The move from people to pigeons as carriers was important in that all the sudden there was a task performed over a distance that could now be automated. Nowadays, instantly sending a message to someone on the other side of the world is trivial — but that doesn’t mean that modern technology has yet been exhaustively used to solve older problems.

There’s plenty of old technology that still works — works well enough in fact that no one has bothered to replace it with a better, more efficient alternative. Here are a small list of examples:

• The Steam Engine. A.K.A. nuclear power. It’s pretty much the same principle, just instead of burning coal or wood to boil water and use the steam to move turbines, it’s nuclear fission. We’ve supplemented an old technology with new components, but the base principle hasn’t changed in 300 years.
• Physics. More accurately, Newtonian Physics. It’s easy to forget that just as things like steam engines and the internet are tools, so are ideas like laws of Physics. The set of tools for modeling the Physical world that Newton and his contemporaries invented were, and are, extremely useful and accurate. They’re also inaccurate and have been superceded by ones that take into account a larger picture of the universe.
• Government. The oldest governments of today were built for a different world, structured to address different issues, for people with different priorities. The election of representatives worked well for people whose lives were spent largely on farms and in factories, unable to travel the distances required to participate in the democratic process. The stability that has made governments reliable in the long run also makes them resistant to change, after all, you go with what you know. Governments are, to their credit, now adapting to involve citizens in the process of running their country, but it’s necessarily a slow-going process as this new technology is tested and accepted.

In the business space, the drive of competition should drive the constant reevaluation of all technological assumptions in favor of more efficient alternatives. But the same might not be true in other areas of society.

In the three examples above, all work well in their native context, especially Newtonian Physics. If you’re calculating how long it takes to fly between Toronto and New York, you don’t need to take into account relativity, so there’s an argument that, in that context, the older tool is just fine. This leads us to the question: should we be aggressively looking for ways to apply new technology to everything in our world, constantly re-evaluating old problems with modern eyes and modern problem solving skills? Or were some problems solved well-enough the first time, and we should focus our attention on other areas?

Similarly, when you look at your day to day life, how many of the tools and technologies that you use everyday seem like little more than sleeker versions of Historic designs — what items are missing from my list?

For anyone not familiar with the idea, it is, simply put, “pay-what-you-want” dining. (Radiohead recently applied the concept [not for food, of course], allowing fans to decide what to pay for their new album). At the end of the meal the customer decides how much it was worth, and pays accordingly.

Menus at Zesty’s Deli in Guelph, Ontario list a question mark beside items instead of a dollar figure. Tony Salamone, owner of Zesty’s says, “I have great faith in the people of Guelph.” The participatory pricing approach could clearly go a long way in keeping businesses honest, but the benefits aren’t one-way. For sure, customers win when they are empowered by the policy. At the same time, honest, and good quality businesses will win too - having customers reflect appreciation in the prices they choose to pay.

The owners of Barrie, Ontario restaurant Oscar’s echo Salamone’s message, “We are so confident in our kitchen and the food that we put out. And we are confident in our front of the house staff, our service is some of the best in the city.” Their message emphasizes the fact that business owners who apply participatory pricing aren’t operating charities – they believe that they will be more successful when they turn the price-setting power over to the consumer.

The first pay-what-you-want restaurant was the international, UK-based chain, Little Bay. According to reports, Little Bay is actually enjoying increased revenue since giving customers the power to decide what meals are worth.

More power to the consumer and an imperative to operate honestly for businesses, with increased revenue for those offering the best food and experience - participatory pricing is win-win.

I’d be interested to learn of experiences others have had with participatory pricing and in which industries you think it’ll have the greatest impact.

Dan Borge: Director, LECG, a global expert services and consulting firm. Former senior managing director and head of corporate strategy at Bankers Trust where he was the principal designer of RAROC, the first enterprise risk management system. Author of the Book of Risk.

John Hull, Maple Financial Group Chair in Derivatives and Risk Management, Professor of Finance and Co-Director, Master of Finance Program, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto

Robert (Bob) Tapscott, interim CEO, RISConsulting

Moderator: Chuck Bralver, Senior Associate Dean – International Business and Finance, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University (former Partner and Vice Chair, Oliver, Wyman & Company)

Chair: Don Tapscott, Chair, nGenera Insight and Adjunct Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, U of Toronto

Highlights:

Dan Borge:  “Risk management came off the track in part because it became so technical with sophisticated analytics that got ahead of risk management knowledge and basic human judgment.  The result was that opacity became a huge part of the financial system.

