discuss - raman srinivasan on Diigo

23 Jun 09

Brazil: Social advertising’s next frontier | VentureBeat

he idea of a company that develops social apps is a relatively new concept. How would you define the mission of your company and what you guys do?

Gilberto Junior: We address the problem of the lack of relevance in display advertising. We believe advertising can be more engaging and it can be where people already are, instead of trying to take them out of there and lead them to some kind of advertising website. Advertising should be viral and spread out spontaneously. Amanaiê, in just 10 months, is already the leader at the social ads market in Brazil. Digital advertising is changing. Digital display ads are working less and [becoming] less relevant over time. The new digital media is that one that engages the costumer. The advertising that is so relevant that the user wants to install it on their public personal profile on a social network.

VB: You told me in an earlier conversation that you have an American partner. How did that come about and what advantages do you see as a result?

GJ: Michael came here for a conference and did some research and met me looking for Brazilian startups. He found my blog, we had a coffe and started to talk about investing in Brazil and the opportunities that would come as Orkut launches the Opensocial platform for social apps. [Afterwards] , we started up Socialsmart and Amanaie.

VB: So what are the advantages of having a partnership that is based in New York and Brazil?

GJ: We look for business opportunities. Mostly, to problems here that were successfully solved in the U.S. and nobody is doing anything here and vice-versa. We can leverage the innovation from the two places and do better deals. We have experience on planning the strategy, design and development of applications for advertising and branding on social networks. That’s what we do best. And the same way brands need it here, they need it there too. As Brazilians have a taste and culture similar to U.S. and Europe, we already know what works and what doesn’t, and that is portable to those places too.

VB: Beyond th

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Docs Are Old-School, We Need PageRank for People (Three Minds On Digital Marketing @ Organic)

Google's big innovation was in realizing that a link to content is the same as a vote. By tracking all the links pointing to a page of content Google assesses how influential that page is - its reputation. Google calls this 'PageRank' and it's old tech.

PageRank assigns a reputation score to the URL where content is published. This makes it a great fit for content that stays put in one location. However, evolving content distribution via blogs, RSS, guest columns, and syndication are a challenge for PageRank. Tweets, retweets, micropublishing, ratings, and comments - even bigger problems.

The solution lies in associating reputation with the identity of the author - a PageRank for People.

Reputation is Personal
At issue is how Google attributes reputation.

If marketing guru Seth Godin publishes an article on NYT.com, marketing wonks want to read it. If he publishes it instead at PodunkMarketingBlog.net, they still want to read it, because hey - it's Seth Godin. Google would rank the article at NYT highly, but Seth's work would be next to invisible when published at Podunk.

We assign reputation to people; experts, advisors, consultants, coaches, gurus, friends, etc. Search engines to date have relied on some proxy for this real-world reputation.

Content Lives Everywhere
In the physical world, your reputation follows you. If you're the world's foremost expert on AJAX, your opinion on the topic will be respected wherever you go. Imagine if the same held true online. Publish an article on an obscure web dev blog, it ranks highly, because hey - you're an expert. Pen a guest column on "AJAX and You" for Women's Day magazine and it ranks great, because you're the best in your field. Post a comment on the blog of an up-and-coming developer and that post gets a boost, because one of the luminaries in the industry judged it worth weighing in on. These are just a few of the possibilities, I'm sure there are plenty more.

Mapping reputation to people instead of URLs makes PageRank portable. It's PageRank for people.

P

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19 Jun 09

Clayton Christensen's Creative Disruption - Forbes.com

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18 Jun 09

Mobile gold-rush continues: Qualcomm offers $550,000 in mobile startup competition | VentureBeat

Qualcomm, the largest wireless chip supplier, has announced it will offer $550,000 to four companies in a business plan competition.

Called the QPrize, the competition comes at a time when Qualcomm is seeking to maintain its spot as the mobile industry’s biggest player (ahead of folks like Texas Instruments, STM and Infineon), now that whole range of new smartphones and devices have emerged.

Every mobile player, it seems is, developing a “platform,” and Qualcomm doesn’t want to be left out. While Qualcomm hasn’t partaken of the iPhone’s success, the chart below shows it’s had traction providing hardware for other new devices, such as Google’s Android’s phones as well as the Amazon Kindle.

