Social Node

When American jobs are threatened it’s time to level-up & get social

2010-12-07T04:33:00.000-08:00

American job losses will continue due to a convergence of big forces including offshoring and automation driven by accelerating change. Service sector jobs will generally not return.
Social web business models are flourishing and point the way to new jobs and efficiencies.
A new class of Super Prosumer companies like Groupon are poised to explode and return more value to people, creating more jobs, but driving price points lower.
We need to encourage the development of Super Prosumer companies on U.S. soil across various industries and become a Prosumer Nation.

Like Scott Pilgrim, America needs to Level-Up.

The erosion of traditional American jobs continues unabated and we can expect it to steadily worsen. From a macro perspective, there is simply no silver-bullet counter to the converging forces of globalization, automation, overvalued real estate prices, national debt, mega quantitative easing (printing more U.S. dollars to buy back our bonds so they don’t tank - a new round of $600 billion has just been proposed), mounting international resistance to U.S. monetary policy, massive overseas spending (Iraq, Afghanistan) general inefficiencies in govt, defense, education, oversight, and social services. Despite weak signs of life in the country’s massive services sector, which comprises an astounding 80% of U.S. jobs, last week’s dismal jobs report reinforces the steady downhill march.

Though the timing is obviously unfortunate, this should come as no surprise. Forecasters like Alvin Toffler have been pointing out the inevitable shift to the Knowledge Age and post-industrial society for some 30 years already, while others like Martin Ford argue this transition is likely to be very disruptive and and downright Schumpeterian due to the rapid labor displacement that’s being catalyzed by accelerating technological change. Well-established generational dynamics like Strauss and Howe’s Fourth Turning further strengthen the argument that we’re in the very early stages of a nasty, punctuated socio-economic transition.

So, what can we do to preserve American jobs and our way of life?

First, we need to come to agreement on the root causes of the problem - a handful of which I have listed above. Since our political system is clearly incapable of achieving this level of dialogue, due to a phenomenon that Jonathan Rauch aptly labels “Demosclerosis” (thanks to ASF President John Smart for the excellent reference), it’s now incumbent on us, as individuals and local community networks, to Level-Up our understanding of the big-picture socio-economic dynamics. Now that the shit is hitting the fan, the time is ripe for productive dialogue, which must replace polarized political rhetoric if we are to successfully adapt to the accelerating change that is obviously transforming our world and digesting American jobs. At the very least, establishing a better sense of accel-aware context can help tell us what NOT to do, and what NOT to waste resources on.

Once we get on more-or-less the same page, we can then either 1) move on to meaningful policy debates and attempt to bend politicians to our will or 2) work around them. Because it’s so difficult to achieve mass consensus, it seems fairly obvious that we must start generating creative solutions locally, at the community level. Fortunately, the same technological change that’s contributing to American job losses is also sparking the emergence of a host of powerful new tools and economic models that grass roots change agents can take advantage of. If our goal is to save American jobs, then it’s our responsibility to identify, vet and selectively apply these emerging solutions.

First and most obviously, we can turn to well-established, leading-edge American tech and web companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple, Intel, Cisco, IBM, Johnson Controls, Amazon, EBay for software, hardware and intelligent systems that can bring down personal and business costs and increase profit. Google Apps, Maps and embedded Search can help save money and form new businesses. IBM’s Smart Infrastructure can reduce municipal sewage and water costs. Amazon and EBay can serve as powerful distribution channels for small businesses and entrepreneurs. And so forth. These are all solutions we need to become more familiar with so that we and our local communities can effectively implement them.

Then there’s also a new class of social web companies that are already playing a more direct role in generating income, savings and new behavior - especially at the local level. These include the likes of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Yelp, Groupon, and Foursquare, just to name a few. These companies offer tremendous marketing and content value and can only exist now that we’ve built the layer of high-speed internet and rich web infrastructure necessary to support them. And, believe it or not, some are growing even more quickly than the likes of Google. For example, tech blogger Kara Swisher reports that “Groupon’s run rate for this year is clocking in at $2 billion in revenue [offering] insight into why Google has been willing to pay up to $6 billion to acquire Groupon.”

This is a MIND-BOGGLING figure, especially for a company that many scoffed at not too long ago and that initially set out to “organize collective action around social or charitable causes”. Never before has a company reached $2 billion in annual revenue in just 2 years time. Never before has a company been offered $6 billion just 2 years into its existence (other than spin-off companies).

Particularly interesting is the trendline of valuations. Going back just one decade we can see acceleration at work. Youtube was purchased by google for $1.65 billion after just 18 months of existence. Farmville creator Zynga is said to be worth $5.5 billion just 3 years into its life. Secondary market shares of Facebook are reported to be trading at a value of $50 billion after 6 years. And now Groupon has claimed the crown of fastest growing company in the history of planet Earth. The speed at which a company can be organized and scale is clearly accelerating.

Even more interesting is the symbiotic relationship these companies have with their customers. Each and every one of them fundamentally depends on user generated content and participation to function. Therefore, they inherently must make the cost of participation as low as possible, and the benefits to users as high as possible - a phenomenon I like to call The Mandate of Kevin. This is their bread and butter. YouTube returns value in the form of attention and ad revenue. Zynga provides a web of social interaction and virtual gifts from co-players. Facebook returns value in the form of a rich, easy to navigate social graph, marketing opportunities and great technology (they’d lose users the second they fell behind in technology, as Friendster and MySpace did). And it’s no surprise that the fastest horse out of the gate, Groupon, returns the most value of them all to businesses and organizations in the form of direct revenue in exchange for participating in the group discount schemes.

It’s logical to predict that their successors will be more dependent on large groups of value-adding participants, aka prosumers (producer + consumer = prosumer). Which means that the power will continue to swing in our direction, resulting in larger pay-outs and more direct value, while the sites themselves become even more user-friendly and integrated with other systems (like Facebook, Google, and Twitter) that we already use on a regular basis. Leading-edge companies like Google are acutely aware of this.

Such prosumer-centric models will steadily trickle down to all sorts of industries and purpose networks. Some early examples include iphone apps that turn street mapping into a reward-driven game, online stock markets that predict box office scores more accurately than experts, and social health networks capable of determining the effectiveness of new drugs years before clinical trials can accomplish the same thing.

Stepping back again, we can see that at the very heart of this transformation of opportunities is acceleration in the networking of human beings and the ability to put more brains and bodies to use more effectively in more ways - the social side of accelerating change. Key to this is the ongoing deployment of mobile computer devices, which currently manifest as the smartphones we carry around that allow us to connect to other people and data in real-time. These will continue to augment the reality around us (if we want them to), bringing more of the web into the world and linking more of the world to the web, and enable more socio-economic opportunities that have been impossible up to this point in human history. Thanks in large part to some accelerating price-performance curves like Moore’s Law, we are truly living through a momentous shift that’s going to proceed far more quickly than most of us presently imagine.

One result of this possibility expansion will be the ongoing emergence of a new class of Super-Prosumer companies that will fill much of the void left by dwindling American jobs. As the traditional economy flounders, these social web companies will clean-up (they already are) and expand the phase space for massive, rapid value creation like never before. It brings to mind the Cambrain Explosion 600 million years ago and the dinosaur-to-mammalian transition 50-60 million years ago, both prime examples of a spurt of species destruction quickly followed by rapid new growth that can occur in systems when the conditions and timing are right. We are now living through a similar period in history.

To take advantage of the disruption and minimize the downside of accelerating change we must act like mammals at the end of the dinosaur era. We must learn to actively seek out and generate new opportunities, especially locally. As the barriers to participation and creation fall we can use new technologies to easily create our own apps, build complex simulations, create custom animations and cartoons, better map and monitor the planet, earn money for our photos and vids, create powerful mobile on-the-fly action networks, earn money by turning people on to deals, reduce emissions and earn money by renting out our cars, and so forth. The list goes on and on.

My near-term hope is that the explosion of opportunities will create more jobs than it destroys while reducing resource consumption along the way. But now that the game is cracking open and more people all over the world can participate it seems far more likely that we will not be able to replace the American jobs that we are losing quickly enough to minimize the negative short-term economic effects. That’s just reality. We as a nation have over-extended, over-borrowed and over-diluted our currency, and at the same time fallen behind in education and technical acumen. All while the rest of the world has learned to do what we do better and cheaper. So, even as we do make the transition, it will be at a lower wage price point than we are accustomed to.

There is however a silver lining to the tale. The United States is a creative nation that can benefit greatly from the entrepreneurial spirit woven into our national storyline and from the presence of the abundant prosumer-oriented companies that have already sprung to life here. If we can learn to more quickly learn from these examples and the potent new models that are emerging every single day, then we can and will recover our edge and relative income. If not, then we will see much value flow outward, off-shore and be left to hope that accelerating change will raise all boats even as others seize the opportunities that we could have seized.

By understanding the nature of accelerating change, globalization, automation, creative destruction at the national level, and emerging prosumer models we can figure out how to individually and collectively adapt to the times. As the world shifts, the individuals, communities, cultures and nations that upgrade their maps most quickly will have a big edge. People who understand the shift and the new tools will be able to do more with less and pull value toward them. They will be the ones to create and take advantage of the new Groupons and Facebooks. That said, the competition will be fierce, the price points will be lower, and the performance metrics more accurate. As a result we’ll need to become increasingly multi-modal, willing to work on-the-fly, become accustomed to low job security, and be willing to engage in an increaingly web-mediated economy. We'll need to become a nation of Super Prosumers.

If we can sufficiently level-up our map of the system and social web then we will surely learn to leverage our voices, feet, dollars and networks to increase personal and local opportunities in unexpected and astounding new ways, thus repositioning America for new jobs and growth.

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Alvis Brigis is a media strategist, writer, and entrepreneur focused on the social side of accelerating change. He is currently CEO of a stealth mobile content start-up, Board Member of the Acceleration Studies Foundation and a weekend bartender.

Here Come the Blobs!

2010-08-27T14:18:00.000-07:00

Now that iPhones and Androids have catalyzed a vibrant ecosystem of services that allow you to check in to places like Starbucks, doesn’t it seem likely that a next logical step will be the ability to check in to people? Such a feature would be the social equivalent of gravity, incentivizing people to form and maintain proximity clusters or blobs.

I’ve already seen a version of this feature in the wild - in RL! Way back when I was a kid spending summers at Latvian Camp we’d often play a game called Blob, essentially group tag. Each iteration would start with one person designated as “it”. Their goal then was to capture additional people, each time adding them to the ever growing blob. The game would end with a large swarm of kids spreading out the blob in a line to trap the final speedy kid in a corner of the playing field.

Now imagine an app called Blob, loosley based on the same principles. The app would reward people for 1) checking in to other friends’ cell phones, 2) remaining in proximity, and 3) growing the blob. Thus clusters of people would earn points, just like Foursquare or Gowalla, for forming groups (much like atoms form molecules), maintaining density, and increasing the size of the blob. For many early adopters this behavior would be fun in and of itself. For normals it’d become more enjoyable as 1) the incentives increased, 2) other apps/games were developed for blob (the Party Version, the Gym Class version, the Flash Mob version), and 3) the functionality was mixed with other potent services like Groupon (imagine that you and your blob could get 10% off coffee for checking your group in at Starbucks).

Like location check-ins, the concept is such a no-brainer next step that I’ve gotta believe companies like Facebook, Foursquare and Yelp are developing it or something similar right now. Facebook Places already allows people to check in their friends to locations (a logical first step for grouping) and mapping crowd-sourcer Waze recently announced a groups feature that allows people to caravan together on trips. The next obvious move is to establish game incentives for group formation, which will then enable a whole mess of emergent behavior, services, games and next-level complexity.

My bet is that over the next 6 months we’ll see more than a few established geosocial players releasing grouping features or discrete apps. They may call it Social Gravity, or Molecule, or Grouply, or ClusterFu*k, or maybe even Social Node. But let it be known, the Latvian Camp kids would prefer they call it Blob.

Image by Zach Armstrong.

The Acceleration of Gaming

2010-08-25T16:51:00.000-07:00

Life must be lived as play. ~ Plato

Fueled by provocative presentations/posts by gaming-oriented thinkers like Jesse Schell, SCVNGR’s Patrick Seth Priebatsch and VC Bing Gordon, the idea that games are spreading into serious areas like work, transportation, shopping and health is finally beginning to spread to the masses. Of course, like most ideas, this concept has been around for a very long time, taking on various forms. We can trace it back to iterations like Justin Hall’s Passive Gaming, Zyda’s spin on Serious Games, Wolfram’s work on Cellular Automata, John Nash’s Game Theory, MIlton Bradley’s The Game of Life (1860 - later associated with cellular automata) and even statements made by Plato like the one above.

But games have been around even far longer than humans have been aware of them. Thinkers like Wolfram and Nash argue, convincingly, that games are baked into nature itself and originated perhaps billions of years ago, certainly when organisms appeared and began competing with one another for resources, and that people rely on games from moment-to-moment to process thoughts (neural nets), emotions and to inform their behavior. This big picture view is key as we now contemplate the ongoing spread of games. It helps us get at the deeper why, rather than just the fascinating how.

Schell does a great job of pointing out how games will interact with pervasive sensors and computers (aka The Internet of Things), which lines up nicely with Gordon’s “video-game-ification of everything” principle and Priebatsch’s argument that 2010-2020 will be the decade of “the gaming layer”. Each of these frames is a very useful guides to the near-future. That said, to get the whole story it’s also critical to place these ideas into the context of life-as-game and and accelerating change.

When I refer to accelerating change, I’m not simply talking about Moore’s Law (the regular doubling rate of computer processors) and other hard-tech advances. I am referencing Kurweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns which he links to information technologies and thinkers like Korotayev argue is the product of the increased rate of networking of human brains (which totally jives with observations like Metcalfe’s Law and Reed’s Law). We as a people-populated planet are steadily, inexorably getting better at mapping systems and simulating our environment thanks to the information networking enabled by rapidly emerging communication technologies. It appears to be a natural planetary development driven by convergence of human created technologies and data pools, and even more fundamentally, the nature of life itself.

Through competition (which also ends up expanding to cooperation - Evo Devo), life produces increasingly more complex structures capable of controlling more resources. This game has brought us to to 2010 and a world in which games appear poised to saturate everything, just as as technology is poised to do the same. This parallel timing is not accidental. Better technology leads to better games. Better games (aka behavior templates and/or guides) lead to better technology. The two are intertwined and it can and should be argued that game patterns themselves are a form of technology. So I am now arguing that games are absolutely critical to the planetary phenomenon that futurists have come to call convergent accelerating change.

If this is the case, then we can venture the prediction that games will proliferate in direct relationship to other accelerating vectors like computer processing, information, communication and perhaps even human intelligence. There are already countless examples of games being used to generate better products (this can be applied to computer processors), assemble knowledge (crowd-sourcing), facilitate communication & interaction, assist with learning. It makes a whole world of sense to me that games will be absolutely essential if general acceleration is to continue.

In particular, I find it interesting to contemplate the interaction between games and virtual models of the world and other systems of interest. Back in 2006 I contributed to a prescient cross-industry foresight project called the Metaverse Roadmap that identified convergence across Virtual Worlds, Mirror Worlds, Augmented Reality and Life-Logging (life logging has since been reconceptualized as Rich Video). The project slug read: What happens when video games meet Web 2.0? ... What happens is the Metaverse. This concept applies now, in a big way, and offers great insight into the near and long-term future of gaming. As we construct virtual infrastructure like Google Earth, Facebook, YouTube and Augmented Reality, we’re ultimately building what IBM researcher Jim Spohrer has dubbed the World Board (what Baudrillard would equate with Hyper-Reality), a cohesive system that allows people to access data about anything and everything in the world around us. Like the World Wide Web, the World Board seems to be a developmental inevitability. And it sure looks like gaming is essential if we’re to build this quickly, as the macro trends I listed above suggest must occur.

