Sort of: once StarCraft 2 reached a stage where it was reasonably polished and playable, Blizzard-Activision moved it into a public beta, where anyone could download the multiplayer component of the game for free and play to their heart’s content. Based on usage and feedback, the strengths and abilities of various game pieces were tweaked and refined, and the beta saw continuous, iterative improvements. The beta wrapped up about a month before the official July 27th release of the game, but when the final product shipped, it did so having been vetted by countless thousands of players–players who not only had a chance to make the game better, but had a chance to get addicted to it and line up to buy a copy of the finished product. The game is great and would still have been great had Blizzard-Activision not had their open beta, but the extra time to polish the product made it that much better, and saved them post-release efforts in squashing bugs and tweaking dynamics.

In another smart gaming industry play, one that coincides with StarCraft 2 both in terms of timing and theme, Valve Software also recently released a “marines in space” style game, Alien Swarm–except that in Valve’s case, the game was released for free; not even as a beta, just as a free product. The closest thing to a catch with this is that in order to play Alien Swarm, players need to install Steam, Valve’s content delivery/social network/game storefront platform. Any player who installs Alien Swarm to play with their friends via Steam will see all of the games that their friends have, be updated when and where their friends are playing, and have a very easy to use purchase/upgrade path should they want to buy any games through the platform. By bringing gamers to a platform where purchasing, playing, and socializing take place, Valve has made a very clean and unified user experience, one that seems to resonate strongly and positively with users.

Video games, like movies and music, are readily susceptible to piracy. In a future post I’m going to explore how parts of the gaming industry have opted for a much different solution than the ones explored by movie studios and record labels (litigation): making “going legit” easier and superior to piracy. I’m convinced that across the board, businesses of any type can learn a lot from what innovating gaming firms are doing.

A blues or jazz band—or any ‘jam band’ for that matter—operates using many of the design principles we’d like to see from a collaborative enterprise. Unlike an orchestra, a band is much more fluid in their interpretation of the music. They are able to improvise on the spot, blend sounds, and often play to the mood of the audience. In other words, they innovate, create mash-ups, and are responsive to users.

I’m not the first person to use the band analogy. Barry Rabkin of the Market Insight Group asks whether technology analyst firms are more like a jazz band or symphony orchestra. He alludes to the fact that the jazz band style is more agile and responsive to customer demands—another important outcome of collaboration:

“Another area where jazz musicians differ from their symphonic counterparts is that jazz musicians, sensing their audience, can and do take liberties with new selections not identified during their rehearsals. They can do this because they have a broad library of music and musical explorations in their knowledge set and, as importantly, they know how to blend their sounds together to get the best outcome possible for their audience.”

What’s more, in a symphony orchestra the conductor alone is responsible for guiding the entire team, whereas with a distributed, ad-libbing crew, anyone can start pushing with a new riff or mood and the others will follow suit. In this way, the benefit of each player’s perspective and expertise is baked into the model.

One of the factors that allows a band to operate in this manner is the existence of very well defined roles (i.e. guitarist, vocalist, drummer, base, keyboards, etc.) and somewhat open tasks (i.e. what songs to play, when to riff, what chords to use, etc.). This is another important learning for the enterprise. As Lynda Gratton and Tammy Erickson note in the HBR article Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams:

“Cooperation increases when the roles of individual team members are sharply defined yet the team is given latitude on how to achieve the task. [...]Assign distinct roles so team members can do their work independently. They’ll spend less time negotiating responsibilities or protecting turf. But leave the path to achieving the team’s goal somewhat ambiguous. Lacking well-defined tasks, members are more likely to invest time and energy collaborating.”

In addition to looking at how bands are structured, we might also consider how band members collect largely unstructured customer experience ‘metrics’ in real time and use the feedback to adjust their approach. These metrics provide a useful analogy for the type of approaches leading companies should take when developing customer strategies, including:

• The applause of the crowd: What kind of noise are customers and prospects making online and in social media channels? Using sentiment analysis companies can find out if it is positive (cheers) or negative (boos) and change their tune accordingly.
• Number of people dancing: How engaged is your audience? Metrics might be based on active participation on forums, comments online, rating of content, and re-broadcasting of brand messages, or more passive (i.e. head bobbing) activities such as subscribing to feeds, friending, and following.
• Song requests: What kinds of requests are coming into your contact center and support organization? In many organizations, the contact center is an untapped wealth of customer feedback, largely ignored by groups like marketing and product development. Listening to this channel and other prosumer input can lead to dramatically improved customer experience.
• Duration of stay in the bar: How long do customers hang out in your online properties? Using Web analytics, companies can now obtain this information, as well as data about how people got there, what path they take along the way, and how influential various ‘promoters’ are at bringing in prospects.
• CD and merchandise sales: How are Web interactions translating into sales? The performance is about creating an experience, but ultimately, in order to be profitable, you need people to buy your stuff.

As companies continue to seek best practices and metrics for collaboration, I firmly believe that some of the more innovative solutions will come from non-traditional fields that have deep roots in collaboration, but that have eluded formal study and analysis. (If I’ve managed to spark an interest in enterprise lessons in collaboration from other disciplines, also see my previous post on Measuring collaboration: Lessons from Shane Battier and the NBA and the related Collaboration box score.)

