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).

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.

First it was an idea… then it became a company-wide research mission… now it’s a book.

Today we start talking publicly about something we have been working on at Yankee Group for much of this past year: our first mass-market book. If you have worked with us recently — or even if you have just visited our web site or talked with us about what we do –  it should come as no surprise that the name of the book is ANYWHERE.

The book is nearing publication with McGraw-Hill, for release in stores on January 8, 2010 (although the major online bookstores are taking orders now; hint, hint). You can get a taste of what it’s all about by downloading Chapter 9, “How ANYWHERE Do You Need to Be?” at our book website, which is anywhere.yankeegroup.com.

Since we’re now preparing to support media interest in the book, I thought I’d use this post as an opportunity to practice my book Q&A.  So I’ll interview myself!

Intriguing title! What’s it about? ANYWHERE is Yankee Group’s vision for the emergence of ubiquitous connectivity: when a seamless, capacious, and intelligent network connects all of us and the things we care about. The book explains why this is happening — but more importantly, it exposes the tremendous changes still ahead in all our lives as it happens. We set out the vision, how and when it happens around the world, and what it’s doing for us as consumers, workers, and business leaders. That’s why the subtitle of the book is How Global Connectivity is Revolutionizing the Way We Do Business.

But Yankee Group’s research is all about Anywhere already. Why did you write a book? By any measure you could choose — the number of people touched, the geographical scope of the technologies, the total economic value added — this revolution in the expansion of the global network will be the largest technology change of our lifetimes, even bigger by far than the commercialization of the Internet.  Yet frankly most managers in the business world today don’t yet see the magnitude of those changes: how the network’s expanded reach will continue to ‘flatten’ the planet, how the growing richness of network experiences will create new appetites in us as consumers, how the network’s intelligence will shrink costs in companies and change the fundamental nature of our activities as businesses.

So we wrote this book to educate businesses on how best to steer their initiatives, partnerships, product development, customer service and virtually every other aspect of a business in order to succeed in the Anywhere environment.

What does the reader get? We focused on describing the business impact of the network changes ahead — in non-technical terms — and prescribing specific things that managers can do to profit from those.  For instance, we paint some pictures of how the lives of typical people will change in ten years’ time, in both developed and emerging markets. We show some companies living the Anywhere vision now, and share how that’s transforming their businesses. We explain how to decide when to move, and what to tackle when you do.

Big scope. How did you pull this picture together? Yankee Group’s extensive resources in the communications world gave us the chance to interview over 50 thought leaders in connectivity–from pioneers to CEOs, from small firms to mega-corporations.  Bob Metcalfe, co-inventor of Ethernet… Nicholas Negroponte, founder of the One Laptop Per Child initiative… Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint… Reed Hundt, former chairman of the U.S. FCC, and many more big thinkers lent us their support. Check out the complete list here. Besides our data assets and terrific contributions from our own analysts, the ideas, advice, and examples from these participants provide very rich context for the Anywhere vision.

You sound excited — why? The reason why all of us at Yankee Group are excited is that we are evangelists for the huge benefits the world will enjoy from the continued expansion of the network — to more people, more devices, and more services. As analysts, we are independent but not neutral: we unequivocally want the Anywhere Network to emerge. The sooner that happens, and the more business people ‘get’ that message and commit themselves to planning how to benefit, the better. With this book, we feel like we’re doing our part to help that all come about.

I’m excited about everyone’s feedback, too. You can talk about it here, follow me on Twitter, join the book’s Facebook fan page, add your reviews and comments on the online book store pages, and of course email me directly as always.

PS: Yes, it’s going to be available in e-book formats as well! You should expect no less for a company working to become an Anywhere Enterprise. Amazon will be promoting it in Kindle form in January — more on that shortly.  Meanwhile — see you Anywhere!

The eBook business is hot. Barnes and Noble just announced its $259 Kindle-killer, the GSM-connected Nook with a color touchscreen complimenting its eInk bland and whie display, Amazon started shipping the international edition of Kindle, and Sony has promised its Reader Daily Edition eBook reader for December. Analysts everywhere (Yankee Group included) are sharpening their pencils and cuing up forecasts of hundreds of thousands of eBook reader sales for this holiday season. And why not; eBook readers take books and make them easy to buy and consume in today’s Anywhere Economy.

At the same time this eBook reader war has been capturing media attention,  a price war has been brewing over paper books. Walmart has cut best-selling hardcover prices to $10 from their normal $24 price tags. Amazon (the same place that sells $9.99 eBooks and the $259 Kindle) has matched Walmart’s prices. Target, not to be outdone, has started pitching selected $9 hardcovers. Add to this the fact that most consumers cherish the flexibility of paper books—the ability to write in them, paste sticky notes in them, lend them to friends, and resell them when they are done with them—and the traditional book market is looking like it could make a comeback with consumers as well.

