It is now several years ago that I first heard Peter Cochrane (member of the Foundation’s Council of Reference) make reference to C2B ….the potential for “consumer-to-business” services.   Interestingly, during the dot.com boom, there was talk aplenty about “B2C” and “B2B” but nobody, as far as I can recall, talked about C2B - that is to say “individual end users” at the periphery of the net, developing and providing services for “corporates” at the center.  At the time, he illustrated the argument with the legendry cult movie, “405”  - made by a couple of Californian teenagers.  “Why” argued Peter “would anyone want to pay through the nose for a Madison Avenue advertising  agency to make your TV commercial, with talent like this available?”

And of course he is right.  But now the potential of an ‘open access’, peer-to-peer, bandwidth-abundant world is beginning to cause others to sit and up and think.  On May 11th, the New York Times ran a story, “An Agency’s Worst Nightmare: Ads created by Users”.   It tells of how Tyson Ibele, a 19 year old from Minneapolis won a competition on the cable network Current TV (describing itself as “the TV network created by people who watch it”) to deliver the first “viewer created” commercial.  It is a masterpiece!

But this example highlights yet again one of the key aspects of the OPLAN concept which many still are prone to overlook.  Namely, that in this emerging digital world of outrageous bandwidth abundance, it is meaningless and indeed dangerous, to adopt any business model that is founded on a fundamental differentiation between “content creators” and “content consumers”.  

This classification of the world into “service/content providers” and “service/content users” lies at the very heart of the obsolete and flawed Cable-TV and telecoms business models.  It is what gives rise to their desperate attempt to differentiate ‘bits’ from ‘bits’.  Ultimately this is fruitless and doomed effort to make water run uphill, for the liberating impact of these technologies is unstoppable – as end users enjoy the impact of Moore’s Law on the ever more powerful array of “digital creative tools” and as OPLANs begin to emerge around the world, then we will see an explosion of C2B activity – not just at the internet level but locally, within neighbourhoods, cities and communities.   The mind can only glimpse through a glass darkly what positive social and economic impact this may have – positive for all of us and quite the opposite for some vested interests that thought their ‘right to life’ was immutable.  Bring it on ... But first watch Tyson's masterpiece!