The combination of Ning and WidgetLaboratory (WL) was a story that had wikinomics written all over it. The former is a platform that enables anyone to create their own social networks focused on anything they want, and they actively encouraged individuals and companies to innovate on top of the platform and make it even better. WL did just that, and in a big way - they sold a number of widgets (for around $30 / month) tied to the Ning platform, supporting somewhere in the range of 2,000 networks and 1,000,000 individuals. WL was the most popular widget creator on the platform.
If I was writing this post a week ago, it probably would have been a feel good story about wikinomics, but the wheels have recently fallen off the proverbial bus. This is a development equally worthy of exploring in relation to the challenges that come with embracing wikinomics principles - and particularly those that emerge when you only embrace a few of them. Of greatest interest to me - if more stories keep popping up like this, it could be a dramatic blow to more open, collaborative innovation processes. That would be a shame.
TechCrunch picked up the story on August 22nd, when Ning suddenly removed all of the WL widgets, without warning to anyone, from their network. This decision which clearly angered the company, as well as the thousands of customers who had spent time and money with WL in order to optimize their offerings. Based on the emails that WL has published on the web, this is the gist of Ning’s complaint:
Over the past few months, WidgetLaboratory’s applications have caused multiple and significant technical degradations to the Ning Platform. In point of fact, your code has broken numerous times and has negatively affected a large number of Networks in addition to the Ning Platform.
Photosynth (ted talk, demo page, our coverage), a project acquired by Microsoft, made for one of the coolest tech demos to grace the internet in a very long time. The experience that Photosynth provided by inferring 3d structures from collections of 2d pictures made for a very rich — and jaw dropping — user experience. But not rich enough, it seems: Microsoft has a competing project another such tool from some people on that team, developped jointly with the University of Washington. Introducing Photo Tourism (project homepage, /. coverage). Check out the video:
Like Photosynth, Photo Tourism assembles its 3d models from photos on flickr. Photo Tourism, however, allows you to not only add your own photos to a 3d set, but “walk” between the locations where your pictures were taken, virtually. Photo Tourism also allows a user to rotate their point of view around a landmark or object, and can even determine if photos of that landmark/object were taken during the day or at night, grouping them accordingly. This results in a very high “feels like you’re there” experience, but what’s the next step? Read More »
The other day I found myself perusing the New York Times like I’m apt to do anytime I need a few minutes to de-focus and relax. The third most emailed article of the day, “If You Have a Problem, Ask Everyone,” caught my eye. “Hmm,” I think to myself. “That sounds collaborative. I’ll check it out.” Low and behold, the article is about InnoCentive, an innovation intermediary that brings together external experts to solve companies’ R&D problems.
Innocentive, founded in 2001, has grown nearly 30 percent since September of last year from 115,000 members to 145,000. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams talk about InnoCentive in the Ideagoras chapter of Wikinomics, so it’s no surprise that it’s making waves. What interests me, though, is that this article was the third most emailed article of the day.And just to clarify, it’s the overall most popular, not the just science section. Imagine all of those people reading about ideagoras! Maybe I just get a little too excited to see Wikinomics in the mainstream media, and maybe I’m forgetting who reads the New York Times. But wikinomics is infectious, and I clearly have the bug.
More interestingly though, according to the NYT article, is that the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Sen. John McCain, has “proposed that the government offer $300 million to whoever invents a battery compact enough, powerful enough and cheap enough to replace fossil fuels.”Maybe he’s a little technologically-challenged, but at least it seems he’s ready to collaborate. If the government embraces McCain’s proposal, perhaps we will see a solution sought on yet2.com or Innocentive. Perhaps even you can be a part of that solution.
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.
As popular as wikis have become, they aren’t yet in use across all mediums. Case in point: music. However, a company called Sonoma Wire Works appears to have solved this problem. Sonoma Wire Works has announced the launch of RiffWorks T4, an online music-collaboration application. With RiffWorks T4, musicians can record ideas, use drums and guitars, and add effects to quickly create songs. Most importantly, users do this online, and can easily collaborate with peers around the world — all for free! When finished, their tunes can be broadcast on RiffWorld.com.
