Four short links: 19 November 2009

Chumby One, Gorgeous IE Debugger, Freer Than Free, and Phone-a-Friend for Government IT

1. Chumby One (Bunnie Huang) -- new Chumby product released. In addition to being about half the price of the original chumby, the new device added some features: it has an FM radio, and it has support for a rechargeable lithium ion battery (although it’s not included with the device, you have to buy one and install it yourself). There’s also a knob so you can easily/quickly adjust the volume. But I don’t think those are really the significant new features. What really gets me excited about this one is that it’s much more hackable.
2. Deep Tracing of Internet Explorer (John Resig) -- very sexy deep inspection of Internet Explorer. Finally, something IE does better than Firefox (other than exploits). dynaTrace Ajax works by sticking low-level instrumentation into Internet Explorer when it launches, capturing any activity that occurs - and I mean virtually any activity that you can imagine. (via Simon Willison)
3. Less Than Free -- begins by talking about Google giving away turn-by-turn directions on Android, and then analyses Google's "less than free" business model: Additionally, because Google has created an open source version of Android, carriers believe they have an “out” if they part ways with Google in the future. I then asked my friend, “so why would they ever use the Google (non open source) license version.” Here was the big punch line - because Google will give you ad splits on search if you use that version! That’s right; Google will pay you to use their mobile OS. I like to call this the “less than free” business model. This is a remarkable card to play. Because of its dominance in search, Google has ad rates that blow away the competition. To compete at an equally “less than free” price point, Symbian or windows mobile would need to subsidize. Double ouch!!
4. Expert Labs -- a new independent initiative to help policy makers in our government take advantage of the expertise of their fellow citizens. How does it work? Simple: 1. We ask policy makers what questions they need answered to make better decisions. 2. We help the technology community create the tools that will get those answers. 3. We prompt the scientific & research communities to provide the answers that will make our country run better. New non-profit from Anil Dash.

Turning Predictions into Opportunities

The view from the eye of a recession isn't great. When companies are going bust, unemployment growing, and everyone's scouring their budgets for costs to cut, it can be hard to see opportunities. However, when Tim pointed to Stephen O'Grady's fine set of 2010 predictions I found myself popping with "oh, so naturally this will happen next ..." thoughts. Think of this as a glimpse of the blue sky after the economic funnelspout that's demolished our economy. (Continuations of the tornado metaphor with "being sucked into the cloud", or "trailer park economics", or "we're not in Kansas any more, Tantek" left as an exercise to the reader)

1. As every cloud provider creates their own "open API" (itself a fraught term), look to see the rise of brokers who can migrate you from one cloud to another. Deltacloud is an early free project here from RedHat, but there are many business opportunities waiting. It's possible that companies will pay for assurance (you've tested your migration tool, you know it works on corner cases), service vs product (they don't want tools to run, they want to pay you to install and maintain the tools accessible through a web console), or premium services so that you're a partner helping them get the most from the cloud and not simply a vendor.
2. We're a long way from sated in the world of collaboration tools. The current rage is mail learning, applying machine learning techniques to email so as to better understand social networks and prioritise incoming email messages and these are largely server-based solutions because it's so hard to get access to the desktop/web clients. Should Google Mail create an app store environment with hooks into the backend, the game could be on for consumer plays around email analytics, prediction, and simply smarter behaviour (why does my email client still not tell me when I say "see attached" yet don't have an attachment in the message?).
3. Beyond email, many interesting tools have sprung up around the Gov 2.0 space that have applicability within organisations. Yammer has done well to bring Twitter to large companies, but there are still opportunities around simple document markup and suggestion gathering and filtering. Solve a real problem and there's money waiting.
4. Google's low overhead management is made possible by its automated intranet and the visibility into projects from public code repositories, public smoke builds, and public status blogs. The opportunities to sell this into large companies looking to be "more like Google" are huge.
5. If Stephen's right that datasets are increasingly viewed as "serious, balance sheet-worthy assets" then the world is going to need some serious balance sheet-worthy help in valuing those assets.
6. Big data is being democratised, but there's a lot of unmet need in businesses around data warehousing. The typical solution is to build a data warehouse team around a product like Oracle, but I've heard plenty of business people grizzling about the result. They want answers, they don't want the headaches and lag that a data warehouse involve. Big Data (or Cloud Analytics or whatever) may be the opportunity to figure out a new minimum viable product for these folks, and offer it without the "data warehouse" baggage. This might be back end, might be UIs, might be visualisation, but all of these have a lot of room for improvement.
7. The proliferation of developer targets immediately makes me think of the early PC era. It makes sense to proliferate: let the most useful ("successful") bubble to the top and survive naturally. At this point in the evolution of the scaleout of massively multiplayer online programming languages, we don't know exactly what winning looks like: it's a big feedback loop between the people who build the programming languages and the people with problems to solve (there are always more of the latter than former) and each time we go around it we know more about what is and isn't useful in this brave new world of coding for other people's data centres. Opportunity? Join the mob and write your own programming language, or simply take your commercial opportunity for a spin around the many different languages out there and be the first in your niche to find a good fit between problem space and solution tool.
8. Stephen's throwaway comment "I’ve never subscribed to the idea that only what can be measured can be managed - open source, in particular, belies that claim" seems like a thrown gauntlet on open source analytics. In particular, I suspect there's a tools opportunity around the nebulous "community manager" role that every company seems to need. It's part CRM, it's part developer tool, it's part tech support, and part camp mother. Usefully quantify aspects of open source development and help companies that are doing it to know how they're doing and what they could do better.
9. Marketplaces are big in mobile, but I look to other areas as ripe for the picking. For example, if Google Apps are catching on in many companies then a plugin marketplace is a natural extension. It would build out the Apps suite faster than Google can, would enable the tight loop between demand and supply that will drive the product along, and make Google's offering very different from other parties. This is also true of Microsoft and others, but I feel like momentum is more with Google's product than the others. (A feature can push a leader further in front, but rarely helps a laggard leapfrog to the lead)
10. Every marketplace thus far has been flawed. Apple's famously annoys many developers and blocks huge categories of product (the "don't be better than we are" rule, which is hard to justify as being in the customer's interest), but don't forget Palm's impedance mismatch with jwz's open source code. I think the final chapter on how marketplaces work is far from written.
11. NoSQL tools remain in their infancy and so there are huge opportunities here. Identify a niche ("fast accurate and timely web metrics for decision-making"), a tool that can solve it (MongoDB), and build the deployment, scaling, administration, reporting tools so you can sell a complete package into that niche. Rinse, lather, repeat.

