A truly staggering, transformative trend yet to unfold
It's been announced that I will be a keynote speaker at the World HealthCare Innovation & Technology Conference, to be held in Washington, DC in December. In particular, I'll be taking a look at the importance of one of the most significant trends that is just starting to unfold.
Twenty years from now, most people will look back and realize that right about now, we had three huge, transformative trends underway: device connectivity, geo-connectivity, and bio-connectivity
Essentially, everything around is about to become linked in -- every device that surrounds your life. My home thermostat is linked to the Internet, and that has changed the scope of how I interact with energy.
Layered on top of device connectivity is spatial intelligence for each device -- vis-a-vis Google Maps types of applications. Think about new forms of energy management built upon sophisticated geographic mapping applications.
Add to this the fact that this type of technology will migrate to devices that will help us better manage complex health circumstances.
I've been writing and speaking about the idea of bio-connectivity and the concept of "hyper-connectivity" for over a decade (before Nortel lamely built a lame marketing campaign around the latter phrase a year ago.) It remains one of the most significant trends that will yet unfold in the health care sector. Our concept of health care delivery will be forever transformed.
Simply put, link the scope of the looming health care crisis to the momentum that will come from Silicon Valley for medical device connectivity, and there are some pretty powerful things happening. Think about what happens as spatial device connectivity comes to everyday things around you -- such as a baseball bat! Read more below. There's a lot going on in this space, and you'd do well to understand it.
Opportunity through the next decade is going to be found by those who will adjust and adapt buisness models, attitudues, structures, methodologies and capabilities to this new reality.
More information:
- HealthCare Innovation & Technology Conference
- Read about what happens When Thermostats get connected
- Read the article about bio-connectivity, The Doctor is in around the clock
- Read the article Minds of their own
- Read "Bioconnectivity and the rapid emergence of new markets"
- Read the article Command and Control - Opportunity Awaits Companies that Master Hyperconnectivity
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Jim Carroll keynoting Toshiba Global Exchange 2008 in Sydney, Australia
It's been confirmed that I'll be the opening keynote speaker for this large scale annual conference in mid-July.
It will be a pleasure to share my insight in Sydney. I'm a big believer that many organizations have barely scratched the innovation-surface when it comes to IT deployment; many organizations are still in basic implementation mode, and haven't learned how to really leverage their investment to provide for significant transformation of their overall organizational capabilities.
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"He prowled the stage like a preacher"
An interesting article in InformationWeek, covering my Sunday night keynote for the Society for Information Managementa annual conference in Memphis.
First time I ever had to follow Elvis on stage : and maybe that's what had me fired up!
Noted InformationWeek: "Carroll, the author of "What I Learned from Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward Thinking Innovation," seemed to embrace the atmosphere of secular spiritualism. He prowled the stage like a preacher, exhorting the assembled crowd to take the message of hyper cultural and economic change fueled by information technology back to their companies and use it to force a closer examination of the role of their own technology efforts in new business models, management structure, and collaboration."
You can read the full article, In the High Velocity Economy, IT is the Engine, here.
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Innovating in the era of instant obsolescence
We're in the era of instant obsolescence: can you innovate fast enough to keep up? Can you keep up, when faster is the new fast?
In the last few years, I've interviewed CFO's and CIO's with companies that have achieved rapid market growth, all of them customers of SAP. This includes such global success stories as J. Crew, Body Armour, Adobe, Purdue Pharma, Hunt Oil, Lennox, Jazz Semiconductor, Merit Energy, and others. SAP has had me in to keynote a wide variety of events, and host panel discussions with these senior executives: it's been a wonderful opportunity to explore what innovate companies do in rapidly changing markets.
I recently such a discussion, both online and at SAPPHIRE 07 in Atlanta, under the theme, Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility: The Four Key Drivers for Competitive Advantage. I interviewed CIO's and senior IT executives with four high-growth hi-tech companies: Entegris, Intervoice, Avocent and Citrix (and it Atlanta, Checkfree.)
One of my opening comments: "We're in the era of absolutely instant obsolescence. We can't afford to take a week to roll up the sales numbers ... we have to know what's happened in the last 10 minutes."
All of these organizations are faced with the challenge and opportunity of the high-velocity economy. Rapid growth, collapsing product lifecycles, and the need for a focus on" time to market."
They provided wonderful insight into how they innovate in order to stay ahead of the market, manage global supply chains, build a cohesive, collaborative culture, and provide for real time insight into their business.