A little place on the Internet celebrating creativity and the everyday moments of inspiration that LEGO® enthusiasts call “CL!CK.” Come to inspire and be inspired.

The community is tightly tied to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, providing tags (#legoclick and legoclick) so that users can take ownership of their new ideas and post those ideas out to the world. The Cl!ck community highlights individual’s random posts on its site, so as I went back and forth to the site I actually saw updated Tweets and posts about what people were thinking about and doing with Cl!ck. Marketers at Lego also did a fantastic job putting together a video to introduce the concept. I’m sure you’ll agree it’s well done and very engaging.

We should not be surprised at Lego’s recent step into more collaboration with customers, especially since they’ve been working on it since the early days of their Mindstorms project. Lego Mindstorms, originally released in 1998, developed programmable bricks, electric sensors, and motors so that Lego enthusiasts and other inventors could create robots or whatever they wanted. At the time Lego was still targeting only kids with Mindstorms, but this initiative revealed how much of an adult following they had. In 2005,  Don Tapscott commented in an Optimize Magazine article(now Information Week):

Within three weeks of their release, user groups had sprung up, and tinkerers had reverse-engineered and reprogrammed the sensors, motors, and controller devices at the heart of the Mindstorms robotic system—and sent their suggestions to Lego. The company, at first uncertain about how to respond, threatened to launch lawsuits. When users rebelled, however, Lego finally came around and eventually created a Web site where customers can co-create products. Now each time a customer develops and posts an application for Mindstorms, the toys become more valuable.

Even years ago Lego recognized how important collaborative customer relationships were to the growth of the brand and the company. Lego’s CL!CK community is clearly an extension of its ongoing collaboration with its customers.

In conjunction with the CL!CK  announcement, Lego also release a free iPhone app that allows users to take any image and convert it to a mosaic Lego image. It’s easy to use and downloadable at legoclick.com or  iTunes.

While the iPhone app seems fun and is an interesting way to keep your brand in front of consumers, the CL!CK community could actually produce new innovations, benefiting both Lego and those inventors who generate new ideas. The launch and campaign around the site has been impressive so far. I look forward to seeing CL!CK success stories and possibly new social product development processes emerge from this as well.

Farmville exists with a very different business model than most video games: you don’t pay by the month to play it, you don’t even shell out a one-time payment to play: you play for free, and then the game tries to sell you in-game perks and a chance to skip the grind to unlock all of the game’s content by spending money rather than time.

Farmville locks you out of some content unless you have enough friends playing Farmville with you, and having friends in your network playing Farmville is a reliable source of coins, experience, and gifts, the main resources of the game.

The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and “adopt” the adorable little self-promoter.

The genius in how Farmville has succeed in getting so many people addicted comes down to how it handles commitments on a player’s time: every time you play Farmville and plant a crop, you’re making a commitment to come back during a 12 hour window or so to harvest your crop, or else you forfeit your investment.

There’s some more surprising and clever stuff that has been baked into the social design of the game, but even the points above would seem to make for an addictive (and viral) experience.

nGenera just hosted a conference in Memphis (kudos to FedEx for graciously hosting it at their World Technology Center) where I gave a presentation on gamers as employees and customers. I argue that gamers are more than a bit self-interested, and are focused on generating smart, efficient solutions to problems that let them sail through the rest of the game with relative ease and speed. Gamers also want to feel engaged with their virtual worlds, and in certain cases have emotional connections with in-game characters and the game itself.

Farmville seems to have taken these constructs to a new level, allowing gamers to pay (real money) for tools that speed them towards completion and give them competitive advantage, and putting gamers in situations where their emotional involvement with the game is leveraged to encourage friends to start playing (and spending their own money for in-game advantages).

While writing this post I’ve had the facebook connect installation screen sitting in a background tab in my browser, I think I have to go try the game out for the sake of research. Are there any Wikinomics readers who play the game? What do you think of it? What should I expect?

Hopefully I won’t get completely swallowed up, and will post again soon!

As reported on ArsTechnica.com, the computer gaming industry is not pleased with the response that AT&T filed with the FCC.  It suggested that online games should be relegated to the category of being nice but not essential. “For Americans who today have no terrestrial broadband service at all,” AT&T wrote the Commission, “the pressing concern is not the ability to engage in real-time, two-way gaming, but obtaining meaningful access to the Internet’s resources and to reliable email communications and other basic tools that most of the country has come to expect as a given.”

This did not sit well with the Entertainment Software Association.  Online video games “are no less important to the future of the Internet than email and web browsing were to the past and are today,” a senior ESA representative told the Commission on Wednesday.

They’re used for employee training and in schools, he noted. “Online video games are a meaningful part of our participative culture. They remove geographic barriers, connecting people from across the country and around the world. They teach cooperation, cultivate leadership skills, and empower users to express their creativity.”

Google’s submission took the most sensible approach. “Ultimately what interests us about broadband is not what it is, but what it enables,” the search engine giant wrote to the Commission. Broadband should be defined at speeds “that enable full utilization of broadband services and applications.” The connections should be “sufficiently robust” enough to let users “receive, generate and interact with voice, data, graphics and video, which will enable users to receive the maximum value of broadband.”

Google’s dream definition of broadband? “A high-quality, ‘always on,’ packet switched, technology-neutral, high speed communications transmission platform,” the company suggests. “This platform further should allow users to harness the Internet, access and upload content, and otherwise engage in high-speed two-way connectivity and interactivity.”

