October 10th, 2008, 02:11pm
Media outlets are rolling in clichés about the current economic nastiness (”The U.S. Sneezes, The World Catches Cold”). Warren Buffett couldn’t help himself with his “toxic Kool-Aid” references and a most recent Charlie Rose interview likening the U.S. economy to a “patient lying on the floor”.
The shockwave is moving quickly: venture capital stalwarts Sequoia Capital have been instructing their portfolio companies to prepare for a “doomsday scenario”. Cutting fat, eliminating redundancy, and finding the cheapest darn way to do business is now the imperative of all those wide-eyed, once-well-funded start-ups.
My dad once gave me good advice which I didn’t take. “Son, doctors, dentists, lawyers and teachers are recession-proof. Work smart.” For the most part, it holds true (it seems some lawyers are having a hard time). But it seems like you don’t need to be bricks-and-mortar or an M.D. to stay “recession-resistant”. Like magic, outsourcing marketplaces have been going like gangbusters despite economic woes.
The more people who take pages from Sequoia’s warning to slim down to essential personnel and services find that outsourcing fits the bill nicely. It’s like having talent attached to a spigot—you can match the resource-flow to your cash-flow (and work-flow) on-demand. A Reuters article boasts that Elance (a popular outsourcing marketplace) has increased billings by 65% this year—driven by the need for smaller firms to have a flexible, highly-trained workforce.
If this downturn finds you sitting on the couch, reluctantly watching daytime TV, outsourcing marketplaces could be just ticket to get you off The Young and The Restless and back to the ranks of the gainfully employed.
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October 10th, 2008, 10:26am
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As TechCrunch reported on Wednesday, an interesting new company has moved into beta launch mode - Poptent, a “crowdsourcing platform” for the creation of advertisements. Why I put crowdsourcing in quotes is that they are not targeting a totally open platform where anyone can participate (think: YouTube), but rather a community of “small put professional teams capable of producing TV quality ads.” In the words of Poptent (you can check our a video about them here):
Poptent is a vibrant community of filmmakers (and actors, comedians, grips, animators and more!) who are connecting to each other and to companies that want to pay them for their talents. Through our passions for advertising and commercials, we are exploring a new way of creating branded messages for the Internet age.
Poptent members can show off their work, build a portfolio, collaborate with other creators, leverage our deep set of features, and best of all make money doing what they love.
Poptent brands are seeking new ways to reach their consumers and create new audiences. They are finding exciting possibilities that save them both money and time while staying just ahead of the curve of competition. They are, in a word, trendsetters.
What I particularly like about this “modified crowdsourcing” model is that it deals with some of the inequities inherent in more traditional platforms - too much power being given to the buyers, at the expense of the sellers. In such models, companies post a request to a community (for little or no upfront cost) where pretty much anyone can work it, and then if they deem any of the projects worthy they can opt to pay for them. Among other problems, there’s a scale issue here - as more and more people join, you are less and less likely (as a creator) to be successful, and in turn one might expect the best creators to start shying away.
Read More »
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October 9th, 2008, 01:17am
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So I’m on my way to Biltmore in Arizona explaining to my driver what I do for a living. I’m trying to describe Wikinomics in the simplest of terms when he interrupts me, pausing briefly to flash a wry smile. “Say no more,” he says, “I know exactly what you’re talking about.” He explains that his daughter is on the Internet all day long answering questions on ChaCha and making about $100 a day. I admit I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I’m highly intrigued. It certainly sounds like something I ought to know about, so when I get to my hotel room I look it up.
So it turns out that ChaCha is a mobile answer service for people who need information quickly on the go. Let’s say, for some reason, you want to know how many seconds there are in a decade but your math skills aren’t up to scratch (apparently there are either 315,532,800 or 315,619,200 depending on whether the decade contains two leap years, or three). Or maybe you want to know who scored the winning goal in the 1966 World Cup clash between England and West Germany (it was Geoff Hurst, the only player ever to have scored three times in a World Cup final).
You text your question in conversational English to the ChaCha system (you can also leave a voice mail). Your question is routed to a specialist in the ChaCha network (mostly Internet savvy teenagers) who provides an answer within minutes. If you want to impress your friends and associates with your wit and sense of humor, ChaCha will also send you jokes!
