Huffington, Newsom, and Trippi talk politics in a Web 2.0 world

by Sara Winge | @sarawinge | comments: 3

"Were it not for the Internet, Barack Obama would not be President," declared Arianna Huffington from the stage at Web 2.0 Summit, the day after the election. In "The Web and Politics" session, moderator John Heileman explores the new world of running for office--and governing once you win--with Huffington, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, and veteran politico Joe Trippi.

Politicians and pundits love to talk, and in this case, they're good at it. A few bon mots and surprising stats to whet your appetite:

* Trippi: People watched 14.5 million hours of the official video created by Obama campaign (not including supporters' videos). Obama would have had to spend $47 million dollars to buy those eyeballs on TV. Plus, YouTube viewers went there on purpose, to watch Obama's videos--they weren't interrupted in the middle of their football game.

* Huffington: "The Internet has killed Karl Rove politics." (You'll have to watch the video to catch her funniest line. Hint: it has an Alaska connection).

* Newsom: "I have to watch myself sing "I Left My Heart in San Francisco" on YouTube, and it can't go away. I am desperate to get it to go away....we're in a reality TV series now, in politics, 24/7."

[NOTE: Web 2.0 summit videos are available on YouTube.]

Online Communities: The Tribalization of Business

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 2

Or, you may download the file.



Recently I spoke with Francois Gossieaux of Beeline Labs about the role of online communities in the enterprise. Francois has been evangelizing the learning gained from his recent study “The Tribalization of Business” (see here for the Slideshare presentation).



The interview is broken into three parts. Francois is a great storyteller, bringing case studies in to support nearly every point. Here are a few insights I took away from our conversation:
Community for community’s sake: most businesses begin planning a community with traditional objectives (lower support costs, drive innovation, increase customer loyalty etc.). On the Social Web this is the equivalent of entering a personal relationship with an ulterior motive (which never works out quite right). Businesses should begin with the question, “how can I satisfy the needs of this community?”- and then follow the community’s lead. Be open to the unexpected.

In my experience this is one of the hardest things for companies to get behind and relegates this kind of "enlightened" community effort to either top-level leadership or skunk works development. Middle management is typically the most reluctant to deviate from standard practice and place a bet on community for the community’s sake.

Communities require a social framework to thrive - most companies have a mindset that reflects the legal, contractual and hierarchical underpinnings of their business and carry these behaviors with them into the community. This informs their planning, measurement and how they encourage contribution. These incentives have little sway on the Social Web where the mindset is social and trust, reputation and relationship are big drivers of contribution. As Francois says, “The most successful communities occur when you tap into that social framework”

Consider stories as a success metric: While there is a fair amount in this interview about measurement - this was my favorite: A great anectdote about how one company views the stories that emerge from their community as a key metric of success. Great stories are inherently viral and can have a profound impact on decision making in an organization.

Think Bigger: Most large companies are satisfied to have small communities; basically bringing a focus group online. Doing so misses the potential of the online community to transform your business. Consider how Intuit is now embedding live community directly into their application - allowing users to seek help and get questions answered directly.

Transformative communities blur the lines between company and customer and portend a future where retail ecommerce sites go well beyond ratings and reviews and provide problem solving, shopping mentors, product development and other services directly from the community. Where internet sites are co-evolved (from interface to feature-sets to codebase) in cooperation with community, where complex applications (desktop and cloud-based) meld standard functions with community functions. Communities are certainly helpful in providing feedback on customer behavior but that is just one small part of the story.

Shai Agassi on Electric Cars

by Ben Lorica | @dliman | comments: 11

One of my favorite sessions at the recent Web 2.0 summit was Tim's half-hour conversation with Shai Agassi, the CEO of Better Place. Better Place aims to make electric cars widespread ("the electric car as the de facto standard") by addressing major issues that have held back electric vehicles: affordability and convenience.

In a relaxed conversation with Tim, Shai described an electric car industry that resembles the mobile phone business. Just as telecom companies sell mobile handsets at a discount if one is willing to commit to a contract, their subscription-based model will allow consumers to purchase an electric car at the fraction of the normal price. Car owners will pay additional fees based on the amount of miles they drive and the type of car they choose to own. To support their subscribers, Better Place will also build extensive networks of charging spots and battery exchange stations. They will build the first "Electric Recharge Grids" in Israel and Denmark.

Prior to starting Better Place, Shai was a president at software vendor SAP. The interview briefly touches on IT and enterprise computing.

[NOTE: Web 2.0 summit videos are available on YouTube.]

Technology, Politics and Democracy

by Joshua-Michéle Ross | @jmichele | comments: 3

Or, you may download the file.


Recently I spoke with Jascha Franklin-Hodge, CTO and co-founder of Blue State Digital about how technology is affecting politics and democracy in the U.S.

