Democratizing puzzle invention
March 26, 2007 By Don Tapscott
Categories: General
Every once in a while a really cool mobile technology is announced in the “west” that sends a buzz through the market - but people in Japan often react with a shrug because they’ve been using it for years. It’s always a stark reminder that in many areas of the economy, countries and companies used to being on the leading edge are being left behind.
There is also a relatively low-tech Japanese export that many puzzle enthusiasts are now very familar with - sudoku. One of the companies making some money off of it is Nikoli, which is now widely regarded as “the world’s most prolific wellspring of logic games and brain teasers.”
The founder of the company, Maki Kaji, claims not only to be the godfather of the sudoko, but indicates the company has at least 250 similar games in the pipeline. But Nikoli hasn’t really invented them - in fact Kaji didn’t invent sudoku either, which was originally concieved by an American. What makes them so successful is the (to quote the NY Times article) democratization of puzzle invention.
In short, Nikoli provides the forum where up to 50,000 readers and puzzle enthusiasts submit ideas to be tested, perfected, and - maybe - eventually turned into “real” games.
Perhaps even more interestingly, Nikoli doesn’t make that much money off of sudoko around the world because they didn’t trademark the name. But not only do they call this a “brilliant mistake”, there are no plans to trademark other new games either. To quote Mr. Kaji:
“This openness is more in keeping with Nikoli’s open culture. We’re prolific because we do it for the love of games, not for the money.”
Admittedly, most companies may not want to replicate this line of thinking exactly - but there is still a lot to learn from them, and how it is they do make money from a variety of product sales tied to their games. How many other companies could democratize their own invention process to get out on the leading edge?
Don Tapscott
To have a look at Don Tapscott's wikinomics blog, please click here.
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Time to expand fair use
March 21, 2007 By Anthony D Williams
Categories: General
A few weeks ago two U.S. congressional representatives — Rick Boucher and John Doolittle — proposed legislation to ostensibly protect the fair use rights of consumers in the wake of a sustained attack on these rights by various copyright lobbies. Much discussion ensued.
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) predictably complained that the “FAIR USE Act” would effectively “legalize hacking.” In other quarters, critics are suggesting that the bill doesn’t go far enough.
Tim Lee notes, for example, that Boucher and Doolittle have launched more ambitious fair use bills in the past, only to have them quashed by Hollywood. This time, Boucher and Doolittle have proposed only modest fair use reforms — for example, allowing consumers to make a compilation of audiovisual works for classroom use, skip commercials and objectionable content, and transmit files over a home network. You see, in politics you often get just one shot at passing a significant reform. Should this bill pass, it would take the wind out of the sails of fair use movement, which has been asking for more sweeping changes. Fair use proponents are understandably disappointed.
Lee also points out, however, that the chief target of the bill is not really fair use; it’s the Grokster decision, which, as most intellectual property analysts agree, discourages high-tech innovation by making the inventors of groundbreaking products liable for the infringing activities of their customers. So, if a particular technology facilitates copyright violations, the content industry can now literally sue it out of existence — even if the technology has substantial non-infringing uses.
Gary Shapiro, CEO of the consumer electronics association (CEA), wrote a nice opinion piece for Business Week that lays out the problem from his industry’s perspective:
Calculating risk is a vital component of every new product launch, particularly in the consumer-electronics industry. . . So imagine a manufacturer that predicts high demand and profit potential for a legitimate new product, but could be sued under an obscure provision of federal law for literally billions of dollars for rolling a single prototype off the assembly line. No rational entrepreneur would launch that product.
If potential liability of billions of dollars for manufacturing a consumer-electronics device sounds crazy, meet the recording industry’s biggest hit since the Beatles: massive copyright lawsuits against legitimate innovators and technologies. These lawsuits are not against pirates, but against so-called “secondary infringers.”
This is legalese for suing a manufacturer for something a consumer does unlawfully (even without the manufacturer’s knowledge) using an otherwise lawful product. For example, when XM Satellite Radio (XMSR) made available to its subscribers an innovative satellite radio that allows listeners to time-shift their favorite music programs, the music industry sued. When Kaleidescape launched an innovative entertainment system that organizes and stores movies on a home server to be viewed in any room, the DVD industry sued.
