b l a s t u l a reblog++

This article was written by Jon Lebkowsky in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Earlier this month I wrote a column about a DIY (Do It Yourself) home showcase I was helping to create for Maker Faire Austin. Here’s more of the story and a report on our success.

Derek Woodgate of Futures Lab and I have been meeting regularly over the last couple of years to consider the prospect of doing a showcase, which we’ve been calling “Futurama,” that would give some sense of the impact of digital convergence on lifestyles in the near future. We’d considered doing it at various conferences, such as South by Southwest Interactive and Innotech, but when we heard that Maker Faire — an offshoot of Make Magazine, the bible of the DIY movement — would be coming to Austin, we saw that as an ideal opportunity. Maker Faire brings diverse people together who make things – many kinds of things – and who want to show their stuff and share their knowledge and practice with other makers.

You might not think this would be the ideal context for a futurist showcase, but we saw the creative chaos of the first couple of Maker Faires in California, and knew the guys at Make would be receptive. Sure enough, Dale Dougherty, publisher of Make Magazine and the lead on Maker Faire, totally got our high-level concept: we were inspired by the famous “Futurama” exhibit and ride at the 1939-40 World’s Fair in New York, which took visitors on a tour of the world 20 years into the future. While this Futurama featured visions of suburbia and superhighways, our effort for Maker Faire would be the “DIY Home of the Future,” a concept that worked well as a representation of the convergent future, and as a manifestation of several converging paths in Derek’s recent thinking. We saw our effort, while not quite so grand as the World’s Fair exhibit, as the first of many — allowing time to pave the way to our vision of Tomorrowland.

In his research for various companies and projects, Derek has gathered material about different aspects of the home of the future, from which he has derived three general attributes:

• Immersive. The home of the future is a platform for both ambient and focused converged media. According to Derek, the key elements are “seamless , multi-sensory engagement and the opportunity to share, collaborate, connect, explore and grow. Immersive environments, use augmented reality to take such experiences to new highs, by enabling the user to extend the “Self” and his /her personal potential. It allows us to achieve deeper understanding of our sub- and unconscious through emotional and cognitive interfaces to reach what we call the “Sense Event” - a harmony of our sensory energy with total engagement.”
• Responsive. One possible future is personified in SARAH (Self Actuated Residential Automated Habitat), the smart house of the future on the SciFi Channel’s “Eureka.” SARAH is a responsive home – in fact, she’s quirky, and she talks back… but she’s also aligned with Derek’s vision of the responsive home as “one in which the living space is sensitive to one’s needs, personalized to the user’s requirements, anticipatory of the behavior and responsive to the person’s presence, in order to improve one’s quality of life, overall.” It “leverages ambient intelligence and socially- and context-aware smart sensors in order to optimize and augment the living conditions and environment.”
• Reconfigurable. The reconfigurable home “consists of walls and devices that respond to sound, light, touch, footsteps, smell, phone calls, mp3 players and even distant remotely connected spaces. Both the physical and the ambient elements can be changed by means of sensor and actuator systems, spatial robots, LEDs, sound and other integrated networks…. New architectural experiments are investigating how one might construct an interactive environment that builds up an internal representation of its occupants through a network of autonomous but communicative sensors, so that the home may better represent the user’s emotional, physical and cognitive state.”

For Maker Faire, we focused on immersive media. Front and center we placed Brian Park’s Flogiston Chair, which was designed “based on the idea that you didn’t need a body in cyberspace, just a presence, so the chair was a place to leave your body” (it was featured in the film “Lawnmower Man”), with a curved rear projection screen for gaming. We projected a high definition, high-intensity Xbox game as part of the demonstration. In addition, David Demaris, the wizard who did much of the actual production work, brought in a massive screen and combined ambient music with visuals that could be manipulated by moving one’s hands over sensors — a kind of visual theremin.

To give a sense of the potential for interaction between the digital environment and mind/body, we ran a demonstration of Wild Divine’s “Healing Rhythms” biofeedback software, a system that includes several guided meditations with audiovisual environments that you manipulate by controlling your own physiology, with heart rate and skin response sensors attached to your fingers.

The DIY aspect of this rests partly in the control you, as the occupant, have over configuring digital systems as well as physical architecture, and partly in the sense that you can (re)invent yourself as you reconfigure your environment.

Our DIY House of the Future isn’t too far out from current reality. There’s already a proliferation of large screen, high-definition displays in the consumer electronics market — and they’re getting cheaper — so whole-wall displays aren’t hard to imagine. Embedded sensor networks are the wave of the very near future. The immersive game environment Derek and I suggested would be relatively easy to build and market, and it drew enthusiastic crowds at Maker Faire (it helped to have game play in the mix).