So then, if games are in fact part and parcel of accelerating change, as I believe must be the case, then we can use that knowledge to formulate new predictions and hypotheses about the future of games and the future in general. For example, we can argue that the gaming industry will grow massively through 2020. Or that serious games like Waze will explode in popularity. Or that web-based gaming will become essential to managing typically conservative domains like government, business and education. Or that game theory and studies will be required learning circa 2015. Or that games will be essential to the increase of human capability and intelligence. Or that games are likely to plummet in price while increasing in performance and experience rapid commodification.

Summarized, the general point I am making is that games have always been critical to the evolution and development of living systems, that they are key to our economy and behavior, and that we can expect them to evolve and spread rapidly as we proceed through the knee of some powerful curves that affect everything we know and have come to hold dear. If acceleration is to continue, games too must accelerate - and we can use that realization to help inform our models and predictions of the world.

Fortunately we have a great deal of experience in this area. As Plato reminds us, we are and have always been compulsive gamers.

Alvis Brigis is CEO of in3d.com and a Board Member of the Acceleration Studies Foundation.

An app for every tree in Central Park by 2015?

2010-08-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

A not-so-silly thought experiment about the Internet of Things, or more accurately, World as Web.

Sometimes I like to think of humans carrying smartphones as Imperial Probe Droids capable of quantifying the world around us. After all, millions of prosumers use these devices to snap photos, record audio, shoot video, map the position of things and even record our paths. Smartphones can and do double as truly capable reconnaissance tools.

Much of the information collected through smartphones is then made available on the internet where it can be pulled into a variety of very useful graphs, web pages and applications. There is tremendous business, consumer, and social demand in place to incentivize these flows. This pull force is getting stronger as we collectively discover new ways to unlock the value of this data.

A powerful example of this effect is Google Earth. Since its birth as Keyhole (2001), Google acquisition (2004) and ongoing evolution, Google Earth has steadily added content and increased its resolution. One can now view weather, traffic and demographic data and even 3d representations of landmarks, trees and buildings (the company I manage, in3d.com, specializes in constructing these) using this contextual 3d map

It is also possible to add information to the objects embedded on Google Earth in the form of custom layers, Google Places pages, or links to websites or custom location/thing apps. Fueled by Google, a growing number of geosocial startups, businesses looking to differentiate their locations and a growing population of Google Earth enthusiasts, the number of 3d objects paired with rich data is exploding, resulting something that closely resembles Jim Spohrer's augmented reality World Board, the internet of things (a scenario that originally envisioned cheap networked sensors scattered all over the place), or even a virtual version of Bruce Sterling’s spime concept. (If you're not familiar with these concepts then they're definitely worth a read.)

So the year is 2010, all of the above is possible, the number of smartphones is rapidly rising, and there’s tremendous demand in place to map and link the world. The next step to proper evaluation of the Central Park scenario now requires consensus on what constitutes an app.

Although most folks probably define apps as programs that run on smartphones, the definition is in fact a bit broader:

Wikipedia: A web application is an application that is accessed over a network such as the Internet or an intranet. The term may also mean a computer software application that is hosted in a browser-controlled environment (e.g. a Java applet)[citation needed] or coded in a browser-supported language (such as JavaScript, combined with a browser-rendered markup language like HTML) and reliant on a common web browser to render the application executable.

The cost of generating an app generally ranges from free (simple widgets, Yahoo pipes) to tens of thousands of dollars fro full-fledged iPhone or Android apps. But, in general, these figures are dropping as more developers come online, HTML5 enables the insertion of basic apps into web pages, and big companies make it easier for non-technical people to create useful apps.

With over 100,000 Android apps, 225,000 iPhone apps and countless other smartphone-viewable pages that also function as apps, it’s obvious that by 2015 there will be many millions of apps, some useful, many not useful.

The question at hand is whether or not each and every tree in NYC’s Central Park (there are upwards of 25,000) will have its own app, or website that contains apps, that can be easily accessed in the year 2015. Here are some of the trends that critically support this scenario:

Rise of the Prosumer: With increasingly more and less expensive means to produce content (higher resolution picture and video quality on smartphones by 2015 + new devices such as panoramic lenses or auto-object tagging AI) and a web marketplace for this content, it’s a safe bet to believe there will be many millions more people playing the prosumer game circa 2015. Especially significant will be the growing number of Super Quantifiers (the 3d equivalent of hardcore Wikipedia contributors, few but powerful!) looking to map everything around them for reputation, $ or other social currency.
Crowd-Sourced Photosynthing: Google, Microsoft and a handful of other companies are in an escalating war to most quickly map the world (no surprise as this is absolutely critical to the future of search). This battle has spread from basic maps, to Street View, and finally to 3d. 3d components are generated by stitching together satellite, aerial, and ground-level photographs. This process is now taking a big leap forward as new rapid photosynthing processes are developed. Photosynthing is currently less effective than building 3d models of buildings and trees from carefully taken photographs, but in the next few years we expect it to overtake standard 3d model generation in efficiency. When that happens, circa 2013/2014, it will be possible to grab public geo-tagged photographs of a given space and to automagically create fine 3d models of everything in that space. With millions of people taking photographs of central park from various angles, it’s reasonable to believe that there will be sufficient data available to crowd-source a high resolution 3d map of all the trees in Central Park in the year 2015. Throw into the mix better location positioning, higher-rez aerial photography and perhaps cash incentives for photo-snapping consumers (Google, Microsoft or 3d Party Quantification Company) and it becomes even more likely that a 3d Central Park model is likely to exist by 2015.
Google Things? To grow its advertising base, Google will continue to steadily add value to its Google Places and drive adoption. It’s reasonable to believe that by 2015 every single Google Places page will either 1) be made available as an app in and of itself, or 2) contain one or many custom apps (thanks to HTML5 or a succeeding web language). I find it likely that Places will be expanded to include Things or Objects. Google is, after all, in the business of organizing the world's information and making it universally accessible and useful. ... If Google doesn’t do this, Microsoft, Facebook or some new start-up likely will. But doesn't Google Things make sense as the next iteration of Google Goggles?

With a 3d model of every tree available on Google Earth and the ability to easily add a Places or Things page associated with any geospatially located object, the next logical question then is whether or not it makes sense for Google to generate a custom Places page for each tree in Central Park.

Why would a company like Google or Microsoft do such a thing? Would people demand it?

Here are a few reason why I think this is likely:

The Benefits of Simulation: Simulations help people to monitor and manage places. Many groups including the City of New York, park managment, citizen groups looking to preserve Central Park, tourism agencies and educational institutions will see the benefits of a simulated, true-to-scale, true-to-object Central Park - local World Board.
Search Wars: The demand for increasingly better Search will drive Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, etc, into every niche that is not defended. Wherever there is information, they'll be there.
Key Gaming Catalyst: 3d simulations can serve as the robust scaffolding for new applications and games. It’s developer heaven. If these simulations enable lots of new fun games then there will be a large class of people that demand to play them and thus demand the mapping of each and every tree in Central Park. Imagine Grand Theft Auto with a closer-to-exact map of NYC?
Super Quantifiers: With technology dropping in price, Super Quantifiers will probably quantify the areas around them regardless of wht the rest of society thinks, unless their behavior can be restricted by legislation first. There are compulsive mappers out there.

But then again, all things future are uncertain, and it’s possible that the 3d Quantification of Central Park will not progress as quickly as I imagine. Some reasons for this may include:

Social Quantification Backlash: At some point the world will realize that rapid, rampant quantification may not be in its interests. Privacy, security, or plain lifestyle concerns could stop the other trends in their tracks. Events leading up to 2015 could turn people against graph stewards like Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft.
Revenue Control: The whole process could be slowed if NYC determines that it wants to control the revenue derived from simulations of Central Park. This could lead to slow negotiations with Google or Microsoft, or strict regulations that slow the process.
Technology: If the world enters a harsh depression, then it’s conceivable that technological progress will slow by 2015. That said, the necessary building blocks for tree mapping and apping are already in place. They don’t have to progress all that much for this to remain a viable scenario.

Conclusion: So long as there's no social will to regulate against deep quantification of our surroundings, it's highly likely that by 2015 we'll have created 3d versions of all the trees in Central Park via Crowd-Sourced Photosynthing. It then becomes an almost trivial matter to pair each object of interest contained in these simulations with its own web app or equivalent.

The implications of such a scenario are profound. It's a confirmation of the idea that the rate and resolution of our world-modeling behavior is increasing in direct proportion to advancing computing, sensing and social media technologies. As we capture more data and get better at patching it together into cohesive simulations tools like Google Earth will grow more valuable (and dangerous). They will then serve as platforms for social commenting, interaction, commerce and gaming. But along the way the value chain will probably transform and new social behaviors will emerge.

Over the next 5 years the web will rapidly spread into the world. This will not necessarily require the abundant, cheap sensors typically referenced in conversations about The Internet of Things (which is more about direct object-to-object communication). Instead, it's more likely that prosumers will enrich rich virtual mirror worlds and then access them via geo-coordinates at home or on the go.

Here comes Sphorer's World Board, sprouting first in densely populated public areas, like Central Park.

P.S. I'm not arguing that all of the tree apps in Central Park circa 2015 will necessarily be used very often, just that the means will be there to establish such systems at uber-low cost. It'll be fascinating to watch use cases emerge. There will be many we cannot anticipate.

Thanks to Venessa Miemis for the conversation that inspired me to write this post and to TakuyaMurata for the iPhone user photo - Creative Commons Share Alike 2.0.

Waze Releases Groups Feature, Social Positioning Takes Another Step Forward

2010-08-10T12:20:00.000-07:00

Waze, the start-up that crowd-sources map creation and refinement by turning it into a game for smartphone users, has added a killer new feature to its latest release - Waze Groups. A next logical step in the LBS app feature war, grouping now allows Waze cliques such as families taking trips, friends organizing pub crawls, cab companies mapping cab positions, road builders transforming terrain, realtors coordinating their sales agents, and so forth, to map and view their respective positions in real-time. Members of Waze groups can also view status updates posted by group members so that messages that pertain to their experience can be shared intuitively.

All in all, this appears to be a smart strategic move by company looking to up its influx of user generated content while at the same time grabbing a bigger chunk of the LBS market. Expect to see more and more advanced geo-grouping features from companies like Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Loopt, Yelp, etc, in the near future. Most probably have grouping features in the works. But those who don't will probably scramble to react once they realize this maneuver could threaten their core.

It's fun to watch the fast pace of the geosocial mobile apps! My bet is that it'll accelerate as more entrants jump into this hot new space.

Prosumer-Centric Capitalism

2010-05-11T14:07:00.000-07:00

Irving Wladawsky-Berger has posted an illuminating piece titled Customer-centric Capitalism in which he convincingly argues the now dominant profit-driven businesses M.O. is in fact detrimental to society:

For the last thirty years, maximizing shareholder value has replaced customer value as the key objective of many companies. But, a number of experts are now raising questions about this widespread business practice and the extreme preoccupation with short term profits that inevitably results from putting shareholders over customers.

It is clear that our system of profit-driven capitalism must be modernized with a greater emphasis placed on the customer. This is already happening. A handful of companies, like Google, have adopted positive-sum or triple-bottom-line business models. Many more are using data more effectively to improve customer service wherever it impacts profit. Customer-centric capitalism is making a slow but steady comeback.

Now consider the spread of modern day analytics.

Thanks to the web information explosion and the social sharing boom it's become possible to track more complex behavior. Among other things, we're compulsively piecing together this data into a more accurate picture of knowledge creation, sharing and value, and can now determine which members of a given network are more valuable than others.

So rather than advocating and rallying behind customer-centric capitalism as the next logical developmental economic step, perhaps we should expand or shift the concept to include this now visible network behavior. We could call this "prosumer-centric capitalism".

What's a Prosumer?: A prosumer is defined as a hybrid of a consumer and a producer. Generally speaking, the vast majority of humans are not pure consumers, but rather prosumers that contribute more or less value to the companies and social systems they interact with.

You think Google is free? Nope. Google relies on all of the search queries we type in and then react to to generate its core value. Same goes for Facebook, Yahoo, Aol, and other social media companies. These companies all depend on prosumers for their bread and butter.

Other interesting prosumer-centric business models include iphone apps that turn street mapping into a reward-driven game, online stock markets that predict box office scores more accurately than experts, and social health networks capable of determining the effectiveness of new drugs years before clinical trials can accomplish the same thing. The list goes on and on, largely due to the spread of modern social media.

It's not much of a stretch to imagine that these companies, and other traditional companies that undergo requisite webification, will be financially incentivized to return increasingly more value to their prosumers. Those that can more effectively pinpoint, reward and tweak the conditions for value creation will have a distinct advantage. At the same time, keep in mind that the prosumers too will gain access to this data. With quantitative data to point to, the tension between the prosumers and funders should create a healthy market for very specific micro behavior that could not have existed at any previous point in history (well, at least not without enormous expense).

Prosumer-Centric Capitalism: There is a gradient between consumer and producer called the prosumer. As emerging systems get better at quantifying prosumer behavior, we will be required to adjust our consumer- and customer-oriented economic models and Excel spreadsheets (or Google Spreadsheets) accordingly. Many companies are already doing this. Defining customers as prosumers that add value in specific ways can help upgrade and bring more clarity to our understanding of our info-economic system and lead to more fair, balanced and/or efficient economic development. When robust and foolproof prosumer accounting spreads to the masses we'll get Prosumer-Centric Capitalism, baby.

The Rise of Social Data Mining (as a Business Model)

2010-05-11T12:19:00.000-07:00

Companies are discovering how to monetize social network data. This is driving Big Open Science. Is that a good thing?

A social network for sharing illness data, patientslikeme.com, has demonstrated that it can tap the information in its user network to predict the outcome of clinical drug trials. The service, which is populated by a large number of ALS sufferers, determined that lithium use had no effect on the late-stage decline in ALS patients. Why is this significant? Because it took 18 months before a formal study was able to confirm exactly the same thing.

While clearly not yet a replacement for the clinical trial process, the findings do reinforce the concept of Big Open Science - the use of large data sets to conduct a rougher, more rapid form of science.

The financial model is clever and solid:

We take the information patients share about their experience with the disease, and sell it in a de-identified, aggregated and individual format to our partners (i.e., companies that are developing or selling products to patients). These products may include drugs, devices, equipment, insurance, and medical services. We do not rent, sell or share personally identifiable information for marketing purposes or without explicit consent. Because we believe in transparency, we tell our members exactly what we do and do not do with their data.

So long as the data remains totally secure, it sure reads like a win-win to me. I can see many quantified health start-ups adopting or moving towards this model.

But, aside from the health data, it's not really all that new.

Focus groups and stock markets have been around for hundreds of years. More recently, Hollywood Stock Exchange (HSX), a movie performance predictor site oft cited by collective intelligence researchers, has clearly demonstrated its ability to forecast box office revenues via crowdsourcing. And, of course, don't forget the banks, credit card companies and info aggregators that can already "predict with 95% certainty that you will get a divorce, two years before it happens, based on your purchases", as Google's Marissa Mayer famously pointed out on Charlie Rose.

