The makers of NBA 2K9 have come up with a very, very cool way to promote the game, and get users engaged in an ongoing way. It’s called The Other Season, a unique combination of video games, fantasy sports, and celebrity endorsement. Eight NBA superstars (real ones like Kevin Garnett and Steve Nash) own “franchises” within the game, which are competing with each other over the season. How they are competing is by selecting a team of gamers to join their respective squads. In other words, I, Denis Hancock, could be drafted by Steve Nash to play for his team, the Nash Potatoes- an MVP staple that always delivers.
Portal is my favorite videogame, it came out just about a year ago. For the uninitiated, the game is built around a new gameplay mechanic: portals. In a twist on the standard First Person Shooter (FPS), instead of having a bang-bang gun, you have a portal gun. It shoots two things, a blue portal and an orange portal. The portals form on any flat surface and anything that goes in one instantly comes out the other. Here’s the trailer:
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. Read More »
I was surfing the web trying to figure out the best way to connect my laptop to my TV (in my defence - I had an idea of how to do it in theory… but wanted to find out in practical terms) when I came across an interesting YouTube video.
It was created by a young, talented kid who lives in Japan called Adrian, aka kidguru. With a straightforward, easy to understand video, kidguru very articulately explained how someone looking to connect their laptop to a tv would go about doing it. Going to his YouTube channel I discovered that he’s been doing this for almost a year now and has turned his site Tech-World into a blogging, vlogging, podcasting, twitter site/community. He’s managed to turn a hobby into a paying job, with sponsors and understands the value of creating community around his videos. He does product and app reviews, and tutorials among other educational things.
KidGuru’s YouTube channel now has over 1,500 subscribers and over 47,000 channel views, and he is now an official YouTube partner. The YouTube partner program is an ad revenue sharing program to reward users that frequently post original content and who have a steady following of thousands of viewers.
If you have any tech related questions I suggest checking out Kidguru’s channel or sending him an e-mail!
I suppose it was only a matter of time before something like this came along and I have been anxiously waiting to see how this one pans out. Launched in July, on seemingly razor-thin legal ice, it appears that beta site mygazines is still alive and kicking (not to mention enjoying the spotlight gained from a widespread AP news release).
The site provides member-scanned full digital copies of magazines, which can be browsed, shared, archived and even re-assembled to create aptly-named “mygazines”. The site is hosted by Stokholm-based PRQ, “the world’s least lawyer-friendly hosting company“, which is also host to (and owned by two founders of) well-known bittorrent tracker, The Pirate Bay.
Interestingly, the site tour appears to be targeted at publishers, pitching itself as multi-faceted growth opportunity, but most industry leaders asked aren’t exactly jumping at the “opportunity”.
Why should I upload my publication to mygazines.com?
Our article-level search and archiving ability allows your audience to find the content they’re looking for faster
Increase your distribution and advertising revenue by exposing your publication to more eyes
Keep control of your publication: Mygazines will not allow for downloading or printing of your publication. Your original source file is never accessible.
Save the trees - no paper will be used in the making of your virtual publication
Welcome back to another edition of the Wikinomics Roundup: Week in Review!In this week’s roundup, I will 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. From now on the Wikinomics Roundup will have a nice new home on the left side of the page, under Regular Features. Come visit!
This week I will profile the Seattle based coffeehouse giant Starbucks. In case you missed my last report card on De Beers; you can find it here. You can now find all my previous entries, and posts relating to them on the new Regular Features tab on the top left side of the page.Like all my previous entries, I will be evaluating Starbucks on the Wikinomics principles of being open, peering, sharing, and acting globally.
What’s the solution for the ever-increasing gas prices? No, you don’t have to stop driving. With the help of a Finnish Internet community, you can convert your used gasoline-powered car to run on electricity. The Finnish-language forum, eCars – Now!, is taking a chapter out of the open source book to create a community where people can collaborate to start a mass movement toward electric cars. They’re encouraging the conversion from gas-powered cars to run on electricity, with the first rollout due this year.
Their website is designed to provide a portal for buyers and sellers of suitable used cars and components, and mechanics who can make the conversion with an electric motor and lithium batteries. Users on the site share ideas on the message board and e-mail lists, with the best information being put into use by the nonprofit community.