The Robot Group was just downstairs from our location on the second floor of the Travis County Exposition Center’s Arena. Next year, we’ll invite Bender from that other “Futurama”.

Photo: Gaming with the Flogiston Chair. Photo by Jon Lebkowsky.

Convergent Media and the DIY Home of the Future is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:35 AM)

Originally
from WorldChanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from WorldChanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under Uncategorized

This article was written by Robert Katz in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Jessica Flannery is, in many ways, an accidental entrepreneur. Had she not met a guy named Matt at a DC conference in 1999, the entire enterprise she's known for (Kiva.org) might not exist today. I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Jessica for an interview on Thursday here at Pop!Tech 2007, where she agreed to share many of the other fortunate "accidents" that have marked her journey.

The best part about interviewing someone like Jessica Flannery is that I don’t have to tell and re-tell the Kiva story. After all, NextBillion.net was one of the first web sites or blogs to even talk about Kiva, the peer-to-peer microfinance web site that Jessica co-founded with her husband, Matt (ok, that’s a smidge of story, I admit). What’s more, Sara Standish – a former NextBillion writer and current MBA candidate – conducted a long interview with Kiva principals including Matt, Premal Shah, and Krista Van Lewen. And Kiva has been featured in a slew of mainstream media – from Newsweek to BusinessWeek to Oprah to NPR.

Since the basic story of Kiva is well known, Jessica and I decided to focus our conversation on some of the lesser-known aspects of her journey and the business it has spawned.

A special thanks to Jessica Flannery and to the Pop!Tech press folks, who helped make this interview happen.

Rob Katz: Why did you take two years away from Kiva to attend business school?

Jessica Flannery, Kiva.org: To be honest with you, it’s the result of timing more than anything. When I applied to the Graduate School of Business at Stanford in 2005, I was working at the school and Matt was full-time with TiVo. Kiva was just a nights and weekends projects. We started it with 7 businesses that I met in Uganda and $3100 that we raised through friends – and we raised it by spamming our wedding list.

So in the fall of 2005, I entered business school. About two months later, we got slammed on the blogosphere – mostly through NextBillion, Worldchanging, and BoingBoing – and Kiva took off. I was in the middle of my first semester, but I strongly considered leaving school. After all, Kiva was a dream for me. After conversations with professors and administrators at Stanford, and long talks with Matt, we decided that I would stay in school and Matt would quit TiVo to concentrate full-time on Kiva.

RK: Why Matt, and not you?

JF: I admit that it didn’t necessarily make economic sense. Matt was earning a paycheck, while I was costing money in terms of tuition and living expenses while at school. But fundamentally, Matt is a true visionary – which makes him better suited to run a high ceiling social enterprise like Kiva. And on a practical level, Matt could program the alpha and beta versions of the web site, while I couldn’t.

Ultimately, my decision to stay in school was a good one. After all, there’s no better place to be while starting something than business school. Stanford’s community of students, professors, and outside experts provided a great test bed in which Matt and I could develop and grow Kiva. It also took over six months – from November 2005 to April 2006 for Kiva’s platform and deal flow to be sufficient to support us. By April 2006, I was nearly finished with my first year of business school. So from both the theoretical and practical side, my staying in business school was definitely the right choice for me, and the right choice for Kiva.

RK: You have a bachelor’s degree in English and a passion for international development. Why did you go to business school in the first place?

JF: Honestly, I happened into business school. To understand how I ended up at Stanford, you first have to understand how I ended up in California – and that goes back to 1999. In 1999, while a senior at Bucknell University, I attended an interfaith conference in Washington, DC, where I met a really nice guy named Matt. We stayed in touch throughout the year, and when I graduated from Bucknell, I moved to California to be closer to him.

When I got to California, I moved into an 11-person group house on Sand Hill Road. My rent was $200 per month (we eventually got evicted). But I moved to California to be 3 miles from Matt, instead of 3,000 miles. I had no job – so I took copies of my resume over to the Stanford campus and walked around.

My first job in California was temping at the Center for Social Innovation. It was a directed accident, if you will. I knew I was interested in international development, so when I read a little about the Center for Social Innovation and what it does, I decided to walk in. The accident part of it was that they needed a temp. My temp job became a contract job, which became a permanent job.

RK: How did your work at the Center for Social Innovation develop from temp job to Kiva to business school and beyond?

JF: Well, the first thing I did with the Center was help coordinate the Global Philanthropy Forum. I was a 23-year old, moderating sessions with Fortune 100 CEOs – and it worked. It was an eye-opening experience for me. I kept working at the CSI for three years, watching students go through business school. At first, I wasn’t jealous – I cared about changing the world, not driving core competence in search of profits.

