Rankings are becoming more and more popular in order to assess individuals, institutions or even countries according various criteria like wealth, innovativeness or economic performance. Crucial for such rankings are the selection and the weighting of the criteria. The more complex the issue addressed by such a ranking, like the innovation performance of economies, the more criteria have to be integrated and the more effort has to be invested in the development of an adequate weighting of the criteria.
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The crux and, indeed, the most challenging aspect of standards creation is the ability of different standards to promote both competition and innovation. Today there are many different approaches to setting standards, including de facto standards set informally through the market and formal standards established by governments or standard setting organisations (SSOs). There are also standards involving proprietary efforts and those based on collaborative or open efforts.
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The title of this blog is a play on the famous words by the pioneering computer scientist Alan Kay who said that: “The best way to predict the future is to invent it”. In contrast, the ‘Standards for standards’ approach seems to take the view that: The best way to predict the future is to standardize it. In other words, it seems to predict future directions for innovation and preemptively create a standards template for future innovation.

This approach will not work for a number of reasons, but in this post I will focus on two specific issues:
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In my previous post, I discussed the actuality of Charles Duell’s 1899 statement “Everything that can be invented has been invented” on the basis of reluctances to innovate at the very core of the Internet and the role of overlay networks.

In this post, I try to answer the question: what are the implications for standards by these overlay networks?
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Innovation at the core of the Internet

“Everything that can be invented has been invented” is a statement attributed to Charles H Duell, Commissioner, U.S. patent office, 1899. No one really expects this to be true…

But oddly enough, when it comes to the Internet, the incorporation of new innovation has some unique caveats.

Charles H Duell

It is almost that we want Charles Duell’s statement to be true!
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Abstract: This is a multi part blog about Smart Grid standardization. It outlines the complexities and the standards at the ‘last mile’ of the Smart Grid i.e. between the Smart meter and the home area network. This is the key interface from the customer standpoint.
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Summary:
The heavy focus in the Open Government community on just “getting the data” has obscured some of the downstream requirements that are necessary to achieve the goals of OpenGov initiatives. Sometimes it seems there’s a perception that just exposing the data is enough – and there’s an expectation that useful applications will start to “magically” appear.

In order for Open Government initiatives to produce results that will truly affect political and cultural change, we need rich, usable, and USEFUL solutions that will add real value to citizens and agencies… and that doesn’t happen by accident or merely through community enthusiasm.
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This week brings the news that an US radar that launched into space aboard an Indian spacecraft has detected craters filled with ice on the moon.

Behind the innovation and bleeding edge headlines must lie a lot of seemingly mundane collaboration between technologists in India and USA.
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With all the high profile initiatives in USA and Europe, it is tempting to think that e-health is a ‘western’ concept. While it is true that the idea of e-health is getting a lot of coverage in the West, it may actually arise earlier in emerging markets.

This is not as far-fetched as it first sounds.
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If you have been watching tech and media trends – you cannot miss the rise of 3D (three dimensional)) film (not to be confused with HD i.e. High definition video).

3D is significant because on one hand, the Web is a force that tends to commoditize content (movies, music etc) by changing the business model (a song sold for 99 cents on iTunes). In contrast, 3D offers an opportunity to reverse that trend by creating new sources of revenue.
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