The future of innovation: What’s next after Facebook and Twitter?

A video version of Twitter might be under way.

After five years of the social-local-mobile and cloud hype which gave us Facebook, Twitter, Dropbox, and iCloud, are we done with the Internet yet? This is just one of the hottest topics debated by a panel of invited guests in the recently concluded MEF Global Ethernet Networking 2014 or the MEF GEN14 in Washington, DC. Held last November 17-20, the event gathered for the first time senior professionals involved in the Ethernet services and technology ecosystem to talk about some of the latest trends in the industry.

During the discussion, panelists agreed that the social aspects of the Internet are fuelling a lot of innovations. Nan Chen, President, MEF/Co-Founder and Executive Vice-Chairman, CENX, said that the tech sector has just begun innovating across verticals in general. "Whether it's social, mobile, cloud or anything else, we've seen the first round of innovation on the Web and yet most of the applications there have two characteristics. They're sort of best effort and very loosely coupled across industries." Chen believes that a lot of work is required to create richer ecosystems for sectors such as healthcare that may have real demands on the network.

Furthermore, consumers’ concerns cannot be ignored in realizing these ecosystems. Sanjeev Mervana, Senior Director of SP Marketing at Cisco noted that most innovations in social networking were being driven by consumers. "When we look at innovations in social applications, such as snapchat and the possibility of video twitter, we see the younger generation of consumers finding value and driving the use of these specific technologies and applications to build a new social online society. Of course this bleeds over to how enterprises interact socially, as well. So, I think innovation is being looked at from both the consumer side of the house as well as from an enterprise perspective.” Mervana adds that as an end consumer, it does not really matter where the innovation is coming from. As long as consumption of the innovation is simple and solves specific consumer needs - it has a chance for adoption.

Consumer innovations
Grant Lenahan, Executive Director of Innovation at Ericsson suggests a possible video version of Twitter. "There's been a lot of research from people years ago like Tom Allen at MIT on managing the flow of information. There's a more recent book on “social physics” that quantifies the same concepts, and says if you don't bring people physically together, they don't communicate as well, they don't share ideas. I'm wondering if communication actually gets better on Twitter. Broadband, almost live interaction, - even though it's done over bits and networks – may allow us to simulate human interaction electronically."

On reinventing the entertainment and media experience, Mike Tighe, Executive Director of Data Services at Comcast Business said that they are looking at the cloud as their new platform or as their new entertainment operating system that will enable them to 'literally' make changes to the entertainment experience daily.
"I joined Comcast two years ago and I've really seen how the cloud has really reinvigorated the company. What they've done is they've taken the [smarts] that used to exist in the set-top box and moved them out to the cloud. So we used to be able to make one or two changes to the set-top box a year, now we can make five to ten changes a day to improve the experience to offer new feature functionality."

Tighe also boasted that they are now attracting the best talents as the company moves to cloud as a platform to build a media and entertainment experience that allows people to consume content in any way that they want to. "We're actually competing for talent that would normally go to Facebook and Google, but because we're enlisting people to work in this entertainment operating system and entertainment experience, we're recruiting that type of talent in the company."

Cloud innovations
Panelists also agreed that the cloud is clearly not done yet. In fact, to meet the evolving need of the cloud service providers and users, a cross-industry alliance was formed – the CloudEthernet Forum (CEF). According to James Walker, Vice President of Managed Network Services at Tata Communications and the President of CEF, the purpose of the group is to produce standardized implementations of interfaces between the carriers, DCs and cloud service providers enabling the creation of highly scalable, adaptable cloud infrastructures. In other words, it wants the cloud to be available uniformly across cloud providers through multiple carriers of Internet and it being as a result of these efforts faster, better and cheaper.

Tighe added that while MEF had done some ‘tremendously’ good work in allowing service providers to interconnect together in a seamless fashion, it hadn’t accomplished that for connecting a network provider to a cloud provider. “So every cloud provider we want to connect to is an individual one-off process and it's slow and it doesn't scale. But we're hoping the work that the CEF does is enable standardised interfaces so we can rapidly interconnect with cloud providers and bring them and to be able to offer these cloud based services to the CIOs that we serve.”

Innovation versus evolution
With all the new products and services coming our way with the advent of the Internet, Walker cautioned that we need to differentiate between innovation and evolution as he believes that something completely new doesn’t come along often. Evolution, he explained is building or re-innovating on something that has already existed and he thinks that this has become more frequent than it was in the past and true innovation is much more rare. “Innovating the way you run your business, innovating on how we work with each other, that to me is slower. It's less visible, it's less actionable at the moment.”

Mervana concurred, that while a lot of innovation has happened, not everything was utilized or commercialized - Meaning People didn't know about the innovations and no one consumed those innovations commercially. The idea of innovation along with evolution, he believes makes a lot of sense. “We can look to Facebook for an example. They innovated a mobile platform for their users while evolving their business practices to support their innovations.”