Four short links: 26 October 2009

Data Exploration, Evidence-Based Coding, API to the English Language, Dual Licensing

1. Toiling in the Data Mines -- Tom Armitage describes the process that Berg calls "material exploration". Programmers very rarely talk about what their work feels like to do, and that's a shame. Material explorations are something I've really only done since I've joined BERG, and both times have felt very similar - in that they were very, very different to writing production code for an understood product. They demand code to be used as a sculpting tool, rather than as an engineering material, and I wanted to explain the knock-on effects of that: not just in terms of what I do, and the kind of code that's appropriate for that, but also in terms of how I feel as I work on these explorations. Even if the section on the code itself feels foreign, I hope that the explanation of what it feels like is understandable.
2. Bits of Evidence -- Slides for a talk, "What we actually know about software development and why we believe it is true". (via Simon Willison)
3. Wordnik API -- definitions, frequencies, examples APIs. See the announcement from the Web 2.0 Summit.
4. The Peculiar Institution of Dual Licensing -- Brian Aker eloquently describes why he feels that dual licensing is anti-open source. Brian obviously has considerable experience informing this opinion--his years as Director of Technology for MySQL.

Four short links: 9 October 2009

Negative Karma, Wal-Mart TQI, Idiot Airlines, and Native iPhone Apps in Lua

1. Don't Display Negative Karma -- A fascinating insight for those building social software, whether for collective intelligence or otherwise: There can be no negative public karma-at least for establishing the trustworthiness of active users. A bad enough public score will simply lead to that user's abandoning the account and starting a new one, a process we call karma bankruptcy. This setup defeats the primary goal of karma-to publicly identify bad actors. Assuming that a karma starts at zero for a brand-new user that an application has no information about, it can never go below zero, since karma bankruptcy resets it. Just look at the record of eBay sellers with more than three red stars-you'll see that most haven't sold anything in months or years, either because the sellers quit or they're now doing business under different account names. (I love finding articles like this, thinking "they should write a book for us!" and then realizing "oh, they already are!") (via Hacker News)
2. Information Wants to be Free, Even At Wal-Mart (Pete Warden) -- an interesting piece on the value of opening up data, sharing information in negotiations so the best outcome can be reached. I'd argue that this trust argument is usually a cop-out, hiding worries about turf and control. In most cases it's clear that it's not in the other party's best interest to screw you over, and if it is, why are you dealing with them at all? The worst cases I saw were between departments within the same company, often we shared more information with competitors than the guys down the hall. The other reason I see people not sharing is shame: many companies (and individuals) work hard to present a facade of competence and quality that facts belie.
3. The Forest, The Trees, and the Bag Fees -- The bean counters can't track the revenue dilution of all these new fees. They don't want to. We miss the forest for the goddamed trees all the time. And the CEO acts as if fees are found cash. Meanwhile, no one asks why our overall revenue is plunging and we're losing money quarter after quarter. Everyone acts as if one thing has nothing to do with the other. A reminder to watch the important numbers, e.g. cash in bank, profit, customer satisfaction. (via Bryan O'Sullivan)
4. Native iPhone Apps Written in Lua -- open source port of Lua with Cocoa bindings for the iPhone. This is a tutorial showing you how to install and get past Hello, World. Apple have already approved one app written using it.

