Confused of Calcutta

ZDNet’s Between the Lines pointed me yesterda to Confused Of Calcutta, the blog of JP Rangaswami, the chief of “alternative market models” at the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in London. This is not my usual fare, but he is seriously intrigued by technology. He thinks about enterprise software, social software from a market believer’s perspective, but focuses on its impact on the individual. With your indulgence, I’m going to quote holus bolus his “About This Blog”:

I believe that it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfilment and conversation. I believe that weaknesses and corruptions in our own thinking about digital rights and intellectual property rights will have the effect of slowing down or sometimes even blocking this from happening.

I believe we keep building layers of lock-in that prevent information from flowing freely, and that we have a lot to learn about the right thing to do in this respect. I believe identity and presence and authentication and permissioning are in some ways the new battlegrounds, where the freedom of information flow will be fought for, and bitterly at that.

I believe that we do live in an age of information overload, and that we have to find ways of simplifying our access to the information; of assessing the quality of the information; of having better tools to visualise the information, to enrich and improve it, of passing the information on.

I believe that Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law and Gilder’s Law have created an environment where it is finally possible to demonstrate the value of information technology in simple terms rather than by complex inferences and abstract arguments.“Three laws that are generally accepted as governing the spread of technology:

” * Moore’s Law: formulated by Gordon Moore of Intel in the early 70’s – the processing power of a microchip doubles every 18 months; corollary, computers become faster and the price of a given level of computing power halves every 18 months.
” * Gilder’s Law: proposed by George Gilder, prolific author and prophet of the new technology age – the total bandwidth of communication systems triples every twelve months. New developments seem to confirm that bandwidth availability will continue to expand at a rate that supports Gilder’s Law.
” * Metcalfe’s Law: attributed to Robert Metcalfe, originator of Ethernet and founder of 3COM: the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes; so, as a network grows, the value of being connected to it grows exponentially, while the cost per user remains the same or even reduces.”
Jim Pinto

I believe that simplicity and convenience are important, and that we have to learn to respect human time.

I believe we need to discuss these things and find ways of getting them right. And I have a fervent hope that through this blog, I can keep the conversations going and learn from them.

He’s enjoyable to read, so you might like to give him a try.