“The industry was infected with perverse incentives.  For example, you had mortgage originators with no stake in the outcome.  There were no incentives to ensure the viability of mortgages, and everyone ended up fooling themselves.

“In the summer of 2007, Citigroup CEO Chuck Prince told the Financial Times that he was aware of the risks Citigroup was taking:  ‘When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing.’  Well, the music has stopped.”

Dan Borge answers questions U of T Rotman School of Management session on Risk Management 2.0

John Hull:  “We saw too many people with the wrong incentives. They thought ‘well, we all know that something is wrong but nothing is going to change this year, so I’ll play the game until I get my bonus.’  The system and products became too opaque, complex and exotic to understand.”

Bob Tapscott:  “Numerous attempts to restart the engine, and they’ve all been unsuccessful. To establish trust and stability the banks need a very different model – something dramatic will have to change.  Tinkering will not solve the problem.  Government throwing money at the problem is not working to restore confidence in the system.  We need a global forensic exercise to open up the entire financial services industry.  This will take leadership and requires radical thinking, baking transparency into the system, and sharing of intellectual property, such as placing algorithms into the public domain.”

Bob Tapscott answers questions U of T Rotman School of Management session on Risk Management 2.0

Don Tapscott:  “The incentives to the industry were toxic, akin to a bacteria. A cultural change is required to achieve a healthy system.  Transparency is required to purge the system of inappropriate incentives and behavior.  It’s never been more true that sunlight is the best disinfectant.”

According to Bob Tapscott, fresh capital and updated regulations are necessary but insufficient to restore confidence. Bankers and business leaders should embrace a comprehensive private sector solution entitled Wiki Risk Assessment Process (WRAP 2.0).  The proposal would rethink the basic modus operandi of the financial services marketplace and create a new operating model.

“The Wiki Risk Assessment Process creates a global community of expert modelers and modeling resources dedicated to unlocking today’s credit and structured asset markets.  This would be achieved through an open, transparent and collaborative process for valuing and risk-assessing non-government credit securities and related instruments and contracts such as CDOs and credit derivatives,” said Bob Tapscott.  ”By tapping the ‘Wisdom of the Crowd’, WRAP 2.0 would introduce transparency and peering to value and risk measurement benchmarking.  It will invite all of the best valuation modeling minds to collaborate in the process. This would contribute significantly to restoring confidence and liquidity in the world’s credit markets.”

Bob Tapscott referred the audience to www.WRAP20.com for more details concerning his proposal.

What got me thinking about this again was this NY Times article about storefronts in the virtual worlds bringing in real money. It basically focuses on how people that can’t afford to buy a lot of real stuff might be shifting their time and expenditures online, opting for a selection of micro-purchases (think: $2 for Justin Timberlake’s signature Fedora for your virtual character, or perhaps just a little eBay auction action).

It makes for an interesting contrast. The whole argument for movies is that it’s been a relatively affordable means of escape from your daily life, and it remains one of the luxuries people will cough up for when times are tough. But virtual worlds are another place that people go to escape, they range from free to very affordable, and importantly the entertainment they provide matches up very well with the Net Gen norms of freedom, customization, etc… while movies remain a prime example of broadcast media.

So what do you think is going to happen? As noted, I’m betting on movie theatres (particularly in Canada, where a fairly monopolistic industry structure helps out) generating just fine returns over the coming years. However, should expectations be tempered as select individuals opt to escape to (at the extreme end) their virtual identities decked out in $1.50 pompadours? Again, I don’t want people to get too focused on this particular type of purchase (i.e. “I’m not one of those weirdos!”), but rather just about any type of “escape” and “entertainment” behavior that might involve drifting into cyberspace rather than off to the theatre… how much have times changed?

That’s why I was so happy to come across this story about Ukoonto when I read the Globe & Mail over lunch. The article is about a young entrepreneur (and soon to be former sound engineer) named Hans Eich, who builds eco-friendly wooden building block toys from his St. Catherine’s based workshop. While I can’t say that I’ve tested the products myself yet, they look great – and from a wikinomics perspective what’s most interesting is how Hans has developed and promoted his company.