Blue State Digital was born out of Jascha's experience helping Howard Dean’s seminal run for the White House in ’04. and is the technology and strategic services company powering Barack Obama (and many other Democratic leaders and social justice causes like Save Darfur and We Can Solve It).

These videos (there are three total) are timely in light of the staggering September figures from the Obama campaign:

• 630,000 new donors (bringing total donors to 3.1 million)
• 150 million dollars raised
• Average contribution: $86

Here are a few observations I took away from our conversation:
Online U.S. political communities will morph from a campaign fundraising role to a governing role. Regardless of whether Obama or McCain wins in November, every 2012 political campaign, even the laggards, will be as sophisticated as Obama is today- and any campaign with that much momentum won’t be able to stop community participation at the White House door or the Capitol steps (“thanks for all the money and support, I‘ll see you in four years”). Online communities will follow politicians into their governing roles. This summer when MyBarackObama experienced the FISA revolt within his own community this became clear. This has far more transformative potential than the fundraising juggernaut we are seeing now. Powerful communities may come to dominate the agenda of incumbent politicians providing feedback, direction and policy input.

(continue reading)

Live Stream of MSR's Social Computing Symposium

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 2

Microsoft Research is holding their annual Social Computing Symposium for the next two days. During the event their will be a number of speakers and discussion groups. The goal of the event is to bring together people from industry and academia. The four areas that are being discussed this year are Location (Monday morning), Boundaries (Monday afternoon), Play (Tuesday morning), and Social Objects (Tuesday afternoon). I've embedded the Live Stream above.

Here are the speakers:

Location (Monday morning, 10:30 - 11:30 AM)

• Brady Forrest
• Tom Carden (Stamen)
• Felix Peterson (Plazes/Nokia)
• Mary Hodder (Apisphere)
• Tom Coates (Yahoo! Fire Eagle)

Boundaries/Context (Monday afternoon, 1:30 -2:30 PM)

• Liz Lawley (RIT)
• Lili Cheng (MSR)
• Molly Steenson (Princeton)
• Kevin Marks (Google)

Play (Tuesday Morning, 10:30 - 11:30 AM)

• Elan Lee (Fourth Wall Studios)
• Jesse Alexander (Heroes/NBC)
• Paolo Malabuyo (Microsoft)
• Merci Victoria Grace (GameLayers)

Social Objects (Tuesday afternoon, 1:30 -2:30 PM)

• Jyri Engestrom (Google)
• Matt Webb (Schulze & Webb)
• Kati London (Botanicalls)
• Rob Faludi (ITP)

Updated: Corrected some speakers

Ignite Boston 4 -- Videos Uploaded

by Mike Hendrickson | @mikehatora | comments: 0

Ignite Boston 4 was an interesting and insightful event. We have many things to take away as we plan our next event for January. One of the themes, which was re-crystalized in my mind, was to do work on things that matter - things of substance and World importance! Following that line of thinking, Voting is one of those things that we cannot take for granted and then complain when a new administration gets into office and enacts policies that affect us all. Join us all on trying to 'get the vote out' by talking to folks about our historical vote coming soon. Regardless of your affiliation, vote and get people to vote.

(continue reading)

Breaking Down What's Happening on the Social Web

by David Recordon | @daveman692 | comments: 2

The past few weeks, John McCrea, Joseph Smarr, and I have been shooting a 15 minute video podcast called TheSocialWeb.tv. Each week we try to break down what's happened in the Social Web in a way that is understandable so you don't have to be living and breathing this stuff.

This week we discuss Meebo's announcement of Community Instant Messaging since it continues the trend of making the entire web more social while using existing building blocks to do so. As Joseph explained, the underlying architecture Meebo is using is Jabber/XMPP. What this means is that unlike Facebook's Chat, social networks using Meebo's Community IM have the ability to interoperate from day one if they choose to do so. Google's Friend Connect is another great example of reusing building blocks where they take advantage of OpenSocial, OpenID, and OAuth. Overtime supporting these underlying technologies becomes easier as companies like Google and Meebo start to build them into their products.

Last week we focused on Gnip and Identi.ca, explaining how Gnip is helping to change the model of accessing data on the web. Traditionally web APIs have been focused on pulling data though things like Twitter's XMPP Stream and Gnip are starting to flip this model on its head. And next week we'll be taping from Facebook's annual developer conference f8 in San Francisco. So please check it out, subscribe to our RSS feed (yes, we know our enclosures are broken), let us know what you think, and how we can do a better job of explaining the Social Web in an understandable way.

Video of Rich Wolski's EUCALYPTUS talk at Velocity

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 1

Rich Wolski gave a truly impressive talk at Velocity about an open-source software infrastructure for cloud computing called EUCALYPTUS . The API is compatible with Amazon's EC2 interface, and the underlying infrastructure is designed to support multiple client-side interfaces. EUCALYPTUS is implemented using commonly-available Linux tools and basic Web-service technologies making it easy to install and maintain. Watch and learn...

