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February 28th, 2007, 05:20pm
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Novartis is the latest pharmaceutical company to throw some wikinomics at its approach to research and development. After investing millions of dollars trying to unlock the genetic basis of type 2 diabetes, the company released all of its raw data on the Internet, for free.
To some, this will sound peculiar. After all, type 2 diabetes and related cardiovascular risk factors – including obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol – are among the most common and most costly public health challenges in the industrialized world. Pinpointing their precise genetic origins could unlock a treasure trove of new medicines and result in a major windfall for Novartis’ shareholders.
But Novartis isn’t giving away quite as much as one might think. The research conducted by Novartis and its university partners at MIT and Lund University in Sweden merely sets the stage for the more complex and costly drug identification and development process. According to researchers there are far more leads than any one lab could possibly follow-up on alone. So by placing its data in the public domain Novartis hopes to leverage the talents of a global research community to dramatically scale and speed up its early-stage R&D activities.
Having taken the plunge, Novartis is now encouraging other companies to follow suit. “We hope that others adopt this novel and effective mode of open collaboration between scientists and physicians, in business and academia … by making the data quickly and freely available to all” said Mark Fishman, President of the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research.
There’s little doubt in my mind that increased data sharing across a wide range of sectors would help companies and researchers launch an unprecedented attack on everything from HIV/AIDS to climate change. For more on the “open access movement”, Wikipedia has a pretty good overview.
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February 25th, 2007, 05:49pm
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Starting a wiki is becoming quite easy - but getting people to engage can be quite difficult sometimes. Now site Wikipatterns.com provides a toolbox for helping wiki enthusiasts spur people’s efforts on, and recognize anti-patterns that could cause the whole thing to fall apart. Wikignomes, Wikigardeners, and WikiFairies all have their place - but beware the well intentioned OverOrganizers and Leeches.
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February 22nd, 2007, 10:25pm
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The jury has weighed in on the Alcatel-Microsoft case, forcing Microsoft to fork over $1.5 billion to Alcatel for violating two audio patents held by Lucent Technologies (which merged with Alcatel). Ironically, the patents cover standards for converting audio into the open MP3 format that spawned the digital music revolution back in the early 1990s. But the irony goes deeper.
While Lucent did have a hand in developing the MP3 format along with the Fraunhofer Institute in Germany in the 1980s, it never did anything to commercialize it. In fact, some readers may recall that Lucent actually developed and released a proprietary format to compete with MP3 in 1999. It called its format the Enhanced Perceptual Audio Coder (EPAC) and claimed it delivered superior audio quality. Lucent deemed MP3 to be too “insecure” to be commercially viable and assumed it would never fly so long as the music industry had its way. So it teamed up with Texas Instruments and a company called e.Digital to develop a digital music player that would comply with the recording industry’s secure digital music initiative (SDMI). Neither SDMI nor Lucent’s device went anywhere.
Since Lucent’s product went nowhere, and it missed the boat on MP3, Alcatel (which assumed ownership of Lucent’s patent portfolio when the companies merged) probably figured that the best way to cash in on digital music was to sue the companies that have actually worked hard to develop viable offerings. You see, waiting until companies like Microsoft have already made deep investments in MP3-related products and services maximizes the potential damages it can extract in an intellectual property case. Unfortunately, Alcatel won. And you can be pretty sure that Microsoft is just door one. Everyone company that uses MP3 technology today is potentially on Alcatel’s hitlist.
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February 22nd, 2007, 04:08pm
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Some great articles written by hardcore Wikipedians about the state of the nation. It takes a while to read through all the embedded links, but it’s worth it.
Very reflective of deep thinking and self-assessment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_failing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_not_failing
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February 22nd, 2007, 03:35pm
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The success of Apple’s iPod has opened another front in the company’s attempt to assert its rights over the player. The millions of units sold have spawned a huge accessory market – with everything from carrying cases to extra-terrestrial shaped speakers. A recent story in the Herald Tribune mentions that over 3000 of these accessories and devices have been officially endorsed by Apple, granting them full control over the player through the docking station at the bottom of the device.