You can listen in, several ways. First, I'm interviewed by Paul Gillin, former editor-in-chief and executive editor of Computerworld, and the author of the book, The New Influencers, on why companies must be in a mindset of innovating when "faster is the new fast."
- You can watch / listen to the podcast of the interview
- You can also download the podcast and listen in later by right-clicking and downloading the podcast
You can also listen to the full interview with the panelists at SAP's web site (registration is required); it's available iin multiple formats.
What do these organizations do in terms of innovation? Several things:
- operational excellence is a major focus
- there are high expectations for growth, and an IT infrastructure that enables such growth
- they have a need for instant, need driven relationships with their partners
- they focus on rapid agility for new market demands
- they are religious on "fast time to market"
- they focus on quick marshalling of resources to accomplish velocity
- they provide for instant scalability, given market volatility and rapid change
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Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility......
I'm doing a private conference call today with more than a hundred executives in the life sciences industry, on behalf of my client, SAP.
The theme, "Velocity, Agility, Complexity, and Flexibility: The Four Key Drivers for Competitive Advantage," drives directly from the key theme in my trends overview: Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care.
Together, the panel will discuss the challenges they face every business day in the high-velocity pharmaceutical industry, and how innovation plays a core role in how they approach to tackling the challenges and opportunities that exist. In the call, we'll talk to these executives as to what they have been doing within the pharmaceutical and health care industry to:
- Increase their agility and flexibility
- Forge innovative partnerships
- Achieve improved business visibility
- Pursue relentless customer-oriented innovation
- Establish forward-oriented leadership
- Leverage technology to meet your business objectives
That's a key point about innovation: it isn't just about hitting home runs. You can be innovative as heck by hitting doubles, singles, and triples, and getting the runs in.
For further background, read Future Medicine: Prescriptions for 21st Century Health Care
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What happens when light stops?
Well, for one thing, when light stops, velocity picks up!
A few weeks ago, I keynoted a crowd of 3,000 telecom professionals in Florida. One of the comments I made was this: when it comes to the velocity of change in the "big media universe," we can only expect that the bandwidth and computing power in our lives will become ever more plentiful, and ever faster, because scientists are figuring out how to slow light to a crawl.
That's important, because it migrates us from a world of "electronics based computing" to "photonics computing." The difference in speed, capacity, processing power and everything else will be simply staggering. Think optical-chips based on light, not today's model-T's based on electrons.
This trend will make the electronic computers of today look like Cro-Magnon tools compared to the optical computers of tomorrow.
Last week, I caught an article in which the folks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) predicted that optical chips will be here within 5 years.
A year ago, at another telecom event in Florida, I made the then bold prediction that as scientists learn to stop light, we'll see bandwidth improvements of a huge degree. Some industry folks in the room were taken aback: it's kind of interesting to read the article that was printed at the time (found below.)
It's awful nice to see predictions of the past become mainstream quicker than you might have expected!
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Optical Futures: Another ET Look at Light
24 January 2006
CT's Pipeline
Among the many intriguing observations and reports shared by the SCTE Conference on Emerging Technologies keynoter Jim Carroll in Tampa two weeks ago was the progress that optical researchers were making on the question of how to slow down light.
In our ET report in last week's Pipeline, we'd written on how it might have been interesting to have one of the industry's many optical experts comment on "when, where and how this could happen." Since then, we've heard back from the futurist Carroll and checked in with one of those experts.
"The slowing of light is nothing new," Carroll wrote, referring to New York Times article from last November that cited Harvard researchers who in 1999 who were able to slow light drastically and two years later were able to bring light to a stop.
Of most interest to Carroll about this science project, which already was well under way six years ago, is its new scale. Whereas the Harvard researchers required a roomful of equipment, according to the Times, IBM scientists now have created a tiny silicon device to slow down light from its usual 186,000 miles per second to 600 miles per second--or to about 0.3 percent of ordinary light speed.
"Heck, I could have a little light-stop-chip in my laptop some time in the future, plug into my optical-wall-plug, and access the yottabit universe," Carroll wrote.
There's no quibbling with ability of a wide-ranging, connect-the-dots futurist such as Carroll in getting those (trade journalists included) who may be stuck in a particular niche to drop the blinders and look around, and ahead. His talk certainly was an effective way to jolt ET attendees into a forward- leaning frame of mind.
New optical thinking
For input from one of the industry's optical experts, we turned to OpVista CTO Dr. Winston Way, who noted up front how thinking about optical networking already is undergoing a shift.