Having identified these potential sources of evil, the NFL announced a formal policy in early August cracking down on the use of Twitter, basically trying to ban the use of the tool by anyone in its ecosystem (players, coaches, staff, etc). So I guess formal communication channels were supposed to remain the norm and the opportunity to informally connect with fans, or communicate with a broader audience, the fundamental concepts behind social media and the reason it is becoming so popular, would not be taken advantage of?  Some teams like the New Orleans Saints have taken a less harsh approach. Shortly after the NFL policy was released, Saints Head Coach Sean Payton stated that he is in favor of the medium as long as players use it wisely. This is the stance that we often recommend to enterprises as they update policies to include appropriate use of social media channels. The below chart from our redefining employee computing study, shows the difference between the old school style of thinking and the new. Note how much of the NFL mandate falls into the old school column. Specifically look at the objective row: The old school is to maintain control vs the new school attitude of building an environment built on understanding, capability and trust.

One area that makes NFL  players different is that they are celebrities; they want to build their personal brands and experiment with this stuff. A company can’t stop an employee from participating online; it can only provide guidelines and trust that the right thing is going to be done. When the right thing is not done, consequences should be clear. Case in point – Antonio Cromartie @crimetime31 was fined $2500 for posting a complaint on Twitter about the food at the San Diego Chargers training camp. I’m not sure it’s really a fineable offense, but it does send a message. BTW: Antonio has protected his tweets so he needs to approve you before you can follow him. I wonder if that happened before or after this incident? The fine is actually ironic given that the Chargers tend to have a more progressive attitude towards social media. They broadcasted their first-round pick on Twitter before the NFL announced it, Charger linebacker Shawne Merriman (@shawnemerriman) answered questions about his use of social media at a San Diego Tweetup, and The Chargers even have a staffer dedicated to heading up social media efforts including Twitter: @Chargers.

Interestingly, less than 30 days after the initial NFL social media regulations were announced, the policy was amended. The NFL graciously announced that it would “allow players to use social media networks this season.” Anyone else think it’s fascinating that the NFL thinks it needs to give permission for this stuff? The league also announced that players, coaches and football operations staff would be allowed to use social media up to 90 minutes prior to kickoff and after the game once traditional media interviews are complete. So, if I’m Patriots tackle Matt Light and I’m showered and on my way home, I have to listen to when QB Tom Brady’s press conference ends to figure out when it’s OK to update my Facebook or Twitter status? BTW: Matt does tweet however the one page I found is set up for his charity vs. a personal Twitter handle. What fine will the NFL dish out the first time something is posted 89 minutes before kickoff?

More pieces of the updated policy:

• Of course, no status updates are allowed during the game, which would be tough to do since cell phones, PDAs and laptops are not allowed on the sidelines.
• The use of social media by all officials and officiating department personnel is prohibited at all times.
• This next one is my favorite: The league has also banned play-by-play descriptions of games in progress, extending that ban to social media platforms. Does that ban apply to fans? If it does and I’m at a Pats game (1 of 68,000+ fans) and I post that Brady just hit Randy Moss (@r81m) for a 70 yard TD to win the game should I expect a fine? Unlike most professional athletes, I can’t afford that type of hit!

Some individual teams also placed restrictions on spectators at training camps and practice fields, including @MiamiDolphins,  @Denver_Broncos, @realpatriots, @buffalobillscom, @DetroitLionsNFL, The Colts and The Saints (if you find their official Twitter sites let me know).

I am not arguing that restrictions are by themselves a bad idea; I do think that all companies need them to ensure security, stakeholder value and maintain a competitive advantage in their market. The NFL has already seen examples where social media has supplied an unneeded distraction (something that makes football coaches everywhere cringe.) When Minnesota QB Tarvaris Jackson sprained a knee ligament, his teammate Bernard Berrian (@bernardberrian)  tweeted that Jackson was out for the season. He quickly posted that it was a joke but this underscored how much “appropriate use” education may be needed.

Interestingly, the NFL  (@NFL)does use Twitter and other social media tools, primarily for marketing and promotions. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell (@nflcommish) even tweeted from the college draft. What I’d like to know is – how far will the  restrictions/policies go? How many more changes are on the horizon? I applaud the NFL  for being the first professional sports league to publically recognize the importance of social media and attempting to develop reasonable guidelines around its use.  However, I am not convinced that the scope of the current policy is actually realistic. My hope is that the guidelines remain flexible or at least amendable; to adjust as the market adjusts, while still providing the players freedom to connect with their fans without becoming too paranoid.

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.

While we haven’t had time to get into much of the analysis yet, I think we’ll have a lot to work with – the popularity of different team accounts do vary widely.  Using simple follower counts as a starting point (we’re working on a “fan score” to index these I’ll talk about another time, but the basic idea is to account for the fact small market teams should naturally have a smaller audience), here’s the raw statistics on a 29 team sample (Golden State was excluded do to lack of use) as of August 12th:

• Average number of followers: 49,877
• Median number of followers: 7,871
• Lowest number of followers: 2,921
• Highest number of followers: 782,019 (has since grown to 875,510 and counting)

Those that remember being in stats 101 may note that the massive difference between the average and the median implies a skewed distribution – which is absolutely the case here. Of the 29 teams in the sample, 27 of them had less than 20,300 followers. The top two had 431,920 and 782,109 – or twenty to forty times more than the third place team. That seems like a difference with exploring.