Qualcomm was the seventh largest investor in wireless startup companies last year, according to the chart below, courtesy of wireless industry investment bank Rutberg & Co.

Nobably, corporate investors have climbed to the top of the list and now constitute 8 of the 20 most active in 2008, up from just 4 of the top 20 in 2007, Rutberg points out. That’s significant, because usually corporate venture investing disappears during economic downturns. That corporations have become more active points to how the wireless industry is still booming — driven in part by the smartphone craze as well as the emergence of new devices like the Kindle and netbooks. That’s one more reason we’re holding our MobileBeat conference on July 16. And, by the way, we’ve invited Qualcomm Ventures’ Nagraj Kashyap to speak on our investor’s panel.

The QPrize competition is open to any entrepreneur, and starts with semi-final competitions in each of four markets where Qualcomm Ventures has offices: China, Europe, India and North America. The four winners will each receive $100,000 of convertible note funding and will be invited to a Qualcomm Ventures “CEO Summit” in San Diego, Calif., to compete for the grand prize. The grand prize winner gets an additional $150,000 in convertible venture financing. More here.

Plans will be accepted in the following are

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The Pocket Doctor: An Open Source Opportunity?

In a post back in March, I made the point that mobile phones and other mobile devices will increasingly function as medical monitoring devices, which could be a big opportunity for open source application development. The concept of the phone as doctor may still be questionable for some people, since there aren't many applications to point to (yet), but open source developers are often uniquely good at creating something where there is nothing. Here are some thoughts on how meaningful this kind of application development could really be, and who is working on the idea.

At the demonstration of the iPhone 3.0 operating system earlier this year, Apple demonstrated two new applications for the iPhone that monitor the glucose levels of the owners and monitor blood pressure. The idea is that iPhone owners who have diabetes or high blood pressure could have data on their physical status collected, and even automatically sent at regular intervals to a doctor. Think of the idea as a sort of onboard doctor.

There are already applications of this type arriving for the iPhone, but the early ones have mostly limited functionality, and don't do the actual monitoring of physical systems. There is, however, an interesting effort going on at UCLA to enable mobile phones to run medical tests. UCLA announced its advances in this area late last year.

UCLA researchers have developed a lens-free technique called LUCAS, or Lensless Ultra-wide-field Cell monitoring Array, for doing medical imaging with a cell phone. Phones with LUCAS technology use a short wavelength blue light to capture medical images. Then, the captured image is compared to a library of images to make a diagnosis. Initially, UCLA researchers see this as leading to new practices for wireless, remote medical diagnostics for diseases such as HIV and malaria in the third world.

We've written about open source applications aimed at humanitarian and global medical aid before. Recently, the Lemelson-M.I.T. program awarded $100,000 to Dr. Joel Selanikio for his developme

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14 Jun 09

JustSystems to Address Connection between XBRL and Semantic Web

NEW YORK & VANCOUVER, British Columbia--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Recent accounting scandals have heightened the need for transparency in reporting of financial data. Companies are now required to submit regular reports and disclosures conforming to accepted accounting principles like International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) and U.S. generally accepted accounting principles (U.S. GAAP). Financial regulators around the world have also mandated that these reports be tagged using the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL). As large repositories of XBRL data are now being collected, the quality of data submission is on the rise.

JustSystems, the largest independent software vendor in Japan and a worldwide leader in XML and information management technologies, today announced that Diane Mueller, vice president, XBRL development for JustSystems, and vice chair of XBRL International, Inc.; and Dave Raggett, JustSystems-sponsored W3C Fellow and member of the XBRL International Standards Board (XSB), will be speaking about XBRL at the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference being held June 14-18 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Jose, CA. The session titled, “XBRL, RDF and the Semantic Web,” will take place on Tuesday, June 16, 2009, at 4:30 p.m.

During the session, the presenters will address how XBRL brings precise semantics to financial data via reference to external accounting principles. By combining XBRL and the semantic web, there is tremendous potential for analyzing and exploring vast amounts of financial information on companies and markets worldwide.