In the coming years we can expect this sort of model to proliferate. Trends like cheaper data storage, smaller sensing devices, widening bandwidth, exponentially faster computing and emergent social behavior suggest that more companies will be able to mine more valuable data from more willing participants and sell it to more interested parties. Barring an all-out privacy backlash, it's a relatively safe bet that the broader market will create the conditions necessary for more similar social data mining startups and operations.

The new opportunities are seemingly endless:

health & medicine sites - like patientslikeme or curetogether (shout out to Alexandra Carmichael)
location video - streaming and stored on youtube
driving information- gathered through your car
smartphone apps - more complex data capture, reality mining
genome - companies like 23andme
etcetera!

At the same time, consider how certain large companies can leverage Big Open Science (they're already doing it for market research, but could easily broaden these efforts):

Search: Google, Bing, Yahoo Search
Social: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter
Gaming: Sony, XBox, Nintendo, Apple
Smartphones: Apple, Microsoft, HTC

Privacy concerns aside (for the moment), there's such an abundance of untapped informational value that it's easy to envision a world in which total productivity grows by leaps and bounds - as a square to acceleration in the technology, data and comm space - a sentiment echoed by Wired writer and Quantified Self blogger Gary Wolf at a recent Stanford MediaX seminar. (When I asked him whether or not he believed that Quantification was directly related to Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns he thought about it for a moment then said "yes".)

Now, will these quantification driven economic gains gains trickle down to the average person? Yes, I do think they will. First in the form of accelerated science. Then, second, it seems likely that the increasingly abundant services and social networks in the space will be forced by the market to return more and more value to the users, or prosumers, that are contributing this data - an effect that I have playfully nicknamed The Mandate of Kevin.

But will these gains come online fast enough to offset the disruptive forces of globalization, production automation, a large-scale privacy backlash or the resulting social turmoil? That's hard to say, because we humans have never experienced such convergence before. However, it is becoming more and more clear that traditional economics will drive Big Open Science and that this behavior is a thread interwoven with other accelerators. Hopefully that will turn out to be a good thing.

Which Big Company Will Launch the Private Facebook Alternative?

2010-05-10T12:44:00.000-07:00

Loren Feldman at 1938media makes the case for a large-scale Facebook alternative that caters to users looking for PRIVACY. He suggests that Aol is best positioned to go that route.

Sounds pretty developmentally inevitable to me. There will be open social networks and closed social networks. The open play makes sense for Facebook at this time, but I expect that at least one large-scale CLOSED social network and many more gated niche players will soon emerge. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Aol, IBM, Yahoo or even MySpace are companies that could make big gains by branding themselves as stewards of your privacy.

The Gradual Transhuman

2010-05-10T12:04:00.000-07:00

According to transhumanist thinkers, a posthuman is a hypothetical future being "whose basic capacities so radically exceed those of present humans as to be no longer unambiguously human by our current standards."

Futurist Jamais Cascio tells io9 he thinks this word is "a term with more weight than meaning".

Posthumanity ... will always be just over the horizon. Always in The Future. When the systems and augmentations we now consider to be posthuman hit the real world, they will have become simply human in scale.

That's because augmentation - the development of systems and technologies to allow us to do and to be more than what our natural biology would allow - is intrinsic to what it means to be human.

Jamais points out in the article and in this NYC Future Salon video that the human species has already greatly augmented itself with technology (this includes words and complex abstractions, like science and math), so it's hard to pin down a static definition of "human" when we're actually evolving dynamically.

I agree and salute you, Jamais.

Our genes have changed to better take advantage of linguistics, numbers, and tools. The cloud is an extension of our thought processes. We're already significantly "post" and "trans" to what we were 100,000, 10,000, 1,000, and 100 years ago.

Yes, technology, information and perhaps even intelligence are growing at an accelerating rate, but the prospect of accelerating near-term change, even a digitization scenario, does not erase that which has already occurred.

So let's achieve consensus on the term "human" to inform our concept of that which is not human, or more than human. (This should also help clarify things in regard to that pesky "Singularity" term, another concept house built on shaky definitional foundations.)

Zuckerberg-Khan

2010-05-08T14:22:00.000-07:00

The similarities between Mark Zuckerberg and Genghis Khan are uncanny:

Genghis Khan was born in the Mongolian plains in 1162 - not far from the current capital Ulaanbaatar. Mark Zuckerberg was born in White Plains in 1984 - not far from world media capital New York City.
Genghis Khan became leader of his tribe at the age of 12 and began plotting world domination. Mark Zuckerberg became leader of his middle school Coders Club at the age of 12 and began planning world domination.
Genghis Khan committed a questionable act by killing his half-brother, Bekhter, during a fight which resulted from a dispute over hunting spoils. This incident cemented his position as head of the household. Mark Zuckerberg committed a questionable act of killing Facebook predecessor ConnectU by mimicking its features and took all the spoils. This incident cemented Facebook as the leading social network at Harvard.
Genghis Khan used his cunning to unite the warring Naimans, Merkits, Uyghurs, Tatars, Mongols, and Keraits. Mark Zuckerberg used his cunning to unite college kids, parents, businesses across national borders, many of whom had been experiencing culture wars.
Employing ruthless tactics, Genghis Khan conquered a vast geographic empire that stretched from Asia to Africa. Employing ruthless tactics, Mark Zuckerberg conquered a vast prosumer empire that includes millions of Asians and Africans.
Genghis Khan was tolerant of the varying religious views of the people he ruled. Mark Zuckerberg is tolerant of the varying religious views of people that follow Facebook's rules.
Genghis Khan decreed the adoption of the Uyghur script as the Mongol Empire's writing system. Mark Zuckerberg decreed the adoption of Facebook Connect and then Open Graph as the web's sharing system.
The Mongol Empire was governed by a civilian code, called the Yassa, created by Genghis Khan. The Facebook Empire is governed by a civilian code called Facebook's Terms of Service, written by Mark Zuckerberg.
In Iraq and Iran, Genghis Khan is almost universally viewed as a destructive and genocidal warlord who caused enormous damage to the population of these areas. In Iraq and Iran, Mark Zuckerberg is viewed as a destructive and genocidal proponent of secularism and transparency who caused many awkward family dinner parties in these areas.
Despite his personality flaws (extreme violence and ego), Genghis Khan was VERY popular with the ladies of the 1100's. Despite his personality flaws (extreme nerdiness and ego), Mark Zuckerberg is VERY popular with the ladies of the 2000's. - Some things just never change.

Mark Zuckerberg should take a DNA test because all of the evidence points to him being a direct descendant of Genghis Khan, the world conqueror.

Twitter is a Full-Fledged Media Outlet, Not Purely a Social Network

2010-05-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

The first "quantitative study on the entire Twittersphere and information diffusion on it" conducted by the Department of Computer Science at KAIST University in Korea confirms that Twitter functions more as a broadcast news arena and less as a discrete social network.

What is Twitter, a Social Network or a News Media?

One particularly interesting nugget is the estimation that "any retweeted tweet is to reach an average of 1,000 users no matter what the number of followers is of the original tweet. Once retweeted, a tweet gets retweeted almost instantly on next hops, signifying fast diffusion of information after the 1st retweet. " This seems to reinforce that Twitter network behavior is more about the content and less about the people.

IBM Previews CityOne - Think Google Earth + Sim City = Educational Software that Supports IBM's Smart Planet Push

2010-05-05T16:33:00.000-07:00

IBM is taking the notion of serious games to the next level with CityOne (think Google Earth + Sim City), a rich game designed to bring about awareness of the foresighted company's Smart Planet and Smart Infrastructure initiatives.

CityOne is already in use at over 1,000 universities for free as part of IBM's academic initiatives and makes sense as a branding and awareness play to support the company's Smart Planet and Smart Town initiatives.

Bill Gates: We Need Innovation, Not Insulation

2010-01-21T15:09:00.000-08:00

With the launch of his new personal news site, The Gates Notes, Bill Gates has formally stepped into the popular blogging arena. His first power post, which just hit the front page of Huffington Post, addresses the the world's propensity to address short-term problems, such as climate change, with bubble gum and tape in lieu of tackling long-term goals by fostering meaningful new innovation.

Gates: People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction -- 30% (off of some baseline) by 2025 and 80% by 2050. I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050.

Gates' logic is consistent with a recurring dialogue I've encountered in technology and forecasting circles: why waste time with incremental advances when we should be innovating technologies an order of magnitude more powerful than the previous generation.

But as we enter the knee of some potent accelerating curves (technology, information, communication), it's become painfully obvious that the majority of national systems aren't offering their populations the right innovation incentives, despite the financial near-crisis we've just experienced. For example, President Obama's stated goal of 3% GDP dedicated to innovation, relegated to the back seat as other issues occupy the attention of federal lawmakers more in tune with the election cycle than the larger national heartbeat and nervous system, remains a pipe dream.

So how will we catalyze the systemic will to innovate in leaps and bounds rather than incrementally? Two possible answers come to mind.

A) CREATIVE DESTRUCTION: Generational theorists Strauss and Howe argue that it will require cyclical creative destruction, a Fourth Turning.

B) CONVERGENT ACCELERATION: Acceleration theorists argue that convergence in technological, communication and information systems (among others) will usher in a new era of innovation fluiditiy that permits us to better research, quantify and solve problems. The idea here is that the free market will permit the best innovations to emerge and evolve more quickly than before thanks to the fluidity enabled by the web.

Unfortunately, our ostensibly free market system is so riddled with holes that leak human generated capital that innovation has become massively underfunded.

Gates points out that "to make the 80% goal by 2050 we are going to have to reduce emissions from transportation and electrical production in participating countries down to zero". The current U.S. system is incapable of meeting this goal. For this to happen, nations like ours will need to develop better cognizance of innovation and re-innovate our decision-making system accordingly.

Gates: If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters -- getting to zero. ... With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed. ... However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.

To solve such problems we need to reinvent our collective approach to innovation. Many bright entrepreneurs, scholars and policy thinkers are compelled to tackle this fundamental problem, yet the system continues to misidentify and underfund progressive efforts (poor health care, lack of start-up & research incentives, poor implementation of smarter systems, red tape that blocks grass-roots innovation of ALL sorts), much less provide an actionable framework for innovation behavior.

So will meaningful change in our innovation policy require creative destruction and socio-economic calamity as a big the kick in the ass? Or will an explosion of bottom-up innovation catalyze the intelligence growth that's required?

The storyline of 2009 suggests the former option may be the more likely future, serving as a necessary a entropy clearing shake-out, allowing us to better align national resources with national priorities. Barring the emergence of some highly effective social media structures capable of diffusing up through and reforming government, an offbeat but realistic scenario, it seems we're destined for some speed bumps on the road to innovating up to Bill Gates' standards.

In the end, those challenges may prove critical to catalyzing acceleration in innovation and adaptation to a rapidly changing world economy.

As Plato once wisely pointed out, "Necessity is the mother of invention."

Related link:
Can we outrace the fourth turning?

Is Facebook Graph a Counter to Google Wave Federation? Absolutely.

2009-10-30T09:22:00.000-07:00

From Beta, to Alpha to Roadmaps - recent moves by Google, Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that platform release is accelerating.

Facebook and Google have me convinced that they're among the most foresighted of companies in the social media space. Understanding the value and nature of prosumers, developers, structured content, open source, and broader tech-info convergence, the gargantuan yet speedy pair (+ quickly growing thirdborn Twitter) are jockeying to connect to more data, brains and meaningful partnerships. The result is fierce, healthy competition that's accelerating the pace and manner of social software platform releases.

Yesterday, Facebook announced a set of smart maneuvers clearly spurred on by Google's aggressively open strategy, including one called Open Graph (you can tell just by the name that this is a Zuckerberg baby) that will allow website builders everywhere to build Facebook-style pages, complete with many of the platform's bells and whistles - a very logical follow up to Google Friend Connect.

This morning, it's rumored that Google will announce the opening of their Wave servers for federation later in the day. Much like the release of Wave itself, the move, initially promised when Google announced Wave at I/O on May 28, comes very early in the Wave life cycle and allows any skilled-enough third party developers to use build custom websites, apps and back-ends using the platform.

What will they build? Based on my experience with Wave (Team Whizzlr took 6th place at a Wave Campout in August for our real-time massively multiplayer quiz game) I can say that Wave will be a remarkable tool for a fairly narrow set of uses, at least initially. It rocks as a platfrom for complex communication in a single place, real-time or longitudinal, making it ideal for 1) functional tasks like document collaboration (Google Docs +), focus grouping, surveying, invitation management, reddit-in-email (Kudos to the GTUG team that designed Blip Appeal - in-stream up/down voting for Wave Blips), dynamic web commenting that takes place simultaneously wherever Wave extensions are placed, new forms of blogging, etc, and also 2) fun activities like PMOGs, massive real-time quiz competitions, Fantasy Football clones run inside tyour email but also on another site, and other casual apps that currently sit atop the Facebook or iPhone platforms.

Put another way, the Wave platform uses HTML 5 cacheing to allow developers to shrink different web applications that we're accustomed to experiencing discretely, combine them in a single location, replicate Wave functionality WHEREVER they choose (thanks to Wave federation), and to mix and mingle all of these Wavelets. From a systems standpoint this looks like a clear path to MetaSystem Transition (MST)in the browser-enabled web app world:

Wikipedia - A metasystem transition is the emergence, through evolution, of a higher level of organization or control. Prime examples are the origin of life, the transition from unicellular to multicellular organisms, and the emergence of symbolic thought. A metasystem is formed by the integration of a number of initially independent components, such as molecules, cells or individiduals, and the emergence of a system steering or controlling their interactions. As such, the collective of components becomes a new, goal-directed individual, capable of acting in a coordinated way. This metasystem is more complex, more intelligent, and more flexible in its actions than the initial component systems.

This, I believe, is the way the Google Brass and Wave Team regard this new platform. It is their confidence in this model, mixed with excitement from a certain class of clammoring developers that recognize this long-term potential, plus their successful experiences with open-sourcing code (Android, Chrome, App Engine) that spurred them to announce the unpolished product in Mat and release Wave in Alpha this past summer. -- They certainyl got a lot of flack for it.

Whether or not this play bears fruit (I've been a believer from the start, mostly because I love what it could mean for the web), social media thinkers like Zuckerberg and Facebook's strategic team clearly must view Wave as an assault into their niche and future niches they'd like to dominate, not to mention a big play to convert developers to Google App Engine disciples. They have to take the possibility of a Wave Tsunami seriously, even if the likelihood is moderatley low.

So, is it a coincidence that Facebook has announced Open Graph and a slew of developer-focused goodies on the day prior to the Google Wave Federation? Probably not.

Is it a Open Graph a necessary (defensive + offensive) response to Google's maneuvering in the Wave space? Absolutely.

(That said, this emerging battle is at the same time component of a larger war between the two. How I would love to speak candidly with their strategists/futurists...)

Earlier this year I was openly wondering about Facebook's prosumer strategy. Since then I've seen Facebook make some truly brilliant moves, mostly in response to the growing Google and Twitter threat, that reveal just how much they do realize the fundamental importance of prosumers and developers (the two are very narrowly separated).

Thus, we've seen these companies move from launching products in Beta (Google is the pbvious trailblazer here), to Alpha and now to laying out 6-month roadmpas for developers and users (Facebook yesterday announced this), in just a few short years.

Make no mistake about it, fueled by Moore's Law, Zuckerberg's Second Law, and Exponential Data Proliferation, this behavior is a manifestation of convergent accelerating change. As such, expect other industries to follow suit (especially those dominated by massive players) as their operations are increasingly virtualized and they too can act in a more fluid manner. Newspapers, film studios, gaming companies, health care providers, and so forth, are all on the queue.

