.”

What about the car as a platform for more consumer connectivity? “Taxis clearly are an opportunity, and Chumby is playing there. But given what’s happened in the economy and in Detroit, things have slowed down a lot in consumer automotive. So the gestational period for that is beyond my attention span.”

Meantime, may your holidays be filled with all the devices you want–connected ones, of course!

Last fall, Yankee Group began measuring the pace of global connectivity with a powerful metric we call the Anywhere Index. It’s simply the number of broadband lines, wired or wireless, in a region compared to the region’s population.

Simple, yes: among other limitations it doesn’t measure the usage of those lines, or their value to their users. But when you compare the resulting indices to GDPs in those same regions, you can see a strong correlation, reinforcing the work done by the World Bank, the ITU, and other entities to demonstrate the benefit of global connectivity. And suggesting that however simple it may be, it’s good enough to track large-scale change.

Carl Howe used Yankee Group’s extensive global forecasts of broadband connectivity to then predict which regions of the world would advance soonest to the state we call Anywhere: when a region has at least one broadband line for every resident.

But as Carl points out in his latest publication, we didn’t know at the time how deep or how long the global downturn would last or who would be most affected. “Because of the actual depth and breadth of the recession so far, consumers cut spending on broadband, businesses pulled back on investments in infrastructure, and carriers reduced their broadband deployments. In essence, the growth of the Anywhere Economy stalled in North America and Europe.”

Thus in the fall of 2009, the number of countries that reached Anywhere status a year after the measure’s debut are those that were less affected by connectivity pullbacks. Broadband lines now exceed the population in three markets: South Korea, Japan, and Hong Kong. Parts of Europe which we originally forecast to reach Anywhere status in 2010–for instance, Sweden and Italy, each with an Anywhere Index in 2009 over 80%–will probably take at least another year to get there.

Nevertheless the global momentum continues, and the total economic impact of the buildout of a global broadband fabric will still be profound. Here you can see that our current outlook for the total value of the Anywhere Network platform itself — independent of access devices, and services atop the network — still closes in on $1 trillion by 2013.

Despite a weak 2009, the Anywhere Economy will grow

Governments around the world now recognize the value of stimulating network expansion. Their investments won’t make up for the lost time in expansion, but they send a powerful message to the private sector: connectivity matters.

For more information on our Anywhere Index and global connectivity forecasts, see our website or get in touch.