Attendees will also learn about:

* Ramifications for both XBRL and the semantic web
* Standards development in relation to the semantic web that will complement the work of XBRL International
* Semantic case studies for financial data
* Current work to date on generating Resource Description Framework (RDF) from XBRL repositories

For more information on the 2009 Semantic Technology Conference, visit http://www.semantic-conference.com/. F

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Digital Domain - Hey, Just a Minute (or Why Google Isn’t Twitter) - NYTimes.com

Google moves faster than some of its critics think. But even if didn’t, the more important question is this: Do we really want Google’s search engine to swallow Twitter’s output as fast as it comes, without filtering, analyzing and ranking by authority?

“Real-time search begets real-time spam,” writes Danny Sullivan, the editor in chief of the Web site Search Engine Land.

Anyone who signs up to follow a particular Twitterer receives tweets instantaneously, as they are dispatched (when the system is functioning). Filtering is not an issue in such cases: The 1.77 million followers of Britney Spears presumably look forward to receiving every morsel of information broadcast from her account.

But if one wants to search Twitter for tweets about a topic — say, about Ms. Spears, but encompassing anyone’s tweet that happens to mention her — Twitter’s data fill an ocean in which it’s hard to find specific fish.

Twitter’s search page says, “See what’s happening — right now.” But Twitter’s database was not originally designed to be searched like Google’s was. Last year, in fact, Twitter bought another start-up, Summize, to provide it with search functionality.

Even so, search performance on Twitter is sluggish compared with the live tweet stream. Mr. Sullivan notes that Twitter’s search service does not consistently deliver real-time results: 20 or more minutes often pass before a given tweet appears in search results. At Google only hundredths of a second are needed to check its index when a search phrase is submitted. But to prepare, the company re-surveys the wide Web to update that index on a schedule that the company does not divulge. Some Web sites, like those of news organizations, are checked very often. Others await their turn in a rotating schedule of visits by Google’s crawler, the software that collects copies of Web pages.

Peter Norvig, director of research at Google, says that Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, has consistently pushed the company’s engineers to index the most active Web pages faster

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30 May 09

Wave: Google’s take on the future of communication » VentureBeat

Finally unveiled after years of development under the codename “Walkabout,” Google Wave combines popular features from across the web — feeds, shared documents, photo galleries, etc. — to redefine online communication. At least that’s the goal. Its creators, Lars and Jens Rasmussen (the braintrust behind Google Maps), even say they set out to break down traditional modes of communication — email and instant messaging — to find a system more in sync with how web users prefer to talk today. The result looks promising.

At a basic level, Wave is part chat room, part collaborative document. You and your friends belong to a page that any of you can add information to, and it will show up for everyone in real time. And this information comes in many different forms: images, videos, links, comments, event invitations, polls, blog entries, and the like. It’s an ongoing conversation — with rich content.

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23 May 09

Appin Information Security Training

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22 May 09

Food Web, Meet Interweb: The Networked Future of Farms | Wired Science | Wired.com

Now, a Bay Area startup has launched a service to make it easier and cheaper for restaurants to buy food from small, local farms. With a suite of mobile apps for use in restaurants and on farms, FarmsReach wants to create an online food marketplace that would directly connect farms with restaurants.

“The food supply industry is ripe for ‘disintermediation’ because of the internet,” said Alistair Croll, a startup consultant working with FarmsReach. In other words, middlemen beware: Food could undergo a transition like the one that swept through classified ads, air travel and dozens of other industries.

If that happens, it could begin to transform the food system, and that would be welcome news for food activists. The problems of the food system have been well-chronicled over the last few years: environmental degradation, occasional food-borne disease outbreaks and millions of overweight Americans.

While these issues are receiving attention from many organizations, both inside and outside of the agricultural sector, information flow could be the hidden lever inside the food system. The current system does a remarkably good job of concealing how food is grown and by whom. Lettuce planted halfway around the world looks pretty much like lettuce grown around the corner. Farmers have a hard time showing the value they add and being recognized for innovative practices.

The current distribution of edibles works the way it does, though, because it’s brutally effective at reliably delivering low-cost food all over the country. Sysco, the dominant $13 billion American food distributor, works and restaurants know that.

“The big problem in small agriculture is supply chain resiliency,” Croll said. “Chefs order from Sysco because they know, no matter what, they’ll get their orders or there is an account rep they can strangle.”