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Reading room at the U.S. Library of Congress

Bloggus interruptus. Firing up my contributions to our blog again after a five-month hiatus feels weird. I almost feel as if I need to re-introduce myself, as if at a 12-step program: ’Hello, my name is Emily, and I can’t stop thinking about connectivity’s impact in our lives.’

Why five months? That’s the time it took me to finish writing a book while suspending any other writing. It won’t be ready for months more, given the follow-on steps at McGraw-Hill and other publishers — gotta get all those commas in the right places, then go kill some trees. Yes, I’m well aware of the potential irony of Yankee Group’s ideas about ubiquitous connectivity being prepared to be frozen in a disconnected, analog format like chewed-up trees and ink. We do expect it to come out in e-book format as well.

But will people continue to read long-format thinking, digital or otherwise? On the consumption end of Anywhere content, the shortening of attention spans isn’t news; rather it’s a decades-long megatrend. Most recently, Carl Howe saw a stat that only 20% of people in the U.S. read even one book in the last 12 months.

What of the attention spans for generating content in the age of Anywhere? After months in a mode of mapping out the long arcs of chapter premise, introduction, body, examples, sidebars, and conclusion, it definitely feels weird to be resuming the construction and near-simultaneous publication of a standalone, crisp, 300-word thought.

Larry Weber’s view is that as we move to ubiquitous connectivity, nothing digital will ever be finished. Kind of unsettling in a way. What pushes a writer to lock up his final ideas if they’re only going to digital screens with a constant link to more, to the new? I so enjoyed the sense of closure that came from shipping  (ok, emailing) the completed manuscript.

So while our book’s manuscript is finished, we’ll now start constructing a digital home on our website for the more, the new. Anywhere (don’t tell me you’re surprised by the name) will live on with more voices, more ideas, more data well beyond the moment it’s frozen for your Kindle pleasure.

That’s my warm-up blog entry, leaving the chapter arcs behind. I promise more coherent snappy entries from here!

This morning I happened to catch a bit of a BBC radio interview with Jonah Goldberg, the author of the book Liberal Fascism. Asked by the interviewer to define the concept, his explanation veered heavily towards examples of governments teaming up with big business. From there it was a short leap to calling the new U.S. administration’s efforts to stimulate the American economy as “fascistic”, including as they do activities designed in close consultation with the private sector.

Let’s set aside the potential irony of that characterization of current events, given the laissez-faire rampant in the last eight years of federal oversight of the financial sector.  Instead I’ll ask this question: what else would you have the government do? Try to re-start the economy’s stalled engine without asking its operators first what might work? Or do nothing, in the interests of ‘keeping government out of the way’?

The contrast between his cute, attention-getting label and reality was apparent later in my day, when I joined a meeting of a few dozen Boston-based technology execs with the governor of Massachusetts and his economic team. The commitment of Deval Patrick’s administration to understand where the tech sector’s various constituencies have common cause and what the state government might do to help, felt genuine. And not the least bit fascistic, which is to say coercive or domineering.

If the job of government is to help its citizens fairly enjoy a quality life, how can you also suggest that in a capitalist economy, it should stand to one side? For my part, I want to see government doing everything it can to support a complete Anywhere Network, and helping its citizens develop the skills to exploit it.

Tough time to be trying to sell that book, Jonah. Unless people need doorstops and don’t have a Yellow Page directory handy. I haven’t proposed a YG Book Club selection recently, but I have many better candidates than this one waiting on the nightstand.

Given the current state of the financial markets, I’ve found myself buying and reading books that help me understand either how we achieved these states or how we’ve muddled through similar crises. Two that are on my Amazon Kindle today are:

• A Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story, the story of creation, corruption, and destruction of Enron, and
• When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long Term Capital Management, the story of one of the first real hedge funds that nearly caused the collapse of world financial markets in 1998.

Both books are wonderfully educational and remind me that we’ve experienced and weathered significant market crises before. But more importantly, I think they illustrate another important idea:  in complex markets, business people — even those who caution us to read prospectuses before buying — often don’t understand the products they are buying and selling. And these books actually have some lessons for those of us working in the Anywhere Economy as well.

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I recently got to a book that’s been in my queue since it came out: Nick Carr’s The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google. Carr’s the writer who became infamous in corporate IT circles with an article in the Harvard Business Review called “IT Doesn’t Matter.” The article suggested that information technology was becoming less a competitive advantage and more a commodity to any business–which is correct. Nonetheless, his analysis spawned a furious wave of rebuttals from indignant CIOs and their supporters, as if he’d instead suggested that companies should do away with IT entirely. My thought at the time: thou dost protest too much.