"Before, people only thought that you could manage packets, frames or bytes, but I think right now people have just started to think about the fact that light, or colors, can be managed also," Way said. One of OpVista's calling cards is its novel approach to reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs).
As for not simply managing, but arresting lightwaves, Way said: "I think that is really out-of-the-box thinking. It's interesting. Slow it down so you can see what's inside, then let it go again."
Way said this project reminded him of work done at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1980s and early 1990s on optical signal processing, which sidestepped the physical limitations of the electronics domain. "I'm not sure it's practical today," he said.
What Carroll was talking about, of course, was not today but tomorrow, or rather the day or year (or decade?) after. "I don't make my stuff up," Carroll wrote. "The future surrounds us, is being developed all around us and all the (technologies) that people work on eventually come into our lives. I just think...that it is going to come into our lives quicker than we might think."
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Can you run your business at video-game intensity?
Video game business intensity is coming to all industries.
This provides some important food for thought -- can you run your business at the high degree of intensity that occurs within the high-tech gaming (not gambling) industry? Remember -- the key words today are rapid time to market, agility, and execution.
One of the most innovative companies I've met in the last few years is a distributor of computer/console video games - they operate between the video game manufacturers and the retailers. They have one core mission -- they make sure that new games get to the store and to the shelf on time.
The CIO of this organization indicated that 45-60% of the total life revenue stream of a typical video game is made within the first four days of its release.
That's why this company is relentlessly, aggressive focused on operational excellence - their entire culture, information system, management structure and organizational responsibilities are completely focused on this market reality.
Tie this observation into the fact that accelerated innovation and rapid time to market is becoming a key trend in every industry today. With that comes short, sharp shocks of revenue hits, with a good chunk of total lifecycle revenue happening in just a few short days.
That's why to thrive in the high-velocity economy, you've got to think about business intensity, and the concept of short-term, rapid operational and market excellence.
Can you do it? If not, you'd better look at your innovation mindset, and begin to adjust accordingly.
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The Google Car and massive market disruption
There are a few news stories today about Tesla Motors, which includes some of the founders of Google, involved in an effort to build a new electric car.
Let's just call it the Google Car.
I've been predicting this type of massive market shift since sometime in 2004; there's a video clip from January 2006 in which I talked at the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers annual conference about the concept of a Google Car (which in my view, will be delivered via FedEx and will come with a party in a box!). I even included the suggestion that you'd be able to pre-order online.
Hmm, look at that -- you can!
I don't think the scenario posted by Tesla is far-fetched at all -- given rapid science, hyperinnovation, low cost offshore production, and the slow response of other traditional business models .... every industry today is ripe for massive disruption and the rapid emergence of new competitors. A big part of the equation is avoiding 'legacy costs' both in manufacturing as well as sales and support. Think FedEx, not car dealerships. Think smart engine modules that pop in and out, not auto mechanics. Think WalMart, not ReadyLube.
It's all there, and someone just has to pull it together.
Watch the video clip here.
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How do you sell the future to people who have no interest in it?
There have been dozens of keynotes through the last few months. All kinds of industries; executives; professionals; markets; challenges.
There's a lot of change going on out there, and the brutal reality is that some get it -- and a lot do not.
Each and every keynote has involved a lot of research, plenty of discussions, and a fair bit of time spent understanding how an industry or profession is changing. You learn some amazing things -- farmers and funeral homes, for example, are some of the most change-capable people out there. Both are innovative, realistic, practical, and open to new ways of thinking. (Maybe this has to do with the fact that global food production has to double in the next few decades to keep up with global food consumption, and that most of those people will become customers of the latter at some point. Ok, there is room for optimism....!)
Through all the discussions and all the preparation and all the time spent on stage, there's been enough material to write a dozen new books, but I'm going to distill it into The Masters of Business Imagination Handbook (the "current" new working title) which will go to the think-factory in a few weeks.
Suffice it to say, there was a crystallizing slide that I pulled together when I keynoted a PWC conference a week or so ago, in which I outlined to a number of executives how they could best segment their customer base in order to determine where to best find opportunity.
The more I think about it, that slide probably contained some really cool insight into how to sell into today’s economy.
I suggested to the audience that they should look at a company / client / industry, and undertake a measure of their change-quotient. If it is low -- if people / executives / an industry can't cope with reality -- if they are hopelessly mired in "today" – and hence, they;ve got a pretty low change-quotient – then bail out. If they are thinking that tomorrow's market / strategy / products / skills / capabilities will be fulfilled by what they have in place today, their change-quotient is hopelessly low.
