1. The state of the world is not good.

The theme of Davos was Rethink, Redesign, Rebuild, which may sound a bit grandiose to some people. I doubt many attendees think this now. The world clearly needs fixing.

Figures cited at the Forum show we’re a long way from being out of the woods on the global recession. Jobs are and will continue to be a huge issue. It is estimated the unemployment in the word jumped by 50 million during the recession, and the working poor increased by 200 million.

But the financial meltdown and recession are arguably symptoms of a bigger systemic crises and deep institutional failures. There is growing recognition that many of the organizations and institutions that have served us well for decades, even centuries, are no longer able. Many of the pillars of economic and social life have come to the end of their life cycle. In 2009, the American auto industry — the epitome of the industrial economy — collapsed. The upheaval is now spreading to other sectors — from the universities and science, to entertainment and media, to government and democracy. The continuing collapse of many newspapers in the United States is a storm warning.

Many other serious problems loom. Lack of access to fresh water is a catastrophe for humanity, as 2.8 billion (or 44%) of the world’s population already live in high water stress areas, increasing to 3.9 billion by 2030. In a world of growing capacity, global poverty is getting worse. Ten children die of hunger every minute and a third of the world’s population fester in slums. Almost everyone, especially the scientists at Davos is deeply troubled by climate change. We need to reinvent out energy grids, transportation systems and reindustrialize the planet. And we’re running out of time.

As Bill Clinton said to a few of us at a cocktail party, “The world is too unequal, unstable, and unsustainable.”

2. Everywhere there are new collaborative models emerging to solve global problems

Our systems of global cooperation are not rising to the many challenges we face. The global warming conference in Copenhagen has become a metaphor for failure.

I believe the Forum itself is an example of the global multi-stakeholder cooperation that is picking up where nation states and formal institutions left off.

The global humanitarian response to the Haitian earthquake is showing us what is possible. The 7.0 magnitude earthquake not being just a Caribbean island crisis, but a world crisis. Millions of people and thousands of institutions have responded in non-traditional ways. They are donating their time, money, goods and services. Charitable organizations such as the Red Cross received donation of tens of millions of dollars within days by using new technologies such as texting, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube. Social media has become the pre-eminent tool to connect people around the world, and help empower people become active participants in relief efforts.

There are 100 million people on Facebook Causes – the biggest application on Facebook. These are not just people talking to each other. They are now organizing activities in the physical world. I heard of dozens of examples at Davos.

3. There is a profound rethinking of the financial services industry and its role in society.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy put it well: “The banker’s job is not to speculate, it is to analyse credit risk, assess the capacity of borrowers to repay their loans and finance growth of the economy. If financial capitalism went so wrong, it was, first and foremost, because many banks were no longer doing their job. Why take the risk of lending to entrepreneurs when it is so easy to earn money by speculating on the markets? Why lend only to those who can repay the loan when it is so easy to shift the risks off the balance sheet?”

The mood at Davos was widespread: Banks need to be reined in, the sooner the better. US banking executives used to be the stars of Davos. Now they are a low-key, humble and dour looking group. Last year at Davos everyone was in a degree of shock. This year, a better term would be “fed up.” Fed up with banks that are “too big to fail,” with government bailouts, with the human costs of this crisis and with an industry that basically got out of control. For some CEOs the crisis warrants a critical re-evaluation of market capitalism.

4. Executive pay, especially for bankers, needs fixing.

There was a very strong sentiment that the issue of exorbitant executive compensation needs to be corrected. The biggest targets of discussions were bankers and other architects of the financial crisis. Many heavily damaged their own firms, some to the point of bankruptcy, paralyzed the commercial credit market for tens of thousands of companies, and today are not able or willing to loan money to entrepreneurs. To set aside $billions for bonuses just after they had been bailed out by the government was viewed by almost everyone as unconscionable. Even those banks that didn’t need a bailout cannot justify 8 digit compensation packages.

5. Sustainability is an idea whose time has come. Business is moving from talk to action.

As one executive put it: “It’s no longer about the Green Economy; it’s about the Economy.” Sustainability is the central issue many businesses face.

A few short years ago, sustainability was buried in a company’s PR department and it was primarily a matter of spin. But then governments began forcing certain reporting and behaviors, and the corporate issue became compliance. Then sustainability became a matter of competitiveness and cost reduction, by capturing efficiencies such as reducing waste and energy use. CEOs everywhere at Davos said we’ve now arrived at the point where sustainability must be integrated into the business strategy — what is a business, and how it does it operate and relate to the rest of the world.

We’ll see if they walk the talk.

I’ll post themes 6 – 10 tomorrow.

In 2004, Walt DuLaney and I conducted a longitudinal examination of business growth and cumulative revenue performance.  Among the success factors, we found that companies with powerful business platforms outperformed peers in cumulative revenue growth over a 15 year period.  Our conclusion: business platforms can be a means for organizational renewal, continuous innovation, and sustainable success.

Since then, the sophistication of business platforms and their related ecosystems has expanded and other companies have found success. In the case of Apple, competitors were forced to launch competitive platforms in response (Google’s Android, Symbian Foundation, and RIM) while Apple collected competitive profits.  A growing body of experience indicates that business platforms coupled with an ecosystem of partners can produce superior economic value.  As those partners cooperate and work together they collectively learn, innovate and expand their options for new product features, additional partnerships, and new platform components.  The platform plus the ecosystem becomes a sustainable economic engine for growth and development.

Here are twelve success factors for business platforms based on our work at nGenera Insight.  The first seven are business-related success factors.  The second five are technology-success factors.  The list reflects current understanding and is far from comprehensive.  Nonetheless, it provides a starting point for companies interested in sustainable growth.