These top two teams are… The L.A Lakers and The Orlando Magic. Notably, these are the two teams that made the NBA finals. Thus, we conclude that being active on Twitter means your team will win . Just kidding of course – but this is going to be an interesting thing to dig into. While intuitively it makes sense that the more successful teams will be more popular (etc.), it’s hard to fathom there would be a 20 to 40 fold difference that stemmed from simply making the finals. Did perhaps the NBA start marketing the teams Twitter accounts for the first time during the finals? Don’t know – yet. But hope to figure it out.

The reason we need to figure it out, of course, is that while “being good at what you do will lead to more Twitter followers” is an important point, what we really want to isolate is the effect of how different teams use their accounts to acquire more followers, deepen customer engagement, etc. To find clues into where to look, we started looking for teams who’s Twitter follower counts (either the straight number, or adjusted for franchise value) seemed to stick out as possible anomalies.

Overall, if you look at the list it is pretty predictable – successful teams (and those in bigger markets) tend to have more followers, unsuccessful ones (and those in smaller markets) less followers. For example, after LA and Orlando, the next three are Cleveland, Chicago, and Boston (all in the 17,000 to 20,000 range) – Lebron, big market, last year’s champ / big market. But the next team is the first one that sticks out a bit – the Phoenix Suns. They didn’t make the playoffs, the market isn’t THAT big, and they have the 6th most followers. That is one account definitely worth exploring. But on the “good” side of things, the team that REALLY stands out is the LA Clippers. To put it mildly, they’re not known for having great fan support, the team has been bad for quite a long time (and some say cursed), they have one of the lowest franchise values in the league… they’re by far the worst team that’s in the top-10 of Twitter followers. Interesting.

Then there’s the bottom of the list, and I’m sad to report that the biggest anomaly is easy to find – my hometown Toronto Raptors. Of the 29 teams examined in the sample, they have the absolute fewest followers – which doesn’t really make sense due to market size, popularity, etc. As noted in the last post, their official account is a peculiar one – Raptors_web_guy – who’s bio is “Coding HTML, Creatin’ Graphics, Cutting Videos all with my finger on the pulse in Raptors Nation.” Let’s just say it doesn’t appear the team is into this twitter thing – even though their best player is all over it – and it shows.

So that’s just a sprinkling of some of the top line numbers and what’s starting to stick out – over time we’ll be digging into how the different accounts are used, types of messages sent, how they’re integrated into the team’s overall web presence, whether or not players are involved or not, what other companies can learn, etc. If you have any thoughts on this – or what we should be digging into – please let me know (here, at my website, @denisbhancock, etc.).

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.

This year, at E3 2009, Sony gave a preview of their new PSP game Invizimals, which is to be released in the UK this fall. The game uses augmented reality to capture children’s imaginations and enhance the gaming experience. According to the introductory video in the game, a Japanese scientist created a camera that is more sensitive than the human eye and can ‘see’ invizimals that humans cannot. The game tasks you to find the invizimals using the PSP camera (the screen begins to pulse when the camera detects an invizimal) and to trap them by placing a star shaped card in the vicinity of the invizimal. If done correctly, the Invizimal, a little, wild, computer-generated animal, will appear on the PSP screen on top of the real star-shaped card, as shown in this YouTube video. Once captured, the Invizimals can be battled against each other, and during the battle, players can blow on the screen to create a windstorm or cast a shadow over the screen to create a lighting strike.

Seeing the augmented reality technology used by Sony, I became intrigued with marketing applications for such technology. After some searching, I came across GE’s use of augmented reality in promoting Smart Grid, a project that encourages energy efficiency and the harnessing of renewable energy sources. GE has created a windmill model (shown in the picture above) that is enhanced by augmented reality and can be viewed using a webcam and the ‘marker’ (a 2D bar code) from their Smart Grid website. Although the model is very interesting to view, this use of augmented reality is playing on the novelty of the technology and not using the technology to its full potential.

I later came across a concept that uses augmented reality to enhance marketing for IKEA in an effective way. It’s called My.IKEA. The idea is that augmented reality can be used by IKEA customers to literally ‘picture’ the furniture in their rooms before purchasing. The customer sets up a webcam in their room, prints out markers that are each tied to an item of furniture and places the markers where they would like the furniture. In the example picture above, the marker for the virtual table is visible, but the virtual couch sits on top of its marker. I love this concept for two reasons: one, it takes a lot of guesswork out of furniture shopping and two, it allows people to show concepts to each other, chat online about them and compete for the best designs. The social aspect to this concept makes it interactive and fun for those that are interested in design, and creates a community that is interested in discussing IKEA products.

Another interesting development is using augmented reality with QR codes on billboards and in magazines. When the codes are scanned by a mobile phone, the image in the advertisement would transform on the mobile screen into a 3D augmented reality picture. These ideas, though, have the same issue as GE’s augmented reality model: once the novelty has worn off, they will no longer be of much interest. One area where it could be useful is if when the code is scanned, the advertisement for, say a cruise, could pop up in 3D and allow you to navigate through the cruise ship, taking a 3D tour of the facilities.

I’m interested to know what you think. Will augmented reality become commonplace in marketing in the future?