As the article notes, outside of an occasional trade show, Hans relies solely on Web 2.0 tools to spread the word about his products. When he started up, he had practically no money, and no big business plan – just an idea to create a toy company. He launched it under the domain of “my toy needs a name”, created a framework online, and asked people for ideas and feedback. From there, to quote Hans:

It was all about interacting with people and trying to set up meaningful relationships. The business evolved out of that.

If you go through the article, you can read about all the interesting lessons he’s learned – from use of things like YouTube and Twitter, to why it’s so much harder to create “fans” on Facebook than create groups, to backlash he received when he tried to push his products to hard in communities he joined, rather than really engaging with the people. To quote Hans again:

You have to listen first before they start listening to you. Traditional media is about telling, but Web 2.0 is all about conversations. It’s very much about letting go of control and engaging with people.

I’ll let you learn the rest from the Globe article, but I found it just an extraordinarly refreshing read – particularly when the three articles on the previous page were “EU to get call for stimulus package”, “Easy credit, public spending fuelled boom”, and “Lost auto jobs pegged at 15,000.” Amidst all the doom and gloom, it’s important to remember that there is an extraordinary opportunity out there for entrepeneurs that can create a good product they are passionate about, and learn to leverage social media and the web 2.0 in a compelling way. As Hans noted, given that most of the tools he’s leveraging are free, his out-of-pocket costs have basically been limited to website design costs. Think about how different it would have been if Hans tried to launch his company twenty years ago…

    In the spirit of honesty, I’m not a VC but I did have fun masquerading as one at a recent conference called BioFinance and got some interesting cards. But if you’re a road-warrior, lugging your card album with you is a pain. Some people have nifty (read: pricey) card scanners, and keep a collection on their laptops/Flickr, but a new startup called CloudContacts offers a service to scan the cards for you, and upload them into the “cloud”.

    You sign up for service ($30 for up to 100 cards), and then mail them your cards. They scan and upload them to your account, and then you can access them through their site. A neat feature is their “one-click connect” which lets you add contacts in your collection directly to Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn. I haven’t read any details about tagging and the like, but I’m sure it’s got that in there too. I can imagine one of my tags now: “Scotch-Fan”. That way I can make sure I get to that person early in the evening before they imbibe, ensuring they don’t confuse me with this guy.

    Cool idea, and while I’m a casual fan of the whole cocktail-party-rigmarole, I’m not enough of a big fish (yet) to necessitate the service. The old school method of using Outlook to manage my offline contacts works well enough. But people with schedules full of hand-shaking and frequent-flyer miles should be pleased with another option to tap their rolodex anytime, anywhere.

    But that said, when are we going to see vCards transmitted via Bluetooth to everyone’s Blackberry more regularly? I really thought that would catch on more than I’ve seen in my limited experience. Have any readers had success with vCards during networking functions? Also, has anyone been subjected to unintended vCards, broadcast by some Bluetooth–crazy self-promoter?

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.

Trips to the gas station have turned into quite painful experiences lately. I used to hate riding bikes and walking places but now it is becoming a necessity. The horse and buggy is becoming more appealing every day.

It isn’t just your car you have to worry about. Airline ticket prices are on the rise. You almost have to create a budget just so you can have the money to get to work. This presents a problem for a global workplace.

This week’s New York Times highlights Accenture’s move to into videoconferencing and telepresence. The technology consulting firm estimates that it has avoided over 240 international and 120 local business trips so far. Their goal is to have 35 videoconferencing rooms set up in their firms across the world by the end of this year.

“These technology tools are going to change the way corporations think about travel and work in the long run,” an analyst at Forrester Research, Claire Schooley, said.

Although videoconferencing cannot replace the important face to face contact that is needed in many circumstances, it can be a great tool to save time and money.

The article also mentions, Darryl Draper, the national manager of customer service training for Subaru of America, who estimated that her reach went from 220 to 2,500 people and her cost dropped from $300 a person to 75 cents a person.

That beats the horse and buggy. As companies like IBM, Mircosoft, HP and Cisco continue to make improvements on the technology we will see more and more company leaders heading to their local boardroom rather than the airport for their next overseas meeting.

Last week he was fired by concession company Aramark for not checking the ID of a 22-year-old “mystery shopper.” (The legal drinking age is 19, but apparently he is supposed to check the ID of anyone who looks under 30.)