You can see more videos from Velocity on Blip.tv.

code_swarm - visualizing the life of open source

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 6

code_swarm was created by Michael Ogawa with Processing.

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

(thanks to Todd Ogasawara for pointing this out!)

DisasterTech from Where2.0

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 2

I was honored to speak with Mikel Maron at Where2.0 about innovation in Disaster Technology, a topic that is extremely important to me. Here is the video:

This talk covers the ongoing efforts of: World Shelters, the UN Joint Logistics Centre, Humanitarian.info, InSTEDD, and Humanlink.

You can read about the development of SMS GeoChat, the Sahana effort for Burma/Myanmar (Radar post), and the Mesh4x KML sync engine on Eduardo Jezierski's blog and on Jon Thompson's Aid Worker Daily.

Learn More About Ugandan Hip Hop with Diamonds in the Rough

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 4

On a more personal note than most of my posts I wanted to give a shout out to my brother Matthew. He spent a year editing and co-producing a documentary on Ugandan hip hop called Diamonds in the Rough. It's a great movie and I am really proud of him. It looked great on the big screen when I saw the premiere in Los Angeles. If you like hip hop you'll enjoy the music.

If you happen to live in SF it will be showing at the 10th annual San Francisco Black Film Festival on Sunday June 15th at noon at Yoshi's.

The description of the movie is below. While the director was in Uganda he filmed videos for a number of the artists in the film, you can also see those on YouTube.

DIAMONDS IN THE ROUGH: A UGANDAN HIP HOP REVOLUTION
Diamonds in the Rough chronicles the incredible journey of the hip-hop group, the Bataka Squad, who use hip-hop to spread awareness of their countries' troubles, and to offer positive alternatives for the youth. As narrator of the film, Michael Franti of Spearhead guides us through an incredible journey from the riot-torn streets of Uganda, to the remote villages in the countryside and finally to the concrete jungle of the United States.

Babaluku and Saba Saba are the two remaining members of the Bataka Squad, Uganda's first major hip hop group to rap in their native language, Luganda. We follow as Silas returns to his homeland to set up a charity foundation for young people living in Uganda's ghettos, while Saba Saba concentrates on spreading their message to the international hip hop community. On the way we meet a host of other socially conscious hip hop artists from all over the world, that use the microphone as a platform for change.

Where 2.0 Video: Google/ESRI Keynote

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 2

Here's the first video from Where 2.0, the Google Keynote with a surprise appearance from ESRI. I can't wait to share some of the other talks we've had so far.

Since Google first presented a snapshot of the geoweb at last year's Where 2.0, it has considerably evolved: more Geo data is published on the web, KML was accepted as an OGC standard and is adopted by a growing number of tools. Join John Hanke, Director of Google Earth & Maps to hear the latest on the evolution of the Geoweb and Google’s effort to organize it and make it universally accessible and useful. John will also demonstrate the latest in Google geo development with Jack Dangemond of ESRI.

You Become what You Disrupt - (part two)

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 10

Google's GrandCentral (Radar coverage) was down over the weekend resulting in missed calls and other phone problems for its users.

This is very similar to the the two day Skype outage last year where I said that "You Become what You Disrupt". I've spoken about this issue several times, most recently at the Princeton CITP "Computing in the Cloud" workshop.

The problem is that it's not particularly clear at what point a disruptive innovation becomes a utility. As innovators it's important that we recognize that this point will arrive and prepare for it. I believe that we have a responsibility to be good stewards of the technologies we create, and to take responsibility for protecting people who come to rely on those technologies to live their daily lives. When we fail to do that, we may find ourselves being cast as either fools or villains who must be regulated and controlled.

Ultimately, I think we will evolve a set of safety standards very similar to building codes. For instance, it appears that a multi-datacenter strategy would have prevented the GrandCentral outage. (As I've said many times before: Datacenters are a Single Point of Failure!)

Cofounder Craig Walker writes: "I wanted to write a quick note to all the GC users and apologize for the service interruption this morning. We had a power issue at our current colo facility and it knocked us off line for a few hours. Unfortunately I’ve been up in the mountains with the family this weekend and had no cell/internet coverage so couldn’t respond earlier. I did want to let you know that we were able to restore the service by noon today and are working extremely diligently to make sure this won’t occur in the future. We’ll do a better job keeping you informed in the future, not only about service related issues but also about upcoming features, soliciting your feedback, and generally making sure that you, the GC user, is well informed as to what’s going on with the service."

Will better industry standards, best-practices, and independent certifying authorities emerge for these new utilities without innovation-stifling regulation? I hope so.

