Alan Majer
Alan Majer is an executive analyst at New Paradigm. Alan has contributed to a number of reports and case studies investigating new media, technology and communications. He has co-authored a paper on the future of marketing (investigating Pay-Per-Click and location based advertising), and managed an extensive research project on enterprise-wide data management. He has also played a key role in previous research programs, publishing over 35 case studies and white papers on dozens of topics ranging from an in-depth look at wireless computing to a detailed study of corporate reporting. He has conducted over 100 interviews with Wall Street CEOs and garage startup founders alike. His work has been featured in New Media magazine and the Journal of Internet Banking and Commerce. Alan has an MBA from McGill University.
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May 13th, 2008, 10:08am
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Let me preface this post with a warning - rockets are dangerous. Please be extra careful if you even think about experimenting with them. Now onto the fun stuff…
With the exception of solid fuel model rockets, actual rocket engines have been out of the reach (and budget) of most DIY’s. However, there’s an older rocket technology called a pulse jet engine which is making a comeback amongst do it yourselvers. It was first invented by Germany and used in their notorious V-1 rockets (buzz bombs) in WWII. One reason they’re popular today is that they can be built with no moving parts. Here’s more info on how they work.
Read More »
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May 9th, 2008, 05:46pm
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Ok, personal banking information is about as private as it gets right? Wrong. Turns out, bloggers like this, this, this, this , this, this, this, and this are sharing their personal finances and net worth with anyone who cares to read about it. For example, the author of the The Money Blog posts a bar chart of their net worth on every page of their site ($257,939 as of May 9th, 2009 in case anyone was curious).
It’s one thing to share information about what music you’re listening to via a widget, but would people really use a widget to display financial information? Well, 23% of people are apparently interested in having a widget that could display the current balance from their bank account.
Read More »
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April 24th, 2008, 04:30pm
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The Arduino is an open source hardware platform that’s used for electronics projects. It has a growing base of fans among DIY hobbyists and artists alike. Arduino.cc describes it:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
Because it’s open you can either buy the Arduino from a variety of people who manufacture it (for example robotshop.ca in Canada) starting at about $35 each, or you can simply build one yourself out of parts.
While the Arduino is an amazing product of mass collaboration itself, it has also spawned an interesting community of innovators who use it. Searching youtube for “arduino project” reveals dozens of results - from funky lights and robots to a visualization of voice patterns. Other companies have even integrated the arduino with mobile networks and GPS for example (there’s a contest to win one if you develop an interesting project with the arduino), the robotshop.ca site even has one with built-in Zigbee wireless capability. It will be interesting to see what new innovations come out of this little $35 hardware platform.
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April 21st, 2008, 09:05am
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Today’s Globe and Mail discusses a survey of 1,500 Canadians who were asked for their opinion on the economy. The most shocking part of the survey is what people ranked as the biggest “challenges facing Canada”. The “price of gasoline” was ranked an astonishing number 2, only “the state of the health care sytem” ranked higher. That puts gas prices ahead of issues such as “education”, “crime and safety”, “reduction of poverty” and “climate change” (which is ranked way down on the list at number 11).
I’m ashamed to see price of gas as number 2 on this list. Obviously when the contest is between our personal pocketbook and a variety of social and environmental issues (including climate change itself) we put our own interests first. If high gas prices are the biggest thing we have to worry about, then everything else in our society must be faring very well indeed.
With higher gas prices, maybe we’ll see more car pooling, fewer SUVs, trips that combine errands, and even more walking/biking/blading. Every $.05 in price in gas hikes brings automatic C02 redution with it. A $2 gas price would be the best thing that ever happened to mother nature.
I’d take improvements to education, crime & safety, and poverty reduction over cheap gas prices any day.
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April 11th, 2008, 08:54pm
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A few months back, I wrote this post on some amazing artwork that used books as a medium for user generated content. This week I stumbled across Brian Dettmer’s equally fascinating and wonderfully carved books that reveal clever “mashups” of the content found within. Some additional example here and here.
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April 2nd, 2008, 09:29am
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What happens when you decide to remove traffic signs, signal lights, and parking meters and merely ask drivers to be responsible? Sounds like a recipe for chaos… yet in the Dutch town of Drachten that’s exactly what they’ve done. Instead of chaos, they’ve found that personal responsibility and common sense go a long way toward reducing accidents and improving traffic flow. Said one citizen, “You drive more slowly and carefully, but somehow you seem to get around town quicker.”