BUSINESS SUCCESS FACTORS

1. Leadership, Vision and Purpose – No surprise.  All successful platforms begin with leadership, vision and a clear persistent purpose.  Wal-Mart’s logistic system implemented in 1993, now over 16 years old established the foundation to manage an increasingly complex distribution model, provide a basis to involve partners in category management and drive sustainable efficiencies in the retail industry.  GE’s aircraft engine maintenance platform supported the collection of real-time in-flight engine telemetry data that in turn provided information to customers and ultimately supported concurrent design of their next generation engines.
2. A Vibrant Ecosystem – An ecosystem is an economic community.  An ecosystem thrives when all parties experience mutual economic benefit.  Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has produced 100,000 apps.  In an ecosystem, motivated, persistent participation and contribution is driven by enlightened self-interest which benefits the whole.  The business platform provides the architecture, policies, rules, transactional frameworks, and the information necessary for the ecosystem to operate.
3. Competitive Velocity – How does a company outcompete its rivals and grow?  Move faster.  Salesforce.com revolutionized the CRM business, not only providing a better deal, but also delivering more new functionality per unit time than their competitors like Siebel, Oracle and SAP.  IBM got platform and ecosystem fever with Linux.  By investing in the Linux platform, its world-wide development community, and its related ecosystem, IBM was able to grow a new operating system faster than it could do by itself and enlist more developers than it could possibly afford.
4. Extensible Business Architecture — Business platforms must be conceived, from the outset, as an unfinished masterpiece.  Extensibility means learning.  The difference between an applications project and a business platform is that a business platform is never finished.  When a platform is finished it is at the end of its life.  Learning creates new directions and options.  New options create new opportunities for growth, alternative futures and other avenues for competitive action.  Amazon’s original on-line retail platform evolved into other businesses such as Marketplace, Web Services, and most recently cloud computing with their Elastic Compute Cloud offering.
5. Transparency — Transparency fosters beneficial contagion and excitement among the ecosystem members and interested parties.  An examination of any successful business platform reveals alternative futures.  Alternative future means options.  Options can be valued and hence the investment community can estimate the expected value of such potential futures and model a resulting perpetuity calculation.  Transparency attracts new partners and helps existing ecosystem partners to co-create the future of business platform.  As momentum builds, transparency also strikes fear in the competitors.
6. Policies and Rules — Policies and rules are essential otherwise chaos reigns and the platform and related ecosystem dies.  The business platform becomes the repository and the enforcer of policies and rules.  The business platform also communicates changes in rules. Consider the rules propagated and enforced in the iPhone ecosystem, or the Android ecosystem through the hardware architecture, operating system architecture, the business architecture and the rules and policies for these respective ecosystems.
7. Analytics — Business platforms generate prodigious amount of data continuously.  One of the most powerful advantages of a business platform stems from the collection and analysis of strategic, situational, transactional and detailed usage data.  As the data is collected powerful visualization and analytic tools can provide a combination of real-time and longitudinal analyses.  The closed-loop nature of the data collection process inherent in the business platform enable the platform leaders and ecosystem partners to run experiments, continuously improve products and rapidly evaluate potential business strategies and directions.  It is very difficult to duplicate this type of analytic capability in a non-platform business model.

TECHNOLOGY SUCCESS FACTORS

1. Open technology architecture – Open architectures provide the basis for future options and business platform extensibility.  Open means that other technological standards can interface with the business platform, even technologies that have yet to be invented.  Remember, business value is ultimately determined by the market’s assessment of future viability and the promise of future value.  If the business platform is based only on a few proprietary or close technology architectures, future business options will be limited.
2. Component based – “assembly required.” Most business platforms consist of a collection of open, custom and proprietary application engines.  From a technological perspective, it is cheaper and more effective for a platform to be assembled from the evolving marketplace of technological components.  A component based approach in an open source, open architecture and cloud computing environment also means that companies can enter the business platform space for less cost and minimal proprietary software development.
3. Scalable – Google has scaled from it beginnings.  At the outset the Googleplex consisted of hundreds of servers.  Today the Googleplex is estimated to consist of over a million servers.  Google’s business platform and technology platform was designed from the outset to scale.
4. Sensing capability – Sensors in products (e.g. aircraft engines, cell phones, elevators) and sensing capabilities in key aspect of the business platform’s infrastructure provides a level of detailed data not possible in standard business models.  Almost all successful business platforms, whether product based, or service-based have a sophisticated network of sensors that collects real-time data.
5. Location agnostic – Business platforms operate to deliver their product or services to the customer at the right place, at the right time in the best possible way.  Successful business platforms eliminate the constraint of place.  Dion Hinchcliffe notes in a recent post that the popularity of mobile apps is transforming the Internet and replacing the web because they provide the right type of interaction for the user at the right time. Whether it is a mobile app or another delivery vehicle, smart business platforms live by being location agnostic.

Taken together these twelve factors provide a basis to begin a quest for sustainable growth.  What is your view?  Are business platforms a new basis for business growth and success?  Will all companies need to be a part of a platform or a platform leader?

Do you have plans for a business platform in your future?

The rise in mobile computational devices such as smartphones and the opening of SDKs for operating systems such as Android, the iPhone, and Symbian have resulted in the proliferation of applications that have enabled users the ability to edit photos without having to purchasing expensive third party applications. Some of these are even free. For example, instead of working in Photoshop to create panoramic photos, I simply purchased a fantastic little app called Panorama for my iPhone and it uses an algorithm to seamlessly patch photos together.

However, the compromise in using a mobile device to take photos is that the quality of the camera is nowhere near that of using a DSLR. Beyond ‘face detection’ and ‘red eye reduction’, how will camera companies continue to further the computational development of their products?

Stanford Computer Science researchers have gone beyond this question and are taking matters into their own hands. Marc Levoy, professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and his students are currently developing what they call ‘Frankencamera’, an open-source and fully programmable camera that allows computational photography researchers and enthusiasts to develop and test new ideas and applications. They believe that the camera no longer needs to be limited by the features that a closed and proprietary camera manufacturer deems fit to supply. All the features of the Stanford camera – focus, exposure, shutter speed, flash, etc. – are at the command of software that can be created by inspired programmers anywhere.