In response, unhappy fans have joined forces on Facebook to demand that he be rehired. The Official Bring Back Wayne Facebook Group has grown from 2500 members on Wednesday, to 9000 on Friday, to almost 15 000 today. The momentum is just picking up. And now, if you search for Aramark on Facebook, Bring Back Wayne is the number one result.

Aramark has not yet hired him back. But they would be foolish not to. This is turning into a public relations disaster that will come back to haunt them when it comes time to renew their contracts, not just for the Rogers Centre, but for universities across the country. They have nothing to gain from firing a popular employee for not checking the ID of someone who was well above legal drinking age, and for not following a rule that I’m sure many feel is a little over the top. (If you were at a baseball game and the beer guy kept slowing down service and interrupting the game by insisting that people who were clearly of age, but looked 29, pass their IDs up and down the isle, wouldn’t you be a bit annoyed?)

But Aramark, like so many companies, is not used to listening to customer complaints about internal policy. Even if they make an internal decision that upsets a large group of customers, only a few have the time and naivety to phone and complain. And I can just imagine what management thinks of them: “whiners who complain about everything and who have no respect for a company policy that took months to decide on, plan for, and implement. Change the policy? That just don’t understand it. They weren’t at the meetings.”

Ah, but they do understand. They’ve worked in those companies and enforced those policies themselves. And if they complain about everything, its probably because they have everything to complain about.

It used to be easy to maintain the myth that the complainers were an irrelevant and uninformed fringe group. Not anymore. Now, with barely any amount of time or effort, social networks are allowing them to form into a cohesive and public opposition to your company.

Smart companies see this as an opportunity to engage with customers and build the company around what customers want, not what a committee meeting decides is a good idea. Those that choose to propagate the myth that complainers are irrelevant are sure to find their own relevance steadily diminished.

“Chapman’s experience is one example of the ways customer service is changing in an age when a single disgruntled consumer with a broadband connection can ignite a crisis,” from Carolyn Y. Johnson, the author of the article.

The article shows the power of ordinary people fighting against large corporations. For fun, in Google, I searched “Comcast complaints” and found over 1,870 listings and without quotations around the phrase Google brings up over a million listings.

“Comcast’s customer service was rated “poor” by 30% of respondents” and it had a strong hit after this video, which showed a Comcast technician sleeping on a customer’s couch.  It was viewed over 1.2 million times with over 700 comments. Also, a website named ComcastmustDie.com was created for users to tell their stories of their experience and grievances with Comcast.

It seems like Comcast finally got the message. With the emergence of Web 2.0 ordinary people can have their voice heard and create a terror of a public relations problem for companies. “Listening and acting upon what [customers] are hearing and being very proactive is different than waiting for a customer to pick up the phone and call us. We can nip it in the bud,” said Karen Hartzell, division vice president of customer care for Comcast’s NorthCentral division.

In the new business environment, companies need to implement a team of individuals to help combat the conversations about their company. By combat, I am not referring to a retaliation, but providing a solution to the problem. Working with customers to generate a satisfying customer experience is essential to thriving in business today. Customer service is just one of the departments shifted by Wikinomics.

I’m interesting to hearing your thoughts on customer service. Is their a company that you will absolutely never use because of their horrible customer service, or is their a certain company that has a level of customer service that brings you back? It may or may not have to deal with Comcast, but please share.

For about as long as corporations have been the dominant form of value creation in society, they have been viewed as enemies by social activists. Naomi Klein’s No Logo documents the rise of a social movement in the 1990s that is specifically anti-corporation. The 2003 book and film The Corporation has taught a generation of socially concerned youth that corporations act, by flawed design, like psychopaths. “The corporate model is broken and must be changed,” is perhaps one of the most unifying mantras across the diverse range of social activists.

And here’s this guy Ben, starting a network for social change, and he incorporated it? Did he not get the memo?

Actually, I believe that this is an example of a much larger trend that is remaking the model of the corporation, blurring the line between businesses and NGOs, redistributing corporate power from shareholders to communities, and marking the beginning of a post-capitalist society.

Change.org isn’t about making money, Ben told me, but it has equity investors and a “sound business model.” The site is free and has no advertising. But rather than support themselves by raising money, they charge NGOs for some higher-end consulting services, and use that revenue to pay for the rest of their work. The hope is that their business model will allow them to become completely self-sufficient.