The experiment is based on a the philosophy of what is called a “shared space”, here’s how wikipedia describes the concept:
Safety, congestion, economic vitality and community severance can be effectively tackled in streets and other public spaces if they are designed and managed to allow traffic to be fully integrated with other human activity, not separated from it. A major characteristic of a street designed to this philosophy is the absence of traditional road markings, signs, traffic signals and the distinction between “road” and “pavement”. User behaviour becomes influenced and controlled by natural human interactions rather than by artificial regulation.
Paradoxically, relying on heavily scripted traffic regulations to improve our own safety leads to a decreased sense of personal responsibility. We rely on the rules of the road instead of our own good judgment. But by removing those rules, we actually start to feel less safe, forcing good judgment and personal responsibility to flow back into the system. It’s a great model for how pushing out central authority and decisonmaking to end users can result in more optimal behavior. If it works under these circumstances, imagine how well it’d work with additional community support like we have on the web - for example, a ratings system for other drivers.
What are the implications for more distributed approaches to guiding or regulating employee behavior within firms?
Thanks to Jonathan Zittrain for bringing this example to our attention.
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March 27th, 2008, 09:13pm
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I’ve heard a lot about Dell’s supply chain, so was interested to see it in action this week when I placed an order for my new desktop machine (their XPS 630 is a terrific machine if you make a few upgrades).
Dell has an order tracking page - so, anxious to see the status of my new arrival, I’ve been checking it a couple of times a day just to see what’s up. But strangely nothing seemed to be moving - I kept seeing that my order was “in production”. But finally this morning I got an email telling me my order had shipped:
Of course, I decided to check into Dell’s order page right away and see if there was any more detailed status (I thought I might find a delivery time estimate from the courier company). But here’s what I saw when I logged in: Read More »
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March 24th, 2008, 09:28am
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In order to combat automated robots and other forms of cheating, World of Warcraft comes bundled with a rootkit (which has since been named Warden) that monitors your computer for signs of “suspicious” activity contrary to their EULA (End User License Agreement).Greg Hoglund first identified Warden in October 2005, a rootkit installed by World of Warcraft that monitors your machine every 15 seconds to identify programs that are attempting to hack or interfere with the operation of WoW that would be against the EULA (bots, unauthorized interface hacks, etc). The rootkit acts similar to spyware, and according to Hoglund:
“Besides Monitoring the WoW process space and keeping track of DLLs running in that space, the Warden pokes around into other processes, doing things like reading the window text in the title bar of every window and doing a scan of the code loaded for every process running on your computer (which it then compares against known cheat code).”
Read More »
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March 13th, 2008, 09:53am
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On this particularly gloomy Thursday, I thought it would be fitting to blog on a subject that’s more a personal area of interest - the economy. With the impending collapse of Carlyle Capital, chances for a new Fed rate cut, and record gold prices nearing $1000 (and oil at $110), it’s important to take a quick look at the bigger picture.
One of the most interesting things going on is the Feds apparent battle against deflation. To stem the credit crisis, at the end of February the Fed had auctioned off loans to banks totaling $160 billion. Then the amount per auction was increased to $50 billion (implying $100 billion would go out this month), and then this Tuesday the Fed announced a new $200 billion lending facility which could offer loans based on pledged securities. Non-trivial interventions to say the least.
