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December 31st, 2006, 02:44pm
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Wikinomics is getting some good press recently. In addition to 800 CEO Read putting it in the spotlight, Steve Pearlstein from the Washington Post called it “an intriguing and important book that belongs on your shelf next to The Wisdom of Crowds and Blink“, and Tom Peters placed it in his notable books of 2006 list - and went on to predict further that it will be the #1 book in 2007 - period.
I’m so impressed with how fast Tom Peters has got all over wikinomics. I met him years ago when we were doing a talk on the same podium. It was a big crowd — 2.000 in a theatre and another 80,000 live broadcast to theatres across the US and Canada. He spoke right after me and was very complimentary of what I had said — and it really struck me at the time that this is a man so confident in his own ideas and shoes that he is able to objectively assess other’s work and support his colleagues as he feels they warrant it. In the sometimes dog-eat-dog works of management consulting gurus his views of colleagues is very refreshing. And for that matter I’m a huge fan of his work and have been for many years.
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December 30th, 2006, 09:19pm
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Journeyman NHL defenseman Rory Fitzpatrick is currently a contender for the all-star team despite having yet to record a single goal or assist. His campaign has become an item of interest on the Internet, fueled by a website and a great deal of discussion on the Something Awful forums and other hockey blogs.
Wayne Gretzky and Don Cherry amongst others have encouraged Fitzpatrick to remove himself from the running since he would take the place away from a more deserving player. Purists become frustrated with situations like this and suggest that fans should not be able to vote at all-stars. Many suggested that Bo Jackson was elected by fans to the MLB all-star game mostly based on his football accomplishments (he silenced them by hitting a homerun to straight-away centerfield). In fact baseball stopped allowing fans from voting for players for 13 years as discussed in the passage below (from Wikipedia)
In 1957, fans of the Cincinnati Reds stuffed the ballot box, and elected a Red to every position except first base. Commissioner Ford Frick stepped in and removed two Reds from the lineup. As a response to this fiasco, fan voting was discontinued, and players, coaches, and managers were given the ability to elect starting position players until 1970.
IMO, the benefits of Internet voting (greater democracy, additional marketing reach for the league, etc) outweigh the downside. After all, if fans believe that Rory’s competitors deserve more votes, then they can set up their own MySpace pages to campaign for them.
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December 29th, 2006, 04:51pm
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Matt Taylor has an interesting piece in the Guardian about how social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo are breathing new life into London’s live music scene. The new energy and interest is apparently coming from underage teenagers, and even pre-teens, who go on MySpace to swap songs and talk about bands. A guy named Blaise Bellville is capitalizing on young people’s growing interest in music by setting up all-age concerts around London, where eight-year old music fanatics dance along side teenagers.
Lately, I’ve heard lots of people say that MySpace is exposing them to music they would never have heard before, and this is turning out to be a boon for independent artists. Live music promoters are getting MySpace savvy too, and this is translating into larger turnouts for live shows, especially now that younger kids are getting unprecedented exposure to music.
In the age of BitTorrent, it’s clear that live performances will account for a greater share of most artists’ income than album royalties. After all, you can’t digitally recreate a truly great live music experience—at least, not yet.
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December 29th, 2006, 04:06pm
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If you haven’t had a chance to check out today’s Globe and Mail, here’s the latest in our seven part series. This one explains the new science of sharing.
As mass collaboration takes root in the scientific community, smart companies have an opportunity to completely rethink how they do science, and even how they compete. For example, our research shows that companies can dramatically scale and speed up their early-stage research-and-development activities by collaborating with scientific communities to aggregate and analyze pre-competitive knowledge in the public domain.
Starting in 1999, more than a dozen pharmaceutical companies did just that — they abandoned their proprietary human genome projects to support open collaborations such as the SNP Consortium and the Alliance for Cellular Signalling…
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December 28th, 2006, 12:19pm
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Today’s edition of the Globe and Mail features another article from Don and I. We focus on what business leaders can learn about customer co-creation from Second Life, a pathbreaking virtual world where residents create all of the game content, own the IP rights to their creations, and make real money selling in-game assets in a thriving virtual economy. Here’s an excerpt:
In 1999, Philip Rosedale invented a business that most of us would only dream of. The peculiar part is that in Rosedale’s business, customers do 99 per cent of the work.