Change.org acts like a business, and has a business model that could be used to make money, but chooses to be concerned with social rather than monetary profit. The same idea is found in micro lending: small loans given to entrepreneurs in developing countries. These loans make money, but more importantly, they create social value.

As NGOs become more business-like, businesses are becoming more socially-responsive, because their power is being redistributed from shareholders to communities. Wikinomics argues that businesses’ value is increasingly coming from their communities. As corporations own fewer and fewer physical assets and lose their ability to control their intellectual property, employees and customers are able to bypass shareholders and recreate a business in a new image overnight. This is even more true in an era where value is created by prosumers and outside-collaborators.

In order to keep their communities, businesses need to make the case that they are contributing to positive social change. A global talent crunch is forcing corporations to compete over employees, and one of the biggest sells is providing jobs that have a meaningful social impact. Customers are increasingly making socially-informed purchases, and increased transparency is giving them more information to do so than ever before.

Naomi Klein and others saw the rise of socially-concerned brands like Starbucks, Apple, Nike, etc. as a corruption of progressive values. But what has been overlooked is the fact that, in creating these brands, these companies have handed over power from shareholders to consumers.

When Greenpeace launched its GreenMyApple campaign to get apple to become more environmentally friendly, they did not attack the company, but created a community of appreciative Apple customers who wanted the company to do a better job at espousing their values. And guess what, they won.

We are moving to an era where NGOs behave like corporations, social activists collaborate with the businesses they are trying to change, and companies get their value from their ability to attract collaborators by showing how much social good they are doing. The corporation will survive, but it will be controlled not by the owners of capital (shareholders), but by the community it serves.

It’s not that he doesn’t like the iPhone; he does, he owns one, and he’s jailbroken it. The problem is control, or, more accurately, the lack of control that device users have over their own devices.

The argument builds on Jonathon Zittrain’s new book “The Future of the Internet (and how to stop it)“, where it is argued that “generative” technologies (think: open) are being marginalized by closed technologies like the iPhone and other proprietary platforms. As Wu went on to argue, open devices are important (and even the iPhone is making tentative steps in this direction), but without open access to networks they aren’t much good. There is also an interesting perspective on Wu’s history provided, notably including how he determined that some work in his former life (working with a device maker to help ISPs control content people can access) was “probably not very good for the health of the Internet or the future of free speech.”

Anderson concludes by properly pointing out that the “moralistic rhetoric” coming from the likes of Josh Silver (where openness is the path to righteousness, and the closed path where giant companies decide what and how much is evil) probably won’t sway many corporations, as companies may detect a tinge of socialism to their words. The key is having these companies realize that being “righteous” and extraordinarily profitable are not necessarily mutually exclusive – which I believe will the biggest driver behind wikinomics being accepted on a mass scale.

In the very short run, it means we should all be able to run cross-company comparisons at a much greater level of detail than before — not just, for instance, comparing revenue or book value; but also, comparing items that appear in Notes to the financial statements.  (Think of contingent liabilities, or stock option valuations.)  Also, the data is much more likely to be truly comparable, because the companies will be tagging it themselves, rather than relying on teams of data-entry staff in India or elsewhere.  Just as CFOs carefully manage their “adjusted operating income” or other specialized measures they use for forecasts, they will want to carefully manage how their numbers look in standard comparisons with their main industry competitors.  For more detail on XBRL as it stands today, see this white paper from Bowne here.

In the longer run, the XBRL approach could bring about a much more radical shift in the relationship between investors and corporations — hopefully bringing the “prosumer” worldview, where consumers now help co-produce many goods and services (see Wikinomics, the book), to a new “provestor” community, where investors can engage with corporations more successfully.

Imagine the following roadmap (in no particular order):

• Step 1.  Corporations publish data in a standard cross-company, machine-readable format, to a single, open-access standard repository in each major jursdiction (e.g., the SEC the US; similar agencies in Korea, Japan, China, the EU, etc.).  [Currently underway in multiple countries.]
• Step 2.  Someone publishes the separate national XBRL repositories to a common global repository (e.g., on ManyEyes or Swivel), for true cross-company comparison across geographies and accounting standards.  [Currently feasible, though not in practice, to my knowledge.]
  • Step 2a.  The DNS infrastructure extends so that investors can find the relevant XBRL data, signed by the relevant corporation or oversight agency, using simple “xbrl://” calls, just as we now find websites through our browsers by typing “http://” or “https://” calls.  [Requires major changes to internet routing conventions, but not unhead-of.  FTP and other protocols exist already alongside HTTP.]
• Step 3.  Analysts, either “informed amateurs” or professionals running subscription-based financial blogs (see, for instance, Psychology of the Call or www.rightside.com), start to publish forecast models also in XBRL, tied to the global repository.  These could provide segment-level detail or other sub-analyses, and could also become the basis for “consensus” forecasts and deltas vs. actuals.  [Would require some additions to XBRL, either ad-hoc or eventually official, to include forecasts for line-items rather than just actuals.]

