Europe 2009 Transcript: Platforms,Markets & Bytes - the EconomicLandscape of the 6th Paradigm (SeanPark)

By Lee S Dryburgh on January 11, 2010 7:28 PM |

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Sean Park

was one of the award winners back at the

debut eComm Europe

lastOctober. He won the "Most Insightful Speaker" Award. The slides and video are on

his blog

. Below is a full transcript. Highlights are mine.

Sean:

Good morning everyone. As Lee said, I'm a founding of

Nauiokas Park

. Formy sins, Iwas a banker, a trader, for about 15or 16 years. Maybe to my credit, I resigned f rom that industry at the end of 2006. I thought it was remediablybroken. I've since started my new ﬁrm which is focused on principal investmentsstrategic advisory in technology-enabled disruptive business models, ﬁnancialservices, and markets.

Why am I at eComm? I'm not really sure. I'm very pleased to have been invited. It'svery exciting, but I don't know anything about telecoms, other than as acustomer, both enterprise and consumer. But, I think there are a lot of similaritiesbetween the two businesses, and increasingly so, and that's because they'redigital businesses.I'm going to talk to you about platforms, markets, and bytes, the economiclandscape of the sixth paradigm, or maybe I should have said the industrial landscape of the sixth paradigm. I'm going to try to answer these questions in 20minutes. I'm going to be broad, not deep, so indulge me if I skate over a fewpoints, and some of these I explore in

my blog

in more depth. I'm happy todiscuss them afterwards in more depth.In a world where everything can be expressed in 0's and 1's, the way we deﬁneour economy, the way that industries are structured, are they still relevant? If not,what new business models or structures are going to emerge, and maybe to focuson this and to give an example; what's the di

erence between a bank and atelecom company?Before I get into that, I want to give a little bit of background in terms of aframework of what I'm thinking. What is the sixth paradigm? If you haven't read it,you should,

Carlota Perez

is a Venezuelan economist. She wrote a book called

Technological Revolutions of Financial Capital

, builds o

Schumpeter

, talksabout long economic cycles that, in her thesis, are driven by technologicalrevolutions.Since the ﬁrst one of the modern era, which was the Industrial Revolution, sheposits that there have been ﬁve. Each of these revolutions is accompanied by a setof best practices. The economy, the society, and the institutions need to adapt tothis revolution they change. You get interesting a

ects in terms of how the

economy diverges from the financial markets and a lot of this, again skating overit, has to do with the fact that technology tends to move exponentially oradoption of new technology moves exponentially whereas our social and culturalinstitutions move linearly. There is a divergence and it takes us time to get ourheads around the way the world will work in this new paradigm. She calls it a"techno-economic paradigm".Here are the five that she's identified: Industrial Revolution, Steam and Railways,Steel/Electricity, Mass Production, and the last one is the Age of Information andTelecommunications. My thesis is that we're coming to the end of that fifthparadigm and we're about to enter the sixth paradigm.

There are a lot of similarities, I think, between this one and the one at theend of the 19th Century, in terms of what we're seeing. Today, the ﬁnancialcrisis we lived through might be analogous to the oil crisis marking the endof the Age of Information and Telecommunications

. I'm not going to go intothat too deeply.What will drive the sixth paradigm? Guessing, because as she points out you canonly really tell in hindsight; it's very hard to identify these as they're happening,but I'm going to have the hubris of a banker to try to guess that maybe this is it;cloud computing - cloud computing may be a catch phrase, but

ubiquitouscomputing storage might be the technology that drives the sixth paradigm,where you have "everything as a service"

.She picks archetypal points - Intel's release of the ﬁrst microprocessor in 1971launched the Information Age. It's not that simple; it's a cluster of technologies, acluster of people, but if you have to pick one for this, maybe it's Amazon WebServices 2006/2007 launching EC2 and S3.Another factor driving the sixth paradigm is what I call "exchange ubiquity". Ididn't really have a good catch phrase for this. Exchanges are now everywhere.Traditionally when we say exchange we think of ﬁnancial exchanges.

Betfair

tookthe exchange model and applied it to another business very directly, which is thebusiness of betting on sports. It goes beyond exchanges. Really, it's marketplacesand everything. iTunes is a marketplace. It's a marketplace that started for music,now videos, and tomorrow any digital goods - maybe. Facebook is also amarketplace. You've got the applications on top. Maybe it's a stretch, but thingslike Skype are marketplaces for voice communications.

Underlying marketplaces, and maybe this is where eComm - communicationsis at the heart of a digital economy

. Alexis Richardson, who is the Principalbehind

RabbitMQ

, which is an open-source messaging software, said

"The