Under a little-noticed change in law secured by record label lobbyists and the Recording Industry Association of America, the music industry trade association, such lawsuits can seek damages of $150,000 per copyrighted work infringed. Because a “work” can be defined as a single song, in the case of an audio device like an MP3 player that permits access to millions of songs, the potential risk is incalculable
His main point is that content industry’s tactics have created a climate of fear that discourages innovation. There are countless new devices for which consumer demand would be unquestionably high. But technology companies are deciding against bringing these devices to market because of the litigation risk. And, that is not how capitalism is supposed to work.
Shapiro goes back to Joseph Schumpeter, the great economic theorist, who maintained that businesses must either embrace new technologies by giving up old methods and products or cede the market share to those who will. Of course, Schumpeter’s theories of creative destruction assume free competition: that firms will bring new technologies and products to market in competitive environment and that customers, not government, will be the ultimate arbiters of who wins.
Recent history shows that Hollywood doesn’t like free competition. That’s why Hollywood’s business model for digital media is based on the premise that it can sue its opponents into oblivion. In other words, when all else fails, fight back with laws and regulations.
The good news is that regulatory measures typically amount to temporary stopgaps, not sources of enduring competitive advantage. Value always migrates to innovative players, the way that the telegraph business lost out to telephones, or the way that PCs displaced the mainframe.
The bottom line is that intellectual property laws were never intended to put the breaks on technological change — quite the opposite. In theory, intellectual property law exist to reward creativity and investment. But today, the content industry is using these laws perversely — not to promote innovation, but to quash anything that remotely threatens its existence.
This change in intellectual property law threatens the chain of creativity and innovation on which we (and future generations) depend. As Cory Doctorow put it, holding back technology to preserve broken business models is like allowing blacksmiths to veto the internal combustion engine in order to protect their horseshoes. That’s why I think the FAIR USE Act is a step in the right direction, even if it doesn’t accomplish all that we might like.
Anthony D. Williams
Anthony D. Williams is co-author of Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.
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Enterprise 2.0 - Just Sayin' .. Again
March 15, 2007 By Jon Husband
Categories: Social Networking
I do not necessarily think that teenage boys talking business models in a pizza shop is a primary recommendation for promoting collaboration and the use of social software, but it is a harbinger of a rapidly-approaching reality, as Joe McKendrick points out in this post from the FastForward blog.
But I've posted often about the rapidly-approaching impact of digital natives on the workplace of the near future ... one more in what will be sure to be a long and widespread series of observations by many people.
Enterprise 2.0 Revelation in a Pizza Shop
by Joe McKendrick
Stewart Mader (Atlassian) surfaced this post from Steven Baker’s BusinessWeek blog, and it really makes you stop and think, especially if you’re old enough to remember the first seasons of Saturday Night Live:
“Stephen Baker tells how he overheard a group of boys in his local pizzeria discussing how MySpace makes money, and why YouTube sold itself to Google for $1.65 billion. He reflects that the boys are “orders of magnitude more tuned into business” than he was at that age, and that to them, “business is a much more vibrant and relevant subject. They know that a start-up is just an idea away.”
Stewart ties this revelation into the rising social software and collaboration phenomenon. “It matters more than perhaps anything else because the mindset of this generation and tools available to it are combining to limitless potential. While most major news stories concentrate on the perceived pitfalls of technology - the dangers of online chat rooms, the dangers of games, the ‘overuse’ of Wikipedia, and so forth - people in my generation and younger are showing incredible savvy - by understanding Wikipedia better than their parents and teachers, restricting their MySpace and Facebook profiles to just their friends and people they approve, and starting great new companies and tools based on the power of their ideas.”
Members of the emerging generation that is beginning to populate our enterprises clearly understand the power and potential of information technology. Not only that, they will expect that their employers (or clients) will also be savvy about the potential of Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 tools and platforms. If the organization isn’t savvy, then they will be expected to stay out of the way while they create, innovate, and find new ways to drive value to their businesses.
As my colleague Bill Ives pointed out in a recent post, a Watson Wyatt study concludes that “nearly 50% of the employee population will soon prefer – and expect – collaborative and interactive methods of communication with their employers.”