I’m sure we will see all this, and much more, over the next 20 years as Wikinomics hits the financial markets.  In fact, I see a huge opportunity to mitigate risk through crowdsourcing, with measures that go beyond Step 3 here.  (This is the topic of a future blog post.)  In the meantime, these early steps by the US, Japan, Korea, China and others are a great step forward towards transparent, meaningful data all investors can work with.

PS — Christopher Cox, SEC Chairman, has a cute sense of humor.  In  last week’s speech (see video here), he harkened back to the announcement of EDGAR, the SEC’s online repository of financial data — by referring to a 1985 article in Women’s Wear Daily.  Who knew that wwd.com makes a better resource on the SEC than, say, the Wall St. Journal?

Well, no. But we’ll get to that in a second.

If you scan through the rest of the Dallas News story you see accusations it was a ”veiled attempt at retribution” towards a particular reporter, various writer/editor-types that “can’t imagine” the NBA would want to set this type of precedent, that it could set off some potential chaos that’s apparently brewing under the surface… it goes on and on from there. The quote that sums it up this sentiment the best:

At a time when professional bloggers are gaining respect across the board, this seems to represent a leap backward for the NBA.

Now you would think those on the “wikinomics team” would agree with this position, particularly those, you know, writing on the wikinomics blog and all. But I personally don’t, and the reasons why are sitting out there plain as day – right on Mark’s blog. If one reads his post about why he did what he did, rather than the Dallas News story, a far more clear-headed story seems to emerge.

Exhibit A, if you will, is a picture of the lockerroom in question. The room is kind of small. He’s worried about overcrowding, which seems fair enough. If all of the sudden being “a blogger” allowed you unfettered access to professional sports lockerrooms, can you imagine how many bloggers there would be? The blogosphere has almost infinite space and no “credentials”, the lockerroom has finite space that by nature must demand credentials to control access… something has to give.

Exhibit B is far more interesting though. Here’s Mark’s primary reason for booting out the particular blogger that’s stirred up all of this controversy:

(It wasn’t) because I don’t want this blogger in the locker room doing interviews. What I didn’t like was that the Morning News was getting a competitive advantage simply because they were the Dallas Morning News. I am of the opinion that a blogger for one of the local newspapers is no better or worse than the blogger from the local high school, from the local huge Mavs fan, from an out of town blogger. I want to treat them all the same.

Interesting, non? A principle of equality, and not wanting to give this one particular blogger a competitive advantage over the others simply because this particular blogger is tied to the major local newspaper. Score one for the little guy! Might that by why some of the people working for newspapers are having a tizzy over this issue?

Of course, being Mark Cuban, he didn’t leave it that… and went on quite an interesting rant about what terrible strategic decisions newpapers have been making. My favorite quote from this part:

Historically newspapers have set some level of standards that they strived to adhere to. By taking on the branding, standard and posting habits of the blogosphere, newspapers have worked their way down to the least common demoninator of publishing in what appears to be an effort to troll for page views.

Nice.

Now I can imagine a time in the future where this strategy might have to be revisited. For example, a particular writter that starts out as a “blogger” may well become so popular someday that millions of people are visiting his site – making it a prime media destination.  In turn, Mr. Cuban might decide to change the rules again and let that guy in. Alternatively, maybe a blogger credential system will evolve – who knows , anything could happen. Either way, if something like this happens he’ll have to make room… so maybe he’ll have to kick one of those other Dallas News writers out, further eroding one of the main competitive advantages that major newspapers have continued clinging to.

It amazes me the creativity, honesty and emotion that individuals are willing to display anonymously via the web. The most recent compilation from PostSecret.com, A Valentine Video, can be seen below.