Now, restaurants have two basic options. Call up a dozen local farms to order the ingredients for their salads or use Sysco’s online system and have everything show up, come hell or high water. Perh

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20 May 09

Steamboats Are Ruining Everything

Dissanayake posed that question boldly in her first book: "Since all human societies, past and present, so far as we know, make and respond to art, it must contribute something essential to human life. But what?" A biologist, she proposed, would consider art a set of behaviors rather than a class of objects. Dissanayake was more interested in sculpting than in marble statues and even more intrigued by dynamic arts like singing and dancing. She reasoned that if natural selection had shaped these behaviors—as it had shaped every other functional aspect of human design—then the behaviors must result from predispositions that gave hominids an advantage over their competitors as they evolved. What was that advantage? Dissanayake has looked for it in children's play, premodern ritual, and mother-infant attachment. There is no consensus among evolutionary psychologists that she has discovered the definitive answer. But there is a widespread belief that she has found the right way to ask the question.

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Informally, though, her education continued. Because her husband studied zoology, she was exposed to the principles of natural selection and their influence on animal behavior. "I had this social world of ethology," Dissanayake says. "We'd sit around and talk with the graduate students and make these links," sometimes comparing the behavior of animals and humans. She also picked up ideas while typing her husband's papers and translating articles he wanted to read.
After John earned his doctorate, the Eisenbergs moved to Vancouver. Two years later, when Eisenberg was offered a position at the University of Maryland, they moved to the East Coast. Not long after, the Smithsonian Institution named Eisenberg director of research at the National Zoo. He brought animals home from his new job: At various times, a pangolin, a cavy, hedgehogs, pocket mice, desert rats, and a genet lived in their house. "City boy," she teases when a reporter asks what a cavy is. "It's a rodent that looks like a little deer, with these big brown eyes." She bottle-fed it. "Living with John," she says, "I really came to realize that humans are animals in a way that I would not have otherwise."
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- With her husband's encouragement, she began work toward a master's degree in art history at the University of Maryland. Then, in June 1968, the Smithsonian sent Eisenberg to Sri Lanka on a project that included a census of the island's wild elephants. The family settled for a year in Kandy, one of Sri Lanka's ancient cities. While John was in the jungle, Ellen homeschooled the children. She also rented a piano. "I hadn't played for years," she recalls. "I'd stopped when we left Berkeley." She began playing music with a group of expatriates and Sri Lankans, and soon she was part of their circle. "This was before television" came to Sri Lanka, she explains. "It was very much a Victorian atmosphere." The group met once a week to play music together. "These were well-educated, broadly educated people," she says. Many were doctors. One of them, S.B. Dissanayake, a professor of dentistry with an interest in public health, would become her second husband.
- In her second husband's home, which he had designed himself, the windows were always open. In photographs, in fact,
  they look less like windows than like the strategic omission of walls. Bats flew in and out. When it rained, you
  could hear the water hitting the giant leaves outside. A Buddhist temple stood nearby. "There was always some tree
  in bloom," she recalls, "with fragrance that would waft into the house." They had to boil the water they drank,
  they slept under mosquito netting, and they had no running hot water. Yet they had a record player, a subscription
  to the Times Literary Supplement, and "bookshelves with Proust and stacks of French film magazines."
- Sri Lanka made Shakespeare intelligible to Dissanayake: It was a world with fools and omens. The arts saturated everyday life. People offered flowers at the temple and drew symbols on the floor before bullocks threshed the rice. She observed the rituals closely. The experiences started her on a new train of thought.
- It's difficult to discuss her first book, What Is Art For? (1988), without reference to her other two,
  Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (1992) and Art and Intimacy: How the Arts Began (2000). The three are not so much distinct works as snapshots of a single theory at different stages of development. That theory starts with a striking set of observations.
- First, the arts appear to be universal. No one has found a culture that lacks them. Second, they consume a
  large portion of available resources. Among the Owerri in Nigeria, for example, the artists who build and paint
  ceremonial mbari houses are exempted for up to two years from the workload normally expected of healthy adults. Third, the arts give pleasure. Our internal motivational systems reward us for making and appreciating the arts the same way they reward us for having sex, spending time with friends, and eating nutritious food: The experiences feel good. And fourth, young children engage in the arts almost spontaneously. With only gentle encouragement, children will sing, move to music, make believe, scribble, and play with words. Together, these four facts suggest to Dissanayake that natural selection long ago rendered the arts a standard component of human behavior.
- In its freedom from social rules, art resembles play, while in its emphasis on display and embellishment, it resembles ritual. To focus her inquiry, Dissanayake has picked out a common element: During all these activities, humans make something special. That is, they distinguish an object or action from the ordinary. "What's interesting about humans," Dissanayake says, "is that they gild the lily. They do more than is necessary." "Making special," rather than "art," is what Dissanayake studies.
- What does making special accomplish? Something that has been made special is more likely to attract and engage
  the attention of others. Dissanayake offers as an example the hand axes fashioned by Homo erectus between
  1.6 million and 200,000 years ago. Flat and almond-shaped, with both front-back and left-right symmetry, the axes
  fit comfortably in the hand and have sharp cutting edges that meet in a point. They were clearly useful, but they
  cannot have been merely tools—they are too attractive. Some are made from pieces of flint with embedded
  fossil shells that figure on the sides of the hand axes as ornaments. Others, under inspection by electron