However, numerous accessories have been developed without Apple’s approval. In case of speakers, the headphone jack is used to plug into the player. The creativity and range of products is impressive. One company has a line of plush toys such as dancing flowers, dragons, snakes and aliens with embedded speakers. They are sold under the trademark iPals. Others iPod related names include iCat, iPulse Bear, iSee, iCarPlay and i-CY Penguin – all clearly linked to the Apple brand.
So far, Apple’s response to most unauthorized accessories has been fairly passive. One Apple executive merely called the devices “less interesting” than those endorsed by the company. Although, it is commendable that Apple has not attempted to sue everyone who registers an “i” related name or releases an iPod compatible product, the company is missing a huge opportunity to create a more vibrant ecosystem. Opening the access to the docking station and even parts of the source code would make it easier for third parties to quickly release new products and services. This would make the iPod an innovation platform, harnessing the creativity of thousands to make the players more valuable to consumers and therefore Apple.
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February 22nd, 2007, 02:32pm
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Interesting blog article here that suggests that Google should contribute a whack of cash to the Wikipedia campaign because 50% of incoming links to Wikipedia comes from Google. Personally, I’ve noticed that the Wikipedia entry is often the second or third entry when I Google something.
You’ll note from the discussion that follows, that many of the people didn’t agree.
Thanks to our new colleague Michael Seaton for the lead. His new blog is www.theclientsideblog.com
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February 21st, 2007, 05:54pm
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Further to the whole Apple-Cisco saga, New Paradigm colleague Paul Barter has an interesting piece in the Financial Post that recounts Apple’s long history of intellectual property snafus. Paul goes back to beginning where Apple ran into trouble with Beatles’ record label over the Apple trademark. He then goes on to discuss Apple’s run-ins with Microsoft over the GUI for Windows and a litany of other events.
One thing Paul didn’t mention was Steve Jobs’ recent call to do away with DRM for music. Now I tend to agree with Steve Jobs that DRM is an unworkable idea that ultimately harms the industry more than it helps. But once again, it smacks of hypocrisy. After all, tracks bought on iTunes won’t play on rival digital music devices and many governments in Europe, most notably France, are treating the dual success of iPods and the iTunes online store as a possible breach of antitrust laws. Last year, Apple assailed proposed French legislation that would have banned restrictions on where iTunes’ tracks will play as “state-sponsored piracy.”
Now Jobs has softened his position on this and claims that Apple was bullied into the decision to use DRM in the first place by the “big four” music labels who control some 70% of the world recorded music. Nevertheless, this is yet one more example of a rather muddled position on intellectual property. In all fairness to Apple, I have a hard time thinking of a single company in the media and technology world that hasn’t struggled with the changing economics of intellectual property. The rules and norms are constantly changing, so perhaps consistency is too much to ask.
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February 20th, 2007, 10:49am
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When Apple launched the iPhone, Cisco popped up noting they had trademarked the name and weren’t going to give it up very easily. While some may argue this is just another company trying to drive profits through lawsuits and abuse of the IP protection rules, there are now claims that Cisco’s real goal is establishing interoperability for their products with Apple’s new phone. This could get interesting.
To put it mildly, interoperability and Apple don’t exactly go hand in hand, so it remains to be seen if Cisco can be successful on this front. If Cisco can pull it off, expect legions of other suitors that have tried to establish interoperability with Apple’s leading edge products to line up as well - in the courts or otherwise. Everyone seems to want a piece, and from where I sit Apple would be better served embracing such overtures rather than resisting them. Or in other words, if Cisco can beat down the door, I hope Apple will let a lot of others follow them in.
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February 19th, 2007, 12:19pm
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An Apple customer, only known as APPLENEWBIE, sent in his sons computer for repair (the computer wouldn’t turn on) but when he got the computer back it had someone else’s hard drive inside with all their personal data still on it. The resulting story, the timeline for which I have laid out below, is a testament to how Web 2.0 and the concepts of Wikinomics are shifting more power to the consumer.
Thursday Feb 15th 6:12pm – APPLENEWBIE makes a post on a Mac forum asking the community how to format his drive, also explaining the switched hard drive situation. They community quickly reminds him that the other person would want there data back, and also advises him of the security risks involved with having his hard drive in someone else’s possession.
Friday Feb 16th – Taking the advice of the community he contacts an Apple customer service rep, but the best solution they come up with is to format the drive (at which point he finds out that the drive he received back is only a 60gb not the 80gb version he originally had). APPLENEWBIE then updates the community of the situation and gets more help form other users.