In other words, enterprises better get savvy about E2.0, because their employees (of all ages) will do it anyway. Lead, follow, and get out of the way.
Jon Husband
To view Jon Husband's Wirearchy blog, please click here
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Enterprise 2.0 … Coming (Sometime) to an Organization Near You
March 13, 2007 By Jon Husband
Categories: Social Networking
The term Web 2.0 created enough noise and confusion for a good year or so ... what is it, why is it that, I don’t agree, here’s my $0.02, etc. There are still many who prefer not to use the term, but the 2.0 meme has crept into all sorts of other labels, like Marketing 2.0, Advertising 2.0, Management 2.0, and a term that was coined by Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School, Enterprise 2.0.
The term comes from the concept of ERP systems (enterprise resource planning) such as SAP, which in turn is the child of the venerable MRP (manufacturing resource planning).
2.0 signifies the second large wave of the Web’s impact as it has moved from a static representation of pages and images to a much more dynamic and interactive user experience, as in Web 2.0.
Here’s McAfee’s definition (and I guarantee you’ll find others):
Enterprise 2.0, version 2.0
I'm not satisfied with my earlier definition of Enterprise 2.0, so let's propose a refinement (I'm sorry if this feels a bit pedantic, but clear constructs are important to academics):
Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities. (Wikipedia's definition).
Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time. Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people's interactions become visible over time.
Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following:
1.Optional
2.Free of up-front workflow
3.Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
4.Accepting of many types of data
Don Tapscott (see post below) has moved the goal posts along with his recent book Wikinomics, which addresses the use of wikis as collaboration and productivity tools for organizations. His firm poured a whack of money and time into research, and has come to the conclusion (paraphrasing) that wikis are the single most important change to the core architecture of the enterprise in the past century. Other notables have suggested that “Corporate Blogging Becomes Enterprise 2.0”. There’s an Enterprise 2.0 blog (http://www.fastforwardblog.com) developed by a range of tech specialists, and any number of debates raging about both the technological and sociological aspects of implementation inside the firewall of organizations, such as those underway here and here and here.
Why do I say “coming (sometime) …” rather than “coming soon …” ?
Because there’s a tremendous lack of understanding, and consequent fear, of loss of control, of turning the keys of the asylum over to the inmates, I think. The vestiges of Theory X management, where employees can’t be trusted to focus, stay on task and act responsibly ... no self-organizing here, thanks very much.
But also because this wired, interconnected and hyperlinked world of work is here to stay ... and the younger generations of digital natives now entering the workforce will expect things to go this way sooner rather than later.
My take ? Five years or more of blogging and wikiing have shown us that what goes on online is just like what goes on offline. When focused on purposeful work activities, I’d argue that the issues of effective leadership, corporate culture and empowerment or work enrichment (call it what you will) come to the fore when considering why and how to introduce the use of social software into an organization’s knowledge work processes or ecology.
Knowledge workers are volunteers, so the saying goes. You can’t control their minds, and so the implementation of Enterprise 2.0 initiatives is about influencing people positively and addressing their often more-latent-than-it-needs-to-be interest in what they are doing.
Looking back at Enterprise 1.0 … I wonder how many C-level executives and IT managers wish that there had been more discussion and exploration (for example, on blogs) about the more often than not sociological challenges of implementing large integrated enterprise systems. Training in the use of such systems even came to be referred to euphemistically as “change management”. How many millions of dollars (per company might have been saved?
One of the key differences with respect to Enterprise 2.0 is that the costs are much much less significant, and so it’s OK even to experiment, to fail faster (in the words of Dave Snowden) and thus accelerate learning and the development of productive work designs in a networked environment. I’d have to say though that I believe the main reasons for any “fast failing” will be the sociological resistance on the part of managers who will want to control and measure everything and thus mitigate against the flow of information sharing and ideas that is a key characteristic of the purposeful use of social software.
Jon Husband
To view Jon Husband's web site Wirearchy, please click here.