His “product” is a massively multiplayer online game (MMOG, for short) called Second Life, a fascinating world where more than 400,000 participants socialize, entertain and transact in a virtual environment fabricated almost entirely by its users.
In fact, Second Life residents are far more than just “users.” They assume virtual identities, act out fictitious roles and activities and even create virtual businesses that earn some 3,100 residents an average net profit of $20,000 a year.
In tomorrow’s installment, we discuss how a new science of sharing will accelerate innovation and learning, while transforming the way companies pursue research and development.
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December 28th, 2006, 11:47am
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Tom Welch, an education consultant, rightly pointed out in a comment on one of my posts yesterday that Wikinomics has too few examples of how digital collaboration tools are changing education.
Don and I always intended for Wikinomics to focus primarily on how mass collaboration is revolutionizing business. But the deeper we got into the topic the more we became aware of the opportunities to harness mass collaboration in the arts, science, government, education, and everyday life. We wrote a chapter on science, but didn’t get to cover other topics in nearly as much depth as we would have liked. We fully intend to use this blog to explore all of the new and interesting facets of wikinomics that didn’t make it into the book and we hope readers will contribute.
For the record, we did cite the following education examples in Wikinomics: Taking IT Global’s education project, MIT’s OpenCourseWare and the California Open Source Textbook Project. Needless to say, this barely scratches the surface.
Tom pointed us to the flat classroom project, which looks like another exciting example of how educators are using tools like classroom blogs and wikis to engage students in collaborative projects that go beyond the traditional curriculum. In this case, students in an 11th grade classroom in Bangladesh are discussing Tom Friedman’s book, The World Is Flat, with students in a 10th grade classroom in Georgia, US.
If you’ve got examples you think we should highlight, please use the “suggest a link” feature at the bottom of the left navigation.
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December 27th, 2006, 05:52pm
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Tokyo’s famous Ginza area shopping district will be blanketed with about 10,000 RFID tags; these will provide information on local stores and services for people through prototype readers developed for the trial. While hardly a new idea (similar location-based-services trials have been popping up around the world), at some point a few of them are going to really take off.
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December 27th, 2006, 12:38pm
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USA Today’s technology editor Kevin Maney has written up a nice review of Wikinomics in today’s edition. He says:
The “company,” as we’ve known it for almost a century, is about to go the way of vinyl albums, floppy disks and perked coffee. . .
Internet companies such as eBay or YouTube, where the site’s denizens create the content, are only the beginning. The Wikipedia online encyclopedia — written by thousands of individuals working without a boss — also shows the way. But these days, the trend is turning companies inside-out in industries from gold mining to motorcycles to diapers.
Don and I are also featured in a seven part series published in the Globe and Mail’s Report on Business.
The series kicked off yesterday with a piece on the evolution of peer production. In today’s article, Don and I discuss how a new marketplace for ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds is revolutionizing innovation. Here’s an excerpt:
The late-19th century chemist and microbiologist Louis Pasteur famously said that chance favours the prepared mind. The same could be said of innovation. Companies face tough dilemmas every day for which there is a uniquely prepared mind somewhere in the world that possesses the right combination of expertise and experience to solve that problem. Conventional wisdom says firms should seek to hire such people and retain them within their boundaries.
But today, thanks to the Web, a new marketplace for ideas, innovations, and uniquely qualified minds is changing everything. . . Companies that move now can leverage a global pool of talent, ideas, and innovations that vastly exceeds what they could ever hope to marshal internally.
The Globe and Mail will publish one piece by Don and I everyday until January 1st, so be sure to check it out.
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December 27th, 2006, 11:47am
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Followers of wikinomics.com in Brazil, China, Japan, Portugal, and the Spanish-speaking world can now look forward to seeing copies of Wikinomics in their native language. The publisher (Portfolio) recently announced a series of deals that will see the book come out in these markets over the next 6 months. Needless to say, Don and I are very pleased that Wikinomics is well on the path to going truly global.
More details about release dates will follow here, but here are the publishers for now:
Portugal/Brazil: Quid Novi
Spain: Paidos
Japan: Nikkei BP
China/Hong Kong: Sunbright
Meanwhile, for the time-constrained, we’ve recently learned of a deal that will see Wikinomics published in executive summary format by Soundview. Executive summaries will soon be available in print, audio, and digital.