On average, ChaCha specialists make between $3 and $9 an hour, but the most proficient Internet researchers can make a lot more (compensation is determined by one’s speed and accuracy in answering questions). My driver’s daughter is apparently one of them. He says all of her friends collaborate with one another to find answers fast, coordinating their searches using IM. Sounds like a decent day job for a high school student, at least until artificial intelligence makes all of this redundant.
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October 8th, 2008, 08:37am
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If you click on the “contact us” link on the side of this page, it sends an email directly to me. I’ve been amazed at how many great stories and contacts I’ve received through this link, but occasionally I’ve been overwhelmed by them - and thus unable to respond to everyone, let alone share all of the messages with wikinomics readers. This has been particularly true over the last couple of months, due to various other work commitments and a couple of excellent vacations thrown in the middle. But I apologize to those who wrote that I have not yet responded to (I will try to address this shortly), and want more importantly I want to start sharing a lot more.
In turn, I’m going to start with what I consider to be the most interesting messages I receive - information about new start-ups that appear to be being built on wikinomics principles (all titles will involve the words Wikinomics in Action Start-Up). What’s slowed us down in the past is we try to investigate them all fairly thoroughly, which can take a lot of time. Instead, I’m going to throw up here the link, a summary of any extra information an individual may have sent us, and a couple more tidbits from the site, and then ask the community for feedback on it. What I’d really love to see is our readers collectively helping out some new start-ups (constructive criticism, new ideas, etc)… so I implore you to get involved.
For no other reason than that I got the message this morning while I was thinking about this, today I’m going to start with Laboratory Films. The new entity describes itself as a network based filmmaking enterprise, and is honest in saying they are not the first in the category. How they are seeking to differentiate themselves is:
- being profit oriented.
- requiring no financial backing from investors and no financial participation from its peers.
- running on a simple, global, public system.
Read More »
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October 7th, 2008, 11:26pm
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For years detractors have tried to convince us that the increasing use of videogames by today’s generation of youth would have harmful effects – i.e. they won’t be able to socialize or communicate effectively having grown up in a world of dungeons and dragons.
As most of you know, my views run completely counter to this negative perception. In my new book, Grown up Digital (a sequel to my 1997 intro to the Net Generation: Growing up Digital) I make the argument that this exposure to gaming and technology has helped enable a truly global and inter-connected generation that sees civic action as a part of their regular routine.
Luckily I’m not alone. Some new research from the Pew Internet & American Life Survey and the MacArthur Foundation finds that nearly all of today’s youth play some kind of video game, 76% help their peers understand and play the games, and that 44% of them learn about problems in society from the games they play. Seems like the antithesis of the anti-social, anti-community views propagated by sceptics.
Amanda Lenhart, author of a report on the survey and a Senior Research Specialist with the Pew Internet & American Life Project, notes, “The stereotype that gaming is a solitary, violent, anti-social activity just doesn’t hold up. The average teen plays all different kinds of games and generally plays them with friends and family both online and offline.”
The survey certainly supports this view:
- 52% of gamers report playing games where they think about moral and ethical issues.
- 43% report playing games where they help make decisions about how a community, city or nation should be run.
- 40% report playing games where they learn about a social issue.
Now if only someone could design a financial services game for them…
You can read the full report here.
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October 7th, 2008, 03:04pm
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I did not notice, but the Gmail settings page now has a “labs” tab. Labs, in the tradition of Google, are projects that are ready for public use, but not really ready to be full fleged Google applications. In Gmail, though, the labs applications seem to be roughly analogous to Firefox add-ons: applications that add small, specific bits of functionality.
With that background, I present The Google Goggles. Most of us have been on the receiving-end of a drunk-dialed phonecall, drunk-mailed email, or worse, a drunk-posted blog post. Mail Goggles aims to save us from sending drunk-mails of our own. The application is set to be active at certain times, like between midnight and 6am on Saturday and Sunday mornings. While active, any emails you try to send are held until you successfully answer some simple math questions. If you’re too loaded to answer, the email is stored until you have a chance to re-read it later, and maybe change your mind about sending it. Read More »
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October 7th, 2008, 12:53pm
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For months several of us have posted about the impact of collaboration and social networks on the election south of the border. The allure of Obama vs. McCain, not to mention their respective approaches towards technology makes for an interesting case study.
