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Ready for the future? Lyndon Cerejo Two interesting books, two interesting concepts. One about the whirlwind transition-through speed, connectivity and product intangibles-in business, thanks to instant communication and computation, to everything being connected to everything else, and to the shrinking of mass. The other book is a study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, services and ideas over the World Wide Web. It talks `marketspace' vis a vis `market place' and gives nine essential cues for business success on the Internet. BLUR:The Speed of Change in the Connected Economy, by Stan Davis & Christopher Meyer, and Webonomics:Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web, by Evan I. Schwartz, make interesting reading, both at the business and individual levels.Authors Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer, both affiliated with Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation, kick-start their work stating that BLUR is more than just a book, and claiming that it is a starting point of ideas, observations and predictions to get readers to creatively think about their future. But what exactly is BLUR? Speed x Connectivity x Intangibles : BLUR. Or in plain English, BLUR is the whirlwind transition of a new emerging economy driven by the forces of Speed, Connectivity and Intangibles. Speed is the shrinking of time resulting from almost instantaneous communication and computation. Connectivity is the shrinkage of space with everything slowly being connected to everything else, bringing about the death of distance. And the explosive growth of the intangible side of products and services is the shrinking of mass. Thus Speed, Connectivity and Intangibles-the derivatives of time, space and mass-are blurring all things traditional in the world as we know it. And if we ignore these forces, we're doomed. The book is organised according to the three basic parts of the BLUR economy: The BLUR of desires where the traditional difference between products and services blurs and merges into an offer. In addition, the traditional roles played by the buyer and the seller change from a strictly monetary transaction and merge into an economic, information and emotional exchange between the two. The BLUR of fulfilment, where real markets start mimicking stock markets, and the market-instead of strategy-manages, prices and markets every organisation's offer. Organisations too, will have to become more adaptive to survive. The BLUR of resources where people and their knowledge, talent and experience are the most valuable resources, while capital is more of a liability. A big contrast to the resource model of yesterday where land, labour and capital ruled! BLUR ends with the authors reiterating 50 ways for readers to BLUR their businesses and 10 ways to BLUR themselves personally. Though it may be tempting to jump directly to this section, those who do so will entirely miss the context and the process leading to these 60 BLURs. BLUR serves to initiate thinking, specially through the thought-provoking questions at the end of each chapter. The answers are for you to come up with to suit your own situation and environment. BLUR belongs to a breed of books that can be applied at two levels-the business level and the personal level. The authors have also attempted to build a virtual community around BLUR by inviting readers, time and again, to interact and discuss ideas on a website set up specially for BLUR (www.blursight.com). While this is an excellent idea, its potential is lost in the execution, since the Website does not cater to all browsers. But as far as the book goes: Read it. Ruminate. Devour. GOING by the title of the book, Webonomics : Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web, you'd expect that it is for people who know a lot about the Internet. It's only after browsing through the first few pages that you realise that Webonomics is a book that is written for anyone and everyone, from a newbie (new Internet user) to the Net nerd who's trying to make the Net work for him. Webonomics, according to Evan Schwartz, is the study of the production, distribution, and consumption of goods, services and ideas over the World Wide Web. And through his book, the author pens experience to paper through nine principles supported by live case studies of Internet businesses and sites. Webonomics starts off by laying a firm foundation of the Web and tracing its history from its origins to the Web that we're tangled in today. While history can be boring, Schwartz weaves the smallest details into a gripping story that not only educates the uninitiated, but also sustains the interests of the pro. The nine principles that follow are the building blocks that businesses can use to build effective sites from the marketing angle (see box). Schwartz covers the on-line aspects of brand management, customer service, advertising, shopping, and monetary transactions and drives the point home through examples of various sites on the Internet that are doing good and bad jobs of it all. The appendix has a long list of Websites from A-to-Z, covering various subject categories providing many starting points for the reader to explore. Webonomics is a useful piece of armour to have with you when you set out to capture the latest `marketspace'.

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