Just as mobilization of the society and rise of cloud computing are two key and defining forces of our time, I believe work is the next big killer app of the Internet. It will be a force that will be transformative, which is why we’ve decided to host a new conference, Net:Work, which explores the Future of Work. At the event, which is scheduled for Dec. 9, 2010 and will be held in San Francisco, we are going to be exploring some of the facets of this shift. (Schedule)
Go Virtual Young Man
Six years ago, I wrote an article for Business 2.0: Escape from Silicon Valley. In that essay, I talked to some startups that were based outside the San Francisco Bay Area. While many of them didn’t make it to the finish line, the concept of working from anywhere and collaborating with virtual teams made perfect sense to me.
In September 2006 when we started our WebWorkerDaily blog, it was based on the notion that work itself was going to be recast and reshaped. So much so, that for the first 15 months of GigaOM, we existed as a virtual company, working from cafes or borrowed office spaces. Our first remote team member was Chancey Mathews, who was our web master. Soon there after, Anne Zelenka joined us from Denver, from where she edited WebWorkerDaily, along with a distributed team of writers, many of whom I haven’t even met.
It wasn’t until 2008 that we got ourselves an office in Pier 38. We added people based on talent, not on the proximity by location. In the knowledge economy, not doing so would be foolish and would limit our prospects. The deciding factor was prospective team members’ connectedness. As Maynard Webb, former COO of eBay and CEO of LiveOps aptly put it: work is the new the killer app of the Internet.
Connectedness
For the longest time, the concept of work had been be confined and defined by two parameters: space and time. We all used to go to a central location to work. We would work at our nine-to-five jobs, then come home, watch television, read a little, go to sleep, and start all over again.
Just as time would define our work and our life, space or location would define industries. Automobiles blossomed in Detroit. Filmmaking and television flourished in California. Fashion thrived in Paris. Publishing and advertising found a home in New York City and in these locations, business giants of the 20th century attracted hundreds of thousands of workers.
With the rise of broadband, a new factor has come into play: connectedness. Connectedness allows companies big and small to exist as a stateless entity. Today, a startup can offer a new device dreamed up and designed in California, manufactured in China and sold in Europe with support services being in India or the Philippines.
It is not just startups; companies as large as Cisco Systems (s csco) and Nokia (s nok) are working across different time zones, accomplishing different tasks and functioning like a beast that never sleeps. Thanks to connectedness, the old-fashioned notions of space and time are soon going to be rendered moot. How can a day end at 5:00 p.m. when half your team is spread across multiple time zones?
We call this shift in idea of work “the human cloud,” and just as cloud computing disrupted the idea of computing and corporate IT infrastructure, the human cloud is shorthand for the intersection of web and work.
I would love to attend this conference but can’t. Will there be videos of the keynotes available afterwards?
yes to the keynotes. checkout gigaom.com/tv to see all our archives and videos. sorry you are unable to make it.
Thanks much!
So this conference is all about how people don’t have to be at the same place to work together. So why do people have to be at the same place to attend the conference?
Yes, I do understand the rationale. And I do think that face-to-face meetings will still rank highly in importance, especially as impromptu meetings can be as beneficial as planned ones.
But still, apparently the cloud isn’t powerful enough yet to really replace the workplace (or the meetingplace).
Larry you don’t have to be at the event. You can watch it online — we are streaming it and talk to folks you want to talk to on Twitter. You can be virtual and still attend the conference.
I really will like the opportunity to watch it live online, can you provide a link for this? Thanks
I’ve been in a entirely virtual organization for almost 2 years, it has got advantages, being a remote employee, but there are clear drawbacks too. I think my company does a great job screening people to work in this capacity, the tools we use and such, but more could be done. FYI – They’ve been doing it since 2003. Sounds like an interesting conference, as I know of one other company going totally virtual in a year.
This bodes well for services like Hashable – first real decentralized social network for business people.
Work, maybe. Education, definitely, since what happens in K12 will model what work looks like in the next few decades.
Maybe both?
I can’t make it in person either, unfortunately. What’s the hash tag for the event?
I guess if we look at the bigger picture – this intersection of web & work has given birth to many industries already – Digital Marketing, IT Staffing, BPO, Application Development-Support & Maintenance, IT Infrastructure Management (becoming the next big wave) – all is perfectly taken care remotely with processes, compliant to global standards, in place with clients sitting oceans apart from the delivery center. Workforce can then be called as working in “The Human Cloud” environment almost all the time. The way things are moving The Future of Work will make the Concept of “time-zone” fade away.
Virtual workers is not only the new app for the Internet, it is one of the most necessary ones as unemployment is still quite high (at least in Canada and the US). It is extremely difficult to find work where I am (Kelowna,BC, Canada) so the internet opens up doors that I never would have discovered otherwise.
The only issue I see with virtual work is wages and salaries may drop significantly as there is more competition out there for those jobs.
Love it, save on traveling and getting tired on the way to work…building costs……total reduction on expenses. I’m looking forward to the new age