The key to the success of the PostSecret model is the anonymity of those who are sharing their secrets. However, when we talk about collaboration in the enterprise that same anonymity that drives creative and honest expression is shunned. The truth is that when companies implement Web 2.0 solutions they are afraid of what employees might say or do if they are not held accountable. What if someone blast the CEO in a blog post, post inappropriate content on the social network or vandalizes project information in the wiki?

These are all valid concerns, after all companies have rules and regulations that they must abide by and need to maintain a safe work environment for employees. But what about the creativity, the innovation, and the honesty that comes from the freedom to express your thoughts anonymously. In the enterprise cultural and political reasons often prevent employees from feeling comfortable to share their true opinions, but the good news is there are ways to get the best of both worlds.

Companies could try creating a forum for employees to anonymous submit thoughts and ideas being clear that all content must be work appropriate. If needed, monitor the site and allow users to flag inappropriate content (ala youtube) or if necessary monitor the submissions before they are posted (making it clear to submitters why the have been censored). If that is to radical, start by allowing employees to express themselves by ranking and rating content. The idea is to give employees a voice and the freedom to break free of the hierarchy and danger of group think. I was just talking with my colleague Alan and we discussed how an anonymous forum could be valuable tool on those occasions when everyone is thinking the plan from the top is flawed, but doesn’t feel comfortable voicing their opinion.

I think it’s something worth thinking about if you are moving the way of Web 2.0 in your organization.

Winnipeg-based Sidetrack Technologies has developed the tools to produce illuminated tunnel advertisements using 360 degree LED strips that combine to create what appears to the rider’s naked eye as video (think flipbook for the 21st century).  In the age of Wikinomics, when advertising dominates the public landscape and the captive audience of the TV commercial is no longer available due to downloading, Tivo etc, Sidetrack may have unearthed a goldmine by finding a way to reach one of the last truly captive audiences and the minds of  millions of commuters in the world’s largest metropolises.  And to think – I figured I had seen it all the last time advertising made it in to the other truly captive space in public life – the washroom.

This new medium will allow Sidetrack to remotely change advertisements on any transit system in the world, based on various metrics including time of day, location and direction into or out of the city’s core.  Wonder why you’re craving that Egg McMuffin this morning?  Maybe it was the golden arches that followed you throughout the tunnel on your way to work…Worried about your next vacation?  Just keep your eye on the plane that’s following you for the latest and greatest travel deals on your way home.

While I applaud the innovative nature of this new medium, within a couple of weeks of seeing it daily, I am pretty sure I would opt for boredom as the better alternative to bombardment, particularly in the morning.

Sidetrack technology is currently in place in the Los Angeles Metro and London’s Underground and it will soon make it’s debut in New York City’s MTA.

Aside:

Subsequent to starting this post, I was on my way home on Toronto’s TTC and I waited no less than 15 minutes in a line at 11pm to purchase a monthly transit pass on my credit card.  The TTC has installed facilities where weekly or monthly passes can be purchased using a debit card at 8 of it’s 70 stations and credit at 4 such stations.  I find this frustrating given that Canada is one of the world’s heaviest users of debit payment systems and yet Toronto’s transit system offers convenient payment options in just over 10% of it’s stations.  There are better systems out there – see London’s Oyster card -  that focus not only on rider convenience, but also system efficiency and saving customers money.  Hopefully, before joining the age of Wikinomics advertising, Toronto’s TTC will catch up to the 1990s in its payment systems.

 [The] defining idea behind Wikipedia, Facebook, and blogging platforms such as WordPress is that if you give people the right tools, they’ll use them to create wonderful things in collaboration with each other or with the organization that provides the catalyst.

Facebook, like Ikea—and like Microsoft—has mobilized an army of independent suppliers. In Facebook’s case, they are developers who produce applications that can be plugged into the Facebook platform. In all these cases, the idea is the same: If Facebook (or Ikea) can woo the customers, independent suppliers will be queuing up to help, and if the independent suppliers are queuing up, Facebook (or Ikea) should be able to woo the customers.

Plus, the author, Tim Harford, reminds us of the urban legend that 1 in 10 Europeans were conceived in an IKEA bed. That is a fun stat.

Amongst his complaints, the program takes too long to enter…

The process of logging into the graphics-heavy Web site and entering a single code took me 55 seconds. I found the cellphone method a bit faster, at 35 seconds. If I were unable to improve on that pace, and I used only 10-point codes from 12-packs and the speedier (but more expensive, under most cellphone plans) text-messaging option, it would take me more than 24 hours of work to win the biggest prizes. That assumes no bathroom breaks related to the 31,200 cans of Coke I would have purchased, of course.