Worse than low – they simply can’t deal with change.
And you can use that measure – the change-quotient -- to segment your client / customer / industry base, and determine where you should best focus your energies.
How do you determine the change-quotient? I suggested a few factors:
- velocity ratio : what is the rate of change within the industry? What’s the velocity of business model change? How many new competitors are there, are how quickly is the industry blurring? What’s the staff turnover rate? How quickly do new products come to market? Pick high-velocity ratio targets, since they are more likely to be focused on making change work.
- rising tides: how quickly are customer expectations changing? If you’ve got an industry in which there are rapidly rising tides in terms of minimum service delivery, you’ve got an industry in which there are countless opportunities for innovative, future oriented products,
- innovation index: is the industry widely innovative, or are there only a few scattered folks who dare buck the current reality? Is it an industry stuck in 2003, or are they somewhere that is just about right now and a bit more of tomorrow? I’ve met a lot of industries who are sleepwalking into the future; on the other hand, I’ve met many who are awake and ready to go.
- creativity capability. Gosh, just who runs the industry? Who are the CxO's? Is it mostly a lot of folks who really good at just running things? Then run away – that’s why I coined the phrase “Masters of Business Imagination” in the first place!
- retirement rate: Not to be crude, but how many boomers are there hanging around who want the benefits, want the salary, and want the executive responsibility, but don’t want to have to do anything to confront change? This, more than anything, can be one of the key measures for change.
- generational tolerance: At the age of 47, I've realized I've been meeting thousands of Gen-X and Gen-Connecters in a lot of industries who scream in silent frustration each and every day. They’re stuck in organizations with management who actively work to kill new ideas. They’re full of innovation, but they have no outlet for it. On the other hand, there are other industries where the frustration doesn’t boil away, but instead, is tapped for opportunity. Spot those industries -- where "young people" are welcomed as a source for ideas -- and you’ve got an industry with massive agility.
- wisdom wealth: Boomers need not be change-barriers; indeed, there are some who understand where change is occurring, and who are using their years of experience – often with devastating effect – to spot and capitalize on opportunity. These are some of the most powerful organizations on the planet. They've merged the generations, and are change-masters.
There seems to be an entire generation of CxO's with the fundamental strategy of not seeing the future, don't hear the future, and don't do the future. You can discover this by studying the change-quotient of the industry and of the company.
Focus on the high-change-quotient targets -- on those who get where we are going -- and you'll do much better with your strategy, and have way more fun.
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Industry Luminaries Keynote the 2006 FTTH Conference & Expo in October
This release has just gone out; I'll be keynoting this event for this fast paced industry this fall. Here's an excerpt; the full press release is here
LAKE OSWEGO, Ore. - (BUSINESS WIRE) - May 30, 2006 - The Fiber-to-the-Home Council today announced the keynote speaker lineup for its fifth annual conference on October 2 - 5, 2006 at the Venetian Resort Hotel Casino in Las Vegas. Innovations in Fiber to the Home: What's Next? will be the premier event for advancing residential and community broadband access in North America. Sprint North Supply, Alcatel and Hitachi are platinum sponsors for the conference.
Keynote speakers include:
Hiromichi Shinohara, Director of NTT Access Network Service Systems Labs, will open the conference on October 3rd. Mr. Shinohara has been engaged in research and development of fiber optic cables, broadband networks and optical access systems since joining NTT Laboratories in 1978.
Robert (Bob) Ingalls, President of Verizon's Retail Markets Group, will address the conference on Wednesday, October 4th. Mr. Ingalls is responsible for the launch of the company's new FIOS Internet and FIOS TV products which are at the forefront of Verizon's transformation into a leading broadband company.
Jeffrey Weber, Vice President, Product & Strategy, AT&T, is responsible for the new data and video product lines under Project Lightspeed and will speak on October 5th. Project Lightspeed is the initiative to expand AT&T's fiber-optics network deeper into neighborhoods to deliver AT&T's U-verse-TV, voice and high-speed Internet access services.
Featured speaker Jim Carroll, futurist, trends and innovation expert is the author of What I Learned from Frogs in Texas: Saving Your Skin with Forward-Thinking Innovation. He is a frequent speaker at global events, with a client list that includes Motorola, Verizon, Daimler Chrysler, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the National Rural Telecom Cooperative among others.