In the meantime, players like Google, Facebook and Twitter that strategize according to these theoretical acceleration and systems principles have a serious advantage. Do not underestimate the power of such simulations and nerds.

Google Navigation = I'm Getting a Droid

2009-10-29T15:07:00.000-07:00

I've been sitting on the iPhone:Android fence for a while now, but no longer. The impending release of Google's100% free, absolutely rocking Navigation System has tipped me in the direction of the Motorola Droid.

The new service is an awesome demonstration of the potent products that can spring from Google's rich, structured data core. Could the company monetize this directly? Absolutely. But they won't because it's even more important for Google to 1) encourage Android phone purchases by offering this amazing feature (expect this to last a short while then migrate to iPhone as well), 2) popularize a new platform that sucks in structured data (much like the free and similarly sweet 1-800-GOOG-411) and 3) generate good will toward the G-Brand.

Expect increasingly more babies from Google's fertile data womb in the near future.

Facebook Keeping Pace With Google's Open Platform Maneuvers

2009-10-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

Not content to simply rely on its explosive growth curve (as MySpace did under NewsCorp prior to the shakeup), Facebook yesterday made three big announcements aimed at wooing more high-end and low-end developers:

Facebook Platform: A rich and well-thought out suite of developer-facing support code, information and services including a heretofore unprecedented 6-month developer roadmap and a major focus on simplicity (similar to Google's maneuvers).

Open Graph: Part of Facebook platform, a vague announcement about a new API that will allow website builders everywhere to build Facebook-style pages, complete with many of the platform's bells and whistles. A logical follow up to Google Friend Connect, this lines up with Mark Zuckerberg's January comments on the decentralization of the platform and follows Google's strategic open API lead, reinforcing that walled graden large scale social media is on its way out.

Developer Access to User Email Addresses: A minor move with major impications. This will allow Facebook app developers the ability to reach out to users directly, massively increasing the value proposition for certain apps, especially those hooked into big companies looking for more marketing value via FB.

The moves reinforce the trend of increasing openness of large-scale social platforms. Google and Twitter have been trailblazing. Now Facebook has made up serious ground.

MySpace is refocused on music and, based on a possible deal with Facebook, seems to be moving in the right direction.

Microsoft and Yahoo, though they're seriously focused on developers are working to grock the seriousness of the prosumer game and Mandate of Kevin. But rest assured, they'll be announcing similar changes shortly because there will be no other option. This will require a shift in internal culture that may result in deeper level shakeups at these not quite fast-follower entities.

Viva los prosumer!

Carving Up the Social Graph Turkey

2009-10-22T07:45:00.000-07:00

After much deal-making and jockeying in the previous quarters, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft and Google at last revealed their near-term Social Search plays at today's Web 2.0 Summit.

Facebook announced the impending launch of its own social search platform + a deal with minority investor Microsoft that brings FB status updates to Bing.

Google announced a new Social Search capability that pulls friend-relevant data from most core social networks with the notable exception of Facebook + a deal with Twitter to bring real-time tweets to the search engine.

Microsoft announced the Facebook/Bing deal + a Twitter deal virtually identical to Google's.

Twitter stuck to its open-expansion-uber-alles strategy, announcing it's willing to play nice with anyone who will help it fend off Facebook from its niche.

The moves clearly demonstrate the increasing value of structured social data (aka the emerging social graph) to search services and should silence skeptics that have complained about the valuation of large social networks.

They also demonstrate one form of massive disruption to search markets: an all-out race to subsume new pools of structured data. It's obvious that Facebook and Microsoft, who recently unveiled a deal to subsume computational search engine Wolfram Alpha, see this as one of the more effective strategies for countering Google's seach dominance.

Prediction: Once these big deals are wrapped up I expect that we'll witness a slew of search-access deals with companies that control pools of unique search-relevant data (e.g. IBM,Technorati, Second Life, stallite mapping services), perhaps eventually resulting in granular opt-in controls (similar to Google AdSense) for smaller niche federations looking to monetize their proprietary data.

Just think of search engines as big brains competing to integrate modules of novel, search-relevant structured data.

Viewing search from this perspective brings much necessary context to Google's long-term search growth plan, explaining why seemingly disparate initiatives like Maps, Earth, Google 411, books, etc are actually part of a cohesive strategy that will consistently add value to the company's core search offering over the coming years. It is this deliberately planned integration that Google appears poised to retain its dominance. Thus, minus an Earth-shattering search AI breakthrough, direct competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo and Facebook must acquire or grow their own pools of unique, relevant and integratable structured data if they are to keep pace.

At the same time, expect new entrants in regions such as Russia, China and India to either license their data to the hungry big boys or focus on the expansion of their native search efforts. All that's required is some magic translation pixie dust. Oh snap, Google appears to have that technology marketed cornered.

Conclusion: The social graph turkey is but a single, albeit core, item on the long table of search. Expect many more scrumptious, exotic foods to emerge from the data kitchen. Google does and has been adjusting its digestive technologies accordingly.

Control Over Perceived Environment (COPE)

2009-10-16T12:06:00.000-07:00

What is intelligence?

"Intelligence" is a pervasive and useful, yet problematic term with no true measure, despite the fact that psychologists and other cognitive scholars having been working on this non-stop for roughly 150 years. It's a readily understood, good-enough meme that helps us put labels on brains and to organize them, yet remains a crude, dull operating tool that leads to much confusion, miscommunication and errant simulation among its bipedal, meme-hoarding user junkies.

The highly elastic meaning of the word is especially irksome in technical discussions. Note how difficult it is to ascribe definitions of intelligence to various systems:

individuals - are we talking about g, social intelligence or Gardner's multiple intelligences?
groups - is the group stifling individual excellence? how can one effectively measure crowd wisdom? are cultures more or less intelligent in different environments?
AI - when does an AI truly become intelligent? how do we accurately compare AI to human intelligence? is the Turing Test representative of human intelligence or just humans' ability to estimate intelligence? is Google slowly becoming more intelligent? (Different researchers will provide vastly different answers to these questions.)
biological systems - how do you measure the intelligence of a Mycelium network or a field mouse? where do systems boudaries stop? what are the criteria for higher intelligence? can punctuated equilibrium and species death actually generate more intelligence?
or the planet - how smart and resilient is our planet? is technology making our entire planet smarter? to what extent do different species and sytems interact and cooprerate? weak Gaiia? strong Gaiia?
or even the universe - is the universe performing computation? does intelligence emerge from simple parts? is local intelligence a manifestation of universal intelligence? is the universe a simulation? if so, then what does that mean for the broader context of intelligence?

These diverging views of "intelligence" can make it a chore to achieve consensus when communicating about capability, complexity, computation systems growth and, of course, "intelligence" itself. Nevertheless, the meme is vague enough and useful enough in different situations to continue replicating from brain to brain. Like other widely adopted cultural memes, it is resilient!

So where does that leave us memesters in our search for consensus on "intelligence"? Rather than simply pointing out that it's an inefficient meme, I believe we need to discover/generate beneficial new memes to outcompete/augment the outdated terminology and occupy its space in our mental simulations. In other words, you replace a broken meme, you don't fix the old one that's loaded with confusion.

To date, my forays into the space have netted two general models of "intelligence" that jive most harmoniously with my personal take on the subject:

First, James Flynn's assesment that environment and genes conspire to generate humans with superior abstraction abilities tuned to the problem sets that society encourages them to interface with. I see this approach, encapsulated in the Dickens-Flynn model, as a recent big step toward Evo Devo compatibility. It also allows for the the software-like behavior of memes, which Flynn calls abstractions (see Piaget's relevant work on abstractions). Flynn's observations line up nicely with both the concept of memes & temes advanced by Dawkins and Blackmore, as well as philosopher Terence McKenna's theory that culture is in fact an operating system. This means the abstract thought frameworks that we drill into our children during critical periods, including math, science, biology, maps, businesses, social networks, new language, etc, are in fact a form of software that affects our IQ and ability to navigate the world. (Note that Flynn is also the discoverer of the documeted steady rise of IQ now commonly referred to as the Flynn Effect.)

Second, Harvard thought-guru Steven Pinker's comprehensive body of findings that support his assessment that brains are essentially computers that operate using easy-to-understand conceptual metaphors, which correspnd nicely with Flynn's notion of abstractions. Pinker is also inherently very Evo Devo in his approach and offers up appropriate props to memeticians.

Both models are very compatible with broader systems thinking and a still relevant systems-first model I scribbled circa 2004 while trying to make sense of concepts like technology, information and knowledge (each useful but vague in their own right). I like to call it COPE.

COPE stands for Control Over Perceived Environment and is designed to overarch definitions/theories of
human, social, cognitive, software, biological, planetary, univeral, cosmological "intelligence". Rooted in the belief that intelligence is an emergent property of complex adaptive (CAD) or living systems, the idea is simple:

Draw an arbitrary boundary (to the best of your ability) around any chunk of any system - this becomes your subject/entity.
Determine (to the best of your ability) what is required for this system to survive, expand, replicate, evolve, develop.
Measure (to the best of your ability) how this system uses space, time, energy, matter (STEM), information, and compexity to increase #2 - the likelihood of survival, expansion, replication, evolution, development.
Cross-reference these STEM, info and complexity scores with other systems to interpolate salient data points that help refine actionable abstractions.

For example, rather than measuring IQ according to a paper-based test, which can net some useful data, a COPE-inspired test would allow humans access to info, tech, other people and the broader system during the exam. (Akin to on-the-job analysis that more serious companies perform before hiring someone.) Such tests might measure for the total efficiency of a given operation according to how little STEM and $ the subject requires to perform it, thus establishing a more robust estimation of problem solving ability.

The counter-argument to performing such a test is inefficiency. To date, it's been to costly or impossible to measure individual performance in such a comprehensive manner. In this context, IQ test have been remarkably successful at netting complex results, that have then helped refine our concept of intelligence,via a relatively simple low-cost process.

Enter accelerating growth in technology, partnered with similarly explosive growth in data proliferation and communication.

The Quantification Principle (STEM Compression Correlates with Increased Quantification Ability): Thanks to constantly evolving technologies like the web, telephone, money, video, brain scanning, we are able to more efficiently (more quickly, at lower material cost, lower energy cost) MEASURE systems and/or systems slices. The accelerating growth in these systems correlates with accelerating growth in our systems quantifications and analysis abilities (eg, IBM, Johnson Controls, Total Information Awareness, Google Search, Web as Databse). (Interestingly, it also correlates with the Flynn Effect (steadily rising IQs), and, more importantly, our collective ability to maintain/expand COPE.)

By expanding the scope and complexity of that which we can measure, and by using analysis and science to better our understanding of what we're testing for, it's clear that we can more robustly analyze the behavioral efficiency, aka COPE ability, of various systems, including brains, thus expanding on the notion of the IQ test itself.

Furthermore, I contend that this is an Evo Devo inevitability, that if better measurment of behavior/intelligence proves beneficial to systems agents (eg, humans), that they will devote resources to attain this advantage.

In other words - if it can be counted, it will be counted. Which means that, barring disruption, we are destined to get better at generating and cross-referencing COPE scores.

The Incompleteness Problem: Nevertheless, no matter how efficient we get at measuring COPE, we still run into the problem of System Closure. According to Godel, system closure is a mathematical impossibility. Systems overlap with other systems. Different systems of varying scale and complexity constantly interact with and impact different systems of varying scale and complexity. So, technically, there can be no true measure of any system, unless the entire system is measured perfectly (a feat that seems unlikely prior to a universal convergence, pervasive unified consciousness, or some mind-blowing external intervention).

At the same time, it appears we are destined to inexorably expand and refine our simulation of the system in which we reside, using abstractions like COPE as powerful tool gradually expand and refine our concepts of intelligence, consciousness, information, knowledge, wisdom, capability, life, etc.

From this perspective, better, more robust measuring abilities and conventions appear to be inevitable and critical tools for progress in science and our broader COPE ability. (Very chicken-or-the-egg like.)

Moving forward, as we continue to improve our models of multi-threaded convergence, including "intelligence" growth, it's clear that a central and catalytic part of the dynamic will be the regular updating of our fundamental definition of and measures for the elusive property currently known as intelligence.

By figuring out what we really mean by smart, we will get smarter... which will hopefully result in more quickly established meme-consensus and more productive discussions of these sorts of topics in the near-future, thus making room for a new class of memes chock full of their own inefficiencies.

Big shout-out to Lisa Tansey who challenged my thinking and encouraged me to write this piece at Fusion 2009.

Finland: Connectivity is a Human Right

2009-10-15T08:00:00.000-07:00

Following in the footsteps of the French, Finland's Ministry of Transport and Communications has decreed that as of July 2010 every Finnish citizen will have"the right to a one-megabit broadband connection" as an intermediary step toward 100 Mb/person in 2015.

If one views brains as supercomputer-equivalents critical to the convergent growth of technology, information, communication and human capabilities, as I do, it becomes obvious that such national policies are beneficial and necessary -- and maddening that we've not made more progress on these issues here in the United States.

Connectivity is not just a stabilizing social force, as Thomas Barnett has pointed out, it is a glue that's critical to convergent growth. It's now high time for more nations to get hip to the idea that their full network of brains makes possible regular value creation and should be optimized for higher use. Hopefully emerging models of individual/social "intelligence" and multi-threaded systems growth will diffuse quickly enough for other countries, large and small, to quickly follow suit.

Google's Long Prosumer March Continues as Building Maker for Google Earth is Unveiled

2009-10-14T11:59:00.000-07:00

As usual, Google is keeping it's eye on the (rapidly expanding) prosumer prize, this time strengthening the base of its Geo-Quantification efforts through the public release of Building Maker, a program w/ complementary toolkit that encourages citizens like you and me to add renderings of buildings to any of 50 designated Google Earth cities.

We like to think of Building Maker as a cross between Google Maps and a gigantic bin of building blocks. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – both of which we provide. When you're done, we take a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn't already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. You can make a whole building in a few minutes.

Here's a demo video from the Google beta:

Google lists some additional consequences of participating in the program:

Building Maker is an online tool, and it runs entirely in your web browser (Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, etc.)
Before you can add a building to Google Earth, you need to sign in to your Google Account (so you get credit for what you contribute).
Models you create with Building Maker "live" in the Google 3D Warehouse (a giant, online repository of 3D models).
You can use Google SketchUp (our free, general-purpose 3D modeling tool) to edit or otherwise modify anything you make with Building Maker.
Make sure you have the latest version of Google Earth installed on your computer.
If you're on a Mac, you need to download the Google Earth plug-in directly.

Note the strategic synergy in herent in this latest GoEogle push (point by point):

Building Maker will likely be optimized for Chrome, leading participating prosumers to adopt Chrome.
Building Maker is yet another service that requires a Google account. Google's goal seems to be to get everyone on the planet signed up and exposed to their other offerings, particularly increasingly coveted value-adding prosumers.
By "live in Google's 3D Warehouse" I suspect that means these models are open to use by others. This repository is immensely valuable, even if/when granular use (Creative Commons) permissions are implemented, to not only Google Earth, but into other 3D initiatives and the developement of object search, etc. 3D will play a big role in the web of 2010-2020 and Google is setting up its plays.
Sketch-Up adoption benefits Google and creates a layer of separation between objects created in that language and other efforts to generate 3D object databases (Microsoft, Yahoo, IBM, Apple, Second Life can't be far behind - note: these dynamics will continue to make Linden Labs a more coveted acquisition target). My guess is that this also incrementally increases the likelihood that more serious programmers will adopt Google App Engine if Google Earth and Sketch-Up are made to play nicely with this core framework, one that Google wants to blow up big.
Encourages the development and use of Google Earth, potentially the most valuable and critical prosumer platform of the near-future.

