Experience shows that the first wave of Internet-enabled change was tainted by irrational exuberance. A sober analysis of today's trends reveals that this new participation is both a blessing and a curse. Mass collaboration can empower a growing cohort of connected individuals and organizations to create extraordinary wealth and reach unprecedented heights in learning and scientific discovery... (but) the new participation will also cause great upheaval, dislocation, and danger for societies, corporations, and individuals that fail to keep up with the relentless change.
- Don Tapscott & Anthony Williams, Wikinomics, page 15.
Ming Kwan is a Research Analyst at New Paradigm and holds an Honours Business Administration degree from the Richard Ivey School of Business. She was also a summer analyst at New Paradigm where she researched the new online conglomerates, and the effects of the Asian Juggernauts. Prior to joining New Paradigm, Ming worked at an IT startup specializing in online registration systems, and at the Ministry of Government Services as a financial analyst.
Although this story happened a week ago, I thought it was a great example displaying today’s interconnected world, where, nothing goes unnoticed. So when three managers at a local Tim Horton’s in London Ontario decided to fire Nicole Lilliman - a single mother of four - for handing out one $0.16 timbit to a regular customer’s crying baby - the news exploded in the media.
A while ago I wrote a blog post on Wal-Mart and its failed social networking endeavours. Many comments I’ve received regarding that post pointed out that Wal-Mart, in general, is not a very well liked brand. Therefore, regardless of what they do, they would never succeed in that type of open environment.
Although I understand that point and agree with it to a certain extent, I do not believe that it’s impossible for companies who don’t have the best reputation offline to do well in an online environment such as social networking. Through my research I’ve come across a surprising example of one company that has done incredibly well online; a company whose success is quite unexpected. Read More »
Since Fidel’s (Castro) departure from office and his brother Raul’s succession, bans on Cubans buying consumer electronics, cell phones and staying in luxury hotels have been lifted. But these activities which used to be illegal were common place – the difference is that now, they’re legalized. Many Cubans have been buying these technologies on the black market. Internet access is still tightly restricted by government, but that hasn’t stopped people from getting online.
While this definitely isn’t the case in a communist regime, many democratic countries are looking at using Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate collaboration and engagement with its citizens:
1. Citizens as consumers of government services
2. Citizens as employees of the public service
3. Citizens as stakeholders in the policy making process.
I just came across an interesting article in the Globe and Mail regarding Facebook’s quest to expand internationally. Whether you like it or not, Facebook is a force to be reckoned with, consistently innovating and pushing its boundaries. For the critics out there that think Facebook is just a fad, I think it’s working really hard to avoid that particular fate and is doing a pretty good job at it. For one, it introduced the ‘newsfeed’ feature, that was initially ill-received by Facebook users; but after a sincere apology and a few modifications the newsfeed feature has become a staple of the Facebook interface. Similarly with Beacon, the initial launch of the project was arguably disastrous with users rallying against the initiative; again after an apology and a change from Opt-Out to Opt-In, it was business as usual again at Facebook. Most recently Facebook has integrated the social graphs concept through its privacy features. Users now have control over what each friend can see what and can essentially develop different profile pages for different friend lists (for more on this, see my previous post). Now in Facebook’s bid to go global it is turning to the wisdom of crowds to help create foreign language versions of its interface.
Facebook’s engineers have developed the Facebook ‘Translations’ application. The application provides a list of words and phrases that require translation, the user submitted translations are then voted on and lastly the translations are tested and verified. Users with the most accepted translations are featured on their language’s ‘Translations Leaderboard’. This is an ingenious way for Facebook harness its loyal user base to help it expand and grow since there will always be users willing to help translate (for free). This point is further reinforced since over 100,000 users have installed the Translations application. A key piece to the translations is ensuring the culture relevance with a tone that is consistent with local cultures. So what better group of people to translate your site than the people who are actually using it? Read More »
According to a survey of 5,000 adults and 3,000 children in the UK released by OfCom (Office of Communications) yesterday, 49% of children between the ages of 8 – 17 are on some form of social networking site.
It’s amazing the difference a few years makes in the daily lives of young people. When I was young (and I’d like to think I’m still relatively young), at elementary school, the only way to keep in touch with classmates was through snail mail (at that age I wasn’t allowed to, nor was I interested in, using the phone) – and snail mail definitely isn’t the best way to communicate with anyone. But even as I got older, I never got to use technologies such as IM to keep in touch with my friends at school during the summer time or to discuss questions about homework. (I remember when I first started using IM at the end of high school, probably around OAC, my friends thought I was really geeky and nerdy – my IM use really took off when I got to university though). I look at how my sisters study and do work now in high school and it seems like light-years have passed from the archaic idea of dictionaries, encyclopedias and even libraries – who uses books these days anyways? When you have Wikipedia! Why do you need to consult any of those ‘old-school’ resources when everything can be found online?