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December 27th, 2006, 10:17am
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It was just announced that Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales will be attempting to use the power of mass collaboration to power a commercial search engine. Amazon, which launched product wikis on their site a while back, is providing the financial backing for the new venture. The product will be called ‘Wikiasari’ and they are planning a provisional launch for the first quarter of 2007.
Wales hopes to translate the community power that runs Wikipedia into creating a better and more intelligent search engine. “Wikiasari will be designed to apply the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ to judging a Web page’s value” states Wales. BusinessWeek has an interesting article on this Crowd Wisdom vs. Google’s Genius
I am personally interested to see how the Wikipedia community reacts to the commercialization of something that up until this time has refused even corporate sponsorship. It will also be interesting to see just how the search will work? Sites such as Digg and Reddit use the wisdom of crowds to percolate interesting news stories and links to the masses, and I am anxious to see just how a wiki/search mash-up will operate.
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December 22nd, 2006, 02:31pm
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Emerging city Wi-Fi networks, ubiquitous café hotspots and home wireless networks are set to change the wireless landscape. As these networks become ubiquitous their coverage will begin to rival those of traditional telecom providers. Wireless internet access brings the possibility of mobile VoIP which, as in the case of fixed VoIP, is much cheaper than using traditional cellular networks.
The reaction of telecom providers has been mixed. Some are fighting the phenomenon by trying to erect barriers such as the abolition of net neutrality. Others are jumping on the bandwagon and developing their own networks. The Bell-Rogers Inukshuk Wireless network has the potential of becoming a platform for emerging mobile IP services including voice, data and Location Based Services. Handset manufacturers are developing products such as dual handsets (that switch between cellular and Wi-Fi) Wi-Fi only phones are also being sold. One such product is a handset made by Belkin in partnership with Skype.
In the end, the customer wins as traditional mobile devices begin to compete with emerging IP offerings. The results will be lower prices and innovative new mobile services.
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December 21st, 2006, 04:40pm
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Ever since the Ray Ozzie memo suggesting Microsoft needed to go through some huge changes, I’m been impressed with how fast this transformation is taking place. The company is shifting to a software as services model, opening up, thinking differently about Intellectual Property and encouraging employee bloggers (call it re-Scobleizing)…
Jensen Harris is one of many Microsoft - yes, Microsoft - employees that publishes an open blog online. One of his latest posts announced a licensing program for the 2007 Microsoft Office system user interface which allows virtually anyone to obtain a royalty-free license to use the new Office UI in a software product, including the Ribbon, galleries, the Mini Toolbar, and the rest of the user interface. It’s complete with a recorded video with Judy Jennison, the lawyer in charge of the licensing effort, and all kinds of other details.
The UI can be used on pretty much any open source project, and on any platform including Linux and the Mac. The one exclusion is that you can’t get a royalty-free license if you plan to make a product that directly competes with the Microsoft Office product suite. Why the exclusion? Harris puts it perfectly:
Microsoft spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the research, design, and development of the new Office user interface. We’re allowing developers to license this intellectual property and take advantage of these advances in user interface design without any fee whatsoever. But we want to preserve the innovation for Microsoft’s productivity applications that are already using the new UI.
So Microsoft isn’t giving away the farm (generally a bad thing to do anyway), but they are certainly opening up the barn door. This seems to make a lot of sense, and a platform for participation, enabling a vibrant business community of co-innovators, has been created in order to unleash all kinds of new forms of value. And it being done by Microsoft, and announced on a blog by their group program manager. This open thing might really take off…
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December 21st, 2006, 09:07am
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Here’s an unusual case of Flickr spam. Advertising has been pasted directly into photos using color backgrounds that are (presumably) designed to foil automated attempts to detect it.
Also looks like the Flickr account containing these photos once belonged to a real person (see their photo sets). Only the last 46 photos are spam. Perhaps some unfortunate users’s account was hijacked for this purpose.
I suppose next we’ll have to contend with mass product placements subtly inserted into cool/interesting photos.
Flickr spam sample:
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December 21st, 2006, 07:22am
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Nintendo’s legal issues in regards to the Wii controller continue to mount, as law firm Green Welling announced it will be pursuing a class action lawsuit against them in regards to the defective straps. This suit comes just days after Nintendo announced they would voluntary exchange the straps for tougher ones that are about twice as thick if people wanted them. They also appealed to, well, common sense by telling players they “should not let go of the Wii remote itself” and prehaps “take a moment to dry their hands” if they get sweaty. You know, like what you’d do if you were waving anything else around the house like a tennis racket, bat or sword. Maybe if Nintendo agreed to add “beta” to the name of their innovative new product we could put an end to all this legal nonsense?
