Sharing value to create greater value

Product is only valuable when there is a market.  If there is no market, there is no value to product.  This means a couple of things.  First, product does not have its intrinsic value.  Instead it derives its value from being put to use by customers.  If there is no customer to use it, product does not have any value.  This leads to the second observation, that is, product must be shared and used to realize its value.  A brilliant product locked inside someone's safe deposit box has no value.  It only realizes its value when people put it to use.

That is the core idea of shared economy.  In order to create greater value, you must share value that you create.  By feeding the market with your idea and product, market will return value to everyone far greater than what you originally created.

Social network works the similar ways.  People participate and spend their energy to create content for people to see.  These content get shared among many members through connected social network.  More it gets shared, overall value generated by content increases just as much.  It inspires people, engages with people, plants idea in people in a way that original content creator did not even imagine at the beginning.  Social network is a perfect example of sharing-based economy.

Tim O'Reilly: The guy with the most data wins

Tim O'Reilly has been talking about impact of location data.  He references Google Autonomous Vehicle and Alohar Mobile during his interview by Forbes editor Jon Bruner.



Tim O'Reilly spoke with Jon Bruner about impact of location and other data
at Where Conference 2012 back in April.

What caught my attention was his view about how our data consumption pattern will shift.  Instead of collecting and serving the raw data log, end users will expect to see how to make sense of the data.  Given different context, whether it's getting from point A to point B, increasing marketing effectiveness, or analyzing personal behavior, users expect to get help in solving their own problems at hand.  Raw data themselves are critical ingredients, but they need to be processed and analyzed by correct algorithms to solves the problems at hand.

Big data generated from Google Street Map is
one of critical ingredients to Google autonomous car;
Tim O'Reilly presented the
slides in Washington D.C.on March 30, 2012.

Having large data is where it all starts.  With multiple sensors available on connected smartphones, it has become easier than ever to collect location data.  In addition, once all our online social network persona data are combined, it will create rich set of data that we can all analyze.

One aspect of big data revolution is how big data will change our personal lives.  We will have far more data about ourselves and people around us to run analytics on them.

This also means that we'll have to be mindful of where we store our data.  We all need to be aware of what data that we share with whom because in larger sense we are in fact the sources for the companies that we choose.  We are not just consumers for these big data companies.  We are also the sources.