Disruptive Technologies, Innovation, and Digital Libraries Research - The Case of a Billion-Dollar Business
Yi-Tzuu Chien, World Technology Evaluation Center, Inc
A research paper I came across yesterday provides interesting perspectives on disruptive technologies that could influence the future of digital libraries (and as a result our traditional libraries as well)...not sure when this paper was published, date does not appear anywhere, my guess is sometime in 2004...
I quote excerpts from the paper.
1. Untethered Communications. The capabilities for “untethered communications” usually refer to the union of wireless and mobile technologies. Included here are a variety of personal information appliances and wearable computing devices, which have shown extraordinary growth in the last decade.
2. Broadband Internet - Why is Broadband Internet is disruptive technology for future DL research and innovations? Partly this is because it can provide dramatically new modalities for communication, especially within families and communities. With convergence of video, audio, text, images and so forth, the traditional library materials, plus new Internet resources, all become a digital stream that can be accessed where the high-performance network is.
3. E-payment - Micropayment technology has been in the market place for some time. It is associated with the concept of letting Internet users to buy digital contents and services with digital pocket change – transactions of about a dollar or less. Up until recently, most Internet based businesses still can’t support micropayments because the processing fees from banks and credit card companies erase any profit...Two recent developments have changed this perspective. First, major IT players are beginning to use micropayment technology with clear success...Second, new start-up companies are making renewed efforts to develop the next generation micropayment technologies that are easier to use, more economical, and safer...Why is e-payment a disruptive force that could lead to dramatic innovations for DL?...By charging pennies for the bits one wants or for faster delivery of the bits, we’ll be able to extend the library functions and range of information services far more beyond the traditional libraries have to offer. A second impact is on the supply side of DLs. With micropayment on the Web, we’ll be able nurture a new generation of artists and content innovators who could create, sell and trade their creative works directly to the users with financial rewards.
4. Distributed storage and retrieval - A new technology known as “distributed storage”, still in its infancy, has the potential of storing and retrieving data files in the nooks and crannies of the Internet. The idea is to free data from dependency on specific computers or systems...The technology in its simplest form already exist – music sharing services, for example, which let people down-load and trade songs from Internet-connected PCs, are a crude distributed-storage system. Pushing this technology into including all sorts of data and media forms is one crucial aspect of this new technology.
The full paper (PDF format) is here
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