......
FTTH Conference Brent Moore & Associates Inc Ms. Laurie Poole, 514-923-6229 Email: lauriep@brentmoore.com
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Article - "Are we thinking fast enough?"
After my keynote for the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers, I was asked to provide a guest column for the prestigious Broadband Library.
I open the article with the line: "If there are three key words that should carry broadband organizations and the people within them into the future, it is these: agility, innovation and execution."
I then focus on the major trends impacting companies today, including hyperinnovation: "Innovation has moved from the corporate to the collective, a trend that is causing absolutely furious rates of discovery. Fifteen years ago, the exchange of new ideas, research and scientific advance in the world of cable, technology and telecom occurred at a rather leisurely pace, through conferences, journals and publications. Today, we find ourselves in the midst of a global infinite idea loop, in which new ideas, inventions and innovations are shared faster than ever before in countless numbers of online forums, discussions, blogs and other collaborative efforts. The pace of R&D and discovery has forever changed at this global collaborative network, as has an eternal discussion about what comes next. The result is that no one can hope to define the future anymore -- the best you can do is simply to plug into the future that is being developed all around you, and learn how to profit from it."
Read the full article 
You can read the full article here:
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Why the world is becoming faster!
I've put up a new video clip from my keynote for the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers ; this short clip focuses on the issue of why the rate of change around us is going to accelerate, because of simple demographic realities.
I find that a lot of people think about the future in terms of what they see around them today. In this clip, I try to help people realize just how quickly business models and everything else are set to change as the next generation takes over.
Watch the clip
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More coverage, from Communications Engineering magazine, on my SCTE keynote last month.
"If you think your customers are a challenge now, wait until 2010, said futurist and ET keynoter Jim Carroll at Wednesday's opening session.
Tomorrow's customers will be "far more demanding, will expect more from you, will be constantly pushing you, and will have far less loyalty to you as a brand," Carroll predicted.
That's because the customers of 2010 are today's youth - many of whom don't remember film cameras, and who view "television" as video that comes to them in the car, on the laptop, or on the back of the airplane seat.
"By 2020, we'll be witnessing the retirement of the change-averse," Carroll said, referring to baby-boomer and older generations. "What will emerge into purchasing power, and into your customer base, is this generation that thinks differently, is wired differently."
As for products and services, Carroll frequently referenced last week's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas as an example of "furiously rapid rates of change." Product lifecycles, such as those traditionally taught in marketing courses," are fundamentally disappearing," he said.
To compete, cable needs to focus on being agile. "Re-skilling the folks who are instrumental in your architecture is just critical," he said.
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An interesting article here.
Optical Futures: Another ET Look at Light
24 January 2006
CT's Pipeline
Among the many intriguing observations and reports shared by the SCTE Conference on Emerging Technologies keynoter Jim Carroll in Tampa two weeks ago was the progress that optical researchers were making on the question of how to slow down light.
In our ET report in last week's Pipeline, we'd written on how it might have been interesting to have one of the industry's many optical experts comment on "when, where and how this could happen." Since then, we've heard back from the futurist Carroll and checked in with one of those experts.
"The slowing of light is nothing new," Carroll wrote, referring to New York Times article from last November that cited Harvard researchers who in 1999 who were able to slow light drastically and two years later were able to bring light to a stop.
Of most interest to Carroll about this science project, which already was well under way six years ago, is its new scale. Whereas the Harvard researchers required a roomful of equipment, according to the Times, IBM scientists now have created a tiny silicon device to slow down light from its usual 186,000 miles per second to 600 miles per second--or to about 0.3 percent of ordinary light speed.
"Heck, I could have a little light-stop-chip in my laptop some time in the future, plug into my optical-wall-plug, and access the yottabit universe," Carroll wrote.
There's no quibbling with ability of a wide-ranging, connect-the-dots futurist such as Carroll in getting those (trade journalists included) who may be stuck in a particular niche to drop the blinders and look around, and ahead. His talk certainly was an effective way to jolt ET attendees into a forward- leaning frame of mind.
New optical thinking
For input from one of the industry's optical experts, we turned to OpVista CTO Dr. Winston Way, who noted up front how thinking about optical networking already is undergoing a shift.
"Before, people only thought that you could manage packets, frames or bytes, but I think right now people have just started to think about the fact that light, or colors, can be managed also," Way said. One of OpVista's calling cards is its novel approach to reconfigurable optical add/drop multiplexers (ROADMs).