But after a while, core competence – and incentives, profit maximization, and all those other b-school concepts – started to make sense to my own personal mission. These business school students, contrary to their stereotypes, actually cared about changing the world. Not only that, but they were getting my dream jobs – managing and running non-profits – when they graduated. So that’s how I became interested in business school.

RK: What about Kiva?

JF: Kiva was, in some ways, born out of necessity. Matt and I had a relationship problem: he wanted to do high-tech startups, and I wanted to do microfinance in Africa. We knew that we had this problem when we were dating, but we were in love, so we got married anyway and decided to figure it out as we went along.

Think about it – Kiva marries the high-tech startup world with microfinance. It’s the perfect solution to Matt and my relationship problem, and I can honestly say that it was born out of love. I would never have been able to get my head around Kiva had I not worked at the Center for Social Innovation, where these kinds of social innovations were part of the standard, day-to-day office talk.

RK: What do you want NextBillion.net to know that we don’t already?

JF: Pursue your passion. Peel away the boundaries between you and the people you want to work with. If you do that peeling, you can build connections that change you and change the world. In the course of pursuing passion and peeling away boundaries, you become vulnerable. Don’t fight it. Strive for vulnerability – beautiful things can happen out of it. In that same light, here’s my one-liner: never, ever think you are better than anyone else. If you can live like that, and work in the BOP context, then you can really change things.

Pop!Tech - Interview With Kiva’s Jessica Flannery is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:21 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

This article was written by Jeremy Faludi in October 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

Biomimicry — getting ideas from nature for the way we make or do things — isn’t just for robots and velcro. Plant leaves and sea sponges are inspiring researchers and companies to invent better photovoltaic cells; one by building the cells the way nature does, the other by having photovoltaics work more like photosynthesis.

Built Like Nature

Daniel Morse at the University of California Santa Barbara has been getting inspiration from sea sponges to make efficient solar cells. Manufacturing silicon solar cells is currently done the way all semiconductor devices are made; the process requires very high temperatures, plasmas and vacuum chambers, and many nasty chemicals. Sponges, on the other hand, self-assemble complex nano-structured silicon materials (their skeletons) out of protein and seawater at ambient temperature and pressure. And there’s no need to worry about wafer shortages: As a university write-up of the research says, “Nature produces silica on a scale of gigatons.” The sponge’s secret is molecular templating, which Morse and colleagues are learning to imitate. Technology Review reported that “Morse and colleagues have made more than 30 types of semiconductor thin films and tested their photovoltaic properties. They are now working to incorporate the semiconductors into functional solar cells.”

Works Like Nature

In status-quo photovoltaic cells, incoming light hits a doped semiconductor material, knocking electrons out of lower orbits into a free state, where they can be carried off by metal wires. New electrons come and fill the old holes via the same wires, so the material can absorb new photons. Pushing electrons around from one place to another like this is what generates a current.

The material properties require a tricky balance. The more conductive a material is, the harder it is to hold electrons in shells that are ready to be conveniently popped up by incoming light. But the less conductive a material is, the harder it is to get the electrons out to become useful electricity. In 1991, Michael Graetzel and colleagues developed what’s now called the Graetzel cell (listed in Wikipedia as a dye-sensitized solar cell), which works more like photosynthesis in plants. It splits the process into three different steps and three different materials, using a little more chemistry than just solid-state physics. As explained on the web site of the Institute of Chemical Technology in Croatia,

In [a] natural solar cell the chlorophyll molecules absorb light (most strongly in the red and blue parts of the spectrum, leaving the green light to be reflected). The absorbed energy is sufficient to knock an electron from the excited chlorophyll. In the further transport of electron[s], other molecules are involved, which take the electron away from [the] chlorophyll. In [a] Graetzel cell, the tasks of charge-carrier generation and transport are also assigned to different species.

The “Graetzel cell” uses a thin coating of ruthenium and organic bipyridine molecules for light absorption, kicking electrons up into higher orbits but not quite all the way to being free electrons. This coating sits on a framework of titanium dioxide nano-crystals that carry the electrons away. A separate electrode replenishes the coating with more electrons (so it can absorb more photons), with the electrons carried from the electrode to the coating by a liquid electrolyte of dissolved iodine in which the entire coated framework sits.