I think Levoy phrases it best when he states:

For the last ten years there’s been a megapixel war. That’s finally winding down and the asian camera manufacturers can no longer compete based on the number of megapixels so now they’re beginning to compete on one other feature. We’d like them to offer lots and lots of features that the research community is currently working on and offer those all at one; not merely when they want to compete with one another.

With support from Nokia, Adobe Systems, Kodak, and Hewlett-Packard, Levoy and his students have put together the open-source camera from a number of difference parts. The motherboard is a Texas Instruments ‘system on a chip’ running Linux with image and general processors and a small LCD screen. The imaging chip is from a Nokia N95 cell phone. They are using standard Canon lenses, but they are combined with actuators to give the camera fine-tuned software control. Finally, the body is custom made at Stanford.

Within about a year, after the camera is developed to his satisfaction, Levoy hopes to have to have the funding and the arrangements in place for an outside manufacturer to produce them in quantity, ideally for less than $1,000. Levoy would then provide them at cost to colleagues and their students at other universities.

Although far from distribution to the public, this is an incredible advancement in computational photography. One can only hope that camera manufacturers will catch word of this and will adopt their philosophy, accelerating the process with their use of capital and technology.

When Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown came out, the best analogy for a movie like this was to a Hip Hop track — a piece of music that remixes together samples from all sorts of sources into something new. While that analogy holds, so too does one about Hip Hop and Open Source software. French trip-hop producer Wax Tailor explains this quite well in a suitably-remixed/sampled track of his own, Once Upon a Past. For those not keen to listen to music at the office, the song argues that a society that allows its members to borrow from and build upon the achievements and accomplishments of others is culturally richer than one that does not. This is an argument also made at length by Larry Lessig in reference to sharealike licensing and copyright law reform. Given the ‘Transitive Principle of Analogous Creation’ (a term that I just invented), we can look at Tarantino’s work through the lens of lax copyright law and open source philosophy. Under this reading, his work is neither homage nor theft, but is instead a synthesis of and reflection on the work that came before his.

Unfortunately, what works for Tarantino is a luxury that most of us do not share. As I wrote about a bit ago, when amateur content creators try to remix existing cultural artifacts together into something new, they get takedown notices, sued, or see their work make money for someone else. There’s clearly a divide: a Hollywood movie exists to make money, buying sound samples or paying licensing fees is a cost of doing business. Unfortunately, small-time directors who are looking to make a movie, not piles of money, and host it for free on YouTube or Vimeo aren’t able to leverage the same library. Even if they release their creation under a free license they’re still on the hook for any and all IP that they added into their mix.

So where does this leave us? As user generated content seems further into our collective popular culture, it will increasingly become fodder for Tarantino and anyone else who wants to paint a comprehensive picture of the world as they see it using parts of the world itself. I think that we need to have a discussion around what we want the roles of IP protection and the public domain to be. This doesn’t seem to be a discussion many people are having — and it doesn’t seem to be a discussion that many people realize needs to be had at all. So, if you are sitting around with your friends after watching Inglorious Basterds and run out of things to say about the movie, use it as a talking point to segue into the debate surrounding copyright law and the rights of content creators and producers. Your friends might flash you a strange look, but it’s a conversation well worth having.

From ancient philosophers to modern day journalists, the rules of engagement for discourse and collaboration have always been hot topics. In ancient times mass collaboration was limited to communities building churches, discussion in public squares, or monks taking turns to painstakingly write text. Today, in addition to facilitating public debate online, mass collaboration has the ability to build robust and super efficient software. Collaboration is central to Day Software’s ethos. Not only is Day Software born through mass collaboration but its software has social collaboration central to its user experience. We also embrace collaboration with our competitors. The last area is one I want to focus on for this post.

Last month we collaborated with one of our key competitors, Nuxeo, in order to advance an industry standard, which will benefit the content management industry as a whole. We used the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) as our neutral “workspace”. The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of Open Source software projects.

That word “community” is key.We teamed up with Nuxeo to advance the Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) standard via Apache. CMIS is designed to benefit the growing number companies that need to securely manage a wide variety of online and offline content from different applications in a central hub. This is just one of many projects that Day collaborates with their peers via Apache. On the Jackrabbit project, numerous vendors leverage the community-driven efforts of building a standardized Enterprise Content Management (ECM) repository based on open standards

Despite our competitive differences, both Nuxeo and Day share the same collaborative Open Source mindset that is central and unique to the ASF. In contrast to the more onerous General Public Licence (GPL) model, The ASF model lowers the legal and creative barriers for commercial collaboration and innovation. When you sign up to Apache your day job (excuse the pun) is irrelevant. It’s an environment ancient philosophers would be proud of; the Apache community is working together, openly, equally, without bias and everyone’s contribution is valid.

Open Source is beneficial specifically because it is not proprietary. That means that the user is not locked in to any one vendor. In community Open Source, if a given vendor were to stop innovating, the community can take the product forward. Apache enforces a simple rule: new concepts under incubation do not graduate until there is a proper community that is not beholden to any one vendor. Apache also enforces the principle benefit of Open Source: no one vendor is responsible for driving or inhibiting innovation. Innovation happens.

Commercial Open Source firms – the ones driving much press these days – do not always follow this model. For many commercial Open Source firms, community and collaboration with their peers does not happen. This limits the benefits of the Open Source model, because while the software is accessible, true participation and joint collaboration does not happen.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, collaboration actually helps us to win marketshare and revenue. By serving up the basic product interoperability that developers and customers demand, collaboration frees up our time to focus on unique customer and market driven product innovations and invest more time in services and support. We are not afraid to say we are reaping the rewards of being a collaborative company. Open Source can provide the basis for a robust and profitable business model.

For us Open Source is proving to be a very strong, yet flexible backbone for our business. This should serve as an example to other technology companies that being Open Source is of benefit both to your customers, product development and profitability. The more competitors that join the Open Source community, the better all our products and services will be.

