Posts filed under 'prosumers'
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August 15th, 2008, 12:09pm
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If you have ever fancied yourself as something of an amateur inventor or designer but never seemed to have the resources to make your vision a reality, your day may have finally arrived.
Shapeways, a new internet-based 3-D printing service, offers rapid prototyping at an affordable price. Send in your digital design file and Shapeways will ship your polymer prototype in less than ten days and won’t charge you an arm and a leg. According to Shapeways, most orders cost between $50 and $150. Shapeway’s proprietary software ensures the design can be built and tweaks small errors in the design before production. Amazingly, Shapeway’s advanced printers can build objects with moveable parts and the clincher is that the price isn’t determined by complexity, but rather by the amount of polymer required.
3-D printing’s uses are virtually unlimited. Small businesses and startups can order prototypes for potential customers, artists can have a new medium with which to play, friends can create their own unique gifts to give, and prosumers can whip up a redesign for a company.
In an age when Starbucks’ die-hard caffeine addicts spend hours combing mystarbucksidea.com for ways to improve a business in which they have no professional stake in, it’s not a stretch to see similarly devoted customers producing actual mock ups of improved products for a favorite brand. But will it really catch on?
Cornell University engineer Hod Lipson thinks so. He told MIT’s Technology Review that he thinks people will eventually have these printers at home.
Could the democratization of 3-D printing technology be for prosumerism what the Gutenberg press was for literacy?
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August 11th, 2008, 07:46am
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Very observant readers may note that this post has some striking similarities to what I wrote about three months ago - the collaborative experience economy. What I tried to do then was connect the “four forms of theater” idea from Pine & Gilmore’s “The Experience Economy” with the principles of wikinomics - hence the name of the post. For whatever reason I didn’t get a lot of traction with it, but I’m still intrigued by the underlying ideas, so I wanted to re-frame the idea directly in relation to social media. More to the point, I’d like to hear from wikinomics readers as to whether it’s a useful framework for thinking about the use of social media in relation to creating experiences both for and with customers.
Read More »
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July 2nd, 2008, 04:34pm
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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.
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June 22nd, 2008, 07:43pm
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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.
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June 17th, 2008, 04:57pm
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When I was doing follow-up research on the topic of prosumerism (chapter 5) last year, the XNA platform (which enabled people to create games for the XBox) was one of the examples I was most interested in. It has continued to evolve, and if you want to see it in action you can check out the creators club online, “a community all about games - created by you, played by everyone.” There are lots of fun little games available, and the next round of the Dream-Build-Play challenge has been launched, offering $75,000 in prizes for the best games - and bragging rights of course.
The problem, however, is that most people will respond to that by saying “I have no idea how to make a game” - and if you go to the game creation details page, most people will be long gone right after they read “Visual C# 2005″ and see what they have to download. It all seems quite confusing if you’re not, you know, a game designer. However, if you want to make a far easier foray into game making, you can now go to Sims Carnival - where users can create their own games on the platform EA provides, with the site providing all kinds of helpful tools along the way.
I’ve just started the process of making my own game (Hancock’s shoot em up), and it is remarkably easy - you simply register and answer a series of questions that are provided, and next thing you know you have a game. Admittedly, the product that emerges at the end of this isn’t particularly good - my game right now has a bunch of boxes floating around, and evidently I have to shoot the black ones before they hit the green ones, I think - but I’ve been presented with a series of tools that can make it better. The first that I’ll likely try is the Swapper, which allows me to swap in any images I want to replace those pesky boxes. If I want to do more than that, I can download the game (or anyone else’s for that matter) and customize it as I see fit… and if I really get going I can download the Game Creator and do even more.
Read More »
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June 16th, 2008, 03:09pm
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I finally managed to get my hands on a Wii Fit and I must say - it’s a pretty incredible game (despite the training avatar’s trashtalk and the Wii Balance Board that cries “Oww” every time I step on it).
Since its North American release a few weeks ago, the game has generated a tremendous amount of hype, both on- and offline. The latest buzz surrounding the game has been created by a YouTube video entitled “Why every guy should buy their girlfriend Wii Fit”. In the two and a half weeks since the video’s release, it has attracted nearly 3.5 million views, and while many question the authenticity of the video’s grassroots approach (the creator and his girlfriend featured in the video both work for an advertising agency), with millions of views and a number of popular spoofs . ., the video has surely helped maintain a healthy buzz around the Wii and the Fit.