These cells are not very efficient yet. However, they’re far cheaper than silicon solar cells, because even though they are not manufactured in a biomimetic way (like Morse’s cells), they also do not require the high vacuum and plasma and other difficulties of traditional PV manufacturing. We’ve mentioned before that the company Konarka has been selling these cells by the roll as “Power Plastic” since 2002, and have even made PV fabric. Power Plastic is currently about 3-5 percent efficient according to Machine Design, but they are hoping to jump to 20 percent efficiency by combining Graetzel cell technology with organic solar cells. Maybe at some point they’ll combine their devices with the templating methods used by Morse to create PV cells that not only work more like plant leaves, but are made more like them as well.

Image Credits: UCSB’s Convergence Magazine, Konarka

Biomimetic Solar Cells is part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on October 1. For the next four weeks, we’ll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 11:58 AM)

Originally
from Worldchanging

by WorldChanging Team


reBlogged

on Jan 1, 1970, 8:00AM

Originally by WorldChanging Team from Worldchanging on January 1, 1970, 9:00am

Posted under reblog innovation

McArthur Universal Corrective Map of the World

On Sunday September 14, i had the great pleasure to host a panel on Cartography of Protest and Social Changes with 3 artists and activists i admire a lot: Brooke Singer, John Emerson and Lize Mogel. I usually avoid writing about the events i’m so closely involved in, either because i don’t have the opportunity to take notes or because there’s some video of it about to broadcast the ridiculousness of my accent on the world wide web.

It all started a few months ago when i found about, read and fell in love with a book: An Atlas of Radical Cartography. An Atlas is in fact a collection of 10 maps and 10 essays about social issues from globalization to garbage; surveillance to extraordinary rendition; statelessness to visibility; deportation to migration.

When Christina Ray, the director of Conflux, asked me if i’d like to host a panel i said i’d like to moderate one inspired by An Atlas. Lize Mogel is one of the editors of the book (together with Alexis Bhagat ), Brooke Singer and John Emerson contributed to the volume with maps. Just like the book, the panel was an attempt to demonstrate that maps have the potential to bring about social changes. I am not going to write down everything that was say, i’ll just share with you tiny bits from the presentations:

Lize’s presentation focused on the maps of An Atlas, you can find information about them online but her intro contained some fascinating facts. Here’s just one of them:

One of the world’s most famous maps can be seen on the flag of the United Nations.

The first version was drawn in 1946 by someone from the US department and had North America at the center of the emblem. The design was changed after some complains from other countries. But one question remained: how do you design a map of the world that has to be fair and display equality between the nations? There is always something on the top, something in the middle (and thus the center of the attention), even being on the left side is not innocent as our eyes are used to read from left to right, the right is also meaningful as advertisers have discovered that the eyes always seem to fall on that side of an image. The solution adopted represents an azimuthal equidistant projection centered on the North Pole. But that area which one would believe is blank and neutral is in fact a space for debate: the area is owned by Denmark, Canada, Russia, Norway and the US and it’s unclear how it should be divided up exactly.

Pedro Lasch, Guías de Ruta / Route Guides, 2003/2006,

An Atlas of Radical Cartography exhibition opens on September 23 at the Global Education Center, UNC campus. Upcoming venues for the exhibition include New Jersey (October), New York City, Utrecht (2009), etc.

John Emerson has a very impressive portfolio and a blog i’d recommend anyone to subscribe to. He often collaborates with grass-root, independent, non-profit associations dealing with human rights, from California Coalition for Women Prisoners, to the Office of The Tibetan Government in Exile, or Injection Drug Use, Syringe Exchange Programs and AIDS in California. His belief is that maps can be useful tools that visualize power and are able to create social change, influence opinions and alter relationships between powers. By making abstraction visible, maps help us navigate through complex concepts.

Trade and Control of Gold in Northeastern DRC

One of the projects he highlighted are the compelling and revealing maps of Gold Trade in the Democratic Republic of Congo he created for the Human Rights Watch report The Curse of Gold. The gold trade is fueling conflicts and atrocities for the last 20 years in northeast of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The maps makes clearer the relationship between gold concessions, paramilitary groups in the country and gold companies from all over the world.

The art crowd will probably have heard about a project he developed together with Trevor Paglen.

CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006, Trevor Paglen & John Emerson on Wiltshire, LA

Paglen’s project ‘CIA Rendition Flights 2001-2006′ explores the practice of extraordinary rendition. Emerson designed the map that visualizes the movements of aircraft owned or operated by known CIA front companies in order to reveal the relationships that have been forged between the United States and other countries in the name of the ‘war on terror.’

Back in 2006, Paglen and Emerson installed a huge billboard displaying the map of the rendition flights on 6150 Wilshire Boulevard, in Los Angeles. The billboard, part of the The Clockshop Billboard Series. The reaction of the drivers passing by was not an unanimous feeling of revolt in front of the CIA activities, some felt proud and satisfied to see that the government was doing a good job.