But if you’re Canadian and concerned that either the current Conservative government will get a majority hold of Parliament, or conversely concerned that it will fail to do so, then there are several appropriate story lines to follow up North. The first is a growing Facebook group called ‘Anti-Harper Vote Swap Canada,’ which now boasts over 12,000 members.
The group works as follows:
“In a completely legal fashion, it allows voters in different ridings to swap votes to best ensure the Conservatives don’t win. Almost anyone who is opposed the Conservatives can take part. If your preferred party has no chance in your riding (or if they are absolutely certain of winning) you can use your vote elsewhere to help candidates from the same party beat the Tories, while at the same time voting strategically to stop the Tories in your own riding.” Read More »
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October 7th, 2008, 11:01am
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What’s stopping you from using a mobile device, like your phone, to access your email?
Cost? Indifference? Technical Inability?
If you’re still one of the great majority not using your phone to access email (I was surprised to find that very few of us do +/- 10% according to estimates), there are any number of reasons that could be the root cause, but a new market entrant, Peek has placed a heavy bet that cost is what’s been stopping many and they have introduced a sleek new offering to do something about it.
Peek’s first device is a slim handheld that shares similar look and functionality to early Blackberry devices, which much like Peek were designed to do one thing only, and to do it well - access your email. Unlike earlier RIM offerings, though, the Peek is available without any contract at a price of $100, with a monthly access fee of $19.95.
I just recently started accessing my email from my mobile phone, when I succombed to my tech geek side and purchased the iPhone, but prior to that, I was no less attached to my work email, I just carried my laptop with me nearly everywhere. For me, the move to on-the-go email access was one of convenience - and I don’t mind blurring the lines between work and home too much - a noted characteristic of just over 40% Net Geners according to our latest research.
Our latest research also shows that cross generationally, email is considered integral to successful work completition, with 73.6% of Net Geners, 73.0% of Gen Xers and 65.4% of Boomers agreeding with the statement that “Email is a necessicity for doing your job as well as you can.” Now, we’ve all got the friend/family member who is addicted to their Blackberry/Smartphone as well as the friend/family member who swears they will never subscribe to the always-on work life enabled (read: encouraged) by ubiquitous email connectivity.
What side of the coin do you fall on? Is Peek really on to something here, or have they totally missed the boat by assuming cost, not lack of interest, is the real barrier to mass mobile email adoption?
October 7th, 2008, 09:43am
So you think you’ve come up with the next Flickr, but you’re not entirely sure about the execution, or whether people will understand the premise, what does one do? While it’s true that you could turn to your friends for advice and feedback, they may ultimately lack the technical acumen or intestinal fortitude to give you the kind of pointed critique that will help take your web design to another plateau. This conundrum is exactly where KillerStartups.com comes in, the site describes its vision as, “Tapping the wisdom of crowds to find the next internet big thing”. This is the online equivalent of the cinematic pre-screening, a chance for designers to share their vision in its earliest form in order to glean from objective third parties what is currently working well, and what could be corrected or deleted. I was inspired by Paul’s blog about this website and I decided to investigate the idea a little further….
Read More »
October 7th, 2008, 07:12am
Last week I wrote an article about Trion World Gaming in which I made reference to their impressive venture capital backing. More importantly, I made an error. I said that Peacock Equity was an NBC venture when, in fact, it was a joint venture between NBC and GE Commercial Finance - Media, Communications & Entertainment.
So I was wrong and a good reader pointed it out, and the mistake was promptly corrected. That’s one of my favourite aspects of the blogosphere: many eyes can spot even small mistakes. So after the favour, I wanted to see if the commenter had a blog of their own I could check out their handiwork. The poster left their email address when they posted the comment so I googled them.
Read More »
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October 6th, 2008, 11:45pm
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This is Gloucester, a UK based blog, is reporting that the Government Communications Headquarters is pitching a plan that would allow it to monitor all SMS and email messages sent and recieved in the UK. The plan, slated to cost English taxpayers a potential $12bn, would be the country’s largest surveillance program, and adds another data point to the security vs. privacy debate.