The real opportunity for Nintendo to help maintain its popularity, though, could come from embracing a little bit of Wikinomics through the creation of a development kit for the Fit (and potentially even the Wii in general) whereby users and developers would be able to write their own activities and games that could be downloaded (likely purchased) through the Wii’s integrated Shop Channel. The Fit’s activity-based games in particular would be a great spot for experimentation as most are fairly quick activities that platform off of the same movements, allowing gamers to refine their skills using various activities with the same end goal - improving balance, stregth or aerobic fitness. Techy prosumers can be quite a powerful, and lucrative, source of innovation - just ask Apple. Historically not known for their willingness to embrace consumer input and creation, Apple has experienced great success with the iPhone SDK since its release in March and it has become a key weapon in the iPhone’s fight against the other big mobile platform(s) available. Read More »
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May 31st, 2008, 12:38pm
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Mashable has a post up on a new, crowdsourced film project: Lost Zombies. The idea is that people from all over the world will make their own zombie home videos, and send them in, the best clips will be compiled into a feature length doc/mockumentary.
Lost Zombies hopes to compile all the proof of zombie existence that people submit from around the world, create a feature length documentary film, and ultimately “…educate the world’s population of the reality of zombies and the potential, if not imminent, zombie apocalypse.”
Here’s the introduction/trailer, watch out, there’s blood and foul language:
This looks like it could be entertaining, and it bridges the gap between the user generated media and Hollywood’s go at doing the same that I wrote about earlier.
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May 28th, 2008, 02:51pm
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Kevin Kelly is covering a story about how Japanese comic book (called manga) companies are embracing fan created content (known as dojinshi) :
Dojinshi often feature copyrighted characters and material; amateur writers riff on established works, remixing the plots and characters, and creating new storylines (for instance a series called BLEACH centers around the chaste relationship of the main characters, but dojinshi versions feature the characters hooking up). How do fans repurpose copyrighted material without drawing legal fire? Via an unwritten, implicit agreement between dojinshi writers and established media companies, what Pink refers to as “anmoku no ryokai” (literally: “agreement or understanding”).
I’m not a big fan of comics, either North American or Japanese, but this strikes me as a much more enlightened relationship between media companies and fans. (Though, from what I gather, these dojinshi are pretty racy and feature characters doing things ..er.. outside of their normal realm of activities — kudos to the manga companies for being so tolerant.) It would be great if instead of slapping YouTube users with c&d’s for remixing their content, media companies just silently paid attention, then picked the best content to develop for larger use. Maybe some day!
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May 20th, 2008, 09:20am
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AP news is reporting that Comcast is putting money into a p2p-based HD video sharing site:
NEW YORK - Comcast Corp., which is under federal investigation for blocking some file-sharing traffic, is investing in a startup that delivers high-definition video using file-sharing techniques.
Seattle-based GridNetworks on Monday said that Comcast would make an unspecified investment in the company and collaborate on developing so-called peer-to-peer file-sharing techniques that are “friendly” to Internet service providers.
The article also states that Comcast plans to stop all bandwidth shaping (usually in the form of slowing down peer to peer traffic) by the end of the year, certainly a good step if they want any of their customers to use the GridNetworks service.
This move is yet another following an all to familiar pattern: companies resist the way technology is being used, then throw their hat in the ring completely ignoring the solutions that already exist, instead suggesting (what for many people is) a superfluous alternative (Napster vs. iTunes, YouTube vs. ComedyCentral Streaming, ThePirateBay vs. NetFlix).
Read More »
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May 13th, 2008, 06:19pm
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The New York Times recently ran a great story / interview with Craigslist founder Craig Newmark in which he addresses some of the issues arising from eBay’s lawsuit against the company. eBay bought a 28% stake in the online classifieds site back in August 2004, a purchase that seemed to line-up much better with the online auctioneers core strategy compared to the ill-timed purchase of Skype. But eBay wasn’t content to stop with Craigslist and bought Marktplaats.nl later that year, launched Kijiji in March 2005, and rounded it all off with the purchase of Gumtree a few months later.
And while these latter three acquisitions all focused on the European market, in July of 2007 eBay decided to extend Kijiji into the US and Canadian markets, thus representing a direct challenge to Craigslist. The move was a bit strange given the dominance of Craigslist in the US and has led to a rather acrimonious relationship between the two companies. As a result Craigslist is trying to buy back its shares from eBay, and in a recent lawsuit filed against it, is accused of trying to minimize eBay’s influence on the company. Newmark’s response: “Sadly, we have an uncomfortably conflicted shareholder in our midst, one that is obsessed with dominating online classifieds for the purpose of maximizing its own profits.”