Detail from the NYC Guide to War Profiteers

Another great project Emerson discussed is the NYC Guide to War Profiteers. First published in March 2003, the map located precisely government and military agencies, weapon makers, corporations, media benefiting from the war, etc. The map was available at progressive bookstores around town, and was distributed at organizing meetings for various protest events. It also listed a series of like-minded websites. You can find a scan of the hard copy online.

Brooke Singer discussed briefly her contribution to An Atlas: the Map of U.S. Oil Fix as well as her fantastic project Superfund365, a website that chronicles 365 of the worst Superfund sites where Americans live at risk of exposure to toxins.

Site entrance of Fried Industries manufacturing plant

In her introduction about map, Singer reminded the audience of a few relevant facts:

- mapping is more about representation than truthfulness,
- maps are often made by scientists and as such, are perceived as objectives. Artists don’t have the pretense to be objective, they do not assume that in the world of map making there is only objectivity going on.

Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion World Map-unfolded, 1946

She showed also two thought-provoking maps that illustrate this idea of maps as representation: McArthur Universal Corrective Map of the World, designed in the ’70s by an Australian man who was upset by the idea that he came from the “bottom of the world”. The second one is Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion map, the first world projection to show the continents on a flat surface without visible distortion. The map highlights the fact that the earth is essentially one big island over one ocean.

Originally
from we make money not art

by Regine


reBlogged

Originally by Regine from we make money not art

Posted under reblog art

While a combination of my job and a bit of intellectual curiosity leads me to devour a lot of content on the web, there is precisely one publication that I pay to have delivered to my house each week - The Economist. It’s always a special treat when one of their articles focuses on one of our regular research areas, which is just what happened last week with Following the Crowd. While much of the article covers some of the “unusual quarters” where crowdsourcing is popping up, the final few paragraphs focus on the perceived limitations and/or challenges.

I want to particularly focus on the last one, which is in relation to Cambrian House (CH). Following a brief discussion about why crowdsourcing and commerce “make uneasy bedfellows”, the article leads into the CH story with “And even those companies that do try to share the proceeds from commercial crowdsourcing are not safe.” Noting that the CH model of encouraging people to send in ideas for new software products, have the community evaluate them, and fund the winners sounded like a good idea, the article then mentions that the chief executive acknowledged that the business model failed.

I assume they’re referring to the comment that CEO Michael Sikorsky made on this TechCrunch article about CH’s failure in May. If you look at his explanation, Michael brings up one particularly interesting reason for the problems CH - “… most of the heavy lifting kept falling back on us, or a few select members of the community. A vicious cycle was created leading all of us to get more and more diffuse… Hence: the wisdom of the crowds worked well in the model, but it was our participation of crowds aspect which broke down.”

But here’s the thing - if you look back on the history of crowdsourcing models, the heavy lifting almost always falls back on a “few select members of the community”. We’ve seen this with Digg, Wikipedia, and a myriad of others - some sort of hierarchy is almost certain to emerge in a crowdsourcing platform, and within this hierarchy a relatively small group of people will do most of the heavy lifting.

In turn, what I’m saying here is that CH shouldn’t have been surprised by this, nor should they have seen it as a business model failure. That was what history indicated would happen. Moreover, as companies start blending crowdsourcing with commerce (i.e. bringing in direct financial incentives), one would expect that it would amplify the effect - and the strategy for the company should have been designed accordingly. This would indicate the Economist’s tongue in cheek final sentence might have some merit - “Perhaps it should have crowdsourced the management of the company, too?”

That’s not to say it would have neccesarily worked, however. This challenge of blending crowdsourcing with commerce is still in it’s infancy, and there is a lot of collective learning to be done - history also tells us that failure is an important part of the innovation process. I think it will be one of our more interesting research topics over the next little while. Right now, I’d agree with the Economist that they’re uncomfortable bedfellows, but somebody is going to figure it out sometime - and might that somebody be VenCorps, who acquired the CH assets in May?

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Denis Hancock


reBlogged

on Sep 11, 2008, 12:18PM

Originally by Denis Hancock from Wikinomics on September 11, 2008, 2:18pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Economic theory suggests that the workings of a market can become more efficient with the increase in available information. Essentially this means that a price differential between similar goods can not persist if all customers that have access to the good are aware of it.