Sunday Feb 18th 10:00am - After a couple more failed attempts by APPLENEWBIE to get any sort of appropriate resolution from Apple a forum users decides to post the story on digg.com so that the company will be forced to address the issue. The story recived over 2,000 diggs in a little over 4 hours and was on the sites front page. Bloggers then started picking up the story and it even appeared on sites such as ZDNet.
Sunday Feb 18th 7:00pm – All the publicity gave Apple a change of heart and our poorly serviced Mac user is now being offered a solution to his problem. He stated in his last post that “I was just contacted by a nice lady from Apple who was very apologetic about all this, and will work with us to get this sorted out. She was very surprised about my conversation earlier today with the service person who said nothing could be done. Apple has apparently also been in touch with the other party.” You can monitor his progress in the forum.
This is an interesting story on how the web can enable not only a community of support, but be leveraged to make a major company take note of a serious problem that may have otherwise been ignored.
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February 17th, 2007, 06:48pm
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More Google news, this time with a Canadian connection. Turns out Google just bought Adscape Media for US$23 million. Now headquarted in San Francisco, the company was founded in Ottawa and its R&D and design operations remain in the capital.
Google’s angle? Like Microsoft, its sees online gaming as a largely untapped venue for marketing and Adscape has developed technology to serve up advertising in online games and virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft and Second Life. Adscape’s software reportedly offers “plot/storyline” integration and enables two-way communication between players and advertisers via text, audio, video, SMS, and email. The Mercury News story had this additional tid bit:
The potential deal fuels speculation that Google is building a virtual world game, much like Linden Labs’ Second Life, using its Google Earth product as a backbone. Last April, the company purchased SketchUp, which makes software that allows people to create three-dimensional models.
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February 16th, 2007, 04:30pm
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Well it’s about time - if any company should be advertising itself all over YouTube, surely Google should be right? Well welcome to Gmail theatre, a series of decidedly low-tech commercials Google is using to promote their Gmail service. Now I don’t have official numbers so don’t quote me on this, but the total budget for the whole thing is probably in the low thousands, including all attributed labor costs and associated puppetry. So what kind of response rate do they need to beat the ROI most companies get on their marketing campaigns? Why aren’t more companies doing this yet?
Of course, it has a long way to go before it’s viewed as many times as this video on how to log-in to the Google TV Beta program. Which is very, very interesting - and reportedly an elaborate hoax. For now at least.
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February 15th, 2007, 04:04pm
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There was a great article in Scienitific American a few years ago about how mitochondrial DNA analysis suggests that everyone on Earth is descended from one woman (dubbed “Eve“) that lived in Africa 140,000 years ago.
The math behind family trees is interesting. Among the many criticisms of the Da Vinci Code (check out the Wikipedia site) is the existence of a Last Scion (the last remaining living descendent of Jesus). Religious questions, aside, the odds of any specific bloodline that was intact 2000 years ago had a single descendent alive today is extraordinarily remote — bloodlines would either have millions of members or would have died out.
A new project, started by a former PayPal executive, described in today’s Wall St. Journal, will build family trees through Wiki technology, with the hopes that one day the full diagram of the world’s population will be completed.
From the article:
Now, sites are aiming to eliminate some of those drawbacks. One new entrant, Geni.com, which was launched last month by a former PayPal executive, offers a new model, based on connecting living relatives free of charge. The site is part genealogy, part six degrees of separation: Instead of paying a fee to research family records buried in archives, it asks users to build their own family trees — using the knowledge of living relatives — that eventually will merge into one giant family tree for the world. That is the hope anyway.
Geni.com is taking some of the elements of popular so-called social-networking and user-generated content sites such as Wikipedia and MySpace. It went live in mid-January and has registered more than 100,000 users since then. It has done no traditional marketing yet, but blogs such as Digg (where users submit news stories) and Tech Crunch (which focuses on technology) passed the word. The site is free. Rather than charging fees, Geni plans on selling advertising and also plans to generate revenue by creating “premium” accounts and selling products, such as posters or coffee-table books of the family trees.