Carr’s latest work likens the broad changes currently underway in computing to the evolution of electricity, particularly in the scope of change it brought to business and society. I couldn’t agree more. At Yankee Group we’re dedicated to examining the emergence of ubiquitous connectivity, which we believe is the heart of the computing changes that Carr examines. The parallels that we see to the standardization of electricity are many and profound. And that’s what made me so eager to read the book: knowing he was right about corporate IT and already agreeing with his latest logic.

But while I nodded my head intently as he set out the basis of the electrical/computing analogy (which is most of Part 1), I got bored in Part 2 and, in the end, was left wanting more. Maybe he’s saving some for the next book, but I thought he dropped his use of the electrical revolution as analogy, and went on to cover ground that has been previously well-trod without bringing much new to the discussion. Chapters on the Net’s impact on existing mass media, information security, and privacy felt dated, disjointed, and not well-connected to his framing analogy.

One dimension where I felt let down by The Big Switch is also where I feel the technology sector itself has yet to pick up on the impact of ubiquitous connectivity: the change it will bring to objects around us. The electrical revolution, among other things, was responsible for an explosion of new devices in our lives as workers and consumers, coupling electricity with important items to create things more useful to us than their forebears. Tools in the home and the workplace were transformed in value by the integration of their own heat source or motive power.

Where are the coffee percolators, the vacuum cleaners, the mixers and blenders, of the connectivity revolution — devices that incorporate persistent wireless connectivity to both augment and regularly update their usefulness to me?

The Anywhere revolution will be marked, in part, by a fantastic wave of connected devices that will do as much to change our lives as consumers as those household appliances did to change the life of the middle-class homemaker. Will it be Sony, Philips, Samsung, Kenmore, LG, or Sunbeam that leads the way? So far, I’d have to say no. A new device maker, imbued with creativity inspired by persistent connectivity, will lead the way. And another book, whether by Carr or someone else, will have to point this out.

Do you have kids heading back to school? My daughter finally finished her summer reading assignments last week, just in the nick of time. I read a few great books this summer, too. My favorite business titles over the past few months:

• Two books on presentations: I think of myself as a PowerPoint dominatrix, able to bend it to my will and make it cry uncle. And not a bad speaker. But these two books–and you should read them together–should take my game up a notch:  Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery and Clear and to the Point: Eight Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations
• A book on simple numbers: Our world is complicated; sometimes very simple ways of looking at it help with the big picture. A great way to exercise your brain to do this readily is Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin. See an earlier blog entry here.
• A book that helps explain the slow advance of U.S. wireless networks: I’m fascinated with The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks Markets, Stops Innovations, and Costs Lives. It explains the concept of the ‘anti-commons’ and how, among other things, we can blame it for the slow rollout of 3G and 4G wireless services in the U.S. market.  
• A book that helps explain why some people grow and others don’t:  At Yankee Group, we have to be willing to ask questions that take us out of our comfort zone and risk making us look stupid. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success suggests that a simple belief about ourselves–that either our abilities are carved in stone or that they are things we can cultivate–has everything to do with whether we are brave enough to ask those questions, and in fact whether we can succeed at all of life’s challenges.
• A great peek into consumer behavior: A core topic at Yankee Group is how connectivity change is transforming the consumer, and how that will in turn further transform connectivity. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions does a great job identifying the rational thinking that underpins consumer behavior that, on the surface, looks irrational. A fast and valuable read for anyone focused on consumer offerings.

Just a little kvetch, though — can’t any of these smart people write a book with a title that doesn’t use a colon?

In my next post, my thoughts on Nick Carr’s book The Big Switch. As always, love to hear what you’re reading — post some suggestions for us all.

One of my most memorable job interviews ever was one in which I was asked to come up with an answer on the spot to this question: “What are the odds that there are at least two people who live in New York City and have the exact same number of hairs on their heads?” *

It was a programming job; the interviewer was looking for a display of a rational problem-solving. Nonetheless I compulsively said the first thing that came into my head: “One hundred percent. I personally know two bald New Yorkers.”

Smart aleck. I got the job offer, but I knew I hadn’t really demonstrated the thinking they were looking for. I’ve just started a cool book called Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin. If I’d read this then, I’d have had the tools to think through that question in the way I suspect the interviewer had hoped.

We’re doing some interesting guesstimation at Yankee Group right now, though, so it will come in handy. As part of some work we have underway to assess the scale and pace of the emergence of ubiquitous connectivity — what we call Anywhere — we’re sizing its impact today and in future. I’ll post again here in a few weeks when it’s finished, so you can see what we have come up with and share some feedback. But at the moment the project is reminding me of the basic challenge of predicting the future: combining art and science in just the right measures. As the book’s authors point out, too many decimal points in a forecast ”are like lying,” since they suggest a level of precision and confidence that these methods can’t possibly offer up.  We’ll round the numbers up to the nearest hundred billion, I promise…

* The current population of NYC is over 8 million, and the average human has 100,000 hairs on his head. so you figure it out.