Open standards and open source software already enjoy widespread support in Europe, particularly among governments who fear the influence of Microsoft and other proprietary software vendors. So this year’s conference will examine some of the issues that will define the Internet of the future. How will the next 5-10 years of technology innovation transform the Internet, for example, and are today’s regulations sufficient to ensure that the Internet remains open?

My role is to help make a broader case for openness in business and government, with my main point being that greater openness — socially, technologically, politically, and strategically — underpins any hope we have of solving some of the massive challenges that confront humanity. Here’s the description I’ve just finished drafting:

Open standards are fueling a period of unprecedented innovation on the Internet that is reshaping every institution in modern society. In business, smart firms realize that openness can accelerate innovation and unleash the knowledge, ingenuity and skills of a diverse global talent pool. In government, greater openness is generating radically more productive, equitable and transparent services and unlocking new possibilities to crowdsource solutions to global challenges. The Open Internet not only underpins these important transformations, it helps reveal a more general competitive and political imperative for the 21st century. Without greater openness in all institutions, the world will be ill-equipped to confront the complex challenges that face humanity.

I hope to see you at the event if you’re in or near Brussels on on April 24th.

Mark’s other rules of engagement are as follows:

1. It can be an existing business or a start up.
2. It can not be a business that generates any revenue from advertising. Why ? Because I want this to be a business where you sell something and get paid for it. Thats the only way to get and stay profitable in such a short period of time.
3. It MUST BE CASH FLOW BREAK EVEN within 60 days 
4. It must be profitable within 90 days.
5. Funding will be on a monthly basis. If you dont make your numbers, the funding stops
6. You must demonstrate as part of your plan that you sell your product or service for more than what it costs you to produce, fully encumbered
7. Everyone must work. The organization is completely flat. There are no employees reporting to managers. There is the founder/owners and everyone else
8.  You must post your business plan here, or you can post it on slideshare.com , scribd.com or google docs, all completely public for anyone to see and/or download
9. I make no promises that if your business is profitable, that I will invest more money. Once you get the initial funding you are on your own
10. I will make no promises that I will be available to offer help. If I want to , I will. If not, I wont.
11. If you do get money, it goes into a bank that I specify, and I have the ability to watch the funds flow and the opportunity to require that I cosign any outflows.
12. In your business plan , make sure to specify how much equity I will receive or how I will get a return on my money.
13. No mult-level marketing programs (added 2/10/09 1pm)

So far, he’s received more than 1,500 comments including quite a few promises of impending business plans.

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.

Since 2002, Humboldt County has promoted the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, an initiative set up to ensure adequate rigor in vetting the electronic balloting process. The software—called Ballot Browser—was developed by Mitch Trachtenberg, a local area software engineer. After the ballots (some potentially with chad, just wanted to throw a reference in there somewhere) are scanned by the Premier system, they get scanned a second time. Trachtenberg’s software is then run on these scans to identify where the punches were made.

After the Transparency Project’s audit, it uncovered 197 ballots missing from Premier’s counts. After some troubleshooting with Premier, the cause was revealed to be a bug in their proprietary software, which inadvertently deleted portions of the ballots it had previously counted. As the story from Wired goes, each stack of ballots fed into the scanner is given a “deck” number starting at zero (0, 1, 2, and so on). If during the process an operator interrupts any subsequent deck, the software deletes the deck 0. The scary bit is that the logs would show no evidence of the deleted deck zero, or of its existence entirely.

The error had been revealed earlier in 2004 with a simple workaround: delete the “deck 0” before it has any meaningful data in it, and you’re set. Not a great workaround, but serviceable.

The major concern is this: what would have happened without this auditing system? Odds are that the votes would have been lost into the ether. Not a frightening prospect in wide-margin victories, but what about the tight races? Any thoughts on these Premier/Diebold balloting machines? I’m certain that the software error wasn’t a vast right-wing conspiracy, but does it underline a need to be wary of proprietary software? Or is that alarmist, and this is an isolated incident?

Proprietary software has garnered significant investment by development firms, in part, thanks to its clear-cut business model. Perhaps open source will see further attention as government realizes that the plus of near-ubiquity in proprietary software comes with its fair share of transparency-related caveats. With a few more strong showings by open source in the governance arena, policymakers may have to recognize it as a viable contender.

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

This week in the roundup:

• Jeff DeChambeau revealed the new beta of the Wikinomics blog
• Ian Da Silva uncovered the power of the social web for consumers
• Patrick Harnett introduced us to Wesabe and money management on the Web
• Andrea Bettello shined the light on a different type of TV experience

In case you missed it, you can catch the last roundup HERE.

On September 15, 2008…Jeff DeChambeau revealed the new beta of the Wikinomics blog:

A pet project of mine for the last little while has been to redesign the Wikinomics blog. Given the topic of the blog, though, it seems hardly fitting to launch it in a non-collaborative way. So, I’m doing a soft-launch and would like to collect feedback from the community about what works and what doesn’t.

To showcase and test the new look, I’ve set up http://wikinomics.com/beta/.

Tell us what you think about the new site @
Presenting the Wikinomics Redesign (beta)

As it turns out, it’s a site that in its own words “provides the world’s largest and most reliable source of information on the health, environmental, and social impacts of the products in your home.”  The site was started by Berkeley professor to help address the concern that most consumers know very little about the products that are brought in to their homes everyday.  Using a team of scientific, technological and academic experts, over 60,000 household products have been rated on three separate metrics: health, environmental, and social performance.

Discuss how your products match up on GoodGuide @
Looking for safe, healthy and green alternatives? Try GoodGuide.

The neat open source aspect of Wesabe is that it has a robust API which allows Wesabe enthusiasts the flexibility to develop whatever their cost-conscious minds can dream up. Wesabe has an articulate stance on how having better information about your spending habits is the first step toward reining them in. There are widgets for Vista, OS X, and even your iPhone.