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February 14th, 2007, 03:28pm
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*This is a follow on to the post about Obama*
While the next President of the United States may not be determined by their Web 2.0 dominance, a site called techPresident.com is going to be keeping track. I alluded to CNN and Fox tracking MySpace popularity in my last post and to my surprise (although in the era of Web 2.0 I should have assumed someone would have already thought of and acted on the idea) I came across techPresident.com. Among other things the site is tracking candidate’s number of friends in MySpace (the democrats are way ahead here) Flickr photos and tags.
One of the more interesting articles that happened to be on the front page when I visited the site was a post called Googlection 2008. Michael Bassik wrote an interesting piece about how only 6 of the 17 major candidates have purchased key words and at the moment the Republicans hold the edge (4 to 2). Bassik goes on to talk about the importance of search, it’s a neat little post.
I am fascinated at how technology is and will continue to affect the democratic process in North America, but also in other countries around the world.
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February 14th, 2007, 12:09pm
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2007 is touted as the year social networking sites open to external developers. This will allow thousands of programmers to build innovative applications such as links to mobiles and other web sites.
MySpace, Facebook and Friendster have already experimented with allowing external developers to access their software. MySpace has deals with wireless carriers such as Helio and Cingular to allow users mobile access to their sites – an indication that the companies worked together to optimize the service for smaller screens. Facebook has been working with a select group of external programmers who have already created over 100 applications. One of these is a link to chat site Mosoto - useful as Facebook does not have its own chat function. Friendster’s external development pilot project has created a link to Slide.com, allowing users to post their slide shows directly to their profile page.
Facebook, orkut and Friendster have announced their desire to open their APIs to the entire developer community. MySpace, LinkedIn as well as a host of smaller sites are expected to follow. The strategy is not as risky as it sounds – Google Maps, eBay and Amazon have benefited enormously from external development. Harnessing this source of external innovation will boost traffic and with it, the advertising revenues of the sites themselves.
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February 12th, 2007, 05:22pm
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In an interesting post at Marketing Shift, author John Gartner dared to ask what’s a wiki worth? The example used is Merideth, a publisher of a few dozen magazines, launching a scrapbooking wiki, which uses Google Adwords on the site. His question - shouldn’t advertisers pay a premium to reach an audience willing to donate their time to a wiki for free? After all, they would seem to very committed and engaged with the topic, which makes them quite a valuable group to reach with a very focused message.
It’s a good question, and well worth thinking about. Of course, once you ask that another natural question follows. Should the wiki owner, in turn, share some of the ad revenue with top contributors? They’re creating a lot of the value, so why not pay them? This has started happening in a few places, particularly around user generated video content, and could expand out in time. Of course, how to distribute such rewards could be tough to figure out.
It’s a really interesting time right now to watch how wikis, open collaboration, and business models will integrate with each other in a variety of ways. But whatever the end results might be, the first movers are probably the best bet to figure it all out…
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February 12th, 2007, 12:21pm
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Presidential hopeful Barack Obama is set to expose politics and possibly the next election to the world of social networking. On January 16th 2007 a group called Barack Obama (One Million Strong for Barack) was started on Facebook. Today the group has grown to almost 260,000 members and hopes to reach 1 million members by mid March. Various celebrities have tried a number of strategies to increase voting by youth, so it will be interesting to see if taking politics to their digital hangouts proves more effective than the Vote or Die campaign that Sean ‘P. Diddy’ Combs ran in the 2004 election.
Obama recently announced the slogan for his campaign “this campaign is about you” and proceeded to launch his own social networking site my.barackobama.com. While the site experienced a few glitches when it went live, his campaign staff responded quickly and seems to have everything up and running smoothly now.
While it remains to be seen what affect grass roots social networking will have on an election, it will never the less be interesting to watch and see how other candidates and the media respond. I can see new polls being dreamed up on CNN and Fox, factoring in the size of a candidates MySpace and Facebook groups. Do you think Wolf Blitzer would be opposed to predicting the next president based on the number of friends they have in MySpace or the size of their Facebook groups?
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February 9th, 2007, 11:05am
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Virgin’s Richard Branson along with Al Gore is launching an open initiative to find new approaches for reducing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. The goal is to find an efficient way of removing one billion tones of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere annually - for ten years. Innovators have 5 years to make a submission. The winner will receive $5 million up front with another $20 million after the ten year period.