Four short links: 24 September 2009

Historic Cartography, MySQL Futures, Timewarping GDB, Open Source Werewolves

1. Milestones in the History of Thematic Cartography -- This resource provides a comprehensive view of the history of cartography, with examples of maps created throughout the ages and background information about the contexts within which those maps, visualizations and map making technologies were created. Explore each time period, click on the images and stories found throughout each time line, and read more about the history of creating thematic maps as a means of visualizing data. (via Titine on Delicious)
2. Interview with Larry Ellison (Infoworld) -- Asked about MySQL, "No, we're not going to spin it off," even if asked to by the EU, Ellison said. Lots of detail and interesting tidbits in this interview. (via timoreilly on Twitter)
3. GDB and Reverse Debugging -- GDB version 7.0 (due September 2009) will be the first public release of gdb to support reverse debugging (the ability to make the program being debugged step and continue in reverse). (via Hacker News)
4. A New Self-Definition for FOSS -- There was this clamour in the past to get companies to open source their products. This has stopped, because all the software that got open source sucked. It’s just not very interesting to have a closed source program get open sourced. It doesn’t help anyone, because the way closed source software is created in a very different way than open source software. The result is a software base that just does not engage people in a way to make it a valid piece of software for further development. I don't agree entirely with this quoted piece, but there's a lot to what he says. Open source is not a silver bullet--hell, most people don't even know what the werewolf is. Open sourcing doesn't magically make developers appear, open sourcing doesn't magically make a market appear. Your closed source problems still exist after you open source because it's. not. about. you. It's about the users and their comfort, abilities, and freedoms. (via Simon Willison)

Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It

Speculation about the demise of the news business and advice about what they should do about it is everywhere. It makes for great, self-congratulatory sport but it won’t help the news industry.

Why?

Because the news industry doesn’t suffer from a shortage of ideas or possible revenue models, it suffers from a different but more acute malady: being an institution during a time of disruptive change.

While we have all been busy telling the newspaper institution what they should do differently we have missed one big point: Institutions are structured to precisely NOT do much of anything different.

The number one thing that ails newspapers? 70% of all costs lie in physical distribution and printing while readership and revenues have dramatically moved away from paper. This leads to a simple-minded but commonsense conclusion (and my superfluous piece of advice): maximize your online presence, build your online community, concentrate on journalistic talent, and jettison all costs associated with print; stop the presses.

Even if I you think I am wrong, just play along with me for a moment and, for the purpose of this exercise, assume I am right. If you can’t go that far substitute your own radical therapy (you know you have one!) in place of mine and answer the next question. Which major newspaper could have gone to its board anytime before 2009 and successfully proposed such a radical solution? The answer if you have ever worked in a large, “institutionalized” organization is zero. The scenario is so horrific, involves pains so great, outcomes so unknown and certain near-term revenue loss such that no institutional body would be capable of acting on it - much less restructuring around so medieval a remedy.

The failure of newspapers is not a failure of imagination or foresight nor is it a failure of individuals. This kind of failure is the hallmark of all institutions in the face of tectonic disruption. Institutions are a set of agreements that perpetuate a social order beyond individual intention or tenure. Changing those agreements is costly and time-consuming. So when the rate of change accelerates beyond the institution’s adaptive capacity - extinction follows.

The question is not “what should newspapers do?” but “how can a large institution effectively organize in response to disruptive change?” Taken thus, it is not only the fundamental question to ask of newspapers - but to ask of ourselves in relation to a host of big-ticket game-changers such as peak oil, environmental collapse and climate change that simultaneously require and defy our capacity for institutional response.

The stakes are much bigger than news. Let’s put our mind to that question instead of making more to-do lists. From the Radar audience I would like to ask for historical examples of institutions that have effectively responded to disruption? What are the lessons that we can draw from them?