Google Earth remains the runaway leader in 3D quantification and serves as scaffolding increasingly capable of adding structure to Google's growing body of information. By encouraging prosumers to add more value to this system, Google continues to put distance between it and its mapping/search competitors. This ultimately bodes well for prosumers who will no doubt reap the benefits of this battling as other companies realize they need a large number of fairly capable brains deployed all over the world to compete in the quantification game - the race to add structure, generate actionable knowledge from the proliferating mass of data.

Maybe it's time to get a nicer camera.

Laser-Generated 3D Maps

2009-10-13T06:51:00.000-07:00

Great Britain's national mapping agency, Ordnance Survey, has posted a beautifully detailed 3D map of Bournemouth that was generated through the use of accurate laser technology. The organization says this map "is made from 700 million individual points of light."

Take a look at the elegant results:

Experts at Ordnance Survey are optimistic that geographic laser scanning technology will "revolutionise the future of personal navigation, tourism and the planning process as well as aiding architects, and the emergency and security services", but I'll be watching to see how their technology scales and performs versus competitors, particularly Google Earth's flesh-out-our-scaffolding approach.

It's also interesting to note that this forward step in 3D quantification is being pushed through a government agency. Expect increasingly more governments to get serious about such initiatives because of the short and long-term value they can produce for the national economy. And if they can't develop the technology in-house, then expect them to lean on companies like IBM and Google for smarter infrastructure.

Big thanks to commenter paulous99 for pointing out that Ordance Survey is in fact a UK govt org.

via Garry Golden

Web-Mediated Learning Found More Effective Than the Classroom

2009-08-20T10:07:00.000-07:00

A comprehensive new report asserts that web-mediated learning has been found to be more effective than face-to-face learning.

New York Times: Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile.

My initial reaction is that both learning settings are critical and that students empowered with laptops in a classroom setting, such as in Maine, would probably outperform both groups. That said, it certainly does open the doors wider to distance learning and, hopefully, sweeping educational reform.

Holograms You Can Touch

2009-08-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

Shinoda Lab presents "touchable holography" that measures where your hand is in relation to an object, then uses ultrasonic transducers to create pressure at the appropriate points. The result is the simulated sense of tactile interaction with a virtual object.

Augmented Reality for the PS3

2009-07-29T15:08:00.000-07:00

Here comes some decently impressive augmented reality for the PS3:

Mattel Releasing Augmented Reality Toy Line to Support Cameron's Upcoming AVATAR Movie

2009-07-27T12:11:00.000-07:00

Virtual Worlds News reports that toy manufacturer Mattel has teamed up with AR company Total Immersion to add an augmented reality component to AVATAR action figures.

Each figure in the new line will come with a 3D web tag, or i-TAG, which consumers scan using a home computer's webcam. Scanning will reveal additional content on-screen such as biographical information or animated models which corresponds to the purchased product.

Here what it'll resemble, as seen through your computer screen while being captured by your webcam:

Go here for some cool product example vids, including their AR Topps Baseball Cards, by Total Immersion.

Google Adds Moon to Its Simulation Core

2009-07-20T12:38:00.000-07:00

After adding the ocean, the sky, Mars, Google Earth now has imagery from the Moon.

Augmented Reality iPhone Apps

2009-07-19T22:47:00.000-07:00

The first of the augmented reality apps hit the iPhone:

Though these may be light-weight, they clearly demonstrate a changing relationship with the world around us.

Twitter House

2009-07-12T21:54:00.000-07:00

As we continue down the yellow brick road to the internet of things, intelligent infrastructure and, ultimately, total systems quantification, we're bound to see more examples such as The House that Tweets. And, of course, IBM technology will play a big role as we develop this Smarter Planet.

Facebook Will Do "Billions in Revenue" Annually by 2014 Predicts Marc Andreessen

2009-07-06T14:55:00.000-07:00

Core Facebook investor Marc Andreessen believes that Facebook will easily clear $500 million in revenue in 2009 and "billions" annually in 2014, reports Reuters.

"This calendar year they'll do over $500 million," Andreessen said in an interview, noting that Facebook has more than 225 million users, so revenue per user is still small.

"If they pushed the throttle forward on monetization they would be doing more than a billion this year," said Andreessen, who made the cover of Time Magazine as founder of the world's first Web browser company, Netscape.
"There's every reason to expect in my view that the thing can be doing billions in revenue five years from now," Andreessen said.

Barring sudden cataclysmic disruption or legal action, Andreessen's forecast seems pretty reasonable to me considering that 1) upwards of 1 billion more humans may well be online by then, 2) server costs will continue shrink, and 3) CPM rates will continue to climb (perhaps offset by deluge of new users online).

And of course, I further believe that empowering Facebook's prosumer community will be absolutely critical to increased monetization -- via ads (more views), Facebook-as-market conduit (similar to Adsense), social graph data (for search or other uses, more targeted advertising) and a perhaps by claiming a cut of the ballooning Facebook app market.

The Rise of Community Genomics

2009-07-06T14:04:00.000-07:00

My dad, a Latvian World War II vet, liked to compare human behavior to that of insects.

"We're all just ants," he would often say.

I didn't really grasp his full meaning until I swung into the social psychology kick of my early twenties. But then, when I did, I realized that this metaphor extended further into all biological systems. My current position is that we're not just humans, or ants, we're a biological mesh of knowledge generating organisms.

So it's interesting and a little bit validating to read that scientists are now (at last - due to reduced technological limitations) exploring community approaches to genomics, in this instance the "genomes of 17 different ants, fungi and bacteria that eat through hundreds of pounds of leaf matter a year could ultimately lead to new techniques for making biofuels."

Over time, the findings will help to paint a more accurate picture of how interdependent life systems cooperate and how exactly we humans (genetically, behaviorally, non-consciously) fit into the equation. Such research will be critical as we seek to either confirm, reformat or discard our simulation(s) of intelligence and the self.

Simulating How Incompetence Flows Through Hierarchical Organizations

2009-07-06T13:26:00.001-07:00

The bulk of the world has long understood that large organizations = bureaucracy = inefficiency. Social historians Strauss and Howe have amassed evidence demonstrating how this occurs cyclically in national systems. But, still, it's been awfully difficult to quantify how and why this entropy consistently builds up over time... until now.

New research by Alessandro Pluchino and team at the University of Catania (talk about a flattening world), reported in Technology Review, confirms the conventional wisdom that incompetence can spread through a business as "individuals [are] promoted until they reach their level of maximum incompetence."

In other words, social climbers that can best navigate a system that fails to understand the diversity of human competency in different areas gradually, but steadily contribute to inefficiency in large organizations that can no longer rely on direct performance oversight.

Pluchino's research is based on a simulated agent-based model that models this spread of incompetency due to bad fit at certain roles.

So how then might we counter this steady entropy without having to rely on tried and true creative destruction / punctuated equilibrium?

Technology Review: [Pluchino's] model shows that two other strategies outperform the conventional method of promotion. The first is to alternately promote first the most competent and then the least competent individuals. And the second is to promote individuals at random. Both of these methods improve, or at least do not diminish, the efficiency of an organization.

Of course, it'll be much easier to counter agent-based entropy once we put in place simulations that everyone can agree upon. Once that happens, I suspect that even the well-entrenched executives will breathe a sigh of relief as they are brought into positions that better suit their personalities.

Here Come Floating Prosumer Probes... Or Not...

2009-07-06T12:35:00.000-07:00

Remember the floating Imperial probe droid (images) sent to the surface of the ice planet Hoth to systematically check for Rebel activity? Like many other speculative sci-fi concepts, it is proving to be a harbinger of things to come, especially now that steady hovering humming-bird-inspired flight has been prototyped and is actively being developed:

AeroVironment video showing progress with testing of a tiny flapping-wing "nano air vehicle" (NAV) designed to fly indoors. Testing culminated in a 20sec flight of an interim test vehicle, called Mercury, which demonstrated controlled hovering flight using a pair of flapping wings for propulsion and control. AeroVironment is now building a prototype for DARPA that will be samller, lighter and will closley resemble a hummingbird.

As such devices drop in cost they will dramatically expand the physical phase space for sensing devices (video, thermal, radar, sonar, networked, etc - all also quickly dropping in cost). No doubt people will seek to use them to film movies & reality shows, lifelog their behavior/environment, probe quantification-resistant environments, bolster security systems, and so forth. Together with many new technologies, floating hummingbird platforms will help to further catalyze prosumer opportunities and the increased input of information into the web and distributed human brains.

At the same time, the technology will represent a defensive security nightmare (recall the Hunter Seeker in Frank Herbert's Dune), further contributing to asymmetric concerns.

The question is: Will these devices proliferate or be thwarted by strict regulation?

Will I have 20 networked hummingbirds at my disposal in 2020 - all kept in check by security protocols and swarms of govt/public/safety counter-bots? Or will their use be restricted to the select few? Might technological and informational zoning be part of the solution? Or will it turn into a distributed free-for-all?

How on Earth will our distributed social systems cope with the steady, simultaneous emergence of amazing micro-techologies? Will we implement top-down technology freezes, trust to bottom-up evolution and self-regulation or turn to immune systems for guidance?

The quest for answers will require a great deal of social processing power.

Google Continues to Add City Simulations to Its Growing Roster

2009-06-29T14:44:00.000-07:00

Interactive 3d simulations of cities continue to proliferate:

Google Blog: Warsaw, Prague and Oslo have joined the growing list of phototextured cities in the 3D Buildings layer of Google Earth. Like other major cities these 3D models are predominantly autogenerated, yet they also contain a number of Google SketchUp models generated by the user community. While the autogenerated models are good quality, user-generated models are often better because ground-based photos can produce a higher quality model than ones generated using aerial imagery.

A Computer Screen That Recognizes and Shields Data From Unauthorized Users

2009-06-26T12:38:00.000-07:00

Just as technology makes it easier to access more information, it's also enabling new ways to protect and segment that information. Case in point is a clever new computer system that recognizes unauthorized eye-contact and jumbles/encrypts the view of the screen from that person's POV. Pretty cool concept.

It'll be interesting to see how this technology develops and is applied. I could, for example, see it working with large digital billboards working in concert with smartphones transmitting real-time geospatial coordinates. You'd be able to, in theory, turn one generic sign into 50+ custom messages.

YouTube's Expanding Prosumer Pipeline

2009-06-26T11:09:00.000-07:00

It is no surprise that the growing number of camera-equipped mobile devices, particularly the new iPhone 3G, is catalyzing an explosion of video content to YouTube.

YouTube reports:

In the last six months, we've seen uploads from mobile phones to YouTube jump 1700%; just since last Friday, when the iPhone 3GS came out, uploads increased by 400% a day.

Particularly interesting is Google's cognizance of this trend, as reflected in their efforts to facilitate / reduce barriers the flow of mobile video content to YouTube and then to social networks.

This growth represents three things coming together: new video-enabled phones on the market, improvements to the upload flow when you post a video to YouTube from your phone, and a new feature on YouTube that allows your videos to be quickly and effortlessly shared through your social networks. It takes just a minute to connect your YouTube account to your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts. Complete a simple, one-time connection on our upload page to allow all your friends and followers to get a real-time stream of your uploads to YouTube, which can be essential in this age of citizen reporting and ubiquitous sharing. (Bold emphasis mine.)

By expanding this prosumer pipeline, the forces at Google are yet again playing the positive-sum empowerment card in order to protect and expand their core prosumer base.

Less obviously, but perhaps more significantly, Google is reiterating its commitment to a faster web, making clear that their future vision includes high-bandwith life-streaming and life-logging, which makes a lot of sense considering their cognizance of the now more widely recognized exponential growth in digitized human information (as conveyed by the updated EMC information ticker) -- a trend that will clearly require a cascade of mobile video and other sensing to maintain its growth rate over the coming years.

After all, increasing the amount of rich content input is far more important to Google's strucutred data back-end and long-term than trivial matters such as the near-term monetization of YouTube. For them, it's all about the information, which means it's all about the prosumer.

Education in a Transforming World - Futurists Von Wolfsheild, Vita-More and Brigis (That's Me) On FastForward Radio Tonight

2009-06-23T12:43:00.000-07:00

I'm happy to announce that I've been asked to appear as a last-minute fill-in on the first episode of FastForward Radio's The World Transformed series (TONIGHT) alongside accomplished futurists Reichart Von Wolfsheild (awesome name) and Natasha Vita-More (pretty cool name too). The episode will focus on education and the role we expect it to play in a world dominated by accelerating change. It is Part One of a riveting Ten-Part series that will include some of the biggest names in the forecasting field. More info on that later as host Phil Bowermaster releases details.

Here's the information about tonight's program as posted by Phil:

The World Transformed begins its landmark 10-week run on FastForward Radio with a discussion about the role that education, both formal and otherwise, has to play in preparing us for the astounding transformations to come.

Is your thinking future-ready?

Find out as futurists Reichart Von Wolfsheild, Natasha Vita-More and Alvis Brigis join hosts Phil Bowermaster and Stephen Gordon for a lively and eye-opening discussion about the vital first step we have to take in preparing for life in a world transformed: changing the way we think.

If you listen live you can contribute to the show by calling in or by joining the text chat. We'll be taking calls in the final half-hour. You can reach the show at (347) 215-8972. Our chat host Michael Darling will be on hand to lead the discussion.

Get all the details on listening live at our audio host, Blog Talk Radio.

The show starts at:

10:30 Eastern/9:30 Central/8:30 Mountain/7:30 Pacific.

About our guests:

Reichart Von Wolfsheild is the Chief Software Architect, CTO, Co-Founder of Qtask, which provides a comprehensive and secure web-based project management and collaboration environment for business. Reichart has more than 25 years of software and hardware design, and he specializes in complex platform software architecture, including cross-platform development, lossless compression technology, encryption, gambling systems, and multi-point real-time communication systems. He played a key role in the conception and creation of a wide array of entertainment titles including Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Die Hard, and Hot Wheels Crash. Reichart designed and created the award winning Walt Disney Animation Studio, and the multi-million dollar original video game franchise Return Fire™. He has also developed ground breaking training software used by law enforcement, the Olympics, the military, and the aerospace industry, including the Boeing RARO system, and co-developed the world's first consumer CD-ROM set-top box (CDTV).

Natasha Vita-More has been called by the New York Times the first female transhumanist philosopher. Her affiliations, past and present, include Extropy Institute, Transhumanist Arts & Culture, H+ Laboratory, Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, World Transhumanist Association, Alcor Foundation, Zero Gravity Arts Consortium, and Foresight Institute. Her talks and writings include "Talent for Living: Cracking the Myths of Mortality" - talk presented at Alcor 4th Technology Conference, 2000; "Sensorial Mix - The Future of the Senses" - talk presented at EXTRO4, Berkeley, California, 1999; and "Ageless Thinking" - Resources for Independent Thinking, Oakland, CA 1996.

Alvis Brigis is a media producer, futurist and entrepreneur with a specialty in evolving communications. His diverse background includes roles on projects such as the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model Search (NBC), MotorMouth (VH1), Virtual Laguna Beach, TheseTunes.com and The Metaverse Roadmap. He is Co-Founder of MemeBox.com, where he writes about intelligence amplification spurred by accelerating technology, communication and information domains.

Wikipedia is Finally Upgrading to Video

2009-06-19T13:28:00.001-07:00

After 8 years of steady growth Wikipedia is finally upgrading to video:

Technology Review: Within two to three months, a person editing a Wikipedia article will find a new button labeled "Add Media." Clicking it will bring up an interface allowing her to search for video--initially from three repositories containing copyright-free material--and drag chosen portions into the article, without having to install any video-editing software or do any conversions herself. The results will appear as a clickable video clip embedded within the article.