In turn, I’m happy to report that I think I’ve found a new topic that will really annoy some of those people . Regular readers of this blog (and my site) may recall I’ve been spending a fair bit of time researching how organizations are using Twitter – and if you watch closely you’ll probably also see that I’m an NBA fan. In turn, much like the Sports Guy, I’ve become incredibly fascinated by how twitter (and social media) is changing the experience of NBA fans. And I’ve convinced myself that not only is it an interesting story unto itself, but it can provide valuable insights for organizations of all different stripes trying to figure out their social media strategies.

The primary reason for this is related to the structure of the NBA. At the top you have the league itself, which has worked very hard for many years to portray a certain image to fans. In general, if they couldn’t control it, they didn’t like it. Let’s call that corporate headquarters. Then you have 30 different franchises that comprise the league. Let’s call them, er, the franchises. While bound by certain rules and guidelines holding the league together, each differs in terms of identity, underlying philosophy, market size, success metrics, etc. Sometimes this is most directly tied to the owner (see: BlogMaverick). Other times it’s tied more to the coach (say, Phil Jackson or Mike D’Antoni).

Then you have the players – a.k.a. “the workers” – who are probably the most interesting group for this analysis. They are high profile and wealthy people, and many might argue that a sense of “self-entitlement” comes with their status. But the wrinkle is that most of them are also members of the Net Generation – that pesky group of young workers that critics often blanket with the “self entitlement” stigma as well. So you’ve got a group of people that grew up in the generation where “everyone got a trophy for showing up”, but they were the ones who were actually winning the big trophies – call it self-entitlement squared. And of course, surrounding this league are all the various media properties that bring the NBA experience to fans.

While the Internet has been slowly changing all kinds of things with how the NBA engages with fans, in many ways Twitter has been a bomb that’s gone off – things are changing pretty dramatically, and pretty quickly. And like we’ve seen with many organizations, it’s been mostly driven from the bottom-up: a whole bunch of enthusiastic Net Geners jumping into the fray, with good and bad consequences for themselves, their teams, the league, and the supporting ecosystem.

The aspects of the “good” story tend to be obvious – it’s very cool for a fan to be able to follow, say, The_Real_Shaq or ChrisBosh. In turn, Twitter can enable a deeper connection between fans and players, which (hopefully) leads to things like increased ticket and merchandise sales. But bad stories about how NBA players use Twitter are popping up with remarkable frequency.

For example, Kevin Love tweeted about his coach not coming back next season. Sounds kind of innocent, except for the fact it hadn’t been made public yet – a.k.a. he gave away a company secret. His reaction was (more or less) this is a new world and teams just have to get used to it – but most would argue that employees need to use better discretion. And NBA journalists around the world likely weeped in unison – if players break the stories, what exactly are they going to do?

T.J. Ford didn’t exactly give away a company secret, but the organization he represents (and society in general) may feel that he said to much when the start of an infamous tweet noted – and I’m not joking – that he was going to “takin a dump.” I believe it’s what the kids call TMI.

J.R. Smith jumped on the twitter – and many of his tweets constantly used “K’s” instead of “C’s”. Bad spelling might be a forgivable offense – but the realization that this letter switch is commonly used to to represent affiliation with the Bloods street gang probably isn’t. He’s since pulled the plug on the account.

Then there are the greyer areas. When Charlie V tweeted during halftime of a game, his coach got angry – and told him never to do it again, because he needs to be focused on the task at hand. When Shaq did kind of the same thing (in a joking fashion), his coach said he didn’t care – so long as he was putting up good stats. One argument is that this is just a difference in coaching philosophies; another is that players fulfilling their potential (say, Shaq) get privileges that others (say, Charlie V) don’t. Companies that struggle with how and when to accept their employees engaging with social media during “work hours” know the challenges of dealing with such situations all too well. Does using Twitter at 2 pm mean they’re not focusing on their job? Or might they be using it in a way that actually helps the company generate sales (or team connect with fans)? Can you have different rules for different people?

Then you can dig into what the various teams are doing. If you check out the Laker’s page, they actively promote a number of different accounts you can follow – including @Lakers, @JeanieBuss (EVP), @LakersReporter, and your choice of five players (I assume they watch the account of Ron Artest closely for obvious reasons). If you go to the Orlando Magic page, you can follow more people – including TV hosts, radio hosts, the unofficial Magic Girl, even the Magic Dancers – but not a single player is listed. The latter case is like how a lot of companies work – the workers work (players play), and the support staff does PR / marketing.

Other teams – like my hometown Raptors – are on Twitter, but don’t really seem into it. Their “official” Twitter account link from their home page is to @Raptors_web_guy, who’s bio starts with “coding HTML”, and the account hasn’t been updated this week. Which is kind of odd, since Raptor’s star Chris Bosh is all over Twitter. It’s also notable that the Raptors_Web_Guy has <3,000 followers, while the Orlando Magic’s main account has 426,000. Already working on a metric to accurately gauge which teams are more effective at using Twitter while accounting for things like market size.

And of course, there is also the main NBA account as well. And all the traditional media coverage sites around it. And all the new-ish NBA information sites that are connecting through it. And all the ways twitter connects with various other social media platforms.