Get ideas about how Wesabe could be used in interesting ways @
Wesabe: The Frugality of Crowds

Using NanoGaming, LiveHive is essentially creating a new environment for the television viewer. The shift from traditional one-way communication is underway as this Waterloo based firm promises to take viewers (and advertisers) to a place where the viewer can now actively engage with the program, ultimately creating a stronger connection. NanoGaming is more than just a fun way for the viewer to become involved, it also introduces opportunities to create a more effective advertising campaign than traditional television commercials offer. By sponsoring NanoGaming sites, firms can access audiences from some of the highest rated TV shows (such as the Super Bowl and the Academy Awards) and because TV and Internet are combined, consumers’ levels of attention, association and recall are increased.

What else does this mean for the future of TV? Find out @
LiveHive Systems: changing the way we watch TV

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight. Until next week…

Here’s how it works: you sign up for a new account on their website and select the method you wish to use to upload your transaction information. There are a few to choose from, ranging from a handy Firefox extension to a manual uploader application. After that, you select your bank, point it to your financial statements, and let Wesabe to the rest. Wesabe then creates charts and transaction lists for your earnings and spending. I found out that my afternoon Starbucks habit averages only $2.05, which isn’t bad considering a significant number of people are closer to $5.

Each of your transactions are tag-able, and each of the places you spent at are reviewable. Most of the popular places (like Starbucks and Chipotle) have a huge number of useful user comments. Some range from how to maximize Peet’s Coffee’s discount when you buy beans to tips on saving money on a healthy lunch instead of inhaling that double cheeseburger. The user groups are also interesting, as you can find out about smarter ways to shop for car insurance to Household Budgeting 101.

The neat open source aspect of Wesabe is that it has a robust API which allows Wesabe enthusiasts the flexibility to develop whatever their cost-conscious minds can dream up. Wesabe has an articulate stance on how having better information about your spending habits is the first step toward reining them in. There are widgets for Vista, OS X, and even your iPhone.

Looks like those GI Joe cartoons from the 1980′s were right! Seems like knowing is half the battle. Keeping your credit card in your wallet is now the tougher other half.

Valve, the company who developed Portal, has a long history of openness with their games. With their first game, Half-Life, Valve released a Software Development Kit (SDK) that allowed amateur game designers to build their own games on top of the existing engine. Counter-Strike, arguably the most popular FPS game ever, was the result of a fan-made project built on top of the Half-Life engine. Valve ended up hiring the team behind Counter-Strike, and eventually made a sequel.

Staying true to form, Valve released an SDK for Portal. So far as I knew, it was mostly used to make new levels with new challenges. Monday, it was announced that for the past eight months, a fan-made prequel, Portal Prelude, has been silently under development. It serves not only to add content to the existing game, but also greatly expand the scope of the story. In fact, Valve has even approached the team to offer their support and congratulations.

The team released a trailer for their project:

It’s tremendously professional.

Valve has done a fantastic job of building a loyal community around their games, and they’re very relaxed about amateur teams using their characters and settings to tell new stories, it’s very reminiscent of the Japanese manga culture. But instead of just providing their fans with material to adapt, Valve also gives them first-rate tool to work with. Based on the Portal: Prelude trailer, those tools look to be usable to great effect.

Valve, and other companies that open their games, are providing their consumers, and potential employees, with far more than a game, they’re selling a platform (and access to a loyal and enthusiastic community). It’s a fantastic example of openness and prosumption, and with benefits shared among everyone involved. This fan made extension of the story is fitting, given that the original development team was a bunch of students who caught the eye of Valve at a trade show, they were brought on board. Maybe the same thing will happen to this team…

Prelude is due out this month, here’s to hoping that my excitement isn’t misplaced!

This brings up some interesting questions. Whose responsibility is it to submit a tender bid for open source? Do governments have the responsibility to consider it even without a bid? And can governments really justify spending a lot of money on things they can get for free (even if the free version has an interface that is intimidating to white-haired public servants)?

But more importantly, governments are missing a tremendous opportunity by ignoring open source. Imagine if even a fraction of the millions of dollars most governments spend on proprietary software was spent on open source initiatives. First of all, the software would become far more customized towards what government needs. Second, rather than funneling tax payer money to one company, it would be an investment for every company in the economy. Third, it would create skilled jobs. Fourth, it would help create the critical mass necessary for open source to overtake proprietary software: something that would benefit the entire economy.

As citizens, I say we start demanding that our governments leverage open source software to save money and invest in our economy.

Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, where I capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog throughout the past week.

In case you missed it, you can catch last week’s roundup HERE.  Friendly reminder: the Wikinomics Roundup has a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features.

“In the past few weeks I’ve been invited to several legal sessions with different law firms and in-house counsel discussing the potential of Web 2.0 technologies. Many of the concerns addressed are similar: IP, privacy, copyright, trade secrets etc. For the most part, many of these issues are easily addressed. Many organizations already have policies in place to address many of these issues such as simple terms of service, disclaimers and employee blogging, social computing guidelines.”

How are emerging Web 2.0 technologies viewed through the eyes of the legal guardians? Find out @
Is Law 2.0 possible?

“Whenever users are given the freedom to create what ever they want, it is clear that they will do just that. This is always a risk when initiating an open source project. Luckily an open source community is just that: a community. Community members monitor the content, and keep the environment enjoyable for all. This is why Wikipedia and YouTube have been so successful. Administrators are necessary to have the final say in what content stays and what goes, but it is largely a community affair.”

It’s not porn, it’s SPORN. Interesting and work safe discussion @
The Underbelly of Open Source: SPORN

“On the other hand, Wikipedia struggles with the issue of censorship and bias. You just can’t trust Wikipedia because its edited by a bunch of conservatives/liberals/people-I-don’t-agree-with. They aren’t telling the whole story. Of course that argument can be made with the mainstream media as well. But when a major network or newspaper is biased or commits censorship, people complain and/or go somewhere else for their news, they don’t solve the problem. In this case, Wikipedians thoughtfully discussed the issue, reached a compromise, voted democratically, and solved (or at least moved towards a solution for) the problem.”