As a co-worker and I at New Paradigm were discussing not too long ago, Facebook was missing a key component that was impeding it from rising above and becoming truly ‘great’. Imagine what the world [or, social networking world] would be like if Facebook could allow its users to organize their profile based on social graphs.
A social graph is a set of relationships, appropriate to a given purpose – for example, my social graph for work colleagues is different than my social graph for friends (or a party). I wouldn’t necessarily want to show these two groups the same things. Read More »
Second Life (SL) was all the rage since 2005. Since then, it has even been featured in Law & Order and CSI… but where does Second Life stand now? As this msnbc article points out, all new technologies are initially driven by early adopters – but that doesn’t necessarily ensure long term success. With all the initial hype and news reports, many governments and companies jumped on the SL bandwagon investing significant amounts of money into developing their own islands and businesses in the virtual world. Some examples include: Vodafone, SAP Network, Pontiac, Reebok, Mercedes, Dell, Herman Miller… and the list goes on. However, it seems that at the end of the day, SL hasn’t lived up to expectations.
Even Robert Scoble cited SL as a ‘cooling technology’ in an interview with Shel Israel for the SAP Global Survey. In a previous blog post written by New Paradigm colleague Dan Herman, when you compare usage rates and active members, those of SL pale in comparison to social networking sites like Facebook. For example, SL users make up 0.05% of the total US population compared to Facebook users that make up 7% of the total population in the US or 22% in Canada.
Why didn’t SL live up to its great expectations? As the msn article points out, early adopters aren’t turned off by the kinks and faults of a new technology – rather they care more about being one of the first and many of them enjoy the challenge and are willing to pay a premium (in whatever form that may be). For the regular consumer though, the ultimate purpose SL serves is still unclear and on top of that, it’s pretty difficult to use.
Although there are many things China can learn from its North American counterpart in this new world economy, there’s at least one thing North Americans can learn from the Chinese.
China has developed a reputation for bootleg products (CD’s, DVDs, software etc.). So here’s a crazy thought, instead of refusing to change and opting to take measures such as suing their customers, or coming up with crazy DRM policies…. the Chinese music industry is – adapting. Albeit, not by choice, Chinese record companies have given up trying to fight piracy like their European and American counterparts and instead, are looking at different business models.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for the mass movement to curb global warming and all that…. But has anyone else noticed something interesting. There has been a lot of talk about it. (Almost) Everyone knows that it’s basically an inevitable truth … so why does it seem like nothing’s being done?
Well, to the contrary – there’s a lot being done. Perhaps, too much being done. Now, this is just a theory of mine, but I would argue that there are too many different ‘curb climate change’ initiatives going on. There’re so many, that people get confused, don’t know what to do, don’t know where to start.
For example, Al Gore gets credit for getting the ball rolling with his documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth”, and as I pointed out in a previous blog post– that really spiked people’s interest in the topic of global warming. Gore also has affiliations with the ‘Alliance for Climate Protection’, a web 2.0 initiative to raise awareness about global warming and things you can do. But here’s the thing - I was charged a little while ago to go searching for some ‘mass collaboration’ projects on the web dealing with climate change, and I found over 20 different websites, blogs, social networks and mashups.
Have you ever heard of this company? TenCent QQ. Well… it has over 220 million active users and over 641 million registered users – to be fair, that’s including multiple accounts. The success of TenCent and other grassroots Chinese companies have established such a stronghold over the Chinese user base that even Google is having trouble establishing firm ground in China (not to mention the heat they’ve been getting for complying to strict Chinese censorship conditions).
you can purchase a virtual QQ pet (pet penguin) and bring him online to meet friends, you can even buy clothes for him and get him educated.
For those of you who don’t know. Sermo is a social networking site exclusively for doctors and a select few sponsoring organizations (such as the FDA, AMA, Pfizer… and now Nature Publishing Group! - but more on that later). As the largest physicians only network with nearly 50,000 physician members, Sermo has been making headlines around the world in the past few months… and now it seems, rightfully so. There will always be naysayers, but Sermo has been doing an amazing job of continuously reinforcing its value proposition, making its community secure, more user friendly and in-line with its stated goals and vision.