  microscope, show no evidence of the wear and tear of use. Even a plain, well-worn hand ax is the result of
  far more care than would be required to produce a stone capable of cutting, and the pains taken by Homo erectus
  hundreds of thousands of years ago can stir strong feelings in Homo sapiens today.
- making special
- "A society that performed communal rites that bound its members in common beliefs and values would presumably have been more cohesive and therefore more equipped for survival than one that did not." The tribe that prayed together stayed together (and caught more ungulates and had more children).
- In What Is Art For? she argues that the arts
  should be integrated into modern life, as they are in premodern cultures, not set aside as the fiefdom of
  specialists self-conscious about their outsider status. In Art and Intimacy, she calls for more art
  education in schools. And in Homo Aestheticus, she takes aim at the hyperliterate credo of poststructuralism: The arts are a part of our evolved nature, she explains; literacy, a recent invention, isn't. She diagnoses the Derridean notion that there is nothing outside the text as a delusion typical of—and flattering to—someone overinvested in the skill of writing. She dismisses as "poppycock" the notion that there cannot be thinking or experience without language.
- It was
  in Scotland that Dissanayake learned more of the details concerning mother-infant affiliative behavior
  that distinguish Art and Intimacy from her earlier work—and from nearly all other studies of
  evolution and the arts.
- But then she names two more books she wants to write—an evolutionary analysis of music and a rebuttal to evolutionary psychologists who in her opinion have underestimated the arts.
- . In
  The Descent of Man, Darwin noted that humans share the sense of beauty with other animals. Bowerbirds, for example, ornament "their playing-passages with gaily-coloured objects." He believed that if apes could give their opinion, they "would probably declare that they could and did admire the beauty of the coloured skin and fur of their partners in marriage."
- Evolutionary psychologists have found evidence that seems to confirm Darwin's hunch that human aesthetic preferences have been shaped by natural selection. For example, most people find a grassland with scattered trees to be the prettiest kind of landscape—no surprise, since that's how the African savanna looked during the Pleistocene, and it would make sense if our predilections encouraged us to seek out the terrain we are best equipped to survive in. When eight-year-olds are shown photos of a rain forest, a deciduous forest, a coniferous forest, an East African savanna, and a desert, they overwhelmingly pick the savanna as the place they would most like to live.
- No such skepticism afflicts Geoffrey Miller. Like Dissanayake, Miller has a proposal to explain what art is for. In
  The Mating Mind (Doubleday, 2000), he suggests that the arts—and many other aspects of human culture—first developed as a way of showing off to prospective mates. The more complex and delicate the arts became, the more taxing they were of brainpower and the better they functioned as indicators of an individual's vigor. In Miller's view, "the peacock's tail, the nightingale's song, the bowerbird's nest, the butterfly's wing, the Irish elk's antlers, the baboon's rump, and the first three Led Zeppelin albums" are all forms of romantic excess. They advertise good health and good genes (and the prospect of good sex) by throwing effort away as conspicuously as possible.
- And "we're good at making things," explains Steven Pinker. "Put those two facts together, and you've got a species that's smart enough to know how to concoct artificial stimuli to push its own pleasure buttons." Pinker likens the arts to pornography, strawberry cheesecake, and drug abuse. Drug abuse, for example, is present in almost every culture, consumes gross amounts of an individual's energy and resources, and is intensely pleasurable. But it is not a behavior that anyone would call adaptive.
- "When you're in a movie theater watching Jaws, your emotion system is actually engaged, but your motor system is not," Cosmides explains. "Nobody has to hold you back from the screen." That's odd, given that emotions are what spur us into action, and it suggests that humans are well designed for appreciating fictional narratives. Furthermore, we have a strong appetite for off-line experiences: We watch sitcoms and dramas more often than news programs and documentaries. And that's odd, because those shows contain very little accurate information about the world. What might the evolutionary advantage of fiction be? Cosmides doesn't rule out Dissanayake's proposal, but she offers a few of her own.
- In a recent article in the journal SubStance, Cosmides and Tooby have suggested that telling and enjoying stories might be the ways that human brains build the mental components responsible for managing social behavior. Most such assembly processes finish their task and then disappear (babbling, for example, subsides after infants learn to speak), but it may be that social behavior is so complex and vital that humans never stop tinkering with this particular weapon in their psychic armamentarium. "It might be that a cheap way of learning about the social world is to run simulations," says Cosmides. "So if you're reading Lord Jim, you're learning about what happens in a social community when somebody does what's considered to be an act of cowardice."
- After the Temple University English professor Robert Storey realized to his chagrin that he "could apply psychoanalytic theory any way I chose," he found himself attracted to "the empirical steadiness" of evolutionary psychology. His Mimesis and the Human Animal: On the Biogenetic Foundations of Literary Representation (Northwestern, 1996) speculates about the emotional "biogrammars" that inform the genres of comedy and tragedy. The University of Oregon's Michelle Scalise Sugiyama says she turned to evolutionary psychology "due to my failure to be convinced by postmodernist theory." Her dissertation for the UC-Santa Barbara
  English department analyzed in Darwinian terms the choices faced by women in Ernest Hemingway's fiction. (Mate choice, sexual fidelity, and hunting prowess are, after all, more than a little relevant to "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber.") Ian Jobling, a graduate student in comparative literature at SUNY Buffalo, has written about the way Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe satisfies the naturally selected but currently maladaptive desire for murderous revenge.
  His Ivanhoe essay appeared in the spring 2001 issue of Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, which was
  devoted to literary biopoetics. The issue was edited by the Texas A&M Russian professor Brett Cooke, who is also
  responsible, with UT-Dallas's Frederick Turner, for the anthology Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (Paragon House, 1999).