To understand the logic behind some of these interventions it’s worth looking at a 2002 speech by Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke… Read More »
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March 7th, 2008, 11:33am
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So, you thought stealing music was bad…
The very unfortunate John Sullivan was executed in for stealing intellectual property - a forged bank note worth about $1. Sure the news is about 200 years late (Sullivan’s execution occurred in 1798), but given that this occurred just two blocks from our office (where the plaque pictured below stands) I thought it’d be interesting to share. Read More »
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February 1st, 2008, 09:50am
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Funny… earlier this week I was wondering about the future of Yahoo’s ad network: would this once dominant network slowly sink into the ground or would it somehow turn around and revive itself? Looks like we have the answer in the form of Microsoft’s $44.6 billion offer to buy Yahoo! While that’s a huge premium over the stock price (62%), I’m betting Microsoft knows what it’s doing here. Yahoo’s ad network has good bones, and just needs some vision on where to take it. While some of the changes Yahoo made to its ad network looked promising, as mentioned here, it would’ve been nice if they’d tried to leapfrog Google instead of just imitating them. And Microsoft seems to have some interesting ideas on the future of online advertising, but they lacked the network that Yahoo would now give them. A Microsoft/Yahoo deal looks like it’ll fill important voids in both camps. Maybe, just maybe, this will inject some new life into Yahoo’s ad network - I don’t normally root for Microsoft, but this Yahoo deal and other changes at Microsoft are a positive sign. They might just be taking Hugh Macleod’s Blue Monster campaign seriously.
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January 25th, 2008, 10:53am
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There’s a shocking ad that many Torontonian’s are seeing lately - one I pass every day on my way to work. I think about this ad every time I pass it, so yesterday I decided to bring my camera in to take a photo:
The image is of a woman holding a dice-sized nuclear pellet and the caption reads, “This little nuclear energy pellet powers an average home for six weeks”. I like it because it represents, in a single image, the tradeoff we have to weigh with nuclear energy - incredible power in a tiny package, but also deadly risks to health and safety from radiation. I like any ad that challenges my assumptions.
For me, the image is shocking. I get an immediate aversion just looking at an photo of someone holding something that would, if the image were real, likely kill them - the image is so far from the truth that (I believe) the pellet would be too hot to even touch! If the photo depicted someone holding their hand just inches above a bear trap I’d probably have the same reaction.
Yet, on the other hand, I also look at the size of that pellet, and wonder how many square meters of surface of the earth torn up from the oilsands or what size of coal-plant-produced cloud is required to produce the same amount of energy. And then also need to ask, where do we store that pellet afterward? Most of our power generating capacity has terrible side effects.
Raising Nuclear energy is sure to raise some hackles - but if sharing this image sparks anything, it should be about getting people thinking about the real problem - reducing consumption. It’s hypocritical to stick our finger at any single method of power generation while continuing to use more energy per capita than almost any nation in the world. We shouldn’t be forcing ourselves to choose one undesirable side effect over another in the first place.
This one has definitely given me food for thought. What’s your reaction - either to the ad or the topic of energy tradeoffs in general? Maybe it’s time for mass collaboration on some of our energy consumption choices.
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January 14th, 2008, 09:53am
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This post started innocently enough - wondering whether there is really any difference between a social network and a social graph (apparently it’s a matter under debate). The distinction isn’t made any easier by the fact that the entry for “social graph” on wikipedia forwards to the social network page, while the one for “social graphs” (plural) has its own entry.
To make a long story short, social graphs seem to offer more precision on the kind of social network you’re talking about - one network might include colleagues, and another could refer to school friends etc. A social network, on the other hand, doesn’t really discern amongst these different networks and how they’re related - they’re all just part of one big social network. And while that sounds like a lot of hand waving around definitions, it does open up an interesting can of worms when you start thinking about how to manage your social network. Managing a social network (where all friends are treated the same) can get a little awkward if you have coworkers and your [insert closet group of friends here] all sharing the same space.
And while we can give credit to Facebook for popularizing “social graph” as a term, the reality is that they’re still just a social network. I can’t (correct me if I’m wrong), for example, set up 10 different privacy/access profiles that differ by the particular group of friends I’m talking about. Facebook (today) does not really enable social graphs.
Now, I’m really nitpicking of course, because that’s virtually certain to change as facebook takes its great new friend list management features and starts to leverage them in managing the social graph. Facebook virtually says as much when they advise that we can, “expect to see lots of new friend list features in 2008 that will give you more control over the information you share on Facebook and who you share it with.”
So get ready for the social network to social graph transformation. That’s exciting because those social graph features are critical to unlocking new potential from social applications. Friend lists that specify access controls (for people and applications) will make facebook interactions a whole lot more relevant.