Four short links: 27 August 2009

Copycrime, Die Music Industry Die, Open Government Data, Augmented Reality

1. Second Degree Murder and Six Other Crimes Cheaper Than Pirating Music -- I'm outraged that the Obama administration is supporting the RIAA on the case against Jammie Thomas, a single mother of four who has to pay them $1.92 million for downloading songs. That's more expensive than murder and six other crimes... (via Br3nda)
2. Bill Drummond Talk (MP3) -- cofounder of the KLF gives 130 years of music industry history and explains why music's future might depend on not recording it. (via Br3nda)
3. NZ Government Recommends CC-BY -- NZ all-of-Government licensing framework recommends CC. So far as copyright works are concerned, NZGOAL proposes that agencies apply the most liberal of the New Zealand Creative Commons law licences to those of their copyright works that are appropriate for release, unless there is a restriction which would prevent this. The most liberal Creative Commons licence is the Attribution (BY) licence. So far as non-copyright information is concerned, NZGOAL recommends the use of clear “no-known rights” statements, to provide certainty for people wishing to re-use that information..
4. Augmented Reality: 5 Barriers to a Web That's Everywhere (ReadWriteWeb) -- great post with five areas that need to be addressed before we can move from "wow" to commonplace. Interoperability: Right now you cannot see information from the Wikitude AR environment if you're looking through the Layar AR browser. This could be the coming of a new browser war just like that of the 1990s. It may not be obvious and it may not even be true that users have a right to view any layer of Augmented Reality through any Augmented Reality browser. Interoperability, standards and openness have been what has let the Web scale and flourish beyond the suffocating walled gardens of its early days. The same is true of telephones, railroads and countless other networked technologies. Logically then, a lack of interoperability between AR environments would be a tragedy of the same type as if the web had remained defined by the islands of AOL and Compuserve or Internet Explorer, forever. (A lack of data portability when it comes to Augmented Reality could cause substantial psychological distress!)

Four short links: 19 August 2009

Survivor Bias, Algorithmic Trading, S3 Tools, DIY GSM

1. Business Advice Plagued by Survivor Bias -- "Burying the other evidence: [...] Doesn't most business advice suffer from this fallacy? Harvard Business School's famous case studies include only success stories. To paraphrase Peter, what if twenty other coffee shops had the same ideas, same product, and same dedication as Starbucks, but failed? How does that affect what we can learn from Starbucks's success? (via Hacker News)
2. A Bestiary of Algorithmic Trading Strategies -- insight into the algorithms used by quant traders. Statistical arbitrageurs are a sort of squishy area, similar to arbs, but distinct from them. They find “pieces” of securities which are theoretically equivalent. For example, they may notice a drift between prices of oil companies which should revert to a mean value. This mean reversion should happen if the drift doesn’t have anything to do with actual corporate differences, like one company’s wells catching on fire. What you’re doing here is buying and selling the idea of an oil company, or in other words, a sort of oil company market spread risk. You’re assuming these two companies are statistically the same, and so they’ll revert to some kind of mean when one of the prices move. (via Hacker News)
3. s3cmd -- commandline tool for moving files into and out of Amazon S3.
4. DIY GSM Network -- wow. How to build your own GSM network. Bit by bit, the telcos are getting pressured by the hobbyists. This barbarian is looking forward to the day when the walled gardens are sacked. (via Slashdot)

Four short links: 5 August 2009

Rebooting Britain, Revealing Errors, Reproducing Generators, Netflix Culture

1. Reboot Britain Video Archive -- video from the talks at Reboot Britain are online. The event also produced a essay set (PDF), CC-licensed. (via Paul Reynolds)
2. Revealing Errors -- Benjamin Mako Hill blog using computer errors as starting points for understanding how computers control the world around us. (via Dan Meyer)
3. New Microbe Strain Makes More Electricity, Faster -- University of Amherst researchers made current-generating bacteria work harder to live, and in five months had a strain that made an 8x larger current.
4. Netflix Culture -- readable slide deck which talks about the Netflix company culture. It's hard to read it and not nod in full agreement. (via joshua on Delicious)

Four short links: 24 July 2009

Copytweet, MacMarket iShare, Open Source Under Fire, and OLPC War Stories

1. Are Tweets Copyright-Protected (WIPO) -- According to an Internet posting on blogherald.com by Jonathan Bailey, every time a new communication technology emerges, it shifts the copyright landscape, and new copyright issues that do not fit existing intellectual property (IP) standards arise. With Twitter, for example, while its terms of service clearly state that tweeters own anything they post on the service, the 140-character limit to a Twitter post makes it almost impossible for the work to reach the level of creativity required for copyright protection. In the same vein, titles or short phrases usually cannot be protected since their length contributes to their lack of originality, as defined by copyright law. A roundup of the copyright issues raised by Twitter, which is a little like a roundup of the climate issues raised by ants.
2. Apple Has 90% Revenue Share Of >$1000 Computers (Ars Technica) -- wow. (via publicaddress on Twitter)
3. Open Source on the Battlefield -- Fortunately, SFC Stadtler knew how to use open source software. Using found hardware, like a laptop pulled from the trash, and wires pulled from collapsed buildings, he was able to establish a wireless network between the towers and the home base. He was able to install freely available voice-over-ip software on this recycled hardware, which turned the computer into a wireless telephone. The soldiers were now able to communicate with each other and the home base. At no cost. (via Jim Stogdill)
4. Sweet Nonsense Omelet (Ivan Krstić) -- Horror stories from the inside about the shoddy suppliers of OLPC hardware. Thinking back, there’s a hardware incident I remember particularly fondly: one of our vendors sent us a kernel driver patch which enhanced support for their component in our machine. They chose to implement the enhancement by setting up a hole which allowed any unprivileged user to take over the kernel, prompting our kernel guy to send a private e-mail to the OLPC tech team demanding that, in the future, we avoid buying hardware from companies whose programmers are, direct quote, “crack-smoking hobos”.