And therein lies the perceived disconnect between the MO held by the folks at Craigslist and the profit-seeking orientation of eBay. Read More »
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February 28th, 2008, 06:20am
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Just a quick heads up that John Hagel and John Seely Brown have a great little article in BusinessWeek, which talks about lessons Western executives can learn from Tata’s $2,500 Nano. All I’m going to give you from the article are the four subtitles, which should pique the interest of wikinomics readers:
1. Think outside the patent box
2. A modular design revolution
3. “Open Distribution” Innovation
4. Welcoming users back into the design loop
As always, John and John are well worth reading… are there any other lessons from the Nano that jump off the page?
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February 15th, 2008, 02:01pm
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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 Make Flickr pool competition is a fascinating collection of pictures.
- 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?
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February 14th, 2008, 08:54pm
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Set to launch in August of this year, Flexbooks is a new open source model of textbook creation that will allow schools, teachers, parents and even students to create custom textbooks in a way that is faster and cheaper than the traditional method. Using open source tools such as Wikipedia, Wikibooks, and WikiUniversity to create content, Flexbooks allows users to drag articles and images into an easy to use user inerface to create various standards based learning materials.
The project is in its infancy right now but its future prospects seem very promising. The first step will be to pool together a large collection of educational assets mainly through a combination of licensing activities, incentives for community-based authorship, and university collaborations. Following that, Flexbooks will continue expanding its knowledge base and team up with various print companies to provide paper-based materials in addition to its core set of online offerings.
Why do we need Flexbooks? the makers of Flexbooks CK-12 explain:
“Today, textbooks that are used in K-12 system are limiting, expensive and are difficult to update. Because of this, K-12 teachers find it hard to introduce new concepts and cater to different needs. What we need is a more flexible and less expensive system to create and distribute books and online content. FlexBooks, by their very nature, satisfies this need. They contain high quality online content, and are easy to create, update and print. They provide a new system that will follow an open source philosophy to place content on-line that can be “mixed, modified and printed.”
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January 31st, 2008, 12:24pm
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I recently had the pleasure of stumbling across this movie on the internet. A little behind the ball on this one, Good Copy Bad Copy is a documentary originally created for the Danish National Broadcasting Television network that was eventually released for free on the internet in 2007. It first appeared on The Pirate Bay and then was officially released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.
GCBC is a insightful documentary about copyright and culture in the context of Internet, and is directed by independent Danish directors Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke. The film goes around the world, showing the changing attitudes toward art and culture in Nigeria, Sweden, Brazil, the UK, and in the US. It features interviews with many people with various perspectives on copyright, including copyright lawyers such as Lawrence Lessig from Creative Commons, Tiamo and Anakata from The Pirate Bay, music producers, and controversial music artists such as Girl Talk and Danger Mouse who, as we all know, created the Grey Album by mixing The Beatles’ White Album with Jay-Z’s Black Album.
Even MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) CEO Dan Glickman makes an appearance. He briefly comments on the MPAA’s involvement with the raid on The Pirate Bay. Glickman states that although he knows piracy will never be stopped, they will try to make it as difficult and tedious as possible.
Amongst the most interesting segments include a trip to Russia to look at the rampant bootlegging that occurs there, the perspectives of the Nigerian film industry and the Techno Brega musical movement in Brazil, which has been using a business model for years that was originally considered to be pioneered by The Pixies, Metallica, and Phish back in 2004.
What becomes obvious progressively throughout the film is the death of the current business models used by the record industry and the lack of control which is becoming more prevalent in the current consumerist climate. The old vanguards are fighting to retain their revenue while people are endlessly re-using and recycling copyrighted material in order to create new art-forms.
I would highly recommend this light-hearted and neutral account of the current state of copyright to anyone. The link to download GCBC can be found here. Feel free to donate something to the makers of the documentary if you enjoy watching it.
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January 3rd, 2008, 05:19pm
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After reading “Eight business technology trends to watch” in the most recent issue of the McKinsey Quarterly, I have to believe that either we have an uncanny ability to predict the technology market (which I like to think we do) or McKinsey analysts really do love Wikinomics (in which case, feel free to send along a cut of consulting revenues). Three of McKinsey’s top eight business technology trends certainly do echo chapters from the Wikinomics book. Consider the following:
- Distributing cocreation. “The Internet and related technologies give companies radical new ways to harvest the talents of innovators working outside corporate boundaries.”
- Using consumers as innovators. “Consumers also cocreate with companies; the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, for instance, could be viewed as a service or product created by its distributed customers.”
- Tapping into a world of talent. “As more and more sophisticated work takes place interactively online and new collaboration and communications tools emerge, companies can outsource increasingly specialized aspects of their work and still maintain organizational coherence.”
While this is old hat for Wikinomics readers, number seven on the list is something close to my heart and something that we don’t talk about much, but probably should: management metrics (or in McKinsey’s words, “putting more science into management”).