Technology empowers users. Apple’s GarageBand, for instance, enabled just about anyone to make professional sounding music (provided a certain level of musicianship). A while ago, Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails released his music as GarageBand files so that fans can remix them as they please (think open-source music). GarageBand has been popular since the source of the music is standardized, people can send it around and collaborate with friends — basically “playing tennis” with works in progress. However, the distribution of these edited files has effectively been limited to e-mailing music attachments back and forth. Very 1.0.
RiffWorks T4 solves this problem by making the music itself wiki based. It lets four people work on the music at once, but there’s no upper limit to the number of potential collaborators. It also synchronizes the piece across the computers of all of the contributors, and keeps a copy on the web that is always up to date and universally accessible. RiffWorks T4 has wikified music. Because of its centralized, collaborative nature, for the first time ever we can have crowd created music, I wonder what it will sound like.
For those that might not know about it, mashable is a great site for social networking news. Today they announced a nifty little “contest”: they are giving away one full month of free advertising, to three lucky start ups, in their new “Start Up Pricing 90×90 advertising zone”. The zone itself is a cool idea, designed to offer more affordable advertising for startups which might not be rolling in cash. The contest is also a cool idea - just leave a comment with your company name / URL, a 20 word description, and 20 words on why your startup is right for the Mashable audience. What I don’t quite understand is this next part:
Winners will be selected at random through a random integer Web app, please leave a valid e-mail address.
Why random? Wouldn’t it be better to select from the submissions based on merit - perhaps even using a community voting application? At minimum, wouldn’t this provide more incentive for companies to really crystalize their ideas in a compelling way, and make the post (and comment section) that much more interesting to readers?
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.
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.
Editor’s Note: Venkatesh Rao is a researcher and social media evangelist at Xerox, where he investigates the “futures of documents and of work.” Venkatesh also maintains Ribbonfarm.com, a blog about innovation and business, and is frequently involved in discussions on the Wikinomics blog.
The juvenile sea squirt wanders through the sea searching for a suitable rock or hunk of coral to cling to and make its home for life. For this task, it has a rudimentary nervous system. When it finds its spot and takes root, it doesn’t need its brain anymore, so it eats it! (It’s rather like getting tenure.)
– Daniel Dennett, in Consciousness Explained
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. Read More »
Last Thursday, Google introduced its GOOG-411 service in Canada, the first non-U.S. country to have the free phone directory service. If you’re like me and detest being charged high fees for services that could be free, (such as ATM transactions and in this case, directory assistance) than GOOG-411 may be just the service for you.
Enabled by Google’s tremendous index of online data, mobile and landline users can now call 1-800-GOOG-411 and by following the queued prompts, receive the phone number, address and even a map of a desired business anywhere in the United States and Canada.
One of the first questions that came to mind when reading about this service when it was launched in 2007 was “What’s in it for Google?“ Despite the fact that the retrieval of such data is a natural extension using Google’s readily-available data and capabilities, it was not immediately clear why Google would provide such a service for free when local phone providers charge anywhere from $0.75 to $1.50 for similar, if not lesser services. Read More »
A couple of weeks ago I put up a post about a company called crowdSPRING, a new player in the “crowdsourcing for creative products” space (who contacted us directly - keep those “wikinomics in action” stories coming!). Co-founders Ross Kimbarovsky and Mike Samson were kind enough to sit down for an interview with me a couple of days later, and they provided a lot of information that I thought would be of interest to wikinomics readers – it’s a very interesting company with some well thought out ideas and plans.
Below is a summary of some of the highlights of the interview (note that I’ve reduced the questions that I asked down to their key points, moved a lot of stuff around, and left out quite a few just to manage the length of the post a bit – this is not a transcript. I have not altered the responses from Ross and Mike, and I have checked with them to ensure that what I’m presenting here is an accurate representation of the conversation).
It is worth noting that, at the time the interview took place, the company had been live for about two weeks. We look forward to following up in the coming months to report on their progress, particularly in relation to the collaborative aspects of the platform and how reputation profiles are coming into play – a particular area of interest that will likely be the topic of a future post.