What makes news trust-worthy?  Join the debate @
Wikipedia: More Reliable and Balanced than the News?

“If each person is their own brand … then your online identity is a large, integral part of that brand. But how do you manage all of the content, yours or otherwise, that becomes attached to your name?”

How do you manage the brand called you?  Take a look @
Brittany Creamer TM

“Seeing this led me to ponder a simple question – what about everyone else? What about that staggeringly large group of people that are neither mavens nor connectors (and particularly those one might call anti–social) – are their social media appetites distinctly different, and if so what are the implications for companies pursuing a social media strategy? More pointedly, will this great mass of people slowly get in line with the adoption curve that mavens and connectors are setting in social media, or might they do something totally different – something that would put some of the prevailing theories regarding cohort behavior into question? To begin looking into this issue, I wanted to start with a particular application where I sense line is being drawn in the sand – Twitter.”

Consider how people of different levels of connectedness fit into the life cycle of emerging technologies @
Social Media for the Anti-Social

Check back next week for more original Wikinomics insight.  Until next week…

An article on CNN.com today announced some recent developments in this story. There has been widespread participation in the game’s pre-release. This comes with an interesting twist though: Along with the normal characters created and shared on YouTube, many people have created pornographic characters also known as “sporn”. For a more detailed (and vulgar) description of the “sporn,” see the CNN article. YouTube and EA have already removed most of the pornographic content from YouTube. This was achieved with the help of the YouTube community, which has the ability to flag content that they feel is inappropriate.

Whenever users are given the freedom to create what ever they want, it is clear that they will do just that. This is always a risk when initiating an open source project. Luckily an open source community is just that: a community. Community members monitor the content, and keep the environment enjoyable for all. This is why Wikipedia and YouTube have been so successful. Administrators are necessary to have the final say in what content stays and what goes, but it is largely a community affair, which is nice to see.

It is upsetting that a few perverted minds have tried to ruin the fun for all, but it is great to see the greater open source community triumph over the few social deviants.

Ongoing, a blog focused on truth, technology, and business, wrote a profile of one OSCON talk in particular, one given by Christine L. Peterson, on the topic of open source security in elections. Peterson argues that the US Government thinks that the best way to safeguard rights is to accumulate as much data as possible through numerous types of surveillance, and that the issue of transparency versus privacy is not even on their radar. Furthermore, Peterson thinks that this approach is fundamentally misguided, as terrorism is a bottom-up problem, and “they’re trying to solve a bottom-up problem with top-down tools.” This leads her to suggest that we need bottom-up physical security — and that the open source community is best tasked to develop this new breed of security systems.

Ongoing, however, runs with a point that Peterson makes about 10 minutes in: that all government initiatives using data collected from the public should be implemented with software that is not closed/secret-sourced. This means no private contracts, like what was done for e-voting. E-voting has not gone well, and Peterson thinks that the geeks bear some responsibility for this; she implies that the geeks (especially the open source community geeks) foresaw the issues with e-voting and did nothing, something that is especially bad because no one but the geeks even knew (or cared about) what was going on. So, there’s a call to arms for geeks to unite to ensure technology is problem designed and implemented by (technically inept) political well-wishers in DC.

Issues like privacy, transparency, and the open sourcing of software that plays out in the public domain are tremendously important subjects, but they’re equally tremendously unsexy. People don’t seem to want to learn about them, let alone fight for them. So, has it fallen to tech savvy citizens to step up, and lead society away from the potential pitfalls and abuses of new technology? Or have citizens got an obligation to educate themselves, and just pay the price if they don’t?

Usually, online piracy groups release “no-cd cracks” that allow games to be played without a legitimate (or any) game-disc. These groups are violating the game developers’ terms of service agreements, and enabling the theft countless games — but, they write good code! So much so, that in order to fix the disc-check issue with Rainbox Six: Vegas 2, Ubisoft released a no-cd patch that contained code written by the piracy group named RELOADED. This was revealed by a user on the Ubisoft Forums.

The Register reports that Ubisoft had these comments:

We’re looking into this further as this was not the UK Support team that posted this, however if it is an executable that does not need the disc I doubt it has come from an external source. There’d be very little point doing so when we already own the original unprotected executable.

As soon as we find out more about this we’ll let you know.

Followed by:

The file was removed from the site over a week ago now and the matter is being thoroughly investigated by senior tech support managers here at Ubisoft.

Needless to say we do not support or condone copy protection circumvention methods like this and this particular incident is in direct conflict with Ubisoft’s policies.

In terms of TV and Movie piracy, it always striked me as pretty amusing that the industry heavyweights were so viciously going after a network of people who do all of the legwork in terms of encoding and distrtributing content (completely for free!), instead of finding a way to track downloads and charge end users for the content they enjoy. But this seems different.

I think that The Register’s article title sums it up perfectly: “Ubisoft pirates game fix from pirates” — a move that is completely in line with any mandate to deliver top-notch entertainment.

Whether you’re a regular reader, or just pop in occasionally, it’s not always easy to keep up with our Wikinomics blog content. With this in mind, we have created the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review, to try and capture in brief, some of the thoughts, discoveries, and discussions that graced the blog from the past week.

We have attempted to condense the key content to just a few paragraphs, but to understand the idea in its full context, you’ll have to visit the original post. Please also keep in mind that not all blog posts are conducive to being summarized in this way, and what follows is but a fraction of our week’s content. With that out of the way, read on!