Price comparison sites such as NexTag, BizRate, Shopzilla and Yahoo! Shopping already help users find the best deals by comparing retailers. However, most of these sites only include prices from online sources as opposed to physical stores. Some physical retailers have begun to put their inventory and price information online, however, comparison between them is usually cumbersome. (Not to mention the frequent inaccuracies)

Other forays into the physical world include Craigslist and eBay mashups which place real-estate, used cars and other goods on a map. These services are excellent in helping people locate things, but do little to make the markets for similar goods more efficient. Japan is one of the countries ahead of the curve. A shopper can use their mobile phone to scan QR codes on items like books and compare them to online retailers such as Amazon.

Perhaps the best example of sharing useful information on physical goods is GasBuddy.com, a website that compiles gas prices in the U.S and Canada. Volunteers text or go online to enter prices for gasoline and diesel at fuel stations in their area. The work of thousands of volunteers creates a price map that can be accessed online or though a mobile phone. Although this is unlikely to equalize gas prices across the country, local differences are less likely to persist. The maps also give analysts and regulators a better picture of the differentials across the country.

As the internet, and increasingly mobile technologies, allow people to compile information on various goods and services, the pricing power will slowly shift from sellers to buyers. Buyers in a given area essentially begin to act as one. This shift could have a profound effect on the retail industry.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Paul Artiuch


reBlogged

on Sep 12, 2008, 9:40PM

Originally by Paul Artiuch from Wikinomics on September 12, 2008, 11:40pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Over the summer my brother had a friend visiting from Japan. Erina – this petite, normally quiet and demure Asian had a good hearty laugh at the fact that our major Canadian electronics retailer fancies itself as the store of the future. Personally, I always find a visit to the electronics shop to be quite exhilarating. I enjoy perusing the new gadgets, hanging out in the speaker room, and fantasizing about the sweet 52-inch Sony flat screens. But then again, I’m male, I’m 30, and I’m a Canadian. To a Japanese native whose expectations are clearly far more demanding, our entire technology industry is a bit comical. The futuristic gadgets that we find ourselves drooling over are already two or three generations old in Japan. In fact the digital camera that Erina walked into the store with was the latest model… too bad she bought it in Japan five years ago. To her, our technology was “soooo 2003.”

I bring up this little anecdote because it is relevant to some research I’m contemplating about Asian business revolutionaries and, in particular, the mobile industry. The issue is that, despite our global business environment, the disparity between North American and Asian product innovation and consumer expectations of innovation is, honestly, quite shocking. The electronics industry in this continent is a great example of the “culture of legacy” that we North Americans complaisantly support.

Our diminished expectations extend to the technology we accept from service providers like cable and cell phone companies (anyone use on-demand cable lately – the interface is circa 1985), from our governments (still waiting on that electronic ballot, e-polling, and efficient online service delivery), and from our corporate work environments (still operating on the assumption that 3- to 5-year lifecycles for employee workstations are acceptable and that iPhones aren’t “enterprise technology”). We do not demand better technology, and so we do not get it. It’s simple supply-and-demand; Economics 101.

Three-year contracts for cell phones are standard – the assumption being that our current technology is ‘good enough’ for at least that long. Flat panel TV’s are “all the rage” right now, but if I were to poll my own group of friends, fewer than half of them have made the investment. In fact, we in Canada are, to a certain extent, proud of being luddites. We exalt our “retro” technologies and some even pine for the ‘good old days’ before the hum-drum of always-on BlackBerries, satellite TVs, laptops, and instant messaging.

When two of my colleagues decided to wait in line overnight to get the latest iPhone, the response was a mix of jealousy and incredulity – that anyone would want to pay a premium for the latest and greatest technology, and to demand it so early is still seen as somewhat geeky and eccentric.

The culture of legacy extends far beyond consumer electronics. It’s a deeply-routed cultural problem we as North Americans have. Our business assumptions are based on it. Take for example the Hype Cycle – now an industry standard technology lifecycle model. Nothing is more damaging to the psyche of the corporate technophile than Gartner’s Hype Cycle which makes it not only okay to be a technology laggard, but in certain circumstances, actually preferable. Gartner has made a business around mitigating the perceived risk of being on the leading edge of technology adoption.

But, it all starts at home. My TV is seven years old (and I still don’t have a PVR), my home computer is getting on four years old, the three-year contract on my cell phone is almost up but I probably won’t renew anytime soon, my CD player is a relic of the 90’s, and the newest electronic device I’ve purchased is an iPod. We perpetuate our own culture of legacy by refusing to update. We generally feel that, even if our technology is behind the rest of the world, it’s still good enough for now. In the end, whose fault is it that our technology in North America sucks? Clearly, it’s our own.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Naumi Haque


reBlogged

on Sep 15, 2008, 2:39AM

Originally by Naumi Haque from Wikinomics on September 15, 2008, 4:39am

Posted under reblog wikinomics

I was surfing the web trying to figure out the best way to connect my laptop to my TV (in my defence - I had an idea of how to do it in theory… but wanted to find out in practical terms) when I came across an interesting YouTube video.