The first conversion target of this community will actually be a Toyota Corolla which they say have a range of 93 miles and a top speed of 75 miles per hour. (As a Toyota Corolla owner, this news is exciting to me.) If this community can successfully convert full size gasoline-power cars to run on electricity, look for this trend to catch on in your area. I may even be one of the first to convert my car if this trend hits the USA.
In my previous post, “Why Call Centers Need Wikinomics,” I argued that call centers—the most underutilized resources in the enterprise—are the low hanging fruit of Wikinomics. Since then, I’ve been researching the topic a bit more and I thought it might be valuable to post some early thinking as to where the opportunities might be (as always, feedback and additional insights would be greatly appreciated):
Wiki scripts: Imagine using wiki scripts edited by call center representatives. For common customer problems, wiki support pages could be both internal and external where customers and reps might find workarounds to problems that are valuable to other users (Tony Baggio from SocialText alluded to this opportunity is his comment on my previous post). There are already many communities online where people contribute for free; call centers have an advantage because they control incentives (beyond free) to foster activity. The evolution of call centers from rigid scripts to a network support model would increase call resolution times and increase the capacity of call center employees to take on more challenging issues and tasks.
Feedback mechanisms: The current focus of call centers is problem resolution and mitigation, not customer insight. Call center employees are the company’s front line to customers. Equally valuable would be wiki feedback mechanisms that send information in the other direction to marketing and product development functions. Remember, call centers only see a small percentage of problems, many are discussed in forums and on blogs that are outside the company’s control. Customers also use products in ways that you might never have imagined. How can we leverage these interactions? Is there a role for call reps to engage other communities? Can a Dell IdeaStorm-type initiative help centralize these erroneous points of feedback? The bottom line is this: market research spends an awful lot of money trying to figure out what product needs are and where to take a product; the customer support mechanism should be guiding exactly those things.
A darling of the Wikinomics blog (1,2,3), Radiohead has impressed before, and with their latest video for House of Cards, they do so again. Maintaining their promise not to make any conventional music videos for their anything but conventionally released In Rainbows, the band’s latest video was made using Geometric Informatics and LIDAR (think radar, but with light) technology normally reserved for geographic mapping and catching speeding cars, among other things.
Prosumerism is everywhere. From the oft-told example of Lego’s build-your-own sets to Starbucks’ customer co-creation website, My Starbucks Idea, prosumerism is turning up all over the place: your kids’ toy box, your cup holder, and now, your Word document.
Word processing individuals no longer need be confined by the fonts available within their software or even by fonts available for download online. Don’t like what you see? Build your own font.
FontStruct, which describes itself as “a free font-building tool brought to you by the world’s leading retailer of digital type FontShop,” lets users sign up, download their software, and build fonts by “construct[ing] geometrical shapes, which are arranged in a grid pattern, like tiles or bricks.”
Don’t have the time or creative inspiration to create your own? Browse other users’ fonts, which are available for download for free (if the creator feels generous with the rights). Or, for $250, FontShop will create a font based on your own handwriting, which you then own the rights to. On top of it all, FontStruct aficionados have built a tight community where they rate each others’ fonts and discuss all things font and beyond.
FontStruct seems to be gaining momentum. It’s been chatted up here, here and here. There are some legitimately cool fonts available to download for free, but I don’t think I will be making my own anytime soon since it looks pretty time-intensive. As the explosion in prosumerism provides lazy consumers like myself endless choices, I think I will leave the labor up to someone else and pick something someone else spent hours creating.
You can get a great media center for about 20 dollars. Sure, it’s ‘illegal,’ but not in the way you might think. I’m talking about modding an old XBOX, and loading it up with XBOX Media Center (XBMC). The process takes about 20 minutes, and when you’re done, you’ve got a full featured DVD player that can also stream content of any type off your local network, or the Internet itself. As great as that sounds, there are legal problems: the source code for XBMC is free for all to use, but in order to compile it for use on the XBOX unit, Microsofts proprietary compiler is needed, meaning that if you download it, you could be breaking the law. This, however, is no longer a problem: the software has been re-written for Windows, Linux and OSX.