Branson and Gore’s Virgin Earth Challenge seeks to leverage the innovative capacity of the entire world to solve this truly global problem. Their open approach has been validated in successful initiatives such as the Ansari X Prize, an effort to build a private space vehicle that became the catalyst for space tourism. It is also reminiscent of Rob McEwen’s Goldcorp Challenge which successfully sought to find new methods for finding gold.
The high profile of this issue is bound to attract the best and brightest minds. If successful, their efforts will literally change the world.�
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February 7th, 2007, 10:11am
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Another Wikinomics reader Stacy Becker wrote in to alert us to a Minnesota-based citizen’s project called Map150 that is working to reinvigorate local democracy. Becker rightly argues that “citizens have tons of really important information that never finds its way into expert-driven policy-making processes.” “This information is critical,” she says, “if we are to solve the complicated problems of today.” Here’s a clip from the Map150 site.
When citizens are “co-producers” in the public good, policies will look different and outcomes for the common good will improve. This is the premise upon which the Citizens League MAP 150 project is built. Policy is now primarily set by experts and vested interests, which leads to excessive partisanship, gridlock and policy stagnation. The status quo is not sufficient for future success, and citizens must be engaged in the process of finding new and effective policy solutions.The goal of the Minnesota Anniversary Project (MAP 150) is to reinvent policy-making by reconnecting the vision, values and voices of Minnesotans with policy-making on the issues that matter most to our future.
Becker and her colleagues are working on a series of “participation tools” that will help Minnesota residents play a greater role in setting policy in areas such as education and health care. Will be interesting to see how this works out.
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February 7th, 2007, 09:30am
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One of our readers, Martin Kunert, wrote in to point out an “omission” in Wikinomics:
You mentioned the wikiized film created by the Beastie Boys in 2006. The first wiki-based film was in fact mine - VOICES OF IRAQ - made in 2004, where sent 150 DV cameras into Iraq and had Iraqis film their own country. Several hundred Iraqis participated, passing cameras from hand to hand, and sending us the resulting video tapes. The tapes were edited into a feature documentary which went into US theaters in the fall of 2004, and overseas in 2005. To record this new genre of collaborative filmmaking, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences added VOICES OF IRAQ to its permanent collection.
You can read more about Voices of Iraq on Wikipedia. Thanks Martin!
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February 6th, 2007, 01:17pm
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Think that the Nintendo Wii as at the forefront of integrating the physical and virtual worlds in gaming? Well then imagine a world where every nook and cranny is a potential space for playing a game - where a virtual play interface overlays the entire physical world, and constantly adjusts to your individual movements and actions. This, in a nutshell, captures the essence of context aware gaming. For example, instead of just playing PacMan, you are PacMan, and the terrain for your game could be your own backyard or the streets of Rome.
As outlined by the Institute for the Future (IFTF), context gaming pulls together inputs from the players enviroment (i.e. current location, and the presence of real or virtual objects in the vicinity), physical activity (i.e. movement of the player), body data (i.e. stress levels, breathing rate, etc.), and context from other people (i.e. other players or users). From this base, all kinds of different games and experiences can be created. Interestingly, IFTF indicates that the “most exciting games will come from the bottom up”, as they won’t require specialized developer skills or multi-million dollar budgets. Ideas for compelling stories and/or novel interactions are what matters most.
This is just one of the interesting areas the IFTF - an independent nonprofit research group - is focused on, as they work with a myriad of organizations to help them make informed decisions about the future. But as futuristic as it sounds, context gaming has actually been around for awhile. For example, people in Japan have been able to pay Mogi since 2003, searching out virtual items hidden throughout their physical surroundings. These items can be traded with other players, with the implicit goal of building the ultimate Mogi collection. As the technology matures, and potential gamers become more aware, the breadth of gaming options available could grow exponentially.
While the whole concept might seem silly to some, it’s part of a greater development - the integration of the physical and virtual worlds - that’s just getting started. Maybe you’d never want to play Mogi, but imagine if you could find out anything you wanted, about anything, just by (say) pointing a device at it and clicking? Or leave a “tag” behind on something your friends could see? The potential of such technologies are almost limitless, and like with many things in the Web 2.0 it’s those interested in fun and games that are leading the way.
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