It was created by a young, talented kid who lives in Japan called Adrian, aka kidguru. With a straightforward, easy to understand video, kidguru very articulately explained how someone looking to connect their laptop to a tv would go about doing it. Going to his YouTube channel I discovered that he’s been doing this for almost a year now and has turned his site Tech-World into a blogging, vlogging, podcasting, twitter site/community. He’s managed to turn a hobby into a paying job, with sponsors and understands the value of creating community around his videos. He does product and app reviews, and tutorials among other educational things.
KidGuru’s YouTube channel now has over 1,500 subscribers and over 47,000 channel views, and he is now an official YouTube partner. The YouTube partner program is an ad revenue sharing program to reward users that frequently post original content and who have a steady following of thousands of viewers.

If you have any tech related questions I suggest checking out Kidguru’s channel or sending him an e-mail!

If you go to the YouTube partner sites you’ll see all the different YouTube partner channels, the vast majority of which are Net Gen (Net Generation – The children of the baby boom; the generation that has grown up with the Internet) using YouTube to express their creativity and build a community around something they love. Some great examples are KevJumba (#6 most subscribed of all time with over 285,000 subscribers and close to 9 million channel views); HappySlip ( #11 most subscribed of all time with over 205,000 subscribers and close to 7million channel views); and VenetianPrincess (# 17 most subscribed of all time with 153,000 subscribers and almost 2.5 million channel views).

These aren’t small numbers, they are reaching a huge number of people and are influential in their own way. The best part is that from what I can tell, they’re not doing it for any particular reason other than to have fun doing something they love and sharing it with the world. Literally. If they can make money at the same time, that’s even better.

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Ming Kwan


reBlogged

on Sep 15, 2008, 8:58PM

Originally by Ming Kwan from Wikinomics on September 15, 2008, 10:58pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

I think one of the most remarkable things about the web over the last 5 years or so has been Google’s continued dominance of the search space… and how such a dominant company has emerged from a patented algortihm system called PageRank. What makes it so remarkable for me is this nibbling feeling is that Google search isn’t really that good. That’s not to say there are other search engines out there that are far superior, but rather that I just feel there should be far better search capabilities available to us by now.

To give an example of what I’m talking about, I’m a pretty big basketball fan. I also know a lot of other pretty big basketball fans. Over the years I think I’ve probably been to every basketball related news site that exists, and I have a pretty good idea of which ones seem the best, and a lot of other people seem to have similar ideas. If I was to give a short list off the top of my head, InsideHoops, HoopsHype, and RealGM are among the better daily news aggregation sites, sites like ESPN and Yahoo! remain quite strong, some blogs like True Hoop on ESPN are particularly good as well, and of course NBA.com is the primary site for the world’s dominant league. I could go into far greater detail, but you get the idea. At minimum, I think I can tell a good and popular news site from a bad one.

In turn, if I type the term “basketball news” into the Google search engine, I expect to be directed towards these type of sites in one order or another. Instead, here is what I get on the first page:

1. CBC.ca News - Basketball. I guess that because I’m searching from Canada, the basketball news site tied to our publicly subsidized (cringe) news outlet gets an extra bump… because while there is some news here, and can’t for the life of me figure out how/why it would come up #1.

2. Slam: Basketball News. Yup, I guess there definitely is a Canada bias - this one’s tied to Canoe.ca, and I can’t see any reason to rank this site anywhere near the top-100 basketball news sites out there. Not a nice site at all. On this Canada thing, note that I get defaulted to Google.ca at the start, and have the choice between searching “the web” and “pages in Canada”… and if I wanted to focus on local, I’d pick the second. I didn’t.

3. Basketball News- Pro Football Weekly. Oh we’re cooking with gas now - I’m on link THREE and I’m sent to profootballweekly.com. Key word: football. The basketball portion is trying to sell me an NBA preview magazine, and if you click on the only available link you are taken here. Note the content for 2008 is blank.

4. Google news results for basketball news. The requisite link to Google’s news stories page. I can understand this one I suppose.

5. Inside Hoops. Finally - a pretty good basketball news site! Maybe it was just bad luck near the top, and I’m going to be overwhelmed by the great basketball content to follow.

6. Broadcast-Live.com/sports/basketballnews. I’m underwhelmed. What a truly awful site. Would anyone ever go here twice? It appears to use moreover technology to pull stories from all over the web… but it’s just awful. I particularly like how if you click on the NBA standings link, or the NBA scores link, you are taken to…  nothing.