The big prizes are out of reach…

Each 20-ounce bottle of Coke or related brands is worth three points, and each 12-pack of cans contains a code worth 10 points. The “cheapest” items in the rewards catalog include things like a Blockbuster movie rental for 36 points, or a Coca-Cola key tag with bottle opener for 53 points. Plenty of items go for 1,000 points or more — that baseball glove is 1,420 points, and a $110 Sony MP3 player requires 2,600 points, or more than 850 bottles of Coke.

But that’s nothing compared with the biggest prizes, such as a walk-on role in a television show or a family RV vacation. Those require 26,000 points. That translates into a gut-busting 8,667 bottles of Coke, or 2,600 cases.

 And the codes (printed in red on a dark background) are far too complicated…

With 26 letters and 10 digits available for each character, there are 221 billion trillion possible codes. If Coke were to use up all of those codes on 20-ounce bottles, the volume of liquid within them would be about 100 times the volume of water in all the Earth’s oceans. Mr. Williamson said the codes help ensure the contest’s security and also allow Coke to track the location of purchases used in the contest.

Ginko Financial just hit its first 100 million in deposits. While the money is in Second Life’s digital currency (Linden $), at today’s exchange rates those deposits are worth $372,500 in real USD currency. While $300k is chump change for any real bank, it’s a surprisingly large amount to put into an entity that includes the following warning on every page of their site, “Ginko Financial and its affiliated businesses are not registered in any way with any governmental organization. Not warrented[sic], guarenteed[sic], or insured.”

The fact that even a modest number of people have chosen Ginko Financial’s buyer-beware virtual bank over a government-insured physical insitution is incredibly interesting. Something unusual is afoot here. Banks might take interest in this development, not because of the miniscule $ amount, but because this unusual home-grown bank illuminates entirely new markets and service possibilities.

UPDATE: Looks like I should’ve read this article by Reuters Second Life first. Sounds like Ginko Financial could be just a Ponzi scheme (a charge denied by the owner). Certainly, claims of 44% annual interest, and the owner being unwilling to disclose his real name, should arouse more than casual suspicion. If this is just another pyramid scheme, the inevitable collapse won’t bode well for future financial experiments in Second Life. Disappointing to say the least. Hopefully banks will NOT pay attention to this particular example/system, but I’d still like to see more exploration of financial service possibilities in SL.

Will the Digital Era Change Writing?

…that discusses whether the trend towards releasing single songs rather than albums will manifest itself in the publishing industry. After all, why buy an entire book if you are interested only in one chapter? Personally, as an avid non-fiction reader, I’ve found that many times I would have preferred a 30 page version of a 200 page book. With fiction, it become a bit trickier. An author (as artist) may resent having his or her work not being presented in its pure form just as AC/DC and Led Zepplin have resisted iTunes because they want their music enjoyed only in the context of the entire album. But perhaps, a reader is only interested in combat scenes, love scenes or the passages where Holmes explains his conclusions to Watson.

Sounds odd? With the power of the long tail, we might be suprised with how people consume content given options and flexibility.

http://www.backbonemag.com/Magazine/CoverStory_12310601.asp.

Many of the predictions are repeats from previous years — location-based services, VoIP, deploying technology to chase the sun, etc.

David Jacobson makes a good point about how firms like Google and Spotrunner are continuing to challenge the printed press.

Some good talk about the future of storage — when will hard drives be completely replaced by portable thumb drives or flash memory cards? On that note… here is my new favorite device; a USB thumb drive made out of wood. Good fashion mashup of sleek laptops and rustic nature.

This reminds me of something a presenter brought up at a conference we ran back in October. One of the presenters was explaining how in North America a successful business deal is defined by winning at your competitions expense. The problem with this mentality is that business is not a one shot deal, it’s a repetitive game, and you need to work with not against those in your business web.

In other cultures a business deal is only successful if both parties are happy. He went on to tell of instances where he witnessed companies go as far as to compensate their business partners if a deal turned out lopsided. The idea that collaborating, or as Russ put it ‘sharing’, can make you more succesful is a dramatic shift for modern business culture and leading companies such as Boeing, BMW and P&G starting to put these concepts to the test.