Four short links: 22 July 2009

Augmented Reality, A/B Psych, Open Source Heartbeat, Launchpad Launches

1. ARtisan -- AR Flash library, the fastest and easiest way from point A to point B in browser based augmented reality. Love the demos on the home page. (via and bjepson)
2. How to Increase Sign-ups By 200% -- A/B testing from 37Signals showed that "See Plans and Pricing" got twice the clickthroughs of "Free Trial!" and variations thereon. (via kathysierra on Twitter)
3. Open Source Heart Monitor, Possible Blood Sugar Level Detector -- another step forward in sensor networks and personal data: I’ve set up a quick prototype of a device that will monitor my heart rate while I sleep. It includes a BUGbase + BUGvonHippel module (from my company Bug Labs). I’m also using a custom module we put together that uses a Polar radio receiver (from Sparkfun) and a Polar strap that I wear around my chest. Lastly, we wrote a simple program that runs on the BUG to log the data. (via chr1a on Twitter)
4. Launchpad Opensourced -- Canonical's code hosting and collaboration platform that was heavily lusted after in the open souce world, finally open sourced and in its entirety. GNU Affero license.

Four short links: 16 July 2009

Transparency Camp, Wasted Time, Advertising Hypocrisy, Maker Skills

1. Transparency Camp West -- a few more slots left for Google-hosted Aug 8 and 9 Bar Camp on open government.
2. Meeting Ticker -- count the cost of a meeting in real time, just enter the number of people, the time it started, and the average salary. (via make on Twitter)
3. More Creative Shops Are Commercializing Their Own Product Lines -- Tellingly, ad companies don't run ads for their products. "[W]e haven't bought a single ad in support of any of our brands. Not one. Why would we? You can do so much if you know what you're doing with product placement, sponsorship, digital PR. It's that whole "I haven't got any money, so I'll have to think." It makes you much better at grinding out media without paying. (via someone on Twitter, apologies for forgetting whom)
4. 18 Essential Skills for a Maker -- 13. Strip, splice, and terminate wire- Trickier than it sounds. You should be able to splice wire using a crimp splice, a wire nut, and heat shrink + solder (note: electrical tape is NOT on that list). You should know how to use a wire stripper to strip stranded wire without cutting more than one or two strands. You should be able to attach a wire to your project in such a way that it will still be attached in two weeks, two months, or two years. (via Makezine)

Four short links: 26 June 2009

Biz Numbers, Progress, Curse of the Mummy Tweets, and Crime Viz

1. Size vs Growth vs Acceleration (Rowan Simpson) -- you can tell how well a company is doing by the basis on which they report their progress.
2. Engineers Are The Best Deal, So Stock Up On Them (TechCrunch) -- Software engineers today are about 200-400% more productive than software engineers were 10 years ago because of open source software, better programming tools, common libraries, easier access to information, better education, and other factors. This means that one engineer today can do what 3-5 people did in 1999! (via Simon Willison)
3. Livetweeting a Mummy CT Scan -- this is why I love my Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans membership--I know that I'm supporting the museum with the coolest online outreach.
4. 20 Visualizations to Understand Crime (Flowing Data) -- thoughtful analyis of a set of visualizations of crime statistics.

Four short links: 25 June 2009

Twitter Bucks, Nike Numbers, Map Apps, and Digi Shiz

1. How an Indie Musician Can Make $19,000 in 10 Hours Using Twitter -- as Zoe Keating pointed out: "cash made by @amandapalmer in one month on Twitter = $19,000; cash made by @amandapalmer from 30,000 record sales = $0".
2. The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics (Wired) -- And not only can we collect that data, we can analyze it as well, looking for patterns, information that might help us change both the quality and the length of our lives. We can live longer and better by applying, on a personal scale, the same quantitative mindset that powers Google and medical research. Call it Living by Numbers—the ability to gather and analyze data about yourself, setting up a feedback loop that we can use to upgrade our lives, from better health to better habits to better performance. Collective intelligence + sensor networks can = happiness. (Mathematics gets by with just an "equals" operator. The rest of us need a "can equal" operator ...)
3. Old Map App -- iPhone app with old maps. Reminds me of David Rumsey's keynote at OSCON 2004.
4. Make It Digital -- Digital NZ site that helps organisations wanting to produce digital content, by offering them guidance on formats, metadata, and other issues they'll have to tackle. Includes a voting system to promote the (NZ) content you want to have digitised.