As Michael Geist wrote last week, the Internet has become a system that never forgets anything, and there are more and more tools that allow people to mine information from the darkest corners of the Internet. That’s become a fact of life, but it’s to be expected: people are participating in a digital medium, with full understanding that data storage is cheap and archives are plentiful, so chances are good that the things they say will be on hand, somewhere, for the foreseeable life of the Internet.
So, are email and sms messages, like public discussions, simply part of a technology that is inherently tracable, or given the targeted nature of email and sms, are they granted a special class of privacy from the rest of the bits that float bout the ‘tubes?
I’m not sure how the average citizen in the UK would feel about their own tax dollars being used to breach their privacy, but it could be a concession that people are prepared to make for their “national security.” This paricular instance aside, it seems as though the reliability and security of connections is becoming less and less trustworthy, so the honus for protection of data is being placed on end users — maybe it’s time for us all to generate some PGP private keys!
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October 6th, 2008, 06:17pm
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A number of innovations in the payments industry are enabling customers to become more ‘green’ with their purchases. Credit card companies such as Visa are taking their detailed knowledge of an individual’s purchases to create incentives and programs to allow the cardholder to become more environmentally friendly.
The latest partnership involves Visa and RePay International, a company that helps manage carbon emissions of products. The initiative allows business customers to sign up for a carbon neutral card that will automatically calculate the carbon emissions and offset them with a green project. Similar initiatives run by Barclays, Co-operative Bank and Rabobank promote responsible purchases or try to neutralize the environmental damage of products.
With detailed information on a customer’s spending, financial institutions are in a unique position to evaluate an individual’s environmental impact. Knowing that someone has a mortgage for a 5000 sq.ft house, a loan to buy an SUV, spends $200 a month on utility bills and $500 on fuel will allow a rough estimate of their carbon footprint. Keeping privacy in mind, banks can and should use this information to help customers make more educated choices.
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October 6th, 2008, 09:00am
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The HP Social Computing Lab has taken an interesting look at the dynamics of crowdsourcing in relation to content consumption. Noting that we are in the midst of an inversion from the traditional model where relatively few people produce content and the majority simply consume it, the authors seek to explore an apparent paradox - why growth in content provision continues to persist, given that the structure of crowdsourcing would predict a tragedy of the commons situation. More simply, given that we can all just sit back and free ride off of what everyone else is doing, why aren’t we all sitting back and taking the free ride?
In order to explore the problem, the authors look at a dataset of almost 10 million videos on YouTube, submitted by 579,471 people, as of April 30 2008. The key finding is that while one might look at a “digital commons” as a traditional public good, the individuals contributing to the digital commons may perceive their activity as a private good. In this mindset, they’re not necessarily getting money, but rather attention, which can essentially be looked at as a “currency” they are collecting. I would personally call this benefit reputation, as I believe it is the ability to build one’s reputation that is driving the majority of crowdsourcing activity, but it’s essentially the same point. Read More »
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October 3rd, 2008, 09:15am
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The makers of NBA 2K9 have come up with a very, very cool way to promote the game, and get users engaged in an ongoing way. It’s called The Other Season, a unique combination of video games, fantasy sports, and celebrity endorsement. Eight NBA superstars (real ones like Kevin Garnett and Steve Nash) own “franchises” within the game, which are competing with each other over the season. How they are competing is by selecting a team of gamers to join their respective squads. In other words, I, Denis Hancock, could be drafted by Steve Nash to play for his team, the Nash Potatoes- an MVP staple that always delivers.
Read More »
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October 2nd, 2008, 03:57pm
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Andrew Cherwenka posted an interesting article last night called Antisocial Web Marketing: Why McCain is Losing. While I’m personally not willing to jump to the conclusion that what’s happening on the web is the main reason he appears to be losing, the comparison between how the two leaders (& parties) are represented is startling. One would have thought that after all the stories about how Obama’s online presence was key to his triumph in the Democratic primaries would have led McCain’s team to focus on this… but apparently not.
Side note: for previous coverage of the role of wikinomics in this race, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.