I'm sure it's going to be awesome, very useful and empowering for prosumers. But, still, what the fork took them so long? Answer: Funding. Counter: So why not sell ads? Counter: But we're a non-profit. Counter: So what?

And when will the foundation implement other powerful web 2.oldschool features such as dynamic comment threads, geospatial data and basic social networking? Answer: When they have the necessary funding.

The opportunities are endless, but the organizational will for aggressive (and very do-able) innovation just has not been there.

Social Graph on Your Sleeve - A Memory Shirt that Combats Forgetfullness

2009-06-19T13:07:00.000-07:00

Former President Bill Clinton was notorious for knowing the name of everyone he ever met. He accomplished this by directing aides to quickly screen people he was about to meet and then whisper that information to him just prior to the handshake moment.

Now, thanks to an innovation called the "Memory Shirt", most of us will soon have the ability to appear socially cognizant of the people we meet, especially those we've already met before, thus amplifying our physical social networking and avoiding some annoyingly awkward situations rooted in memory discrepancy.

Very cool product, but, personally, I think I'll wait for the contact lens version, which shouldn't be very far behind. :)

The Simulation Era

2009-06-18T19:48:00.000-07:00

Simulation, aka the ability to generate knowledge maps in various formats and languages, resides at the heart of the convergence that is expanding human capability and driving the systemic creation of knowledge. It is absolutely critical to accelerating change in information, technology, problem solving, etc, and deserves a more central role in our models of economy, intelligence, society and living systems.

Accordingly, it is no accident that the market for humans who generate complex simulations is growing, as reported by the NYTimes earlier this week:

"Bill Waite, chairman of the AEgis Technologies Group, a Huntsville, Ala., company that creates simulations for various military and civilian applications ... estimates that 400,000 people make a living in the United States in one aspect or another of simulation. His company employs close to 200 people, with an average salary of $85,000."

Of course, thinkers such as Richard Florida, Rise of the Creative Class, and Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave, have long argued that society's demand for creative prosumers is expanding as we continue to free up brains for abstract endeavors not directly tied to classic survival behavior. Only now, having seen the formation and resulting efficiencies of simulations such as Google Earth (geospatial), Wikipedia (lingual, memetic), Blue Brain (human brain), Blue Gene (genomic), Facebook (social), fictional Virtual Worlds (imagination), etc, we can confidently confirm that these prescient forecasts were indeed right on the money.

But how far back does simulation go? And what role does it play in our broader life system, not just social, informational and technologicial systems?

Philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who has many great thoughts to offer on the matter, posits that simulation began with modern media technology. But I think that's a bit too clunky and binary, if you will, especially considering the work on conceptual metaphors as the basis of thought done by cognitive theorists such as Steven Pinker. Though Baudrillard's focus on externalized technology vs. internal processing of reality is very useful when analyzing a stretch of human history, it doesn't fit well with long-term and acceleration models. (Great work, but the abstractions need to be pruned to fit with modern theory. I do think that the hyper-reality argument has a lot of merit. More on that in the future.)

So where then do we turn for an updated version of this thinking?

In his recent excellent Atlantic Monthly article, Get Smarter, futurist Jamais Cascio convincingly argues the critical nature of simulation in human history, citing neurophysiologist William Calvin's research on our evolutionary development:

"According to Calvin, the reason we survived is that our brains changed to meet the challenge: we transformed the ability to target a moving animal with a thrown rock into a capability for foresight and long-term planning [aka simulation]. In the process, we may have developed syntax and formal structure from our simple language."

Technology scholar and Singularity proponent Ray Kurzweil goes even broader in his assertion, contained in The Singularity is Near, that the ability to model, or simulate, is essential to life forms of varying complexity:

"[T]he more complex any system becomes, the better it models the universe that engendered it, and the better it seems to understand its own history and environment, including the physical chain of singularities that created it." "..there is something about the construction of the universe itself, something about the nature and universal function of local computation that permits, and may even mandate, continuously accelerating computational development in local environments."

My personal take on the matter (original article), in alignment with both Cascio and Kurzweil's views, is that as organisms evolve and life's complexity increases, new species with brains capable of greater quantification and abstraction (simulation!) emerge at a regular clip. Over time, these organisms discover ways to expand their knowledge by communicating (actively or passively) information to one another and letting the network manage their quantifications and decisions. Then, eventually, the higher-level organisms figure out how to extend their knowledge into the environment through technology that allows them to communicate and retrieve it more easily than before. This is accomplished directly through technologies like language, writing, or classical maps, and indirectly through the hard-technologies like spears, paint, and paper that critically support knowledge externalization.
In other words, I believe that simulation plays a critical role in not only the evolution and development of the human species, but also of all forms of life on this planet and probably in our known universe (as suggested by recent findings that physical matter millions of light years distant closely resembles our own).

Consequently, I find it likely that we will soon discover a proof, power law or other theorem for complex systems that correlates increased simulational ability with increased 1) control over environment and 2) survivability. It may look a little bit like the following diagram, with the added explanation that simulation drives the creation of more knowledge as our informational inputs are expanded by technology that steadily increases the data we mine from withion our environment (inner space) and across the universe (outer space):

This perspective or paradigm is useful in that it can 1) help us recontextualize and simplify much of what's going on in exploding domains such as search, the semantic web and structured data for enterprise, and 2) help to streamline the abstractions we use to describe our system upn which we can then build cleaner new theories.

It's particularly interesting to observe the web trending toward advanced simulation. As I noted above, many of the web's most valuable properties are rooted in super-simulations - massive bodies of structured data that can be viewed as a whole or sub-sections. It is clear that the major players are now racing to add both more data and more structure to these simulations in order to fend off sharp-witted competitors and amass more resources, a very life-like behavior indeed.

Math savant Stephen Wolfram, the big brain behind "computational knowledge engine" Wolfram Alpha, who has written convincingly about his belief that life evolves from basic micro-interactions that he describes using the example of cellular automata, lends credence to the argument, claiming that search engines will soon have the ability to "simulate in real time based on [text input] descriptions", which makes sense to me considering the growing amount of structured data (thanks in large part to an increase in data, semantic tagging and knowledge engines such as Alpha, Google and IBM's enterprise quantification software) that can easily be converted into visual formats and models.

Wolfram then extrapolates this capability, suggesting that search may subseqently move onto "creat[ing] things that have never been created before, in real time".

That's right. One of the brightest structural minds on the planet sees our knowledge processors first becoming amazing simulators, then using that simulation data to piece together new structures that have never existed. (Pretty cool that he's also running an influential business.)

It kinda sounds like the human process known as thought or imagination, the ongoing processes of input-sorting-output, just dramatically scaled and accelerated. Which brings us full circle to my initial assertion that simulation is a critical component of accelerating change and to the tandem argument that it deserves a more central role in our models of economy, intelligence, society and living systems.
CONCLUSION: Simulation is crucial not just to our contemporary economy, but to life's knowledge engine(s) at many different levels. Understanding this can help us to better simulate our environment, history and future.

By using quantifiable terms like simulation in concert with updated and rigorous definitions of information and knowledge, we can begin to move away from and/or bring clarity to subjective and scientifically problematic terms such as "intelligence" and "the human". This may well prove critically important for unified knowledge (insightful paper) and information theory efforts.

By more actively crediting the power and role of simulation in our system and behavior we can develop better understanding of the importance of simulations and thus allocate resources more efficiently. This may lead us to the realization that many or even all humans contribute to our simulation economy, more-or-less directly (everyone a part-time quantifier?). The ability to measure this could have profound impact on prosumer behavior. (This should make simulation and serious games advocates/experts like the grossly underappreciated Clark Aldrich happy.)

By viewing simulation as en essential component of knowledge creation we can develop better understanding of culture and social dynamics, and develop better metrics for social change, stress and transformation.

By better measuring simulation, we can prove or disprove the argument that the creation of better abstractions fuels the Flynn effect, steadily expanding general human intelligence.

By developing our understanding of the role of simulations, we can develop better testable theories re: universal computation and the possibility of simulation chains (add some meat to Bostrom's ultra-subjective simulation argument and its predecessors).

We are simulators. It's in our nature to get better at simulating the present, past and future - the entire system around us. And now that we've entered the knee of some powerful accelerating curves, it's becoming clear that we're about to take our simulating behavior to the next level. With the help of simulation enhancers like Google, Facebook, Alpha (that make economic sense) and new cultural norms, it is highly probable that we are going to 1) increase the complexity of our simulations (drive new knowledge), 2) increase the number of humans directly dedicated to to complex simulation and 3) increase the number of humans indirectly employed to contribute to the formation of simulations.

After all, it's in our interest, as living beings who want to survive and figure our or universe, to do so.

Enter the Simulation Era.

The whole of science is nothing more than a refinement of everyday thinking.
-Einstein

Using 'Declarative Technology' to Scale 3d Models and Accelerate Rich Simulation

2009-06-17T13:17:00.000-07:00

Now this is what I call serious capability-enhancing STEM Compression:

Prosumer Takeaways: Soon we will all be creating simulations on par with DreamWorks and Pixar (high end personal computers can already match the renderings their server farms were busting out years ago). And as the simulation phase space expands, so too will our economy and intelligence.

Annotating the Physical World - How Much Augmented Reality Cake Will Layar Take?

2009-06-17T11:27:00.000-07:00

Imagine pointing your iphone at different locations around you to reveal geographically pertinent annotations and/or other media that people have deposited there. Now there's an app for that.

In futurist circles, this basic world-as-web scenario has been discussed for years (I even worked on one such forecasting project), if not decades. The simplest version of the concept has always been an application that intuitively and instantly blends real-time first-person physical world experience with the valuable data contained Wikipedia, Yelp or other websites, allowing you to instantly access stats about restaurants, concert venues, parks, car dealerships, schools, businesses, etc, that you encounter in your view. Such an app could, for example, provide information about a certain shrub in your yard, allowing quick access to species data, historical photos and related ads from the local lawncare services. Now, thanks to the convergence of smart phones and real-time geo-sensing, a new Android app (iPhone app out shortly) called Layar, marketed as the "World's First Augmented Reality Browser", claims it can accomplish exactly that... and then some.

Here's the impressive demo vid released by the developer, SPRX Mobile:

Obviously there's no guarantee that Layar will take the cake (haha, get it - Layar. Cake. - rewriting headline... love bad puns...), especially considering that the Gigantor info companies already have scores of AR-hip forecasters, researchers and developers on payroll, but 1) it is possible the small company could blow up very quickly to become one of the first critical three into the market, and 2) either way, it certainly does look as though somebody is going to create a compelling and quickly diffusable AR app in the very near-term.

Why? Because it's so obviously useful.

Just take a look at this (somewhat crude, but very useful) vision of what AR might look like over the coming years:

Prosumer Value: Easily-to-use AR will have a profound impact on the average prosumer, opening up massive phase space for new content and services. They will of course benefit from the efficiencies inherent in mashing together all this data, but, more interestingly, they will also play an critical role in writing content to these new layers and innovating new applications that interact with this new structured content.

Another Basic Scenario - Ever seen those Google Street View cars with panoramic cameras driving around? Well, imagine this. As component and web costs continue to plummet, it will VERY SOON become for individuals to hook cheap cameras to always-on smart-phones and then broadcast increasingly richer streaming data feeds to the web. It will then be possible to sort this data according to geography (GPS), identity (facial recognition, already getting very good), annotation (voice recognition is just on the cusp), and so forth. This means that some information giant with gazillions of servers will probably find it compelling to incentivize the population of their given information platform. (Google? Microsoft? Yahoo? IBM? Apple?)

Data will of course drop in value as a square to these feeds (inevitable ongoing commoditization), but will that offset the creation of millions of new Feed or Real-Time Quantification jobs? Even if they are low-paying, I find it likely that they will pay out (per capita) on par with, say, Google Adsense, thus opening a whole new market for real-time geo logging/blogging. In fact, I find it likely that this same infrastructure (Adsense, Facebook Connect's forthcoming payment system, PayPal, Microsoft's Content Ad Network) will be used to facilitate payments to proliferating content harvesters, ultimately leading to a great blur between traditional corporate structures and an ever-expanding prosumer cloud (prosumer centralization?).

At the same time, the new applications written atop these new web layers will catalyze a whole new app industry and additional opportunities down the road. No doubt that niche players will counter ongoing prosumer centralization with micro-federations of their own, similar to how the old-media / new-media game has played out.

Context: Made possible by broader innovation convergence, geo-coordinted augmented reality is on the cusp of becoming reality for millions, then billions. Fundamentally, it represents new phase space that will not only lead to big-time near-term market efficiencies, but also contribute to accelerating convergence and open even more phase space. Like the 3D web, it's a formidable catalyst that will contribute to economic, informational and cultural transformation. And it's here, now.

Mark Zuckerberg Getting Hip to the Mandate of Kevin

2009-06-15T13:02:00.000-07:00

Recent public statements by the socially awkward (but getting better now that he's feeling more comfortable in his own nerdy skin) Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg have at last convinced me that the second-largest and most-valuable social network is increasingly growing cognizant of its dependency on the prosumer. Zuckerberg's updated thoughts on decentralization (understanding the inevitability), monetization (finding the right niches) and democratization (a big theme in his recent interviews and statements) should serve to pacify those in the blogosphere who have been calling for his head in light of internal drama, digital rights debacles and a totally debunked revenue crisis.

Decentralization (above): "We're big believers in the idea that over time the value will decentralize from just being on Facebook to being spread out over the eco-system. Ultimately I think that's a really good thing. I think that's it's good for the web to have all of that functionality built into these different applications and I think that the place that Facebook will hold in the ecosystem will move more away from being a website to being more this platform and this representation of the graph." Full vid interview here.

In light of 1) the recent web chatter that Facebook and Twitter should be positioning to monetize their information through search, 2) Twitter's successful open developer strategy, 3) Zuckerberg's assertion that Facebook can expand its Connect platform to become a newfangled version of PayPal, and 4) the success of cross-platform comment app Disq.us, it seems obvious that Facebook is being tugged toward decentralization. The question is, how will Facebook manage decentralization, granular content control, and integration with other apps? The company seems to have realized that it must keep its prosumer nation happy. Hopefully understanding that this makes good business sense will make for a better Facebook experience. Ultimately, this approach will be key to keeping open-source competitors at arms length.

Monetization: "I think [a Facebook payment system] has the potential to be really important. Its potential correlates with how valuable it is to developers and users. There’s a bunch of things that we test as a company, and we basically choose what to invest in based on what people are doing. I don’t really have anything new to add to the information that you already have on this. ... But based on how our tests go, we may choose to do a lot more. We’re pretty optimistic [about the potential performance of the payments service], but we don’t really have a sense of how big it will be yet either. I do think it is one interesting area."

Thoughtful, deliberate testing is key for a company of that size. A payment system seems critical, especially if the bigger goal is to empower constituent prosumers as they transfer data and content. Listening to users is Rule #1 of web businesses. Allowing them the freedom to discover the value, then amplifying those processes and monetizing indirectly seems like the rule of thumb for large prosumer businesses looking to innovate rapidly. Gotta stay in tune with that moving target known as the Mandate of Kevin.

Democratization: "Growing rapidly to 200 million users is a really good start, but we've always known that in order for Facebook to help people represent everything that is happening in their world, everyone needs to have a voice. This is why we are working hard to build a service that everyone, everywhere can use, whether they are a person, a company, a president or an organization working for change. ... There are still many more people and groups in the world whose voices we want to connect with everyone who wants to hear them. So even as we celebrate the 200 millionth person and all of you using Facebook today, we are working to bring the power of sharing to everyone in the world."