18 May 09

Jump Into The Stream

Once again, the Internet is shifting before our eyes. Information is increasingly being distributed and presented in real-time streams instead of dedicated Web pages. The shift is palpable, even if it is only in its early stages. Web companies large and small are embracing this stream. It is not just Twitter. It is Facebook and Friendfeed and AOL and Digg and Tweetdeck and Seesmic Desktop and Techmeme and Tweetmeme and Ustream and Qik and Kyte and blogs and Google Reader. The stream is winding its way throughout the Web and organizing it by nowness.

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The stream does not replace Web pages or search, for that matter, but it has the potential to completely transform them. Already, we are seeing Web pages adopt the stream as a new user-interface. Web pages are increasingly being designed as places to present the most relevant streams of information. And with streams of data spreading everywhere, search actually becomes more important than ever as a navigation tool. As Borthwick points out:

Traffic isn’t distributed evenly in this new world. All of a sudden crowds can show up on your site.
Traffic occurs in bursts, depending on what people are paying attention to at that second across a variety of services. Someone might notice an obscure blog post on Twitter, where it starts spreading, then it moves to FriendFeed and Facebook and desktop stream readers such as Tweetdeck or Seesmic desktop and before you know it, a hundred thousand people are reading that article. The stream creates a different form of syndication which cannot be licensed and cannot be controlled.
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- The problem, more than ever before, becomes one of information overload. How do you keep from drowning in the deluge? Borthwick suggests letting go of teh notion that you can ever master the stream, even just your own personal data stream of friend’s Tweets, updates, blog posts, Flickr photos, YouTube video finds and so on:

Is The Stream What Comes After the Web? | Twine

The Internet began evolving many decades before the Web emerged. And while today many people think of the Internet and the Web as one and the same, in fact they are different. The Web lives on top of the Internet's infrastructure much like software and documents live on top of an operating system on a computer.