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eBay’s foray into social commerce By Don Tapscott
March 7, 2007 By Don Tapscott
Categories: Social Networking
Back in the mid 1990s I was trumpeting this little company called AuctionWeb - a place where people could go on this new thing called the “internet” to buy or sell any number of different goods. While we were writing about it, some other people were investing small sums of money in it, which eventually turned into billion dollar equity stakes in an online behemoth now known as eBay. While it was nice to be proven right, there might still be a little regret over not getting in on the ground floor.
Since then eBay has had some ups and downs, with various people questioning the logic behind multi billion dollar acquisitions of companies like PayPal and Skype. But through it all, the core auction site and the powerful network effects built into it have remained an almost unassailable growth and profit making machine.
Now eBay, under the guidance of new “Senior Director of platform and innovation” Max Mancini, is looking to improve on this cash generating machine through something they’re calling social commerce. While it could still evolve in a number of ways, the key idea is integrating the emerging relationship and trust measurement tools of social networking sites directly into the transactional relationships and trust metrics currently employed by eBay to facilitate commerce. Or in the words of Mancini himself:
Our feedback system is based on transactions, as opposed to determining whether I can trust this person through some other relationship other than a transaction. We need to stay on top of this trend.
So could an acquisition of a company like LinkedIn be in eBay’s future plans? At least one blogger is speculating that it could be in the cards, and given eBay’s history of buying up assorted companies (in addition to PayPal and Skype, stakes have been taken in Craigslist.org, Rent.com, Shopping.com, Stubhub.com, and a variety others) it really wouldn’t come as a surprise. But whether they do or not, the key message is that social networking is already starting to transform how business operates - a trend that no company can afford to ignore.
Don Tapscott
To view Don Tapscott's WIKINOMICS Blog, please click here.
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WEB 3.0 - Darwin's Revenge or The Next Big Thing?
March 6, 2007 By
Categories:
Last November there was a very interesting article about new tools and technologies that will drive Web 3.0 by John Markoff of the New York Times. Apart from being of general interest, this matters because there are claims that within these new technologies there is a “Google Killing" application. Initial reaction across blogs was fairly negative with an eclectic but interesting set of observations.
So, rather than resort to a quick and merciless blog entry, I thought it more interesting to dig deeper and get past the “label veneer.” This ended up being an odyssey of link- following, and generally learning more about some obscure and complicated new technologies ranging from OWL to ONTOLOGY to SPARQL. In summary, they are technologies that provide a foundation for the categorization, interaction, and delivery of information available via the web.
CONTEXT
There is currently a lot of discussion about the wave of open source computing, peering, and how the world is “flat”. Arguably, the search engine space is a major arbiter of “flatness.” Contrary to this “flatness” theory however is the fact that there is an exponential growth of data making the process of finding the right answers problematic. When everyone contributes – that’s a lot data!
The semantic web, or Web 3.0, by definition suggests the World Wide Web is a jungle that needs to be tamed and sorted into a more organized garden. A better analogy may be that the web provides instantaneous access to anything in the world; but, as with mining for diamonds, if you don’t have the tools or the right location you won’t find what you're looking for.
To combat this issue, there are a number of start-up companies with very decent funding that are hyping Web 3.0 technologies. Their emphasis is on W3C standards that will potentially make content on the web more “meaningful”. Meaningful in this sense means that the words and content on any particular site are tagged and linked to a contextual model (ontology) that determines their relationship and meaning within a particular "class."
FOAF (Friend of a Friend) is an example of a popular new way to represent information about people and information. It’s an open source project that uses RDF/OWL tools to enable better identification and linkages between people. This is a well explained and practical example of the thinking in the Web 3.0 space. Because FOAF is by its nature structured data- using the right query technique will yield the exact result – so it’s closer to a database style query. So if web site developers adopt FOAF tools, every time a person is referenced then they would be adopting a standard that structured queries can readily access.
So when such sites are interrogated by Artificial Intelligence based search engines or just plain old “machines” - powerful new services can be created. The proponents of this next big thing (NBT) go so far as to suggest that artificial intelligence engines will then be able to start learning at an exponential rate because they will have a structured web as their playing ground.
YOU CAN READ THE REST OF MILES FAULKNER'S LATEST BLOG SERIES "CONNECTING THE DOTS" ON HIS WEBSITE AT Faulkernerconsulting.com
Miles Faulkner
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