Sermo’s first test of resilience occurred a few months ago in October, when a (then) popular medical blog published an article accusing Sermo of a ineffective verification/authorization process where they showed a step-by-step guide on how a non-doctor could hack into the system. [For more detail on this story, go here] To make a long story short, essentially the community came together to protect Sermo, as opposed to turn against it (which (I’m sure) were the author’s intentions). This for one, showed that Sermo has really taken root and developed a loyal following – maybe doctors were really seeing the value in this community.
The next tell tale sign that Sermo really understood the special relationship between users and service providers in the world of the web is when they took a second and listened. As CEO and founder of Sermo Daniel Palestrant said in an interview with New Paradigm, “I always thought that Pharma was a third rail and as a doctor I thought that other doctors were tired with interacting with Pharma… then we started having more and more members of the community saying, “Hey, where’s Pharma… why aren’t they in the system?” So we got quantitative feedback and consistently when members of the community would ask the community, “Do we want Pharma in here?”, it would be anywhere between 60% and 80% of the community says Pharma has to get involved somehow.” Sermo took this feedback to heart, and next thing you know Sermo announces a partnership with Pfizer.
Now, Sermo has gone one step further by announcing a partnership with Nature Publishing Group! This collaboration is aimed at fostering discussion among physicians on articles they read in medical journals such as Nature Medicine, Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, and Leukemia. The online versions of articles in these journals will have a “Discuss on Sermo” link. This fits perfectly with Sermo’s information arbitrage concept. Doctors are on the front lines, and see things as they happen, often before clinical research sees results. Bringing these two aspects together is a healthy start to bridging that gap.
I’m interested / excited to see what Sermo has in store for us next, but so far I’d say they’re on the right track.
I think it’s fair to say that all music record labels in the world are always in search of the next super star artist and hit song and I’m sure there are many different ways to go about doing that. But new Interscope artist from Atlanta, Soulja Boy, has not only managed to create a hit song ‘Crank Dat’… more impressively he has managed to take his song and music video viral.
Ok, I admit that it is arguable whether or not his song actually deserves the amount of popularity that it has (it isn’t exactly a masterpiece) but he has managed to shoot into relative superstardom among his target audience and has kids/teens/young adults singing and dancing to his song around the world. Read More »
I must admit that I didn’t run a regression analysis, but I think it’s safe to assume that there is a relationship between the release of “An Inconvenient Truth” with the spike in searches for “global warming”.
As you can see, there is a steady increase of interest in the topic, and this interest peaks right around the time when “An Inconvenient Truth” wins an Oscar - Check out point ‘C’ on the graph. It’s interesting to see that a movie was able to increase people’s interest in a topic like this, and if that’s what it takes to raise awareness about pressing issues that people like to pretend aren’t there, then so be it. Angelina Jolie should put out a documentary with a compelling slide show to talk about her forays in Africa… and so on.
For the most part, the human civilization is reactive as opposed to proactive. We see all the signs, but often times, it just seems easier to avoid and deny the situation than dealing with it directly.
There are many web 2.0 initiatives out there looking to deal with this pressing issue. Some of them are even quite innovative and engaging, and you know there are definitely some social networks out there charged with dealing ’solving’ this issue. Hopefully the power of the web 2.0 is strong enough to start a mass movement towards action… and only time will tell if it is up for the challenge.
Here are some of those sites trying to educate and make a difference:
Tree Nation: Help plant one tree out of 8 million in Africa, in the shape of a heart.
MyAbodo: Cool application that teaches both adults and kids how to ‘build’ an environmentally friendly home.
ZeroFootprint: A social network aimed to engage citizens to fight climate change. The City of Toronto, has a community of their own - this is a partnership between ZeroFootprint and the City of Toronto.
Climate change, the environment, global warming has been a hot topic lately (and rightfully so). Although some people may feel that there is too much hype surrounding the issue, the fact of the matter is that it’s not going to go away… but I digress. The reason for today’s post is because last week, when I went out for lunch I came back to the office with a plastic bag that said “environmental bag – this plastic bag is 100% biodegradable”. I was curious to find out what this meant, and as I discovered, it’s surprisingly difficult to find a definition for a biodegradable plastic bag – a definition that I was satisfied with, at least. With a bit of searching, I found out that regular plastic bags don’t ‘biodegrade’ they ‘photodegrade’ meaning that they break down into smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways (it’s estimated that plastic bags take 1,000 years to breakdown) while biodegradable bags degrade into basic properties like carbon dioxide and water (a biodegradable plastic bag takes around 18 months to dissolve). So I’m wondering, is a 100% biodegradable bag supposed to make me feel better about using it? I would like to point out, however, that biodegradable bags and regular plastic bags need to be recycled in different ways, and when the two are mixed together at a recycling plant, it makes that entire batch of plastic bags unrecyclable, since sorting out biodegradable plastic bags from normal plastic bags just isn’t feasible at that stage of the process.