As for not simply managing, but arresting lightwaves, Way said: "I think that is really out-of-the-box thinking. It's interesting. Slow it down so you can see what's inside, then let it go again."
Way said this project reminded him of work done at AT&T Bell Labs in the late 1980s and early 1990s on optical signal processing, which sidestepped the physical limitations of the electronics domain. "I'm not sure it's practical today," he said.
What Carroll was talking about, of course, was not today but tomorrow, or rather the day or year (or decade?) after. "I don't make my stuff up," Carroll wrote. "The future surrounds us, is being developed all around us and all the (technologies) that people work on eventually come into our lives. I just think...that it is going to come into our lives quicker than we might think."
-Jonathan Tombes
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"...the rapid rate of change in cable telecommunications is going from fast to furious ..."
Read the full SCTE press release here
Shortly after my keynote in Tampa today to open the Society of Cable Telecom Engineers Emerging Technologies conference, the SCTE put out this press release:
"Jim Carroll, international futurist, trends, and innovation expert, said the rapid rate of change in cable telecommunications is going from fast to furious in a stirring keynote address today to a sold-out Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Conference on Emerging Technologies® 2006 in Tampa.
Carroll was a perfect fit for the forward-focused ET, with a high-energy speech that entertainingly challenged attendees to embrace constant change and see it as rife with opportunity as opposed to a threat."
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: 800-542-5040
Kimberly Maki, SCTE VP Marketing & Business Development, ext. 221, kmaki@scte.org
Joe Madagan, SCTE Editor Marketing & Communications, ext. 212, jmadagan@scte.org.
Visit SCTE online at www.scte.org.
SCTE ET KEYNOTE CARROLL HAILS COMPELLING CALL TO ACTION
JAN. 11, 2006 (Exton, PA)--Jim Carroll, international futurist, trends, and innovation expert, said the rapid rate of change in cable telecommunications is going from fast to furious in a stirring keynote address today to a sold-out Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers (SCTE) Conference on Emerging Technologies® 2006 in Tampa.
Carroll was a perfect fit for the forward-focused ET, with a high-energy speech that entertainingly challenged attendees to embrace constant change and see it as rife with opportunity as opposed to a threat.
"Furious rates of scientific advance will make the last 10 years of rapid technology development seem like a slow train ride," said Carroll. "Optical researchers are learning how to slow the speed of light to 30 miles a second, in order to develop the next generation of optical router. Next-generation storage companies are dealing with concepts that involve storing three data bits in every single molecule. It's only a matter of time before VoIP is built into every laptop at the chip level. How do we ensure that we've hitched our train to everything that is going on?"
Carroll told the audience that bandwidth demand is set to explode. "With digital cameras having just entered our world, we are already taking 80 billion pictures a year and are sharing them online. Once we all start sharing video, bandwidth will take off in ways that are unimaginable." Carroll challenged the audience members to ask themselves if they are thinking big enough.
"Everyone is focusing on 100 MBPS or 300 MBPS as being the key question for the year 2010," he said. "I think we should be thinking about yottabits and zetabits when it comes to capacity."
Carroll affirmed his audience members for their presence at a conference like ET, which, with its myriad networking opportunities, helps to meet the need to develop what he calls "complexity partners," other companies that are specialists in their particular technical niche of the industry. "No one cable engineer, no one cable company, can possibly do it all," he said.
The keynoter said that new competitors will continue to emerge at a furious pace overnight--and learning to tap into the global innovation mind is critical.
"We are now witnessing a sort of infinite idea loop, in which new ideas, inventions, and innovations occur faster than ever before," he said. "No one can hope to define the future anymore--the best you can do is simply to plug into the future that is being developed all around you, and learn how to profit from it."
Carroll said that, fueled by the Internet, what took four years to discover in years past can now take about four hours.
Carroll's speech kicked off two full days of ET, which is featuring four hard-hitting sessions focused on what cable's future will look like in three-to-five years.
####
The Society of Cable Telecommunications Engineers is a non-profit professional organization committed to advancing the careers of cable telecommunications professionals and serving the industry through excellence in professional development, information and standards. SCTE currently has more than 15,000 members from the U.S. and 70 countries worldwide and offers a variety of programs and services for the industry's educational benefit. SCTE has more than 70 chapters and meeting groups and has technically certified more than 3,000 employees of the cable telecommunications industry. SCTE is an ANSI-accredited standards development organization. Visit SCTE online at www.scte.org.
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