Most interesting stat in the story? The top-20 user uploaded YouTube results for McCain are negative, and the top-20 for Obama are positive. Read More »
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October 2nd, 2008, 09:24am
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I’m back studying at Queen’s University, and last weekend was Homecoming. In recent years, Queen’s Homecoming has become an annual pilgrimage for Southern Ontario’s Net Gen. Thousands of them, from Ottawa to Windsor, descend on Kingston for a 24-hour party that begins with 9 AM pancake keggers and culminates with a booze-fuelled riot that sees hundreds arrested, dozens injured, and three years ago, a car flipped over and lit on fire.
A group of Kingston residents, fed up with students’ intolerable behavior and the inability of police and university administrators to stop it, have turned to transparency as a weapon. On Homecoming, and for the past month, members of SaveOurNeighborhood.ca have been patrolling Kingston’s student neighborhood to take pictures of young people committing debauchery and posting them online for the world to see.
Read More »
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September 30th, 2008, 08:43am
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Carleton University has been in the news lately for being the victim of a hacking attack. Erm, more accurately, Carleton has been in the news for having a student, Mansour Moufid, identify a serious security flaw in the Carleton Campus Card, which enabled him access to the email passwords of 32 of his fellow students. Moufid then wrote a report on how he was able to breach the school’s security, and snail mailed it to the school’s security department, who ignored him (says Moufid).
Ten days after mailing the physical copy of the report to Carleton, Moufid emailed the 32 students whose accounts had been completely compromised, and informed them that the school had been made aware of the attack on security, and had decided to ignore it. One of the students happened to be an intern at a CBC newsroom, and her supervisor found the story to be interesting — it grew from there. Carleton said that they only received the package the same day that Moufid emailed the 32 students, leaving them with no time to do anything at all. Read More »
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September 30th, 2008, 07:13am
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I know that in the past I sure have, and it appears that a number of employees at enterprise software company Citrix are now also doing the same.
Instead of the typical “here’s your company laptop - enjoy!“, Citrix is one of the few companies to have gone public with a Bring Your Own Computer policy and they are experimenting with giving employees a stipend with which to purchase their own machine. With a $2,100 allowance, employees can purchase a PC or Mac of their choice, so long as it comes with a three-year service plan and carries guaranteed next day on-site service.
There are obviously a number of challenges posed by the infinite number of options that come as a result of a customized computer program, but the program brings with it at least one important reward - and one that our research has shown to be particularly attractive to the tech-savvy Net Generation - Customization.
Much more than just a machine on which to complete work (and sometimes play), laptops, like many other tech devices have become an important means of self-expression (enter the Mac marketing strategy). The option to customize also goes far beyond the Mac vs. PC debate by allowing employees to purchase a machine that best suits their desired specs i.e. screen size and port availability vs. weight, speed vs. storage capacity etc. Read More »
September 29th, 2008, 07:12pm
Here’s the situation: you are at home watching your favorite television program and just as the scene ends you exclaim, “I KNEW that was going to happen!” Well if you ever wanted to put your powers of prediction to the test, then tvClickr is a great way to showcase your television smarts. As mentioned in my previous blog, tvClickr is a Facebook application that was developed by LiveHive Systems and it is based on the idea of NanoGaming.
As a competitive person I was intrigued by the idea that you could play against other viewers for points and prizes by answering questions about a live television show. Throughout the week I thought about testing tvClickr on a show that I was already familiar with (such as Greys Anatomy) but I decided that my review might be a little biased because I was already engaged by the show and not necessarily by the application. Instead, I opted for a show that I don’t normally watch to see if my attention waivered or if I stayed focused on the show. Enter the test subject: The Amazing Race. Read More »
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September 29th, 2008, 11:43am
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We’ve written before about how Obama has deployed technology and engaged the Net Generation to enhance his bid for the Oval Office. See here, here, here, here, and here.
Here is another interesting story in today’s Wall St. Journal.
After two campaign signs disappeared from his lawn, Preston Fosback decided to monitor it via an Internet camera. From the article:
Dozens of viewers now take shifts, based on their time zones, so as not to leave the sign unwatched at any time. Viewers in Europe take over for those turning in on the West Coast, who are in turn relieved by a dedicated crew of Australians. It’s attracted more than 40,000 viewers and ranks among the top 10 most-watched videos on Ustream.tv, the Web site that hosts the video, among videos of the two presidential candidates and comedian Dane Cook.
The video (and ongoing commentary) can be found here.
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