An increasing number of artists are now signing recording deals with consumer product companies such as Nike, Red Bull and Procter & Gamble, who are acting as de facto record companies – finding, funding, promoting and in cases even distributing new music. In an effort to promote various product lines, these companies have now begun to look outside of their core businesses for a new way to get their brands out there…

While collaborating with artists for short-term promotional pieces is nothing new, a number of companies are taking their relationship with artists to the next level, and early signs point to a winning relationship for both sides involved. Dupri is very pleased with the budget provided by P&G, claiming “You can’t get this type of marketing budget. There are endorsement deals, but not like this.” Artists appear to benefit by receiving both an up-front payment as well a royalty agreement that outpaces what is offered by the big labels.

• Andrew Jones of the Tall Skinny Kiwi talks about how the Wikinomics ideas of transparency, generosity, and trust relates to the Bible and Christian ideals.
• As mentioned in the comments of last week, a relatively new website, Swirrl, has posted a review of Wikinomics.“Swirrl is like a wiki, but better.”
• The State Sunshine and Open Records blog criticizes “Show us a Better Way”, a new website sponsored by the British Government, but reconsiders the statement after hearing this site is the brainchild of the U.K.’s Minister for the Cabinet Office. The website invites users/citizens to post ideas for new government services.
• Wikinomics and how mass collaboration will fundamentally change learning was one of the topics at the recent NECC 2008 conference.
• Brendan Dunphy’s Innovation Blog debates the Wikinomics Report Card on General Motors. He argues that closed innovation is better when the current market solution is not sufficient.
• Paula Thornton of the Fast Forward Blog talks about Don Tapscott’s economic tsunami in reference to the User Revolution and the Age of Aquarius.

Derek: Dipity was started by three friends who got together and who were long time Internet professionals, one from development, one from design, and the other from a product user and consumer perspective. We were all struggling with the same problem – the tools available that tell stories and provide backgrounds around particular topics are lacking because the web is so media rich now. If you look at the way people use information or when people write stories, they use text and don’t really integrate photos or videos and images.

We thought of a better way to create an interactive experience around topics that takes advantage of the web, people in the world, and the fact that everything is connected. Dipity allows you to easily create interactive experiences around particular topics; could be people, could be places, could be subjects like Darfur, and aggregate information in one place. This creates an easy summarization of a topic that’s easy to understand and a richer experience.

A corporation too, is rather like Dennett’s sea squirt. When young and growing, it is all innovation-everywhere – strategy is an active line function, a brain, through early twists and turns towards fertile markets. Research isn’t a separate function because it is all research. As it matures, the organization may take root in a comfortable market… and eat its own brain. Strategy shrinks and becomes a backroom staff function, and R&D is first localized as a vanity function (“we have a lab with 50 star PhDs!”), and then gradually shrunk. Then one day, the market is threatened and everybody screams, “Who moved my cheese!” The capacity for active strategic steering and innovation everywhere has been lost.

How do you keep it alive in a cost-effective way? How do you prevent the animal from permanently becoming a plant? Succumbing to Luddite researcher screams for more blue-sky funding is dumb – history proves that doesn’t work. Here’s a smarter way …

Here’s my ideal 2.0 banking environment: I envision a unified single-sign-on financial management space that spans all of my financial interests so I could easily move funds—across different banks and institutions—from my checking account to my line of credit, or Visa, or RRSPs, or investments, or mortgage. Picture a Web portal that aggregates data from all of my financial accounts in a single dashboard. The “smart” interface would highlight opportunities for me to save money by using different investment vehicles or compare different promotions being offered. More than just making recommendations, the authenticated system would actually facilitate these transactions via a single click. I would also get dynamic results on how my actions are affecting my lending rate, monthly payments, and tax return in real time…

If you think this utopian vision is too far-fetched, consider solutions like Jwaala.com. The company is taking some early steps towards enabling this type of functionality at banks with products like personal money manager, budgeting and reporting tools, account aggregation, and dashboards and widgets.

A few weeks ago, the popular news aggregator site Reddit went open source. This struck me as pretty surprising, as I know that reddit is competiting with Digg, and I was under the impression that both had algorithms to determine which stories were deemed most popular that were kept secret and well guarded. Opening the source of reddit for all to see would allow anyone to instantly copy the site. Given that the site is coded in and run on languages and software that are themselves open, giving the entire world their proprietary code seems like an easy way to add competitors to the market…

My hypothesis is that the reddit team doesn’t have to worry about knockoffs stealing their lunch because it would take a few years and many, many users for the weighting variables in the clone sites to become anywhere near as refined and useful as in the original. Giving away their source code is really giving away very little. In exchange, they get all of the accolades of openness that come with bearing all to the world, and legions of users who then want to engage in making the site even better — for free of course!

When an organization has a wiki at the center of its operations, people can gather and share the kind of information that others need – including everything from projects, products, initiatives, strategies, and other pieces of the big picture, to the everyday: how to process an expense report, access an office’s network, get business cards printed, or reserve a meeting room. On a wiki, this information can be gathered by the small efforts of many…

But what’s really important about the wiki is not just that one example of the expense report, or even that the report itself is available on the wiki. It’s the idea that employees are working together to put the information they’re carrying around in their heads on the wiki, where others can more easily access it, use it, edit it, and improve it. That builds a culture where all employees can become contributors – both to the goals of the organization, and the evolving knowledge about how to reach those goals.

FreeGovernment.org, launched on July 4, is one of a growing number of online, direct democracy communities that allow users to vote on bills, draft their own legislation, and engage in debate. While these communities present an opportunity to make government more accessible and responsive to citizens, they have failed to earn any influence over politicians.

To change that, Free Government plans on electing the politicians. The community, which is also a political party, is looking for candidates to run in the 2008 US Congressional election. If elected, these politicians will be contractually obligated to vote according to the results of an online poll of constituents (for their vote to count, users will have to first be confirmed as registered voters).

On Wednesday Yahoo! made a pretty cool announcement: Today, Yahoo! Search is taking another step in extending the Yahoo! Open Strategy with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS, a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. Here are my two favorite wikinomics themed quotes to entice you into reading the post:

“What’s in it for Yahoo! and partners?: Why would Yahoo! open up its search infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies who could use it to compete with us? It’s really quite simple. First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!’s future success — opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS — will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!.