The whole plastic bag issue really does seem to be taking root, and governments and businesses are taking notice and making changes. Several retailers that I shop at regularly have stopped using plastic bags, and instead are using a reusable bag. Often times, they’re even quite stylish! Lululemon has their cool, ‘motivational phrase ridden’ reusable shopping bag that I would use as a real bag any day (and I’ve seen a lot of girls using the lululemon shopping bag as their purse at the mall - I kid you not, they’re even being sold on eBay). I noticed that Jacob, has also started producing a similar type bag, as well as Steve Madden. President’s Choice has a dedicated marketing campaign to their green initiatives and even have a name for their shopping bag – the “PC GREEN, Canada’s Greenest Shopping Bag” bag.
Here’s an update article on Free Rice that my colleague Dave forwarded to me this morning. For background, see the post I wrote last week. Apparently, the program is doing really well, and warranted a front page spot on MSN’s ‘Windows Live Today’ box when he signed in to messenger. For the full story, please read the MSN news article, but to give you a bit of a preview. Free Rice has hit over 1 billion grains of rice - “enough to feed 50,000 hungry people for one day”. Over the weekend there was a huge spike with 122,377,240 and 136,236,930 grains donated per day Saturday and Sunday.
I’m not going to delve into the subject of Wal-Mart and whether it is an evil corporation that mistreats its non-unionized workers, but I do have to say that I feel a bit sorry for them.
As several articles over the past few months (just Google Wal-Mart + facebook) have pointed out, Wal-Mart has (and now, as I’ll explain in this post - HAD) a sponsored facebook group that, you could argue, failed miserably. To give readers some context – Wal-Mart’s facebook group was called “Wal-Mart Roommate Style Match”. The purpose of this group was for college students heading back to school to figure out their respective ‘styles’ and to find cool back to school supplies at Wal-Mart. Instead of talking about which cool product they were going to get, members of the group started posting anti Wal-Mart content and entered into discussions on the evils of this American corporation. Even the pictures posted in the group were anti Wal-Mart in nature…
Thanks to my lovely friend Betty who works at Scotia Capital (thanks Betty) I received an e-mail the other day with the link http://www.freerice.com/index.php and accompanying subject line ‘try out if you get a sec’. I was curious to see what this was about, considering a busy i-banker had the time to send me this email, I could take some of my ‘thinking time’ (since I work at a think tank – get it?) to see what this was about.
I go to the page and am greeted by this nice logo:
And an explanation of what I have to do. For each word I get right, this site will donate 10 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program. FreeRice (which is a sister site to Poverty.com) argues that playing the vocabulary game will help me – and how will it do that… (From the site)
Learning new vocabulary has tremendous benefits. It can help you:
Formulate your ideas better
Write better papers, emails and business letters
Speak more precisely and persuasively
Comprehend more of what you read
Read faster because you comprehend better
Get better grades in high school, college and graduate school
Score higher on tests like the SAT, GRE, LSAT and GMAT
Perform better at job interviews and conferences
Sell yourself, your services, and your products better
Be more effective and successful at your job
These are reasons that appeal to people of all ages and walks of life. Who doesn’t want to do better in school, or at their job? The game, as it turns out is actually pretty fun and challenging – AND you feel like you’re learning something new. Did you know that Goober = peanut or Tubercle = nodule.
So how does FreeRice.com get rice to these people in need? The way they’ve set it up as actually quite ingenious, and is an illustration of some of the new creative ways companies are reaching out to customers. Instead of a blatant aggressive marketing ploy, companies are now partnering with a good cause, something that people are interested in. They’re showing you that they care, and with your help – can make a difference. They are showing you exactly how much progress we’ve all made, on their totals page… AND at the same time they’re getting their name out there. You’ve got to give these companies a bit of credit for trying, and I think it’s a pretty smart idea. On top of that, FreeRice.com has been completely transparent to their vocab game players and explain exactly what they’re about, how it works, where the rice comes from and how it gets there. And as Don Tapscott says in his book “The Naked Corporation” transparency leads to customer trust (obviously Don says it in a much more eloquent way than I just did – but you get the idea).