Many will chalk up this talk as rhetorical fluff, but given that Zuckerberg seems to be taking a personal stake in the gradual democratization of Facebook, I think it's quite likely the company will increasingly take the allegiance of the prosumer base more seriously. Why? Because that's where the money will come from.

Prosumer Empowerment = $$$$$$: Really, it is irrelevant whether or not Zuckerberg's recent public posturing is rooted in genuine benevolence. What matters is that the Facebook apparatus appears to be smart enough to realize that Monetization opportunities are correlated with the Empowerment that comes with natural Decentralization and/or Democratization, thus abiding by the Mandate of Kevin and developing a increasingly compelling system that will deliver more informational and financial value to its users - the 200 million + and growing Kevins.

PicFog.com - Actually Useful Real-Time Image Search

2009-06-15T11:57:00.000-07:00

For the first time I have encountered a somewhat useful real-time visual search engine. Thanks to a timely tweet by friend & documentary filmmaker Graeme Lowry, I'm now aware of PicFog, a relatively new service that scours recent twit-pics for tags. It's particularly relevant for current events and regional search results, offering a quickly digestible snapshot collage of real-time coverage and reactions.

For example, check out the huge volume of PicFog results concerning "Iran" (thanks to Graeme for the link) right on the heels of the Ahmadinejad's re-election. Clearly, such results and/or streams will play an interesting role in near-future of media, particularly as 1) pic volume increases (as a square to affordability of input devices and total planetary info), 2) the results incorporate Creative Commons licensing, and 3) the results begin to include HD video.

We are the media mob.

Update: Jorgen Chee also recommends comparable service Twitcaps.com, saying it's less likely to crash, probably because it caps the number of image search results displayed on a single page.

U.S. Debt Will Nearly Equal Annual GDP in 2011

2009-06-14T15:26:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Office of Management and Budget projects that in 2011 our national debt will equal 97% of the country's yearly GDP. This will diminish national value stores and influence unless we can use the pressure to redefine our values, empower human capital and develop prosumer opportunities.

That news is especially scary considering the context of 1) steady and massive increase in Social Security payments due - MORE $ PRINTED / INFLATION, 2) impeding peak oil production and consumption - HIGHER COSTS, 3) potentially necessary investments in disconnected conflict regions such as North Korea, Japan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, African Nations, perhaps even Mexico, - INCREASED EXPENDITURES and 4) growing pressure to replace the dollar as the primary international reserve currency - DROPPING $ VALUE, DECREASED MARKET INFLUENCE, INCREASED SECURITY COSTS?.

Silver Lining: The socio-economic environment is more attuned to powerful, scalable solutions. Web-based innovation, collaboration and prosumer empowerment is being encouraged by the market. Sort-term creative destruction can expand and fertilized the phase space for rapid innovation.

Though it will add to short-term national exposure to risk, Obama's pledge to bring science spending (essentially a U.S. R&D and human development investment) is the the main counter to massive spending. It's the Great American Bet and will determine our national role in the near-term future world.

Thanks to poly sci prof David Mason at End of the American Century for the info. Be sure to check out his analysis.

Praise the Lord of the Web! Google Finally Launches Creative Commons Image Search

2009-06-11T17:31:00.000-07:00

To date, whenever I've needed free-to-use Creative Commons 2.0 or 2.5 images for blog posts or other projects I've been relegated to either Wikipedia or Flickr for my image searches. No longer will that be the case, thanks to a typically simple, yet broadly important

announcement via the Google Operating System blog:

Google Image Search added the option to restrict the results to images that are licensed using Creative Commons, a list of flexible licenses that allow content creators to share their works with the world.

The options aren't yet available in the interface, but you can use the search box [here] to find images that are licensed using some of the most popular Creative Commons licenses.

The new CC search is already turning up great results and will clearly be an invaluable prosumer resource for years to come. It's certainly going to make this blog more visually appealing, entertaining and just plain weird (sometimes the image results are just too funny to not include in a piece, no matter how tangentally relevant, ie this is the first CC 2.5 result for the search term "future").

So I'm now flipping the hourglass as I await full-on Creative Commons integration for YouTube. Keep bringing it, Google. I dare you to make my life even easier. Meow.

And the Largest Social Media Site on Earth is... China's QQ - Not Facebook

2009-06-11T16:52:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting tidbit for ya. According to recent Alexa and Google Trends stats compiled by web marketer Vincenzo Cosenza, China's QQ site (this must be how the rest of the non-english speaking world views Facebook and Myspace) reigns supreme as the most trafficked social networking site on the planet, boasting 300+ million monthly unique users (that's nearly as many as this blog). The knowledge serves as an important reminder that the rest of the world is just as interested in the web and that competition, cooperation and disruption will increasingly come from different directions, especially as human resources and markets are equalized in the coming years.

Wildcards: Look to shifts in currency value, robust real-time translation tools and emerging micro-credit and service/good-barter markets to even out the international value of prosumers.

Adding Avatars to Email Increases Response Rates

2009-06-08T11:28:00.000-07:00

Social web design aficionado Joshua Porter reports that Rypple, a client of his that manages enterprise idea feedback systems to increase workplace creativity and productivity, noticed a 15-20% increase in email response rate when users personalized their messages by including basic avatars representing themselves.

Joshua commented: That’s some food for thought…there aren’t many ways to increase response rates that much that easily…this also adds another data point to the importance of avatars in social design.

Combine this data point with Seriosity's finding that basic email token systems can dramatically increase the rate of email consumption and it becomes clear that 1) there is still great room for improvement in our email systems, which bodes well for new forms of messaging like the potentially breakthrough Google Wave, and 2) much of that innovation will occur through systems that can most quickly provide the email consumer with a rich snapshot of data (micro-topsight) that convinces them to invest their time in consuming and/or replying to a message.

The recent spurt of email innovations is a necessary systemic response to the explosion of messaging, feeds and general information directed at every web-using human, a welcome development that will increase the quality of our communication in the face of growing volume. By adding more structure to our micro-communications we will triumph over data overload.

At the same time, the new interfaces and protocols that we adopt to communicate more quickly and effectively will change our culture in ways that most hard-tech focused futurists have not yet explored.

Even as human entrepreneurs move onto new systems and innovation phase space, the global brain continues to evolve its most basic mechanisms.

Hands-Free XBox and Wii Interfaces Will Give Microsoft and Nintendo a Data Collection Edge

2009-06-02T08:19:00.000-07:00

On the heels of Google's potentially revolutionary Wave announcement, Steve Ballmer's Microsoft has dropped a future bomb of its own: a hands-free, emotionally responsive XBox control system that could disrupt and expand the video game industry much like the Wii did eons ago in 2006.

Unveiled yesterday at E3, the new Natal system has been evoking rave reviews arcoss the blogosphere. Some choice phrases: "game-changer", "seminal moment not just in video games, but in technology too", "disabled gaming revolution?", and the more cautious "seems to hold a lot of potential, with some possible technical limitations".

Particularly interesting is Natal's ability to scan objects, such as a skateboard, and bring them into the game, as demonstrated in the promo video below:

Not to be outdone, Nintendo has also announced a lighter-weight hands-free control interface for the Wii, releasing this workout demo on the heels of Microsoft's big announcement:

Prosumer Takeaways: While not all that surprising from from the futurist perspective (these sorts of interfaces have been in the labs for years, even popping up in shopping malls way ahead of their time, RIP Matt Bell's Reactrix) hands-free interfaces sure do have the potential to make possible Minority Report-esque interfaces, enable whole new gaming genres, allow people to interact with rich media in public places, lay the foundations for hands-free mobile iPhones, Zunes and Androids, and so forth. (Truly a disruptive multiplier.)

That said, I wonder how other non-gaming companies are going to react to 1) the new interfaces themselves and 2) the information generated by hands free play. I'm sure they'll all race to incorporate them into their own devices and systems. For Google that may be done via external developers working with the Android platform. But that will take some time and perhaps some big new plays in hardware or cloud-based gmaing systems (facilitated by more efficient compression, coordination and streaming software), which leaves Microsoft, Nintendo and possibly Sony (they can't be far behind) with a unique window of opportunity to create marketplaces for the gestural/behavioral data generated and captured through these systems. I bet that's how Google sees it.

Who will win that niche search war?

Update #1: Sony, too, has announced it's getting into the motion capture game, albeit with a hand-held, gyroscope-free stick used as visual reference for a camera. Apparently the controller outperforms the current Wii stick. The controller arrives in early 2010.

Google's Wave Overshadows Microsoft's Bing Release

2009-05-28T10:27:00.000-07:00

Steve Ballmer woke up thinking this was going to be a good day...

For those of you wondering why Google hasn't been even more aggressive in its development of the already best-in-show Gmail platform via the integration of its diverse web app suite, the answer appears to lie in a forthcoming product called Google Wave, announced just an hour ago, that takes all-in-one, customizable webapp integration to the next level to consolidate all of your Google-based conversation, collaboration, gaming and geo-spatial interaction into discrete "waves" of information.

In other words, rather than continuing to build onto a focused and already successful email product, potentially 1) overcomplicating it for certain users and 2) remaining stuck in an old product frame, Google Wave will sit atop apps like Gmail, Chat, Status Messages, Docs, Widgets, Friend Connect, Blogger, Calendar, Reader, Maps, Earth and perhaps even Facebook competitor Orkut, allowing you to mix the info flows in one central location.

Here's a snapshot of one version of the potentially revolutionary Wave interface:

It's no accident that Google's Wave announcement was made simultaneous to Microsoft's unveiling of its new Bing search engine, which is getting "nice improvement, but I'll stick with Google" reviews. My bet is that Wave will mark a far more disruptive forward step in the web experience because of its focus on fundamentally better user:info interaction.

Google's message rings loud and clear: "Microsoft, while you're playing catch-up in search, we're utilizing our already massive and debugged app suite to develop entire new products and integrated search data. Spend all the money you want on Bing marketing, it's going to take you years to develop the structured prosumer data necessary to meaningfully compete."

Of course, the message actually posted was far more Googly:

Google: "Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year. Here's a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool."

Further adding strength to the oncoming Wave is the fact that it's being released as an open model, similar to mobile phone OS Android (18 different Android phones will be released in 2009, others are using it for netbooks) and Chrome (already superior in speed and function to Internet Explorer), that developers can modify and integrate into their own sites. By keeping its great googly eye on the information prize and relinquishing development sovereignty and near-term income, Google seems to be out-futuring its competitors on most fronts.

Prosumer Takeaways: So what will Wave mean for you?

A next-level conversational experience. Reduced app switch-through time. One-stop shop. Ideal for collaboration. Big time saver.
More organized personal data. Relevant past items will pop up in appropriate new "waves" automatically. Big time saver. Powerful memory aid.
A big improvement in personally relevant search. If you opt in, the social-info graph cobbled together by Wave will increase your Google search efficiency. Time saver. Intelligence amplifier.
A centralized application through which you can monetize your scattered content in a variety of ways via the ever-evolving AdSense. Essentially a better way to monetize prosumer value creation and behavior. Gradually more $$$ in your pocket.

I think it's fair to assume that Steve Ballmer and a host of other social media execs are having a bad day.

Update: Here's a solid description of the philosophy behind the service by Google's Lars Rasmussen.

Update #2: TechCrunch has a great vid interview up featuring the founding Wave developer team.

Update #3: Google founder Sergei Brin, who's working hands-on with Wave, believes the product will do very well, creating a new "benchmark for interactivity". The stickier it is, the better for the Big G.

Micropayments for Memes - Extrapolating Seriosity's Breakthrough Email Token System

2009-05-27T13:32:00.000-07:00

Seriosity, a seriously cool company hard at work developing applications for the expanding serious games market, has begun making waves with its "Attent" email token app, thus opening the door to efficient new micropayment systems woven through increasingly popular webware.

Wired: Every employee is given virtual tokens — say, 100 a week, — that they can attach to e-mail they write. If you really want someone to read a message now, you attach a lot of tokens, and the message pops up higher in your correspondent's Outlook inbox.

The early word is that assigning more tokens to more important messages truly does encourage recipients to digest them.

Wired: When a work group at IBM tried out Attent, messages with 20 tokens attached were 52 percent more likely to be quickly opened than normal. E-mail overload ceased to be a problem.

Now, imagine if these tokens represented actual micropayments - small amounts of money or services IOUs - and were expanded to include replies and quality communication feedback scores. My bet is the quality of communication would increase. Employees, students, peers, family would all be far more likely to open and reply to messages, even from advertisers or spammers, that offered them large enough value.

Considering the growing economic pressure to STEM Compress currency units (Second Life's Linden Dollar, PayPal, TipJoy's Micro-Tip system, to name just a few), pegging email tokens to real-deal micropayments seems like the next elegant and logical step toward a more fluid information economy. Furthermore, such a development would also 1) lend support to the steadily rising value of human attention by creating a new means of income pegged to information processing by humans and 2) open wide a new frontier of advertising or "acceptable spamming" that many ad haters have been clammoring for (check out this future prosumer micropayment scenario by Adam Cutsinger).

So, I wonder what Seriosity's next move will be? Will they be the ones to lead the latest, potentially supra-lucrative, charge into micropayments (possibly facing a backlash from the uber-protective SEC / Govt.)? Or will the idea be lifted, perfected and scaled by prosumer gorillaz like Yahoo, Microsoft, Ebay, Amazon, Apple or Google for any number of their respective people applications?

With growing expertise in content monetization and sharing via AdSense, Google sure looks to be the likeliest mega-trailblazer in the prosumer-focused micro-economics domain.

Will the Next Google be a Prosumer-Based Quantification Company?

2009-02-12T13:39:00.000-08:00

To scale as quickly as Google has a new company will need to generate serious end-user value, monetize effecively, and take a new approach to human resources. One possible future Google is an organization specializing in prosumer-based quantification (structured crowd-sourced info mining) that can scale up very quickly based on contracts and growing content advertising rates. Such a company could have a large and very necessary effect on the global economy as we enter the knee of the curve.

Here's a speculative timeline of such a company (2011-2015), dubbed Quantification Company, that I quickly threw together to get the discussion and simulation rolling:

2011 - Launch: A logical outgrowth of flash mobs, open mapping parties, and steadily rising prosumerism, the Quantification Company (QC) was created in 2011 with the mission of "organizing and accelerating the comprehensive quantification of Earth's most valued systems." The for-profit organization relied on a small core of programmers, salespeople and community managers to catalyze quantification cascades, better known as Data Swarms, for a large variety of clients, but mostly municipalities and large corporations. Early efforts were kept simple and focused mostly on the rapid and/or real-time HD video mapping of U.S. cities, national parks, and other under-quantified areas of interest. Traffic-based fees were paid out to citizen quantifiers who captured and uploaded the best geographic footage and/or commentary. Though they were slightly nervous at the ambition and direction of the QC, competitors like Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia were happy to see traffic and content flow through their systems.

2012 - Rapid Growth, Big Contracts: Having noticed the high-quality information netted by the early efforts, various governments and powerful non-profits turned to the QC, which they viewed as a higher-order CraigsList, for their large-scale survey and mapping efforts. The largest of these contracts was a deal with the economically suffering European Union to generate pro-tourism video and guides for ALL major tourist sites on the continent. The deal was extended to include previews and coverage of the London summer Olympic games, which generated the largest web video audience for any event in human history.