And just as the Web once emerged on top of the Internet, now something new is emerging on top of the Web: I call this the Stream. The Stream is the next phase of the Internet's evolution. It's what comes after, or on top of, the Web we've all been building and using.

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Perhaps the best and most current example of the Stream is the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other microblogging tools. These services are visibly streamlike, their user-interfaces are literally streams streams of ideas, thinking and conversation. In reaction to microblogs we are also starting to see the birth of new tools to manage and interact with these streams, and to help understand, search, and follow the trends that are rippling across them. Just as the Web is not any one particular site or service, the Stream is not any one site or service -- it's the collective movement that is taking place across them all.
To meet the challenges and opportunities of the Stream a new ecosystem of services is rapidly emerging: stream publishers, stream syndication tools, stream aggregators, stream readers, stream filters, real-time stream search engines, and stream analytics engines, stream advertising networks, and stream portals are emerging rapidly. All of these new services are the beginning of the era of the Stream.

21 Apr 09

FT.com / Business education - Don’t guess, experiment

Don’t guess, experiment

By Hal Weitzman

Published: April 19 2009 20:19 | Last updated: April 19 2009 20:19

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Steven Levitt has an unusual admission to make for someone who has just finished teaching a class at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.
“I don’t know that much about business,” says the economics professor whose 2005 book, Freakonomics, made him an unexpected household name.
“Four years ago, I especially didn’t know much about business,” Prof Levitt says, “but, when Freakonomics came out, somebody decided to call it a business book – which it wasn’t meant to be – and, when you write a best-selling business book, you automatically become a business expert. That makes businesses want to talk to you – so, over the past four years, my colleagues and I have spent a lot of time talking to businesses.”
What’s so strange to an economist who walks into a business is that economists have a set of models that describe how businesses should optimally respond. But that’s not how businesses make decisions.
“That’s not to say the economists’ models are necessarily right. The business model can be sensible. It’s usually pretty seat-of-the-pants, built round a set of rules of thumb, but that makes sense because the world is so complex and they have to make so many decisions that they can’t optimise every one. But there are some decisions that are too important to make guesses on – and, in those cases, you either need to find data to help you or to generate your own data through experiments.”
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- That view led Prof Levitt to team up with John List, a fellow economist at the University of Chicago who has been conducting field experiments and teaching experimental techniques for 15 years. Prof List says that, after working with companies such as United Airlines and Chrysler, he reached the same conclusion.
  “The level of experimentation is abysmal,” says Prof List. “These firms do not take full advantage of feedback opportunities they’re presented with. After seeing example after example, we sat down and said, ‘We have to try to do something to stop this.’ One change we could make is to teach 75 to 100 of the best MBA students in the world how to think about feedback opportunities and how to think about designing their own field experiments to learn something that can make their company better.”
- The two economists decided to team up to develop a course for Booth students on “Using Experiments in Firms” – the first time either had taught at the business school.
- hey say data-gathering experiments at companies fall into two broad cate-gories: accidental experiments – for example, in which companies automatically generate data about how responsive customers are to changes in prices – and those that are deliberately designed and carried out, such as constructing an experimental framework to find out what optimal pricing levels would be.
  Although they clearly favour the latter, Prof Levitt says they also want students to recognise and analyse the accidental experiments their companies are already undertaking. “The nice thing about accidental experiments is that they’re free.
  “If you can figure out the answer without having to design and conduct an experiment, that’s wonderful. But a lot of everyday activities that businesses undertake could be transformed into experiments with almost no effort and almost no cost. The way businesses operate more and more lends itself to being able to run these real-world experiments. The lessons are enormous and the costs are often trivial.
- “We teach the students that there’s a hierarchy of decision making,” he says. “One thing you can do is what’s always been done. The second thing is you could just think about whether what you’re doing is the right thing. The third step in the hierarchy is you could take the data you have and try to analyse it. But the problem is that it’s often not the right data. The fourth rung would be an accidental experiment. The fifth would be to go out and generate the idealised data you would like to have.”
  Realistically, companies may not have the resources or the know-how to design experiments and analyse data, so when they look for information, they often turn to outside experts. Prof Levitt says he impressed on the students that they should be sceptical of such analysis.
  “Although it seems incredibly simple, even analysing the data trips people up and the way you design the experiment affects how much data you get out of it and how generalisable those data will be to other settings,” he says.
- analysis was correct.”
  Prof Levitt suggests that the lesson is just one of a number of fresh perspectives that he and Prof List have brought to the Booth MBA. “Even if our students don’t become experts at data-crunching, at least they’ve thought about how you can be misled with data, how to think about correlation and causality – issues that have tended not to be central to an MBA’s education.”
  Meghan Sheehan, who will join the Global Leaders Programme at Barclays Bank in London after she graduates from Booth this year, says she can imagine using the techniques she learnt to look at issues such as how the bank can discover the best way for its customers to keep in touch.
  “You could design experiments to test the relative virtues of telephone, internet and branch visits,” says Ms Sheehan. “How could you incentivise people to bank online rather than in a branch?
  “Do you use a negative incentive to make in-person banking more difficult or do you offer an added benefit?”
  These are exactly the sorts of questions Profs List and Levitt are trying to provoke. “We’re on a proselytising mission of bringing a different way of thinking,” says Prof Levitt.
  “We’re trying to bring about a revolution in business, so this is the first shot over the bows. This is an important battle to change the way businesses think.”
  Changing business thinking means placing data-gathering at the heart of business practice.
  “With the right data, you can improve your decisions,” says Jasper Platz, another Booth student.