In my previous job, I used to write a lot about service level agreements (SLAs) and decision-making tools for IT managers. As part of this work, I often talked about using metrics to improve IT service management through various stages of maturity. The stages of maturity that we used for the IT service management model are probably fairly transferable to all levels of management. Generalized to be relevant to non-IT sectors, they would be as follows:
- Unmanaged: You pretty much have no clue and manage without any data inputs at all. The extent of your insight into how things are going is, “the lights are on.”
- Reactive: You are pretty much fighting fires and allocating resources without any pre-determined priority. Whatever your boss is yelling at you about the most inevitably gets done at the expense of everything else.
- Predictive: Automated metric gathering is in place to give you a basic view of operations. Resources are allocated in a predictable manner based on solid data that tells you at a high level what is important and what isn’t. You are now managing with the help of Spidey Sense.
- Proactive: This is a consolidated “single-pane-of-glass” view of operations. You understand what metrics are key and contribute to value creation. Patterns emerge that allow decision-makers to pre-empt problems.
- Optimized: Value-driven reporting provides cost vs. risk tradeoffs that help you make the best decisions. There is complete transparency into the metrics program.
I think it would be interesting to get back into looking at how technology can help managers reach the “optimized” stage. If anyone has any new ideas on this, or comes across any interesting examples of how Wikinomics and performance management are intersecting, please send them along.
And for those of you that want to start thinking about the top trends for 2009, I think Don’s new book should be coming out sometime this year ; )
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November 25th, 2007, 06:40pm
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I was on a panel discussion in Helsinki last week where we were asked to explain the three big things a company should do to succeed these days. The person before me (a well known author and pundit) offered up the following:
1. avoid risk
2. hire the best people
3. focus on your customers
After presenting this list, he concluded that “nothing has changed under the sun.” While I had done a fair bit of work to prepare my own list, I found myself quickly discarding my notes to disagree with each of these directly. While it may sound hard to disagree with “focus on your customers”, stay with me and you’ll understand why in a second.
1. Avoid risk? Sure there are many new causes of potential loss and companies need good risk management. But from my research companies can avoid suffering loss by being more transparent, by opening up, by sharing their intellectual property and intentionally showing (controlled) vulnerability. That’s what Rob McEwan did with Goldcorp - publishing his geological data and inviting the world to scrutinize it — and he increased the value of his company by an order of magnitude. If he was driven by a mantra of “avoiding risk” he would have shut the company down.
2. Hire the best people? Because of the new web, Ideagoras, peer production, open platforms and the other models we discuss in Wikinomics - the uniquely qualified minds to do things for your company may be outside your boundaries. Don’t just hire talent! The world is your HR department. 50% of all P&G’s innovations now come from outside the company. In fact, right now I’m working on a logo like the “Intel Inside” brand, but it will be “Talent Outside” - just to get the message about what’s going on across.
3. Focus on Customers. Wrong. This is so old school - do good market research, have good focus groups, treat customers well, build great products and services, give great support, be customer centric. Because of the new web we can go beyond focusing on customers to engaging them in deep and ongoing ways. Consumers can become Prosumers - co-innovating value. Firms can co-create thrilling experiences with customers. It’s possible to think of customers as part of your business web. In fact, now that I think about it, I’ll create another variant of the “Intel Inside” logo. It’ll say “Customers Inside.”
I like this mindset, and at minimum it gets people thinking about new ways to run their business - Talent outside, customers inside, and think differently about what is a real risk to your companies success… because a whole lot of things have changed under the sun, and it’s just getting started.
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October 11th, 2007, 07:03am
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In the prosumers chapter of wikinomics we talked a lot about Second Life - the virtual world that the users continuously co-create and share with each other. In the peer pioneers chapter we talked a lot about IBM and embracing open source culture and strategy. So what happens when these two leading examples of wikinomics in action come together? Well, we’re about to find out, as Second Life and IBM have announced they are working together to create universal avatars that can travel across and between virtual worlds.
Colin Parris, IBM’s VP of Digital Convergence, summed up nicely why they are doing this:
“It is going to happen anyway.If you think you are walled and secure, somebody will create something that’s open and then people will drain themselves away as fast as possible.”
I couldn’t agree more. And where might these new virtual worlds emerge from? Well, Metaplace might be able to help with that… metawhat you ask? To quote from their website:
Metaplace! That’s what! Build a virtual apartment and put it on your website. Work with friends to make a huge MMORPG. Share your puzzle game with friends. We have a vision: to let you build anything, and play everything, from anywhere. Eventually, anyway. We have to finish first.