Anyways, the detailed research is to follow – but you get the idea. There’s a whole lot going on, many different teams are doing many different things, and I believe the high profile of the NBA coupled with the way it is structured indicates there’s a lot that other companies can learn from them. If you have an interesting stories to share on this front, send them my way (here, or @denisbhancock)– and of course any new research ideas that would involve we doing what many employers would view as a “waste of time” are welcome. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it…

Appearing recently before hearings of the House of Commons industry committee, Mike Lazaridis, co-chief executive of Waterloo, Ont.-based Research in Motion, urged the federal government to intervene to avoid the loss to foreign control of technology he called “a national treasure.”  RIM would like to acquire the assets.

He told Members of Parliament that allowing the sale to proceed and having Canadians lose control of Nortel’s next-generation wireless patents would be similar to Canada’s notorious decision to cancel development of the Avro Arrow aircraft in 1959.

Writing in the Globe and Mail, Roger Martin, dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto and a member of the RIM board of directors, said the government didn’t appreciate how bare-knuckle the global marketplace can be.  He likened Canadians to being well-meaning but sometimes ineffectual boy scouts.

Bankrupt Nortel Networks Corp. is auctioning off its assets to pay what it can to creditors. A key component of those assets is valuable intellectual property related to the next-generation wireless standard, known as long-term evolution, or LTE. Those intellectual property assets were created by Nortel with millions of dollars of support from Canadian taxpayers through the Scientific Research Tax Credit program.

Sophisticated participants in the global wireless market who identified desirable intellectual property in Canadian hands came bidding for those assets with their chequebooks wide open. As a strategist, I absolutely would have encouraged them to do what they did. In the end, Swedish telecom giant Ericsson was the winner of the court-sponsored auction, gaining licensing rights to Nortel’s 125 LTE patents, though not ownership of the patents.

However, had crucial Swedish telecom intellectual property been up for sale instead, there would be no chance that any foreign company would have even have had a sniff at it, let alone get $300-million in financing for it (as Export Development Canada offered to Nokia Siemens Networks in its failed bid for the Nortel assets). And that’s because the Swedish economic policy leaders aren’t boy scouts.

The time is now – right now – for the Canadian government to step up to the plate and use the Investment Canada Act review provisions to demonstrate that, like the leaders of Canada’s great global companies, it has graduated from scout status to being a full partner in global competitiveness.

The sale should not proceed.

First, I got some extra inspiration by attending the National Instruments annual users’ conference last week in Austin. Here are a couple of photos of Isadora, a robot that works very similarly to the CopyCat that I wrote about, this time built by a student team. The left-hand photo shows the small version of the bot, whose manual movements are captured via the NI software shown on the screen and then communicated to the larger robot in the right-hand photo, which automatically duplicates the movements.

Second, also in last week’s post, I mentioned my colleague Alan Majer and his “GoodRobot” project. If you like to help him with a little market research regarding robots, please take a look at his wiki page and add your thoughts. Just thinking through your responses to the questions helps to get you thinking about the possibilities.

Third, I have a grass roots appeal: if you have any interest in this subject, plan to attend South-by-Southwest (SXSW) next March, or just want to help us out, please go to the panel picker beginning Monday, August 17 and cast a vote for “Controlling Robots Through the Web.”

Tohato, a Japanese snack manufacturer, launched the “World’s Worst War,” a massively multiplayer online game created to promote the launch of two new spicy snack flavours: “Tyrant Habenero Burning Hot Hell” and “Satan Jorquia Bazooka Deadly Hot”. The flavours were positioned as rivals with each snack claiming to be the spiciest, and the matter was settled on the battlefield. To join the battle, a consumer would purchase one flavour of the snack and with their cell phone, scan the 2D barcode (called a QR code). The consumer would then become a part of either Tyrant Habenero’s or Satan Jorquia’s army, depending on the flavour they had bought. Every 24 hours, there would be a battle at one of the 31 online battlefields and players would receive updates from “War Reporters” on recent battle developments, including who had been captured by the opposing army and who of their comrades had been promoted to a higher ranking officer.

By awarding special mobile standby screens to battle winners and offering an increase in rank as well as improved fighting power to players that recruited friends to their army, Tohato was able to promote the viral nature of the game. The “World’s Worst War” became very popular, with over 10,000 participants in total. Players even created communities online to discuss strategy for upcoming battles. Tohato reported that as a result of the campaign, sales increased significantly and page views on their website increased to 100,000 per day.

The success of this campaign is evidence of the shift in power that has occurred in the marketing world. With TiVo, time-shifting and media available online, consumers have become empowered to decide which advertising they view, and to get their attention, marketers must create value for them. The “World’s Worst War” was able to do just that. It introduced new consumers to Tohato products while providing an entertaining experience that consumers appreciated.

So, if even a CPG like Tohato can integrate their product into an exciting online game of war, marketing through games should be applicable to almost any industry.

It’s already begun, really, if you include the factory-based robots at modern manufacturers or offerings such as iRobot’s Roomba and other products for the home. But, with advances in wireless communications, broadband connectivity, continuing miniaturization and commoditization of components like cameras, power supplies, batteries, motors, etc., the next wave of robots at work and home is getting within reach – and they will be available on a mass scale.

For example, at the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2009) earlier this year, a team from Anybots debuted their new device, tentatively called QA. You can watch a video of QA running through a few of its paces in its home lab. Cool things about QA include: wireless, internet-based control; human height and good mobility; and 2-way telepresence.