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December 21st, 2006, 06:32am
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It’s easy to forget that a few years ago Google had a leading edge search algorithm and very little else. But not content with their prospects for changing how multiple businesses work here on earth (and making billions of dollars in the process), Google is partnering with NASA to move into the final frontier.
In the words of NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, “(the) innovative combination of information technology and space science will make NASA’s space exploration work accessible to everyone.” Early collaborations will allow everyone to see real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, while real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future. But behind the scenes, the focus is on tackling a variety of new challenges from large-scale data management and massively distributed computing, to human-computer interfaces. Agency data sets will also be incorporated in Google earth, and there will be a focus on user studies and cognitive modeling for human computer interaction.
One of the biggest things Google brings to the table is technology that will make NASA’s detailed databases of information usable. In NASA’s words, “(we have) more information about our planet and universe than any other entity in the history of humanity. Even though this information was collected for the benefit of everyone, and much is in the public domain, the vast majority of this information is scattered and difficult for non-experts to access and to understand.”
So sometime in the next little while people around the world will be able to enjoy a simulated trip to Mars in the comfort of their own home – but this just scratches the surface of what could come from such an open, innovative collaboration platform.
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December 20th, 2006, 02:13pm
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Google recently released the top search terms used on their site in 2006, which (in the words of Google) “tend to reflect what is collectively on our minds day in and day out.” While Paris Hilton’s popularity online probably won’t surprise many, it may trouble some to find her dominating the Google News search function as well. But possibly the wierdest looking revelation is that Bebo.com, a self-described “next generation high school and college social network (like MySpace and Facebook)” site, was the most dominant Google search term for the year. If Bebo is what’s on everyone’s minds, MySpace should be worried, right?
The Alexa page ranking scores tell an entirely different story. At the start of 2006 Bebo was about a year old, and had a daily reach of a little less than 1,000 people per million online. By the end of the year their reach had peaked and then leveled off at 1,400 people per million, while page views trebled from a small base - hardly earth shattering numbers. Of course, traffic driven by the Google news release will probably bump up these numbers the next few days.
In contrast, MySpace started the year with a reach of 24,000 per million online, which grew to 40,000 per million towards the end of the year. Their page views hovered consistently around 20,000 per million throughout the year. So it appears MySpace started the year with about 24 times the reach of Bebo, yet still managed to grow faster - while Bebo was the most popular term on Google. Odd, no?
There are at least three possible scenarios here. One, a whole bunch of MySpace users are about to jump to Bebo, which seems unlikely at this point. Two, Bebo is somehow gaming the system, which is more plausible. Three is that a whole bunch of people heard about Bebo, searched for it, took a look at it, and decided there was either no reason to switch and/or it simply wasn’t worth the effort. This scenario would be very, very good news for MySpace.
It’s also worth noting that as MySpace grows more popular, it’s search frequency should decline - people don’t need Google to find their favorite site - so their relative rank should be kept in perspective. But overall, as the saying goes, there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. It’s highly unlikely that Bebo’s ranking reflects what was on the top of our collective minds this last year. Sadly, the same may not be able to be said about many of the other popular terms.
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December 19th, 2006, 10:17am
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Harrah’s entertainment is reportedly close to accepting a $16.7 billion buyout from two private equity-firms.
Much of Harrah’s success (it has outperformed its competitors consistently over the past ten years), is due to its adept use of business intelligence.
Harrah’s competes by deploying technology and the new business intelligence in an industry that traditionally depends on instinct. Competing casinos rely on the perceptiveness (and whims) of pit bosses to grant customer premiums (such as hotel rooms, show tickets, gaming chips). Harrah’s loyalty program is based on decision science. Even the hiring of Loveman, an academic without any gaming industry experience, differs from the typical “work your way from the bottom” Las Vegas career path.
Harrah’s executives felt that return on investments in lavish entertainment palaces would dwindle when the next batch of hotels opened. Rather than splashy entertainment centers, Harrah’s focused on a streamlined, standardized operation designed to create outstanding customer service across a wide geographic area.
