The Radar team got together in December to work through our priorities for 2013. This blog is where we narrate our work, but our real goal is to identify and create new products and businesses for O’Reilly. This year we plan to be more intentional with our focus areas, and more transparent as well, with the hope that it will engage you in shaping the topics and where we go next.
In our discussions we worked through about 35 potential themes and narrowed them down to 10 that we are actively working on in the first quarter of 2013. Here’s the list along with the Radar team member who is focused on it.
Hidden/Sharing Economy — Tim O’Reilly
Consumer AI — Edd Dumbill
Data Journalism — Alex Howard
Future of Programming — Edd Dumbill
In-Memory Data Management — Roger Magoulas
Industrial Internet — Jon Bruner
Open Data Economy — Alex Howard
Professional Making — Mike Loukides
Robotics — Mike Loukides
Synthetic Bio / Bio Hacking — Mike Loukides
Each topic will launch here on Radar with “intention casting” posts like this and this so I won’t bother expounding on them here. The idea of being more explicit and transparent up front about our interests is to more actively engage you in the discussion. We know you’ll point us at things we wouldn’t otherwise find.
As the projects unfold we’ll continue to post here on what we are discovering and we’ll noodle on the principles we discover. When we get to the point where we start to feel like we’re getting a handle on it, we’ll host public hangouts to talk about what we are learning and solicit your reaction and input. Again, the idea is to engage more directly with you on each topic.
Each quarter we’ll go through the process again and sometimes we’ll double down on our focus as we push to turn it into a business. In other cases we’ll abandon it or put it on a back burner because we are either too early or there is simply no there there. Unfortunately some themes will be interesting but won’t make sense for us to continue to pursue. We’ll often be thinking to ourselves “this feels like a Homebrew Computer Club moment, but is it going to blow up or just keep simmering?”
As 2013 develops you can also expect to see some changes here with Radar’s design to help bring focus to these themes. Blogs are great but the sequential format makes it tougher than we’d like for you to focus on a theme. We want to make it easier for you to see a holistic view of a theme as it evolves. More on that later.
Here’s to a great 2013.