Not cool: $30,000 USD suggested price, at the moment, which is mainly due to each model being hand-crafted until they can forge a manufacturing partnership that gets scale. (That’s the goal anyhow.)

For another example of a robot still in development and prototyping, take a look at one of the side projects of fellow Wikinomics colleague, Alan Majer. I find the fine-grained degree of precision in the movement of this prototype very impressive. Again, remotely controlled and wireless through the Internet.

But as frequently happens, it may well be that someone like Will Wright – the brains behind The Sims and Spore – will be among the first to crack the code of mass collaborative robots. For example, take a look at this intriguing video demo of CopyCat, a lab prototype that is nominally a project of Wight’s StupidFunClub.

Now, think about if I have a CopyCat and you have a CopyCat and a dozen of our best Facebook friends have CopyCats? Well, it takes the idea of a FB “poke” to a whole new level of meaning! I’m looking forward to seeing how this and other robotic technologies percolate to the broader global audience.

In my mind, the results are completely predictable. Personally I trust Jon Stewart more than anyone else to probe issues of actual importance. Most network news is sensationalist, and typically irrelevant blather, one step up from man bites dog. There are real problems in the world today. Young people know this. Increasingly they don’t accept the existing paradigms of what constitutes public discourse.

Jon Stewart’s popularity does not mean that today’s Net Generation is indifferent to the news. After all, to get most of Jon Stewart’s jokes, you actually have to know what is happening in the world.

Today’s youth are media-savvy, and have a good grip on what I would call the theater of Washington. A favorite Stewart technique was to note when a politician was blatantly contradicting what he or she said in the past. He would show two or three video clips back-to-back, and often just leave the contradiction to speak for itself. The news department of the big networks could do the same thing, but they choose not to. That’s not how they play the game. One can’t blame Stewart’s audience having greater faith that they’re getting the real goods.

Because of its nature of individual matchups between the pitcher and the batter, baseball lends itself to the collection of stats. Bill James and his band of sabremetricians help to collect detailed information about each player.  As the group would tell you, three of the most “traditional” baseball stats, batting average (treats a single and a grand slam as equals) and wins (can you team hit at all?) are useless. Total Average was the rage in the 1970s (it was updated after base stealers received too much of a premium because hitting a single and getting caught stealing means you did your team no better than if you struck out), fielding percentage (penalizes a shortstop for booting a ball that a fatter guy wouldn’t have reached).
Still, we are just talking about offensive contributions. The Times article describes how technology can enhance statistics even more.  From the article:

Which shortstops reach the hard-hit grounders up the middle? Which base runners take the fastest path from first base to third? Which right fielders charge the ball quickest and then throw the ball hardest and most accurately? Although the game will continue to answer to forces like wind, glaring sun and the occasional gnat swarm, a good deal of time-honored guesswork will give way to more definite measurements — continuing the trend of baseball front offices trading some traditional game-watching scouts for video and statistical analysts.

First was a stunning article about Trent Reznor and the Nine Inch Nails iPhone app. Yep, you heard it right: the NIN iPhone app…I have it my phone now. It’s been a while since one of my colleagues, Ian Da Silva, wrote about Mr. Reznor, who is Nine Inch Nails.  But the gent has not gotten any less intense or tech-savvy. In the new article from last month that I refer to, Reznor sounds even more like an enterprise 2.0 guru than ever. Here are but a few choice quotes:

Regarding the inertia of the music industry: “Anyone who’s an executive at a record label does not understand what the internet is, how it works, how people use it, how fans and consumers interact — no idea,” he declares. “…They’re in such a state of denial it’s impossible for them to understand what’s happening,” Reznor says.

“As an artist, you are now the marketer…I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think music should be free,” Reznor says. “But the climate is such that it’s impossible for me to change that, because the record labels have established a sense of mistrust. So everything we’ve tried to do has been from the point of view of, ‘What would I want if I were a fan? How would I want to be treated?’ Now let’s work back from that. Let’s find a way for that to make sense and monetize it.”

Regarding the decision to use off-the-shelf resources — Blogger, Twitter, FeedBurner, Flickr, YouTube — rather than trying to duplicate what other people had already created: “They’re going to do a better job than we are and they’re going to have a lot more resources to put into it.”

Lastly, regarding the one part of NIN.com that Reznor had custom-built at the piece at the center of it all: the database of fan info that has been harvested from the registration process giving Reznor 2 million e-mail addresses: “If The Slip [NIN’s most recent album] had ‘X’ number of downloads, we know who those people are and we’ll reach out to them with the next thing we have,” he says. A concert coming up in Atlanta? It’s a simple matter to send out e-mails to everyone within a hundred-mile radius of the city. “That seems to be the most valuable thing you can get — a way to reach people,” Reznor says.

Second was a fascinating article about the crazy cool guys at MacHeist. If you are a Mac user (I’m not on the desktop; iPhone only), then you’ve probably heard of this gig. Running for its third year, as the Wired article explains “MacHeist consists of a series of online missions, and the completion of each stage unlocks access to a free Mac application. The difficulty of the puzzles encourages community collaboration in MacHeist’s forums. And the entire scheme is designed to promote the sale of a Mac software bundle.”