Ryan Schultz sent me a great wikinomics in action story last week, highlighting the fact that Studio Wikitecture won the “Founder’s Award” for their open source entry to a competition hosted by Architecture for Humanity on the Open Architecture Network. Their entry, for a tele-medicine facility in Western Nepal, was selected for a reason that is truly music to our ears: “for embracing a truly collaborative way of working using online crowdsourcing and Second Life as a way to create a highly participatory design approach.”
The details of their entry can be found here. To quote the project description:
In keeping with the collaborative spirit of the Open Architecture Network, this entry was created by an open and public community of over 40 contributors from around the world representing a wide range of disciplines and backgrounds. To facilitate this effort in design collaboration, we developed a grassroots ‘3D-Wiki’ technology that is built on the virtual reality platform: Second Life. With this technology, we were able to focus a very diverse range of ideas into a naturally evolving process ranging from comprehensive text-based research to 2D plan diagrams and on into immersive 3D virtual models designed and built on a replica of the project site.
As always, you can check out the original (and all the other mash ups) at www.dilbert.com. For those that may be seeing this for the first time, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams has embraced the principles of wikinomics, and created an easy-to-use “mash up” tool on his website. Each morning he posts his cartoon, and then invites people to come up with alternative punchlines for the final box. I’ve been giving it a go for almost a month now (sticking to a wikinomics theme wherever possible), and you can check them all out by clicking on dilbert in the tag cloud - rumor has it that May 13th and May 30th are my best.
I’m going for the coveted “someone in the office said I was funnier than Adams” award for a record-breaking* third day in a row… you can check out the original at www.dilbert.com.
* yes, I broke my previous record each of the last two days… but I’m 91.3% sure that’s a fantastic trend line!
Cost: As much as $650 billion in the US, or approximately 8 hours a day for the average knowledge worker, according to a recent New York Times article.
Our potential savior: Semantic search
The main problem with using regular search engines to find information is that they tend to retrieve a lot of erroneous results. Search engines like Google and Yahoo! don’t do a very good job of taking into account natural language indicators and transition words to derive the context in which search terms are being used. Semantic search—helping computers identify the meaning of the words being searched—is being touted as the leading solution and a key enabler of the knowledge economy. There are a number of players that are working to develop a good semantic search solution, but the following two strike me as particularly neat.
A little over a week ago I published a post called Is that gemeinschaft uncomfortable in your geshellschaft?, which was about an unfortunate Schnitzel incident that I had at Octoberfest once. Er, I mean it was about the two sociological categories that were introduced by German sociologist Fredinand Tonnies in 1887 (You can think of Gemeinschaft as community interest, and Geshellschaft as self-interest), and how they applying to strategic choices for business in the age of wikinomics.
The insightful comments from Venkat added a lot of value to the post, and he dropped me a note to say that our brief exchange helped him frame the Outsider Innovation 101 post he put up yesterday. I think wikinomics readers will find it interesting. The start of the post lays the foundation for the concept of outsider innovation he hopes to explore, and this touches on many of the themes of the book. The middle of the post then focuses on what we would probably call Education 2.0 (and what he refers to as the missing Education Revolution), which is a particular interest of mine. Having recently went back to school to complete a master’s degree, I’m wholly convinced we’re closer to Education 0.1 than 2.0 right now - but that’s a topic I’ll have to come back to later.
A few weeks back Don announced the new Wikinomics in action section, and encouraged people to send us a note if they came across a great new example (see the “contact us” link on the right hand side of the page). This is exactly how we found out about crowdSPRING a few days ago - a new player in the “crowdsourcing for creative projects” space, but with a couple of new and interesting twists. We’re currently in the process of setting up an interview with the founders to get a few more details, so this post can be considered a “first glance” at the new site.
2018 - A Vision of the Future
One rainy day earlier this summer, nGenera's Gov 2.0 Program Director, Dan Herman, locked three summer interns in a room (Ben and Jude, and I) and asked us to think about what life - and government - would be like ten years from now. One of the results was the following short story about a [...]