Four short links: 10 June 2009

App Wall, Negroponte Switch, Data Exploration, Inadequate Innovation

1. Apple's Cool Matrix-Style App Wall (TechCrunch) -- a huge collection of icons for many of the apps available in the App Store, arranged by color. Apparently, when someone purchased one, that app’s icon would pulsate. An App Store version of Google's search globe. Information visualization makes activities meaningful, beautiful, and useful, but not necessarily all at the same time. (via dubdotdash on Twitter)
2. The New Negroponte Switch -- "Designing things that think they are services, and services that think they are things". Matt Jones presentation gushing with great ideas for the "Web Meets World" change. I love the evolving printed map they made for the British Council at Salone di Mobile. A five course meal with port and insulin shots for thought.
3. Odesi -- web-based data exploration, extraction, and analysis tool. (via scilib on Twitter)
4. The Failed Promise of Innovation (Business Week) -- I have a post building up inside me about how irritatingly of the mark this article is. Until that post erupts, however, you'll have to just read it yourself and form your own view of its flaws. But what if the conventional wisdom is wrong? What if outside of a few high-profile areas, the past decade has seen far too few commercial innovations that can transform lives and move the economy forward? What if, rather than being an era of rapid innovation, this has been an era of innovation interrupted? And if that's true, is there any reason to expect the next decade to be any better?

Four short links: 9 June 2009

Biological Radio, Laggy Smart Grids, API Moneys, and Pubsub Server

1. Drawing Inspiration From Nature To Build A Better Radio -- based on the design of the cochlear, this MIT-built RF chip is faster than others out there, and consumes 1/100th the power. Biomimicry and UWB radio are on our radar.
2. Why the Smart Grid Won’t Have the Innovations of the Internet Any Time Soon -- While it’s significant that utilities are starting to build out smart grid infrastructure, utilities are largely opting for networks that provide connections that are far from real time, and this could stifle the desired innovation. [...] smart meter data that is pushed to Google’s PowerMeter energy tool has to make its way back to the utility before it can be sent to Google. That means that even for Google’s energy tool, there can be both a significant delay before information reaches consumers, and significant gaps in energy data details. These delays and gaps can undercut the premise of how smart meter technologies will empower consumers to make decisions about their energy use based on real-time costs. Smart grids (houses and devices able to take use of instantaneous pricing changes) have the potential to help us with our energy obesity problem, but the architecture must be right.
3. API Value Creation, Not Monetization -- On the side of the unexpected but interesting outcomes, Kevin said they have seen a flurry of internally developed business applications. In the past many valuable, internal-facing projects were turned down because the programs had to meet strict top line to bottom line ratios. With the availability to data and services, many teams within the company now have access to things they didn’t in the past, and project costs have been minimized. Throughout the company, consumers of the API have been able to launch successful projects that have created additional revenue and have reduced the overall development costs for new projects. Some solid numbers and names to help convince businesses to offer APIs, though the battle is still much harder than it should be.
4. Watercoolr -- a pubsub server for your apps. A channel is a list of URLs to be notified whenever a message is posted to that channel. Clever little piece of infrastructure for web apps, embodying the Unix philosophy of small tools that each do one thing very well. (via straup on Delicious)

The Myth of Macroinnovation

An idea is making the rounds and appearing in articles like this New York Times piece, and it goes roughly thus: the age of the small inventor is over because to work on stuff that matters requires the largescale coordination of people and materiel that only governments and large corporations can provide. This notion that we're entering a Golden Age of Macroinnovation is bunkum, I'm happy to report.

Scale matters, scale has always mattered, but scaling is not innovating. It's true that there are many opportunities for businesses and governments to do big things. That's always true—all my friends who worked at Yahoo! and Microsoft said one of the attractions was the ability to write code that would be used by hundreds of millions of people. However, the article basically says, "large institutions are tackling large problems." That's wonderful news, much better than large institutions ignoring large problems, but has nothing to do with innovation.

Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps scaling is a form of innovation. Innovation is characterised by disruption and the unknown. Think of those governments and large corporations and ask yourself: are these the birthplaces of radical thinking, new ways of getting things done, and risk-taking leaps into the unknown? Of course not. Governments are the most risk-averse institutions in the world, more so than medicine where lives hang in the balance—doctors at least listen to evidence, whereas the definition of bureaucracy is "we follow the rules regardless of reality". Governments exist to preserve the status quo that elected them, not disrupt it.

Don't go hoping for a change in government's risk aversion any time soon. Every penny is spent knowing that to fail means to be vilified for "squandering public money". Doing something new risks failure. Like a puppy that has been harshly house-broken, Government associates failure with pain and so responds with fear, hostility, and concealment. With that mindset you can never learn from failure, and so unless you luckily get it right first time you'll find your Government road to delivering something new to be harsh, difficult, and largely untrodden.

Do you think things are different now? Consider Obama's billions on health record rollout. KP have a model EHR system, "KP HealthConnect". It cost $4B and took five years to buy and roll it out. This is KP's second go at it: in 2002 they wrote off $770M they'd spent with IBM trying to build their own EHR system. Do you think that the Obama Administration will get a second chance if his first attempt at EHRs loses $770M?

Big businesses aren't much different: a large company is a small Government that has more flexibility on HR. The profit focus of a business is a help and a hindrance as Innovator's Dilemma so clearly showed. The NY Times piece quotes Clayton Christensen saying, "The good news is that, once they recognize the benefits of disruptive thinking, the big companies have all the resources necessary to induce change.”

My experience with large companies and governments shows me that it is not a simple or trivial matter to recognize the benefits or marshal the resources. A common failure mode is where the leadership say they want disruption and innovation, the grass roots want it, but the middle management tiers aren't incentivised to deliver it because their bonuses are tied to metrics on existing product lines. Disruption eats into existing businesses. "Maximizing Shareholder Value" is a wonderful focusing device but, without an explicit timeframe for that value, innovation risks shareholder lawsuits for sabotaging profitability.

In his delicious.com comment on the NY Times piece, Michal Migurski observed, "New New Deal is at heart a massive, all-fronts realignment—where's the role for the small and the nimble in this universe?". It is premature to declare Mission Accomplished for reinvention of Government (see the Government 1.5 meme). At its heart, this is an attempt to get Government to use the Web 2.0 tools we built in the last decade ... tools that were largely the product of one or two people. I don't see bureaucrats using decade-old tools as an "innovation" that the small and nimble have to worry about.

I love that governments, NGOs, businesses, and citizens are going to be tackling large and meaningful problems with the aid of the tools and techniques developed by researchers, entrepreneurs, and hackers around the world. But to mistake using those techniques for inventing them is to ignore that great lesson of Margaret Mead: "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

Four short links: 19 May 2009

Recession Map, Gaming Psychology, Charging For Unwanted Content, and Two Great Projects

1. Economic Stress Map Outlines Recession's Stories (AP) -- The Stress Index synthesizes three complex sets of ever-evolving data. By factoring in monthly numbers for foreclosure, bankruptcy and most painfully unemployment, the AP has assembled a numeral that reflects the comparative pain each American county is feeling during these dark economic days. Fascinating view of the country, and I wish I had one for New Zealand.
2. Handed Keys to Kingdom, Gamers Race to Bottom (Wired) -- Free to play the game as they like, players frequently make choices that ruin the fun. It’s an irony that can prove death to game publishers: Far from loving their liberty, players seem to quickly bore of the “ideal” games they’ve created for themselves and quit early. Not only a lesson for creators of user-generated content sites, but also for students of human nature: if you provide a number, some people will act to maximize that number come what may. See also friend counts on social networks. (via jasonwryan on Twitter)
3. San Jose Mercury News to Charge For Online Content -- congratulations to the SJMN for trying something, my regrets that it's this. This business model didn't fail in 1998 because there weren't enough people on the Internet, it failed for the same reason it will fail now: you have a generic product and a cheaper substitute will win.
4. Two Groundbreaking Open Source Projects -- two open source projects that are developing software in very different ways (one with centralised authority, one more distributed), large (60k and 200k+ LOC), in some cases teaching people to code from scratch, with a wonderful vibe and solid outputs. I was stunned and delighted at the OTW’s process for choosing a programming language for the Archive. In the Livejournal post, Python vs Ruby deathmatch!, they asked non-programmers to read up on either language and then write a short “Choose your own adventure” program. {The trick is that we would like you to try writing this program with no help from any programmers or coders. DO feel free to help each other out in the comments, ask your flist for help (as long as you say “no coders answer!”), or to Google for other help or ideas-in fact, if you find a different tutorial or book out there which you think is better than the ones below, we really want to hear about it.} There were 74 comments in reply, and the results — 150 volunteers on the project, many of whom had never programmed before — speak for themselves. It makes me realize how much of the macho meritocracy "it's just about how GOOD YOU ARE" individual-excellence cocks-out culture in programming in general and open source in particular isn't about what's necessary to make good programs and good programmers, it's what's necessary to make great egos feel good about themselves.