What’s in it for users? More choice. BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide value to users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations. Our hope is that the resulting expansion in user choice will have the effect of fragmenting the increasingly consolidated search market in much the same way that cable TV dramatically increased programming choices for television viewers.”

Being Open: Traditionally, De Beers has been very closed in their dealings. Throughout their history, they have tried their best to control industry supply, and keep competition down. In 1994, along with GE, they were charged with price fixing on industrial diamonds. In 2006, De Beers settled numerous class action lawsuits alleging that they were keeping the price of diamonds artificially high and violating anti-trust laws. They agreed to pay out almost $300 million to anyone who bought diamonds from a jewelry store from 1994 – 2006. However, ever since Gareth Penny became CEO and the complete change in business strategy, the company has become more open and transparent. Now, 100% of their diamonds are sold through the Kimberly Process which ensures that diamonds are conflict free. For the second consecutive year, they released a massive “Report to Society”. The Report covers De Beers approach, economics, ethics, employees, communities, environment, and a range of case studies, initiatives and related web sites. However, it was reviewed by Ethical Corporation magazine as “transparent but not entirely reader friendly. You can find the 2007 report here.

Keep checking back each week, as Wikinomics bloggers keeps their eyes on the web, and their fingers on the keyboard. And as always…if something stood out and interested you, please comment!

The guys at reddit gave three reasons for why they’ve opened their source:

1. Even faster development.
2. Total transparency.
3. They <3 open source.

All three of these are great reasons, but the fact remains that they’ve effectively handed all of their would-be competitors everything that they need to very quickly launch knock-off or competitive sites. Or maybe they haven’t. As I see it, reddit has two things going in its favour. First, the loyalty of it’s users (something solidified even further by a move like going open source). There’s no reason for any of these users to splinter off to their own reddit-clone sites, after all, they’re part of an open and transparent community.

The second thing strikes me as much more interesting. Earlier today, Alan and I were discussing how important the algorithms of these pop-news sites are when it struck us that the algorithm is only half of the puzzle. These social news sites improve over time not because their algorithms change drastically, but because the weighting of the variables in the algorithms has a chance to be refined over many years.

My hypothesis is that the reddit team doesn’t have to worry about knockoffs stealing their lunch because it would take a few years and many, many users for the weighting variables in the clone sites to become anywhere near as refined and useful as in the original. Giving away their source code is really giving away very little. In exchange, they get all of the accolades of openness that come with bearing all to the world, and legions of users who then want to engage in making the site even better — for free of course!

Very, very smart. Unless I’ve completely missed the mark and don’t understand how the site works. Have I?

Why would Google dump this? They claim that it was so they could focus efforts on other products, like Toolbar and Gears, and to extend the capability of multiple browsers. I wonder though, is this really the reason? Think about it. With with the ever-increasing prevalence of mobile computing, and with social bookmarking managers such as del.icio.us, will people in the near future really need to be able to access the same bookmarks on the same browser? Information is voluntarily placed in (organized?) repositories in a centralized databases with better searching capabilities from individual access points.

The other issue is without Google hosting the information any more, you will need to host it on your own, or find someone you can trust with your information. The thread on Slashdot where I picked this up is pretty funny. Chrisq makes a point of stating,

with Google you knew where you stood. They might use your info to to target advertising. They might reveal it to the government if ordered to do so. They would not be likely to sell it to spammers or pass on lists…

I do think the best line though is about releasing Windows ME in the interest of tragic comedy!

Please note that the wikinomics blog team in no way supports violence towards those who suggest open source projects. As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com.

This is a big step forward in the cell phone industry. Big cell companies like AT&T and Sprint can no longer dictate what applications you can run or how big a dent they will make in your pocket book. Now if you want your phone to do something, you can just design it yourself. The operating system is entirely open source. This means that with a little programming knowledge, you can make your cell phone… beep when it is lost; detect air quality; help you practice your golf swing (this is feasible with the motions sensors on phone). The possibilities are endless. Big cell companies beware: This is the future.

What will you create with your open source phone?

This situation is open source collaboration at its finest. Mozilla made the source to Firefox open source. This allows them to harness the researching power of thousands without employing any of them. In addition they don’t even need to employ full time programmers to fix the problem. TippingPoint programmers find a solution to the problem and sell Firefox only what they need. The researchers are also happy because they are compensated for any discoveries that they find. Every one is a winner.

Many people believe that it is impossible to make a profit using open source, but this is clear evidence that the belief isn’t true. TippingPoint and Mozilla are utilizing open source to achieve greater profitability than would be possible using traditional business methods. In addition, they are able to create a safer, higher quality product. The benefits of open source are undeniable, and you can expect more companies to utilize this power in the near future.

Officially, IT analyst firms are a $2.5 billion dollar business, of which about $1 billion belongs to the industry behemoth Gartner. As impressive as this number might seem, it represents only a fraction of the total IT analysis actually being traded. There is a social media undercurrent running just below the surface of the IT analysis industry—call it “IT Analysis 2.0” or “Open Source Analysis,”—where insightful content is not bought and sold, but rather offered up for free…

Like MySpace and YouTube in the entertainment industry, the social media undercurrent in the IT analysis industry is threatening to build up to tsunami proportions.

… my point is that online research reports and white papers – like a great deal of other digital content – are becoming commoditized. Open source analyst firms understand this and are disrupting the market by offering basic content for free and shifting revenue models to value-added services.

Hardcore geeks (like me) have already been enjoying the new “awesome bar” (not my term) in previous release candidates for Firefox 3. Whatever you type in the “awesome bar” is used as a search string against your favorites and history. For instance, If I want to see someone’s Facebook profile, I can just type their name in the bar, and if I’ve previous been to their profile page, it’s the first suggested drop-down result. Pretty cool!