The first digital revolution changed just about everything we do, but the second is underway now and is going to have even more powerful transforming power, Ross Mason founder of MuleSoft told the All Things Open Conference in Raleigh on Thursday.

Mason said hyper connectivity and the decentralization of digital resources empowers individuals to provide taxi service with their personal car via UBER, rent or book accommodations in private homes via Airbnb, or buy from local merchants through distribution networks, and that’s just a beginning.

“These new business models are low overhead, decentralized services based on the value of the services they provide,” Mason said.
“The first digital revolution changed the way we work, communicate and live,” Mason noted. “The second actually changes the way we think. The Internet connected the world and gave us a really powerful network, but we’re just now discovering everything we can do with that network.”

That means, he adds, “Things are going to change in ways we can’t even think about today, just as if you thought about smartphones ten years ago, you didn’t know how far that would really go.”


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The key element, Mason said, is that the decentralization and democratization of the second digital revolution means that “You can help shape the new world being created by this network.”

Mason took his audience on a guided tour of innovations that moved the Gross domestic product (GDP), noting that it was the industrial revolution that finally freed humanity from subsistence living. “It wasn’t until a few key things occurred, such as the invention of the steam engine, which allowed us to harness power in a new way,” he said.

“What really drove it was the cotton gin,” he said. “It gave us a 50 times improvement and sparked people to think you do things more quickly and mass produce them.” Once you mass produce things, you need to transport them, so “Railroads were next. Then, in 1876 electric light came along and in 1903 the Wright Brothers made the first airplane flight.”

It wasn’t until 1945 that the first programmable computer appeared. After that you see a GDP bump, leading to the fastest growth period of the last 70 years.”

Now he said, “We’re at the point where you can put something the size of a coin on your wrist that is vastly more powerful than those first computers. But the Internet was something more profound. The Web democratized information.”

In the second digital revolution, he said, open application programming interfaces (APIs) “Democratize resources. You can embed maps in any application. You can leverage prediction engines. It puts the power of a lot of thinking and research into the hands of every developer.”

He quoted Pierre Levy who, in 1997 said, “No one knows everything. Everyone knows something,” extending that to “All knowledge resides in networks.”

Digital networks connect 2.8 billion people with a free flow of information (except in China and a few other places). But today a network is more than people.

“Making things machine readable is incredibly transformative. It lets more than 10 billion devices connect – outnumbering people.”

New apps and location services are changing how we interact with the world. “Consumer expectations have changed so much, the engineers in my company say it’s hard to keep up with it. What you’re going to see in the next ten years is an increase in innovation leveraging the network to democratize everything.”

Other decentralized services, many based on open source technologies, will transform finance via crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, and even identity management, where you sign in to sites and services via Facebook, Twitter, or Linkedin.

“The second digital revolution is changing the way we think about business models and the way the Web should be,” he said. “You should think about what you’re going to do with all that power.”