7. Douglas College Women’s Basketball News. Now I have nothing against the Douglas College Women’s Basketball team per se. In fact, I congratulate them on their 7-3 season last year, and wish them the best for the future. But #7 on the basketball news search? How? How does that happen when you are using the best search algorithm in the world? Among others, we haven’t seen ESPN, or any other major sports site for that matter, yet!

8. ESPN NBA Site. Ah, there it is. Note to ESPN NBA Editors: to improve ranking, increase coverage of Douglas College Women’s Basketball.

9. The Toronto Star. Oh Canada, our home of relatively poor basketball coverage, is now on here three times and I haven’t seen a major U.S. paper yet - and their coverage is generally much better. Note again to Google - I will take better over local every time.

10. Carleton Women’s Basketball. Uh oh- I see a rivalry brewing here between Carleton and Douglas College. Goooo, Ravens! But seriously - we’re still in the top-10 here. Two somewhat random women’s college basketball news pages?

11. Frozen Hoops. I guess us Canadians like our basketball cold, eh? Just another bad site.

So there we are - the top 11 from the world’s most powerful search engine, and I would argue an impartial analysis would indicate that maybe 2 of them SHOULD be on the front page of a basketball news search, and at LEAST five should be nowhere near the top-500 or so.

Of course you might argue this is just a quirk in the system, but I find it’s a pattern that repeats itself. I have a pretty good idea of some of the top sites I would expect in a search for “online videos“. Maybe even Google’s very own YouTube, the #3 most popular site in the world based on traffic. It shows up only in the paid ad. I have a pretty good idea of some of the top sites I would expect in a search for “pictures“. Maybe even Flickr (Share your photos. With the World), which has a global traffic rank of #33. It’s not on there, but Icanhascheezburger certainly is. In fairness, if I search “photos” Flickr does come up number one… but again, you’re telling me that the best search engine in the world can’t figure out someone searching for pictures might be interested in the top photo site?

Anyways, you get the idea. Am I the only one that just feels that there should be a far, far better search engine by now? And if one does ever come along, what would it mean to Google and it’s $135 Billion market cap?

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Denis Hancock


reBlogged

on Sep 16, 2008, 11:53AM

Originally by Denis Hancock from Wikinomics on September 16, 2008, 1:53pm

Posted under reblog wikinomics

Portal is my favorite videogame, it came out just about a year ago. For the uninitiated, the game is built around a new gameplay mechanic: portals. In a twist on the standard First Person Shooter (FPS), instead of having a bang-bang gun, you have a portal gun. It shoots two things, a blue portal and an orange portal. The portals form on any flat surface and anything that goes in one instantly comes out the other. Here’s the trailer:

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Valve, the company who developed Portal, has a long history of openness with their games. With their first game, Half-Life, Valve released a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allowed amateur game designers to build their own games on top of the existing engine. Counter-Strike, arguably the most popular FPS game ever, was the result of a fan-made project built on top of the Half-Life engine. Valve ended up hiring the team behind Counter-Strike, and eventually made a sequel.

Staying true to form, Valve released an SDK for Portal. So far as I knew, it was mostly used to make new levels with new challenges. Monday, it was announced that for the past eight months, a fan-made prequel, Portal Prelude, has been silently under development. It serves not only to add content to the existing game, but also greatly expand the scope of the story. In fact, Valve has even approached the team to offer their support and congratulations.

The team released a trailer for their project:

It’s tremendously professional.

Valve has done a fantastic job of building a loyal community around their games, and they’re very relaxed about amateur teams using their characters and settings to tell new stories, it’s very reminiscent of the Japanese manga culture. But instead of just providing their fans with material to adapt, Valve also gives them first-rate tool to work with. Based on the Portal: Prelude trailer, those tools look to be usable to great effect.

Valve, and other companies that open their games, are providing their consumers, and potential employees, with far more than a game, they’re selling a platform (and access to a loyal and enthusiastic community). It’s a fantastic example of openness and prosumption, and with benefits shared among everyone involved. This fan made extension of the story is fitting, given that the original development team was a bunch of students who caught the eye of Valve at a trade show, they were brought on board. Maybe the same thing will happen to this team…

Prelude is due out this month, here’s to hoping that my excitement isn’t misplaced!

Originally
from Wikinomics

by Jeff DeChambeau


reBlogged

on Sep 18, 2008, 4:13AM

Originally by Jeff DeChambeau from Wikinomics on September 18, 2008, 6:13am

Posted under reblog wikinomics