Harrah’s Total Rewards is similar to a frequent flyer program. Guests collect points on smart cards. Data on game play, win/loss rates, hours of play, and the like are combined with demographic information to provide a detailed profile of each guest’s activities and preferences. In 2000, Harrah’s estimated that 26% of players provided 82% of its revenues; with the average player spending about $2,000 annually, typically in multiple locations Gary Loveman comments (in Fast Company), “Some people like to demean us by saying we’re the Wal-Mart of gaming. I love that. If I can be the Wal-Mart of gaming, I will feel that I’ve done extremely well for my shareholders.”
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December 19th, 2006, 09:03am
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In an important milestone for the Web 2.0, Media Metrix reports that in November MySpace became the most viewed site in the U.S. In that month alone an astonishing 38.7 billion pages were viewed on MySpace. That’s 1.29 billion a day, 54 million per hour, 895 thousand per minute, or 15 thousand per second. Or to take the number the other direction, MySpace could easily get over 500 billion page views in the next year even if growth slows to a snails pace. While questions abound about how Fox (which bought MySpace in 2005 for $580 million) can monetize this traffic, 1/10th of one penny per page view could pay back the entire investment in about a year. Add on elements like 30,000 unsigned musicians registered to MySpace and a digital music marketplace screaming out for a transformation, and the possibilities truly are endless.
As I discussed in a recent interview for ABC News, this is what the Internet 2.0 is all about - not Rupert Murdoch making money, but the shift from a presentation platform to a community platform. And MySpace is hardly the only example of this phenomenon. In our research we’ve been highlighting the rapid rise of flickr.com, craigslist.org, blogger.com and a variety of other community platforms that seemingly emerged from nowhere in mid-2005 to transform how the web is being used. It really isn’t your daddy’s Internet, and the transition - however dramatic and quick it has been - is just getting started.
Next step? Myspace becomes part of a new mode of production. Read my new book Wikinomics (co-author Anthony D. Williams) and stay tuned to this blog to learn how.
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December 18th, 2006, 10:14am
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Relatively high quality, pirated versions of Hollywood blockbusters have long been available on the streets of Beijing. Priced as low as $1, some estimates indicate they account for 93% of the market. But in what a spokesman for the Motion Picture Association (MPA) calls “a small step up a very big mountain“, five U.S. movie studios recently won a US$20,000 verdict against Beijing Century Hai Hong Trading Company for copyright infringement through pirated DVD sales.
While a movement towards IP protection for copyright holders is nice for Western content creators looking to go global, what this situation highlighted was the bigger issue they face in the Chinese market. By government mandate, only about 20 foreign films are allowed to be released each year. Blackouts are frequently imposed during the theatrical release of foreign features, and they are banned all together during holidays and other times when movie audiences are the biggest.
So right now the pirates are filling a void that is being created by the Chinese government as they try to protect domestic movie producers. Whether there is any real benefit to them is questionable; some argue domestic producers are often hurt the most by pirating. And as often happens in such situations, there are accusations that organized crime syndicates are heavily involved, and they are taking their pirated versions global. The lure? Profit margins on fake DVDs produced in Asia and sold in the U.K. are around 1,150%, versus 400% for heroin - and if you are caught the punishment is typically a fine rather than jail time.
The world is still a long way from being flat, and China is still a long way from being open. But hopefully these baby steps in regards to piracy will get us closer to a solution that benefits all producers and consumers of content around the world.
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December 17th, 2006, 11:01am
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That Google would enter the telecommunications market has, for many observers, seemed like an inevitability. The latest news coming out of the UK suggests that this move is happening even sooner than some predicted.
The Guardian and the Times are reporting today that Google and Orange (Europe’s second largest mobile operator) are in discussions to create a “Google phone.” Details are still sketchy, but reports suggest that the partnership would combine Orange’s knowledge of the mobile market with Google’s search expertise to develop a superior mobile Internet experience for users, and perhaps even a free-VOIP service that would compete with Skype. Add “Google Earth” and YouTube into the mix and one can see the contours of a pretty exciting mobile offering that would forever change the way users interact with the Web.
Needless to say, the deal has huge implications for the future of telephony, search, mobile media, and particularly, location-based services. Stay tuned for more New Paradigm analysis of this deal in the coming days and weeks.
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