The combination of new contracts and a growing prosumer base allowed the QC to dramatically scale its core staff and expand into other languages and quant sectors. With revenues totalling more than $20 million, the QC announced in September 2012 that it had become profitable. This fueled speculation of a near-term public stock offering and spurred numerous copy-cat efforts, most notably by non-profit Wikipedia. The company also turned down several aquisition offers form companies like Microsoft, Google, IBM and Johnson Controls.

2013 - Widespread Adoption, Competition: As the worldwide economic recovery finally got underway and more people began to understand the catalytic value of quantification, individuals and organizations of all sorts began to rely on the QC to crowd-source many of their critical projects. Reality shows and online video super-producers requested QC support for their shoots. Sporting events like the Tour de France, NYC Marathon and even stadium-based games relaxed their stances on copyright and regularly supplemented their coverage via the QC and the web. Universities looking to expand research eforts while reducing cost turned to the QC for structured data mining efforts. Small start-ups began to launch businesses that sat atop QC platforms, negotiating sub-contractor deals.

At the same time, a big quantification backlash led by non-profits, private activists and certain governments began to pick up steam. New anti-quant legislation was enacted, preventing the quantification of certain regions and zones.

At year's end the QC reported $300 million in net annual profit and announced that it would go public in 2014. But competition from a revamped Google Knol, Wikipedia, Video Twitter, Facebook and Microsoft, as well as home-grown efforts in China, Russia, India, Japan and Brazil. Wikipedia, in particular, began to grab Data Swarm market share as many organizations preferred to do business with a well-established non-profit. The QC attempted to counter many of these efforts by striking exclusive deals with Open Street Map and IBM.

2014 - Racing to Quantify the Developing World: As quantification revenues began to rise for individuals and the recovered world came around to the import of developing prosumer markets, the deliberate quantification market grew in both scale and complexity. To spur connectivity and global economic growth, a UN-led coalition of governments and enterprises funded massive quantification efforts in developing regions including Africa, the Middle East, China and Mongolia. These contracts were divied up amongst the leading quantification companies, but the well-repected QC walked away with more than 40% of the business. In a show of good faith (and smart business) the QC lowered its profit margins for these regions and subsidized the purchase of new hi-tech input devices, allowing more new regional prosumers to earn more income through these efforts. This proved to be a brilliant move as upwards of 100 million new prosumers developed a positive view of the QC brand vs. its competitors, in particular Wikipedia. In particular, the QC became the quant market of choice for new sub-contractors that sprung up in these regions.

At the same time, the QC pushed hard to develop innovative new brain, body, corporate, refuse, solar system, ocean, and uninhabited region quantification efforts. It invested heavily in mico-robotics, sensing, neural net, life-logging and BCI technologies.

Despite heavy investment and running its development programs at just above cost, the QC reported annual operating profits of $2.3 billion, thus confirming that it was indeed the "next Google". Due to the massive growth and huge growth prospects, the QC decided to remain private, forgoing the warchest it could have amassed through an IPO.

Anti-quantification efforts grew more intelligent. Certain cities and regions (led by Switzerland, Monaco, Germany and Saudi Arabia) developed their popular appeal by prohibiting quantification. They began funding counter-transparency technology and protocols and came to realize there was a serious market for these strucutres and services.

2015 - Quant Market Matures: By 2015 the annual worlwide Data Swarm market had risen to well over $150 billion. Upwards of 60% of this was paid out to prosumers or small companies via advertising or sub-contracts. Many of the specialized sub-contractors now commanded large revenue streams. 20% of people, most sporting always-on life-log systems, on the planet now regularly participated in quant markets to supplement their revenue. Most countries on Earth were now either spearheading a nationalized quantification faciltator or had struck serious deals with the leading providers.

The broader economic growth fueled by quantification was estimated at several trillion $ since 2012. Still, for the first time, counter-transparency efforts began to chip away at quantification revenues in certain areas. A rise in quant-based crimes and hacks began to alarm people all across the globe, prompting many to join these efforts. Clearly the world was developing pro-quant, quant-neutral and anti-quant regions (physical and virtual), each of which were ideal for different individuals, activities and behaviors. It was now up to the nimble start-ups and billions of prosumers to make the most of this new infrastrucutre.

(Big props to Marisa Vitols who helped generate the geographic quantification concepts.)

Google Earth Adds Virtual Time Travel, Moves a Step Closer to Gelernter's Mirror World Vision

2009-02-02T14:33:00.000-08:00

Not only did Google add an ocean to its Earth platform today, the company also enabled "Historical Imagery", a new feature that brings to life a crude version of what Yale computer scientist David Gelernter's 1992 prediction of the planet on a “time toggle”.

The Google Blog: Until today, Google Earth displayed only one image of a given place at a given time. With this new feature, you can now move back and forth in time to reveal imagery from years and even decades past, revealing changes over time. Try flying south of San Francisco in Google Earth and turning on the new time slider (click the "clock" icon in the toolbar) to witness the transformation of Silicon Valley from a farming community to the tech capital of the world over the past 50 years or so.

Along with a new 3d Mars feature, the additions have increased the scope and resolution of the largest publicly accessible simulation of our physical system, thus expanding the Google's information scaffolding and future monetization opportunities through an increasingly valuable Mirror World.

The new features also reinforce the notion of a rapidly growing retro-quantification industry rooted in our social desire to achieve topsight over space and time. A resource that quickly allows people to surf physical history is obviously critical to bettering our view of reality and thus improving the efficiency of our economic behavior.

Clearly, Google is prepared to devote massive resources to dominate the Great Quantification Race. I just wonder when they'll open up 1) additional data layers that work together with historical imagery, and 2) a more-or-less open Future Imagery feature that allows planners and forecasters to deposit their future visions right on Google Earth.

Look out Nick Bostrom, here come simulated tunnels of time and 4d idea markets.

Total Systems Quantification - Graphing Everything

2009-01-26T12:00:00.000-08:00

Quantify: To determine, express, or measure the quantity of. - Merriam-Webster

Why do we compulsively quantify?

An army with a map of the battle terrain is more formidable than an otherwise equal opponent without access to that knowledge. It can more quickly make decisions that will best optimize its chances for success. So it's no surprise that good mapping, or quantification, has been essential to human warfare, and that armies nowadays work to create the most comprehensive real-time maps that technology will allow.

But quantification isn't just essential to effective warring (unless you view life as a perpetual war or game). It's also critical to human decision-making on all levels. Whether we're taking short-cuts on the walk home, contemplating a new diet, planning to send our kids to college or writing software code, we're making these decisions in the context of systems maps (aka quantifications) that we run in our brains. Thus we can reduce the amount of Space, Time, Energy and Matter that we waste (a process related to what Evo Devo philosopher John Smart calls STEM Compression), avoid situations that threaten our well-being and generate max value by taking advantage of opportunities to control resources and our environment.

In short, quantification is an essential component of knowledge and leads to efficiency as we strive to survive, multiply and thrive.

Furthermore, quantification appears to be "rigged" into the game of life. As organims evolve and life's complexity increases, new species with brains capable of greater quantification and abstraction emerge at a regular clip. Over time, these organisms discover ways to expand their knowledge by communicating (actively or passively) information to one another and letting the network manage their quantifications and decisions. Then, eventually, the higher-level organism figure out how to extend their knowledge into the environment through technology that allows them to communicate and retrieve it more easily than before. This is accomplished directly through technologies like language, writing, or classical maps, and indirectly through the hard-technologies like spears, paint, and paper that critically support knowledge externalization.

To my mind, it seems likely that wherever life is found in the universe, it is required to steadily improve its ability to manage knowledge, lest it be overtaken by chaos or other organized life. This, of course, requires the systematic quantification of its complex environment.
Such understanding has always been essential, but now in the context of convergent acceleration (comm, info, tech, intel), we are scaling our knowledge and quantifications more quickly than ever before. To cope with and/or catalyze this acceleration, we need to rapidly better our ability to generate knowledge. Fortunately, we can make big leaps just by understanding the processes critical to knowledge, such as quantification.

By growing cognizant of our built-in quantification tendencies (quantifying quantification), it becomes possible to make more sense of much of our complex behavior. We can develop a finer representations for phenomena like group behavior, social media and the success of Google, then use the new quantifications and abstractions to further bootstrap our view of the system in which we exist.

That argued, here's a list of more-or-less novel quantification-related paradigms and suppositions I've synthesized that help inform my view of the system and contemporary view of accelerating techno-social change:

BRAINS ARE SUPER-COMPUTERS: There are 6.756 billion human brains on Earth, each more capable at generating knowledge than the fastest super-computers. (Fred Wilson is right when he says "all social media is about the people that use it". That's because social media organizes and catalyzes the most valuable processors to create big value.)
BRAINS NETWORK WITH OTHER BRAINS & ENVIRONMENT: These brains function as a network, pan-hierarchically, in concert with other human brains, other species, and their environment. (Howard Bloom nicely demonstrates this interconnectedness and plasticity, as well as the steady increase in informational processing ability, in The Global Brain and The Lucifer Principle.)
BRAINS GATHER & SORT RAW DATA INTO MAPS: To generate knowledge, these brains capture raw data from their environment (including themselves), compare that information to their existing information models/abstractions, and refine and expand these models, resulting in maps of various scale and resolution. More accurate and updated system maps then allow operations or further generation of knowledge at a faster pace. (James Flynn convincingly argues that IQ is directly related to better abstractions of our system. Why do we assemble history and scientific models?)
BRAINS MAP SYSTEMS of INTEREST: To generate useful knowledge, brains focus on improving/updating maps, or quantifications, of systems slices critical to their survival and well-being. Animals have been shown to do that to varying degrees. Humans are the most capable species when it comes to quantification. (Kevin Kelly demonstrates that we are working hard to quantify ourselves. Esther Dyson extends that thinking to human social behavior on the web. Pervasive sensing and computing trends extend the web into other physical systems. Janine Benyus argues that we generate knowledge through biomimicry. John Smart theorizes the universe is rigged to develop and discover knowledge, which I believe involves quantification and abstraction.)
HUMANS COMPULSIVELY QUANTIFY: We humans are compulsive quantifiers that share our mental models through communication and technology. The digital web is the latest powerful example. (Aaron Hirsch argues that the web is driving larger and more complex efforts to generate more useful useful data in different ways, thus accelerating science.)
CASCADING KNOWLEDGE FUELS SOCIAL MEDIA: Web-based social media allows human brains to network effectively, catalyzing Knowledge Cascades, much like a scalable chemical reaction. (Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg observes that of late, social media is allowing people to share roughly 2x more digital data about themselves every year. With better, cheaper video, audio, graphics, machinima, and search capabilities arriving regularly, this new content is steadily growing richer.)
QUANTIFICATIONS BEGET SUBSEQUENT QUANTIFICATIONS: These knowledge cascades result in larger and finer information graphs, or quantifications, that then allow other humans to generate value and knowledge at a faster pace. (Open Street Map and Wikipedia participation increases in speed as more people jump on board.)
KNOWLEDGE MAPS = FLYNN'S ABSTRACTIONS: These new quantifications are synonymous with the abstraction upgrades that Flynn correlates with rising intelligence, meaning that we're all getting smarter faster. (How much efficiency is generated through Google Search, Wkipedia, Google Earth? A lot.)
TREMENDOUS VALUE is GENERATED: It is no accident that many of the world's largest companies generate value through scalable quantification. (Google, IBM, Facebook, Banks) As the quantifications generated by these companies are commoditized, becoming redundant, they must continue to cascade knowledge, transform their business or quickly lose active brainshare.
OPEN-SOURCE KNOWLEDGE MAPPING: As the web, new software and new hard technologies conspire to decrease the costs of coordinating people, it becomes possible to create more & bigger open-source public knowledge structures. (Wikipedia, Open Street Map, Open Metaverse, AI) This is why some are forecasting that by 2020 40% of IT jobs will be open source.
LARGER & FINER MAPS are GENERATED: Better knowledge maps, new technologies, new software and new social behavior allows humans to build larger and finer maps of everything. As the process accelerates and becomes more obvious (thanks to the quantification of this same behavior), more humans get involved in knowledge processing at steadily lower costs.
KNOWLEDGE MARKET FLUIDITY INCREASES: The more comprehensive our knowledge maps become, the more quickly we can determine the value of novel information, content and structures. Quantification allows us to ask more questions and quickly arrive at more answers. It allows us to more quickly place relative value on a structure and then transfer that value, fundamentally speeding up economics. Thus we can more quickly ascertain the behavioral value of a rare species of bees in a rare section of the Amazon and pay someone to harvest them or protect their indigenous environment (which is also a critical part of the bee's behavior).
QUANTIFICATION MORE DIRECTLY REWARDED/VALUED: As we move deeper into the Information Age and people increasingly use emerging web structures to assume the roles of quantifiers, sorters, idea mixers, facilitators, etc, we all grow more cognizant of the underlying fundamentals driving value. The drive to quantify systems becomes more obvious and is formalized and the way that we graph HR and other value evolves accordingly.
HIERARCHY of NEEDS: As the value of quantification becomes more obvious, we accelerate such efforts, which in turn helps us to make more efficient decisions, decreasing costs and increasing opportunities... unless it leads to a zero-sum world war or necessary period of creative destruction.
RISE of SOCIAL NODES: The rise of the prosumer, increasing knowledge market fluidity, more open-source and hybrid economic options, a larger $ pie, and advanced communication technology (hi-def video, real-time translation, 3d web, etc) catalyzes the formation of efficient international web-based economic tribes that can scale up and down very quickly and distribute value in innovative new ways. It becomes possible to participate in many different nodes and switch affiliations rapidly.
TUNNELS of TIME: The quantifications that we create spread into all available dimensions, including time. Thus we work to 1) retro-actively quantify everything we can (perhaps to the point of chasing our history on the light that has bounced off us), and 2) most accurately extend our simulations into the future. The result is software that runs Tunnels of Time, then more multi-dimensional simulations of our system. (We already do this individually and socially. Compulsively.)
The QUANTIFICATION of EVERYTHING: Google is already leading the way into the mapping of space (Google Sky) and the the ocean (Google Ocean). Other companies are quantifying the genome, viruses, proteins, underlying physical structures, etc. We are already heading toward the quantification of everything, we just don't realize it. It's a necessary behavior if we as an eco-system want to increase our chances of survival and growth. It's a fundamental drive of any complex adaptive system, is a requirement for the evolution and development of intelligence and adaptibility.
EVER-ELUSIVE COMPUTATIONAL CLOSURE: Information and knowledge are relative. Godel's incompleteness theorem is a reminder that no matter how much we've learned, there's always more to learn. If life is rigged to compute its system, then one logical possibility is that the cosmos is collectively working to close off its quantification of the total system. Implications include the drive to network universal knowledge, the potential discovery of extra-systemic existence or expansion of systems boundaries, a possible universal singularity, and so forth.

Thanks for reading my meme dump. Thoughts, reactions, and related links are very welcome.

Social Nodes Defined

2008-07-24T21:36:00.000-07:00

Social Node: A micro-economy of brains organized by advanced social software networked in a single place (virtual, Physical or conglomerate), playing by the same game rules with a collective goal in mind. Social nodes are seen as a natural outgrowth of natural human economic systems catalyzed by rapidly advancing technology, information and knowledge. Individuals typically belong to many social nodes, though some impose more or less serious restrictions on the behavior and networking of their constituents.

As the pace of change accelerated, the world grew flat, America relinquished sovereignty, and people across the globe collectively climbed the hierarchy of needs, Nodes gradually emerged and then exploded. An outgrowth of previously informal, non-cognizant, or semi-cognizant affiliation pockets, people grew more deliberate about the their Nodes as they were quantified.