The transition from being console software to desktop software brings about some advantages, support for HDTV, and support for new hardware… like the Nintendo Wiimote.
A bunch of strangers on the Internet found each other and collaborated to write new software for an old product, making the old XBOX a top-of-the-line media center, better than commercially available alternatives. The team grows, develops into a community, and the code gets ported over to new, more powerful platforms, allowing a competing Nintendo product to join the equation and make things better still. All of this is done by volunteers and released for free online. I think that’s really cool.
Nate Anderson published a very interesting article on Sunday where he quotes Columbia Law School Professor Tim Wu calling Apple’s iPhone the device “at the center of the battle for the future of the Internet.” Why? Well…
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.”
Whenever LEGOs are mentioned my mind wanders and I can hear the sound of my dad’s footsteps walking down the hallway after putting us to bed. Suddenly a cry of pain would signal to my brother and I that it was time to act asleep. For some reason, my dad managed to always find the one or two rogue LEGOs we had missed when picking up our toys. The funniest/ saddest part of the story is that I am the oldest of seven children and through out all those years he never was able to escape those rogue LEGOs. Read More »
Well, Grand Theft Auto IV was released last night at midnight, which means that there were people lined up to buy it. From where I sit, dressing up like Niko Bellic is less geeky than Dumbledore and certainly better than dear Jar-Jar. Some of your co-workers may be a little sleepy if they spent the wee hours commiting mayhem in Liberty City.
The game has great reviews so far as well as the typical hoopla about inappropriateness of the material. Thing is, adults make up a huge percentage of the gaming population and some games are just not made for children — just as the Godfather (parts I and II), Silence of the Lambs, Pulp Fiction, and the Usual Suspects are all considered great films, but not ones that you would watch with your tween.
What’s the wikinomics angle? User-generated content delivered through “walkthroughs” are a huge value ad to the game and the best ones are prepared by volunteers. Below is an excerpt from a study that Alan Majer and I conducted about a great walkthough creator “named” AggroSk8ter.
A cool new mashup at Dilbert.com allows users to create their own punchline for the famous Dilbert comic strip. Focusing on interactivity, the site plans to eventually let users rewrite entire strips. This is a great example of an innovative way to engage consumers in a way that traditional newspapers are not able to do. When asked whether he expects to see funny suggestions, the original creator Scott Adams replied:
I think 99.9 percent of the submitted punch lines will be less funny than my original. After all, I’ve had a lot of practice. But with volume, that still leaves room for lots of comics that are better than the original. But we’ll see. This new model makes mocking your co-workers and boss a competitive sport, so it should be lots of fun. I submitted two alternative punch lines today myself, trying to top my original. It’s addicting.
The Arduino is an open source hardware platform that’s used for electronics projects. It has a growing base of fans among DIY hobbyists and artists alike. Arduino.cc describes it:
Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software. It’s intended for artists, designers, hobbyists, and anyone interested in creating interactive objects or environments.
Because it’s open you can either buy the Arduino from a variety of people who manufacture it (for example robotshop.ca in Canada) starting at about $35 each, or you can simply build one yourself out of parts.
While the Arduino is an amazing product of mass collaboration itself, it has also spawned an interesting community of innovators who use it. Searching youtube for “arduino project” reveals dozens of results - from funky lights and robots to a visualization of voice patterns. Other companies have even integrated the arduino with mobile networks and GPS for example (there’s a contest to win one if you develop an interesting project with the arduino), the robotshop.ca site even has one with built-in Zigbee wireless capability. It will be interesting to see what new innovations come out of this little $35 hardware platform.
Along with Don’s coverage of the Wii Pay to Play model, the gaming system has also been building steam on the web recently with the announcement and distribution of the Twilight Hack. This marks the first time that the tools to hack the Wii have been made readily available and this opens the door to a wide range of user-generated programs for the Wii, which can now run unsigned code. In non-geek language, this means that it is now possible to write your own programs for the Wii, using nothing more than a plain old Wii, a loophole found in the Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess game and an SD memory card with an SD media reader.