But, here’s what I love about this deal: it’s an absolutely novel way to sell software. Check out the economics: “Putting on MacHeist is neither cheap nor easy, but the payoff is big. Overall, MacHeist 3 sold more than $3 million worth of bundles, earning about $750,000 for charity, $1.25 million for independent software developers, and $1 million for MacHeist. After $400,000 in marketing and production expenses, that leaves a fat payday for MacHeist’s founders.”

Isn’t that a trip? I love the creativity, inventing a sales model that stands out in the crowd and engages people intensely in a way that just about nothing else could do in a down economy. The whole thing completely changes your notion of the traditional model of software sales. 

Forget the drudgery of shop-bot price comparison or scanning the aisles of OfficeMax for that bundle of Mac utilities. Play, smile, learn, and buy. In this spirit, I say it’s time for the Enterprise Heist – an approach as completely unconventional for selling enterprise applications to large organizations.

Both the MacHeist and the NIN articles are examples of what some creativity and elbow grease can do. I encourage you to read the full versions of both articles. Tell me about the best entertainment-inspired business stories that you’ve run across. I’m sure there are some great ones.

What I liked most about the book was the clever variety of well thought out characters and scenarios. How would people, companies, and institutions fare if plunged into a full scale zombie war – an unusual question, but one that the book tackles with great relish.  Interestingly, one of the scenarios described in the book gave me a new insight into wikinomics (see other wikinomics zombie mentions here, here, and here).  [if you plan to read the book, stop here, minor spoiler ahead] 

There’s one event described early in the zombie wars which pits America’s military might and technology against an invading army of mindless zombies. The book does a great job of describing a modern battlefield technology which allows combatants in the field to communicate and exchange information with one another (including live video transmitted by others). The description got me thinking… wow, great stuff, wikinomics, distributed collaboration, and collective intelligence in action. Cool.  Sure enough, I was duped. It turned out (in this fictional case at least) that this advanced battlefield technology contributed to the mighty army’s defeat. Instead of spreading intelligence and coordinating responses across the troops, it helped spread panic. Frightening visuals of defeat and voiced fears were instantly shared with everyone… and the result was a frightened mob, not orderly action from soldiers. In the end, the higher ups had to turn off the video feeds and try to reassure people that all was well (and by that time it was not).   

The lesson for me is that succeeding with wikinomics takes much more than just simply connecting people. A crowd can be “smart”, or it can be a mindless mob too. While James Surowiecki wrote about “The Wisdom of Crowds,” in 2004, I highly recommend Charles Mackay’s counterpoint written in 1841 called “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds.” Crowds, even when highly connected via digital technology, do not automatically become smarter. In fact, as Mackay observed, sometimes they become mad and delusional too.  The difference is less about the process of magically connecting people, but more about the architecture for connecting them. HOW people are connected, seems to make the difference between  wisdom and madness… call it appropriate collaborative architecture. At the moment, finding the right collaborative architecture appears as much art as it is science, but we have lots of examples (and smart community builders) to point the way. Perhaps readers of this blog can share their own insights into these principles.

Laird has a MySpace page, a Facebook fan page, and has posted several videos on You Tube, including male-version mash-ups of some of Swift’s songs. But, his real stroke of genius came this month when Laird dropped his life savings on a giant billboard in front of Swift’s publishing house which reads: “Hey Taylor – I LOVE your music. Will you produce my album?” The sign also includes a link to his MySpace. Says Laird; “I needed a unique way to reach out to her because she’s really busy.” I think it’s a great example of how an expensive traditional media placement can be used to ignite a spark and drive traffic to free online venues (not unlike the Paris Hilton/Carl’s Junior phenomenon).

The strategy appears to have worked. In an interview with E! Canada, Swift said that she would “definitely want to meet him,” and “definitely want to hear more of his stuff.” Notably, the MySpace link was critical to the billboard’s success. Says Swift; “I went on his MySpace and listened to one of his songs and absolutely fell in love with it. […] It would be really cool to maybe work with him.” Even if Swift doesn’t elect to produce his album, the viral buzz around Ryan Laird is growing. In an interview with CMT, Laird talks about how about 16,000 of Swift’s MySpace fans have become his fans as well.

You can watch the entire story behind the billboard proposition in a video posted to Facebook.

“The mainstream had vanished with all its power and money. Now it was just us, bloggers, hackers, kids. The more voices there are, the more spin there is. The truth becomes that much harder to find. In the end, it’s just noise.”

Clearly, George did not read Wikinomics. It’s true that big media would fall with studios being overrun by the living dead, and that bloggers and citizen journalist would carry on. But, all accounts we’ve seen of bloggers and citizen journalists suggest that the more eyes you have on a story and the more voices you have reporting, the less spin there is. In fact, the truth is usually obfuscated by big media, not the other way around. Moreover, in times of crisis, we’ve seen that small groups of individuals working together online have been extremely affective at mobilizing aid and sharing information – just think of the Katrina People Finder Project and other related initiatives.

The second question raised in the Romero movie is whether or not Web communication would go down in a time of war. When the band of survivors’ Web feed dies part way through the movie, one of the characters notes:

“The f#*#@!% service is going down… there’s nothing… how could there be nothing. The relay towers are out.”

Seems a bit simplistic. I mean, what about cell phone networks, satellite communications, and personal LANs? Maybe I’m wrong, but would think that the Internet would carry on even with limited human involvement. Maybe power would be first to fail, leading to other outages? Hmm… Note to self: In case of zombie war, be sure to charge cell phone and laptop…