31 Mar 09

Basics - The Biggest of Puzzles Brought Down to Size - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...31angi.html - Preview

Fermi estimation print discuss swarna SE

One excellent way to start honing such skills is with a few so-called Fermi problems, named for Enrico Fermi, the physicist who delighted in tossing out the little mental teasers to his colleagues whenever they needed a break from building the atomic bomb.
Importantly, you are not looking for an exact figure but rather a ballpark approximation, something that would be within an order of magnitude, or a factor of 10, of the correct answer. I
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- Dr. Adam and his colleague Lawrence Weinstein, a professor of physics, offer a wide and often amusing assortment of Fermi flexes in a book that just caught my eye, “Guesstimation: Solving the World’s Problems on the Back of a Cocktail Napkin” (Princeton University Press, 2008).
- O.K., 12,000 miles annually per car. And how many cars are we talking — one for every two people? That comes to 150 million cars, times 12,000 miles, bringing us to roughly, um, two trillion miles. We are embarking on a serious space junket here, way beyond our favorite plutoid Pluto, at some three billion miles from Earth. A dozen years at this rate, and we’ll make it to the nearest star.
- Among his favorite examples is to consider how much cropland we would need if we decided to fuel our cars entirely with ethanol from corn. There’s one piece of knowledge you need here, he acknowledged: that there are 30,000 calories in a gallon of gasoline. From there, you cruise. A car needs a gallon or two a day. You eat 2,000 to 3,000 calories a day. “Your car uses 10 to 20 times as much energy a day as you do,” he said. “If we’re going to fuel our cars with ethanol, we’ll need 20 times more farmland, so it could be this is a bad idea.”
- million seconds, for example, is about 10 days, while a billion seconds amounts to some 32 years. And a trillion seconds ago, in circa 30,000 B.C., t

29 Mar 09

Unboxed - How Crisis Shapes the Corporate Model - NYTimes.com

www.nytimes.com/...29unbox.html - Preview

print dnld discuss swarna business fluff

modern version of that kind of technology-aided shift in management practice and corporate organization could be in the offing, says John Hagel III, the co-director of the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation, a research arm of the consulting firm.
The sharp downturn, according to Mr. Hagel, will force companies to go beyond simple cost-cutting to take a hard look at the economics of their businesses. Most companies, he says, are actually bundles of three different businesses: infrastructure management, product and service development and commercialization, and customer relations
Manufacturing innovations and distribution patterns have been powerfully shaped by economic shifts. Japan’s just-in-time, lean manufacturing system, management experts note, was an adaptation to postwar poverty, a shortage of capital and scarce land for factories, while pro-market policies in China and India opened the door to globalization.