The Smart Value platform

Computers have been around for about half a century and their social effects have been described under many headings. Society is changing under the in uence of advanced informa- tion technology; we face fundamental transformations in social organisation and structure. Such a change is getting much more evident in the recent period of time, nowadays digital technology pervades mayor part of the world, mobile position aware devices, social media and apps are spread everywhere. E-Government and e-Health force citizens to interact via the Internet, access and digital skills make the difference. Economy has been profoundly changed, on the one side huge market players such as B&B or UBER practically do not own any of the assets they manage but they own the “platform” to provide such services and this widely demonstrated to be the main asset. Another actual trend is about key information, user pro les, and big data analytics trading; Amazon and digital malls use to have a core business different from the appearing one as it was for Mc Donald’s as a real estate corporation. They do not earn from the of cial business, but selling selected customer’s pro les to other business companies. The combined effect of such trends is deeply in uencing society shifting key assets from the physical world to the cyber dimen sion; young citizens are changing and the change is not smooth, it is a real discontinuity. Today we are not yet in the maturity phase of what time ago was named “digital revolution”, but we are already aware that it is a true revolution, not simply a rich set of new technologies. It is profoundly impacting on society and economy, changing both of them in an almost unpredictable way. It is not the matter to increase the throughput of industries or reduce costs. Digital domain revolutionises because it is ontologically different from past; copies are perfectly equal to originals, can travel across the planet at light speed and be in nitely replicated at zero cost. There are no more distances and time constraints. Even physical objects may enjoy “tele-transportation” thanks to “makers” and 3D plotting. It is the time of the “wisdom of crowds”, to mention a well-known book. We are witnessing relevant changes due both to technological enhancements and modi cation of user requirements/expecta- tions. ICTs are stimulating changes in the way most people earn their incomes; altering the balance between our roles as consumers and producers; changing the way we educate succeeding genera- tion and train ourselves; changing the fruition of world’s cultural heritage; transforming the delivery of health care; altering the way we govern ourselves; changing the way we form and manage communities; altering the way we obtain and communicate infor- mation; contributing to bridge some cultural or physical gaps; and modifying pattern of activity among the elderly, last but not least potentially contributing to a green world. Mobile position aware devices together with powerful virtual and augmented reality applications are considered everyday commodities to nd a shop or choose an apartment in our preferred district. Such commodities are deeply in uencing our behaviour reshaping the way we do things or acquire experiences. Big and open data extended the area of data querying and data mining enabling new services and applications. Internet of things and network of sensors are progressively enabling new sectors and services, deep machine learning and crowd computing are progressively doing the rest. Crowdfunding, crypto-currency, FinTech, bitcoins and blockchains are going to revolutionise economy. In recent times arti cial intelligence is back1 and offers new applicative scenarios that may really bene t citizens in their everyday life. In particular, the crowd approach summed with big and open data opened the way to innovative approaches simply unthinkable before. Even if announced by the Chinese government as a reality in the eld of telecommunication satellites, we will not take into account today the incredible future impact on society due to quantum computers and huge sets of Qubits ensuring “superposition”, “entanglement”, and “quantum tunnelling”. This is not a complete list of changes, but highlights some of the most prominent and important effects of ICT on our society. Everyone experienced in “ICT based innovation” knows that “it is not only a matter of technology”. Of course technology advances are one of the potential actors, enablers, as in the case of the diffusion of personal computing or easy access to digital networking. Anyway different parameters are actively in uencing e-Services success or failure: cultural aspects, organisational issues, bureaucracy and work ow, infrastructure and technology in general, user’s habits, literacy, capacity, market models or merely interaction design.