Some of the early homemade programs allow gamers to use their Wii as an MP3 player and also to run the Linux OS. While I couldn’t hack a mainframe to save my life, I will be keeping a close eye on this development - first to see what kinds of great applications ensue, but also to watch for Nintendo’s official reaction.
How MAKE magazine describes itself should make clear to any wikinomics reader why we are so interested in the site:
MAKE Magazine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. MAKE is loaded with exciting projects that help you make the most of your technology at home and away from home. We celebrate your right to tweak, hack, and bend any technology to your own will.
In other words, it truly is the bible of a generation of prosumers who are customizing and innovating with all the technology around them. I strongly recommend that you regularly check out the site, if for no other reason than getting a sneak peek on all the cool innovations floating around there that you’d otherwise never hear of. To mention a few hot spots:
the main blog page is the prime destination for staying up-to-date.
The new “MADE in Japan” blog section will be particularly interesting to many North American readers, who may or may not know Japan tends to be a few years ahead of us in technology innovation.
The how-to DVD rental space (powered by SmartFlix) could help a lot of people… though the lack of direct-download option is curious.
As a side note, it appears part of their advertising done through Federated Media, a very interesting company that deserves a blog post on here soon.
Of course, there are also literally thousands of interesting little innovations posted all over the blog, etc… like this scary looking Handheld 3-D Scanner. Anyone want to point us towards some of their favorites?
The website has since been taken down but you can view the winning video here. Quiznos take on the whole thing seems simple enough “We’re just facilitating consumers who go out and create their own expression in the form of a commercial,” said Ronald Y. Rothstein, a partner at Winston & Strawn, on behalf Quiznos.
Now, I don’t pretend to grasp the legal intricacies of corporate advertising but from what I have understand ads that contain ’slanderous statements and false claims’ are supposed to be off limits. However, from what I have observed as a consumer doesn’t seem to be that cut and dry. Coke and Pepsi used to run blind taste test about which was better, Bud and Miller Lite continuously state they taste better than the each other, and what about the Mac ads? They are hilarious but I would think they have to be pushing the boundaries with the whole Vista sucks by a Mac angle in their latest campaign.
Personally it would make more sense to me if the lawsuit was aimed only at the ads Quiznos created and maybe the way the instructed customers to portray their subs as being better, but to sue over user generated content seems a little odd. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. Hopefully it won’t kill this type of engaging and entertaining advertising that allows companies to connect with their customers and spice up the marketing industry.
The launch of Tata Motor’s $2500 Nano has made a big splash across the world. Although, not an immediate threat to established car makers, expertise in the design of cheap cars could allow Tata to eventually compete for the dollars of the increasingly prosperous middle class in developing countries. Obviously a huge growth opportunity for any car maker who can tap it.
However, a $2500 dollar car makes a smaller impact on your life if you are one of the vast majority of Indians who makes $700 or less per year. Even Tata’s best engineers could not make a car to serve this market. However, this doesn’t mean that India’s vast poorer classes do not have access to motorized transportation. Under these difficult conditions, a “car” called the Jugaad was created with the efforts of self-organizing rural mechanics.
The car is basic to say the least. It has four wheels, an engine and a chassis that is often made out of wood. A model with a 10 horsepower engine and all new components costs around $1000. However, since each part of the Jugaad can be replaced individually, or substituted with used parts, the price tag can go down to as little as $600.
The Jugaads operate mostly in rural areas as they are technically illegal - they do not meet any government standards, pay taxes or have license plates. However, with India’s famously overloaded transportation infrastructure, the need for these cars is likely to continue.
Although Tata’s Nano will go a long way in making the lives of millions of people more convenient, the real opportunity lies in the rural areas where a huge share of the world’s poor live. It seems that with the proven ingenuity of people in those areas a modest investment by either governments or corporations would yield a very high return in terms of development. Coincidentally, this topic was addressed by Bill Gates at the Davos conference.
Technology and the US election I've written several times about the impact of social networks on this year's US Presidential election - see here and here. And let's be honest, the use of such networks and new web 2.0 technologies has been dominated by Obama. He’s embraced social networks like no other candidate in an attempt to connect with [...]