In their FAQ section they state clearly:
“The rice is paid for by the advertisers whose names you see on the bottom of your vocabulary screen. This is regular advertising for these companies, but it is also something more. Through their advertising at FreeRice, these companies support both learning (free vocabulary for everyone) and reducing hunger (free rice for the hungry).”
“When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.”
Some of the companies involved (that show up each time I click on my vocab answer) are: Amex, Macy’s, Fujitsu, TimeLife, Radisson, iTunes, Liz Claiborne, Toshiba…
Looking at the usage, the game seems to be gaining popularity. On the first day this site was launched – October 7, 2007 : 830 grains of rice were donated, now only a month later on October 31, 2007: 59,167,790 grains were donated (in one day). To date, a grand total of 537,163,380 grains of rice have been donated.
Cool video I found on SAP Developer Network (SDN) ‘evangelist’ - Craig Cmehil’s blog.
It’s a really good illustration of the opportunities presented by the Web 2.0 and some of the changes it’s bringing to the business world.
itopia’s Virtual Finance Forum has exhibitors such as IBM and SAP. Businesses are really starting to find interesting and creative ways to use these tools to their advantage.
So I was perusing around facebook this morning doing ‘research’. No seriously, I actually get to go on facebook at work, to do work. While I was looking through the facebook applications, the easily recognized Google logo caught my eye – Google is finally on facebook! The first of (what I foresee) many facebook applications was for their Google News service. Launched a mere 10 days ago (I checked out some of the discussions and the developer first posted a “Launched!” discussion on October 12th) it has already amassed 2,276 daily active users (45% of total) meaning - with some quick mental math - that 5,058 people have added the application. Looking at the comments on the page it seems like Google is getting a lot of positive feedback on the application. It updates users on the news stories they’re interested in while at the same time allowing you to share them with your friends and see what news your friends are interested in / have shared.
To give you all an idea of how many businesses are actually on facebook. A quick search shows 500+ sponsored groups on facebook, the largest being “Apple Students” with 422,752 members. Victoria’s Secret - PINK line is a close second with 350,378 members. Apparently, many businesses have jumped on the facebook bandwagon and are trying to get plugged in. There’s an interesting blog post on Social Media Optimization blog that outlines a facebook marketing campaign that went well (Target) and one that flopped (Wal-Mart).
Needless to say facebook has been the topic of many discussions, and it looks like a lot of companies are taking notice and taking action. I think there’s still a lot to be learnt, however about entering the facebook world, and what it takes to be ’successful’.
Like something out of a science fiction movie, according to an article in the Washington Post, there have been some sightings of unusual robot-looking dragonflies around various political rallies in Washington and New York. Governments (in general, I’m not trying to point any fingers) seriously need to do a better job at gaining the trust of their citizens. So the dreaded spy bugs of the future are upon us… the implications of such a technology are paramount. There are huge military implications (although, why can’t we all just live in peace – that’s another post for another day), but more importantly privacy implications. If you think about it, bugs are a given in everyday life – depending on where you live. They’re in your backyard during a barbeque, birthday party, in your house if you leave your door open for too long – this technology has the potential to infiltrate our daily lives. But it begs the question, what has the government done to be associated almost instantaneously with ‘suspicious looking dragonflies around political rally’ to ‘secret government spy technology’.This is not some technology dreamt up by a Hollywood movie maker – the CIA had developed a form of robobug as early as 30 years ago, and with recent advancements in technology who knows at what stage they’re at now. Don’t forget that the internet was originally developed for military use and then was disseminated for widespread public use when there was promise of commercial viability. Now I’m not trying to liken the internet with insect spies. But at the time, the idea was equally fantastic.
Apparently imitating the wing movements of bugs are much harder than it looks and although no American federal agency has confessed to using these robobugs, a number of them along with some private organizations have admitted to trying to develop them. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) sanctioned a project to develop robobugs weighing less than 10g (0.3oz) each, and with a 7.5cm (3in) wingspan, they have also tried to implant live insects with chips, so that they can be controlled remotely. I can see the slogan now… half machine - half arthropod.
Obviously these sightings are being attributed back to overly paranoid political activists looking at a group of some of the more impressive dragonfly species. But it says something when they relate the image of unusual looking insects to their government spying on them at a peace rally.
The Dumbest Generation? Have your say. I must first acknowledge my personal bias on this topic...
As a member of the Net Generation research team at nGenera (and a member of said generation myself), I am a firm believer in the tremendous accomplishments and potential of the Net Generation (those born between 1977 and 1997). So, I must say that when I [...]
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