That has real implications for the value of social networks. That’s because Metcalfe’s law doesn’t enumerate network value very well, bigger networks aren’t always better. Anyone whose encountered spam in their inbox, dealt with telemarketers, or had to yell to make themselves heard at a party, knows that larger networks introduce their own set of problems. Value in social graphs comes through having enough control to obtain better signal to noise ratios from your networks. Value isn’t just limited to enabling conversations with those you want to talk to, it can also come from preventing unwanted conversations. Once Facebook and others deliver that control (by enabling true social graphs), the world of social applications will get a whole lot more interesting and useful.
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December 14th, 2007, 11:13am
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Today, Facebook just announced that it’ s opening up the Facebook Platform. In their words:
Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms.
The announcement in even more interesting in the light of the fact that Bebo, a founding member of Open Social, has apparently been working closely with Facebook in their release of their own “Open Application Platform” (some say it’s virtually a clone of the Facebook Platform). And Bebo’s no small potatoes either, according to comscore among social networks they rank third in North America (by number of users), and are first in Europe.
So what does this mean for Open Social? The InsideFaceBook blog offers a answer from Bebo CEO Michael Birch:
“What about OpenSocial?” Clearly the Facebook Platform is different than Open Social. We attend the Open Social meetings. We’ll start development early next year. We want to give developers the choice to develop on the Facebook Platform or OpenSocial on Bebo.
When Google launched Open Social, their wide array of partners and open approach seemed to catch Facebook by surprise. And yet all that perceived openness was enough to overcome some of the “not quite ready yet” problems and fragmented implementation plans among OpenSocial partners. However, now Facebook offers a way for developers to have their cake and eat it too - with a mature API that they’re willing to share beyond the walls of Facebook. It’s a big win for facebook developers, and helps thwart Google. Dave Winer calls it: “the end of OpenSocial”.
This is a very positive move by Facebook, and with a bit of luck, might signal the beginning of a new more open approach by Facebook in general. It’d be nice for Facebook to elaborate more on their approach to “licensing” to other platforms. And of course as third parties get involved there will also be some “embrace and extend” tensions as those parties pick and choose what gets implemented (something OpenSocial hasn’t been immune to either). As Bebo’s Jessica Alter puts it:
“We’re going to do our best to keep things as compatible as possible for developers. However, it will be an 80/20 thing. We want to do most of the same things with our platforms.”
With Bebo now riding shotgun with Facebook, Google has its work cut out for it if it wants to keep other OpenSocial members from breaking ranks.
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December 7th, 2007, 05:57pm
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A lot of people are up in arms about beacon. However, Facebook is good at taking this stuff right on the chin. Exact same thing happened with the NewsFeeds too:
step 1, broadcast formerly private data to friends, then wait for the outcry
step 2, apologize profusely, give users control, scale it back a bit, and then continue sharing an unprecedented amount of formerly private data (for competitive advantage I might add)
It’s interesting to examine similarities between Mark Zuckerberg’s latest apology for Beacon and this much earlier apology for the NewsFeed (which turned out to be a brilliant move).
Can they do it again? Maybe… certainly advertisers want that info, but maybe users do too. Newsfeeds turned out to be brilliant in hindsight, though heavily resisted at the time. Pushing the privacy envelope is strategically important, not just for advertising but for building stronger connections and relationships amongst Facebook’s users (i.e. weaving a stronger social graph). Sure, this time Facebook faces challenges on other fronts (discussed in a recent Fortune article), but I’d be hard pressed to bet against them at this early stage. In time, perhaps we’ll see beacon in a different light too. Privacy doesn’t come from how much we share, it’s in how much control we have over it.
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December 7th, 2007, 05:34pm
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Yesterday I had the chance to speak with Avi Muchnick, CEO of Worth1000 (check out their interesting galleries). I originally wanted to speak with Avi to ask his thoughts on social networks as platforms, and was curious about whether he thought the talented community at worth1000 might offer potential in that area.
It turned out to be a naive question because Avi began to describe Aviary (http://a.viary.com/) to me - one of the most ambitious Web 2.0 projects I’ve seen so far. Aviary is not just a powerful browser-based media creation suite, it’s an entire supply chain for creative media. The 18 tools includes things like an image editor, powerful pattern generator (see screen shot at bottom), audio editor, and even a 3D Modeller (amazing that’s even possible in a browser).