Four short links: 14 May 2009

Open Source Ebook Reader, Libraries and Ebooks, Life Lessons, and Government Licenses

1. Open Library Book Reader -- the page-turning book reader software that the Internet Archive uses is open source. One of the reasons library scanning programs are ineffective is that they try to build new viewing software for each scan-a-bundle-of-books project they get funding for.
2. Should Libraries Have eBooks? -- blog post from an electronic publisher made nervous by the potential for libraries to lend unlimited "copies" of an electronic work simultaneously. He suggests turning libraries into bookstores, compensating publishers for each loan (interestingly, some of the first circulating libraries were established by publishers and booksellers precisely to have a rental trade). I'm wary of the effort to profit from every use of a work, though. I'd rather see libraries limit simultaneous access to in-copyright materials if there's no negotiated license opening access to more. Unlike the author, I don't see this as a situation that justifies DRM, whose poison extends past the term of copyright. (via Paul Reynolds)
3. Lessons Learned from Previous Employment (Adam Shand) -- great summary of what he learned in the different jobs he's had over the years. Sample:
   • More than any other single thing, being successful at something means not giving up.
   • Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer.
   • In a volunteer based non-profit people don't have the shared goal of making money. Instead every single person has their own personal agenda to pursue.
   • Unfortunately "dreaming big" is more fun and less work than "doing big".
4. Flickr Creates New License for White House Photos (Wired) -- photos from the White House photographer were originally CC-licensed (yay, a step forward) but when it was pointed out that as government-produced information those photos weren't allowed to be copyright, the White House relicensed as "United States Government Work". Flickr had to add the category, which differs from "No Known Copyright", and it's something that all sharing sites will need to consider if they are going to offer their service to the Government.

Four short links: 5 May 2009

Spies, Community, International Success, and DNA Origami

1. Supermap -- The CIA's venture capital arm, In-Q-Tel, is paying an undisclosed sum to California-based Geosemble Technologies to develop an intelligence version of the "geospatial data integration and layering technology" that the company developed for use by urban planners, real estate investors and market analysts. The technology combines overhead imagery, maps and heavy-duty data mining to create a map-based intelligence capability reminiscent of the Pentagon's former Total Information Awareness program. When the project is done - and In-Q-Tel won't say how soon that might be - CIA agents will be able to merge aerial images and electronic maps on a computer screen. Then they will be able to click on the building or other item of interest and all manner of information will pop up: who the tenants are, phone numbers, company records, links to company and organization Web sites, news reports related to the tenants or incidents at the address, property records, tax data and more. I love that Cheap Suit Susan, your local real estate agent, had the technology before the CIA. It's like learning that Lionel Hutz has a missile defense system to stop his house being TPed.
2. 7 Harsh Truths About Running Communities -- As the leader of your community, your personality sets the tone. As a result if the community behaves in ways you do not want, then you only have yourself to blame. I have seen many bloggers write about the negative comments they get on their posts. In most cases this is due to the tone they themselves strike in their writing. Although there are exceptions I believe that users will respond in the same voice you yourself set. If you are irreverent, then so will your users be. If you are rude, expect rude responses. "Social software" is an anachronism-software that doesn't let users interact has become antisocial software. Every web creator needs to know what successful communities have in common. (via Julie Starr)
3. Lingopal is Big in Japan (Lance Wiggs) -- Turns out we are biggest in Japan. We have done no marketing there - it is all organic growth as our google ad writing and PR ability is not so good in Japanese. More anecdata for my belief that, while chance favours the prepared mind (as Louis Pasteur said), we routinely use post-hoc rationalisation to explain why it was inevitable that this or that lucky SOB hit it big.
4. DNA Origami Seeds: Bottom-Up Methods for Molecular Self-Assembly (US News) -- Winfree's coworker at Caltech, Paul W. K. Rothemund, pioneered the seed-DNA technology that allows tiny "DNA origami" structures to self-assemble into nearly arbitrary shapes (such as a smiley face and a map of the Western Hemisphere). The researchers designed several different versions of a DNA origami rectangle, 95 by 75 nanometers, which served as the seeds for the growth of different types of ribbon-like DNA crystals. The seeds were combined in a test tube with other bits of DNA, called "tiles," heated, and then cooled slowly. At the lower temperature, the tiles start to stick to each other and to the origami. In this way, the DNA ribbons self-assemble, but only into forms such as ribbons with particular widths and ribbons with stripe patterns prescribed by the original seed.