And because Aviary takes the media right from the point of creation all the way to a marketplace where it can be sold, there’s no pitfalls with copyright issues (i.e. you know the seller really authored the work they wish to sell). Just in case there’s any doubt, an application called Eagle will analyze tiny camera/image imperfections to trace images sources back to individual cameras!
Aviary is still in beta, but I can’t wait till it goes public. Check out their blog to learn more - even if it’s just to see their nifty homepage - I haven’t seen an intro page quite like it before (move your mouse over it to get the full effect).
Promotional poster for Aviary’s 3D modeller
Aviary’s pattern generator - reminds me of yahoo pipes
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November 30th, 2007, 09:44pm
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Saw a great demo of motion capture technology today by Fast Motion Studios today (thanks to Mark Jones of Seneca College for organizing the event). The martial arts demos were impressive, as were the cameras’ abilities to track the action at 300fps (apparently they’ve done as high as 800 frames per second for some applications). While the equipment was highend/expensive, it’s interesting to speculate on mainstream applications of motion capture embedded in everyday devices. Will your mobile phone tell you to correct your posture, will stores track/watch shoppers while they move down the aisles, or perhaps your airbag will change the angle of deployment to better absorb your impact in a crash?
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November 30th, 2007, 12:02pm
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November 16th, 2007, 10:54am
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My computer crashes a bit more than I’d like it to. Perhaps it’s the fact I often have 20+ browser pages at any given moment, or maybe it’s a hardware/OS problem. But the result is that I often lose valuable material I’m working on before I have the chance to go through it.
Firefox has changed all that with it’s ability to “restore” all the pages you had up in your browser after your OS crashes (see the magic button below). Now that’s a killer app! I can safely say that firefox saves me a few hours of time every week with this feature. Sure, javascript/Ajax is nice for interactivity, multi-tabbed browsing is pretty handy too - but I take my hat off to the inventor of the “restore” feature. “Thank you firefox!!”
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March 29th, 2007, 08:11am
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Every decade or so a piece of writing appears that conditions our thinking and helps shape the course of history. Work like Eric S. Raymond’s, “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” for example, help expose truths to us that, until they’re written down, somehow remain outside our grasp. In some cases it can be decades until we appreciate the full impact that they have.
“As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush in 1945 is also such a work. I’ve recently come accross it in two very different contexts; and re-reading it today, it’s startling just how visionary it was and how illuminating it remains. Here’s a particularly fun passage that we could argue anticpates charge cards accepted by merchants (not invented until 5 years later in 1950):
Take the prosaic problem of the great department store. Every time a charge sale is made, there are a number of things to be done. The inventory needs to be revised, the salesman needs to be given credit for the sale, the general accounts need an entry, and, most important, the customer needs to be charged. A central records device has been developed in which much of this work is done conveniently. The salesman places on a stand the customer’s identification card, his own card, and the card taken from the article sold - all punched cards. When he pulls a lever, contacts are made through the holes, machinery at a central point makes the necessary computations and entries, and the proper receipt is printed for the salesman to pass to the customer. …The whole record on the card may be made by magnetic dots on a steel sheet if desired, instead of dots to be observed optically, following the scheme by which Poulsen long ago put speech on a magnetic wire.
Later, another passage appears to very nearly describe what we today call “hyperlinks,” via an invention he labels a “memex” (I bolded a passage that brings wikipedia to mind):
the basic idea of which is a provision whereby any item may be caused at will to select immediately and automatically another. This is the essential feature of the memex. The process of tying two items together is the important thing. …Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails. …Wholly new forms of encyclopedias will appear, ready-made with a mesh of associative trails running through them, ready to be dropped into the memex and there amplified. The lawyer has at his touch the associated opinions and decisions of his whole experience, and of the experience of friends and authorities. The patent attorney has on call the millions of issued patents, with familiar trails to every point of his client’s interest. The physician, puzzled by its patient’s reactions, strikes the trail established in studying an earlier similar case, and runs rapidly through analogous case histories, with side references to the classics for the pertinent anatomy and histology. The chemist, struggling with the synthesis of an organic compound, has all the chemical literature before him in his laboratory, with trails following the analogies of compounds, and side trails to their physical and chemical behavior.
If we had to identify a specific inflection point in history - a single point at which we moved from the industrial age to the information age - this acticle might be it. Highly recommended reading.
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