(continue reading)

Jill Bolte Taylor's amazing TED talk

by Jimmy Guterman | comments: 23

At least three of this year's TED talks were flat-out amazing: Tod Machover's, Benjamin Zander's, and Jill Bolte Taylor's. The first of them has just been posted:

Jill Bolte Taylor, a Harvard neuroanatomist, eavesdropped on her own stroke. As I wrote the day of her talk, she walked us through what she felt and thought while her brain was going wild, from the borderline-metaphysical ("I can't define where I begin and where I end") to the borderline-hilarious ("I'm a busy woman. I don't have time for a stoke"). Her description of her time in that strange state, caught between two worlds, the rare researcher who has been able to chronicle a brain-changing event from the inside, was astonishing.

And now you can see and hear it, too:

The brain she's holding there is a real one, by the way.

We'll alert you to the other two classics when they're published.

DIY Multitouch with the Wiimote

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 0

If you will be missing Jeff Hahn's presentation at Etech next week, you can still make your own multitouch display thanks to Johnny Chung Lee and the Wiimote. Johnny has a number of sensor hacks on his blog, and just announced that EA Games has incorporated his Wii head tracking hack into an upcoming release.

(continue reading)

Mainstream acceptance of Twitter for disaster communication...

by Jesse Robbins | @jesserobbins | comments: 7

I'm stuck at San Francisco Airport due to delays from the big storm yesterday. A few minutes ago a plane was struck by lightning at the gate which caused quite a bit of excitement. Planes are designed to take a lightning strike and apparently it happens all the time. They took off after a quick check by the pilot and ground crew. (I hope the rest of their flight is otherwise uneventful!)

I wanted to pass on a few disaster preparedness tips from fellow Emergency Manager W. David Stephenson (earlier Radar post). David is working to educate the mainstream public about using services like Twitter during disasters with a series of YouTube videos like this one:

I have many thoughts about this, but they just started boarding my flight (24 hours late!)... more to come.

WikiPediaVision: Watch Realtime Wikipedia Edits

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 2

With WikiPediaVision you can watch realtime English Wikipedia edits on a Google Map. It was inspired by Twittervision and Flickrvision (Radar post). The site combines Wikipedia's Recent Changes page with "Google Maps API, hostip.info and GoNew's IP to country service." You can learn more about the service on its FAQ. It was built by László Kozma, a grad-student at the Helsinki University of Technology.

[via Justin Hall via Duncan Gough]

3D WorldViewer Everyscape Launches

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 3

Everyscape is a new service that takes 2D photos and 3D-fies them to create an immersive street-side experience (Radar post). Today they are launching their service with four cities (Boston, New York, Miami, and Aspen). Their technology will allow anyone with a decent camera and GPS can contribute; they're another example of crowdsourcing for geo data. The cities that Boston-based startup is launching with were primarily done by their employees, but that will not always be the case in the future.

Map pages of the site show a 3D'd streetside view in a Flash player that is in sync with a normal street map (See the image above). You can use either map to navigate a city. In the street-side views you move by clicking arrows and you zoom through the picture. In many of the 3D-ified images you can view 360 degrees. When you see a large orange marker (like a chess pawn) that denotes additional information is available about a location. The service has categorized business listings that are browse-able and searchable for each city. Once you find a business you can locate them on the maps -- handy if you aren't sure exactly where a store is. In time they will make money from businesses loading their buildings into the service and from ads. My biggest two biggest requests are KML import/export of the imagery (let me overlay my own data in the service and let me view some of their imagery on others) and bigger 3D'd images -- the pages should dominate the page, it is after all the cornerstone of their service (they are working on this).

The above image on the left is from Aspen Mountain and the image on the right is a custom map. There are other examples on the site where they have gone in buildings and show the floor plans as the secondary map. Being able to take in a custom map and rich imagery and show it in a useable way is powerful. Where Everyscape shines is when they go off the beaten path and let us tour small towns, buildings and other places that are uneconomical for many geo-data companies to do.

After the jump is a video of the service.

(continue reading)

Virtual Earth: Birds-Eye in 3D

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 3

Virtual Earth is going to be releasing an update soon and they've published a preview on their blog. The low-res movie above shows Bird-Eye in 3D. They're using aerial imagery (Birds Eye) taken from 4 different angles and, like Live Labs Photosynth (Radar post), they have stitched them together to create a 3D world (only available on Windows). They give a brief description of the work that they put into it:

For background, its important to understand the challenges of visualizing our Birds eye imagery in a seamless mosaic the way we are all used to looking at satellite imagery that looks straight down at earth. Since all of the images are shot from the same point of view, it's relatively easy to stitch them together in a convincing tapestry. There's still challenges like doing good color balancing across images and rectifying so that buildings in tall cities don't appear to butt heads, but these are pretty well understood problems. Birds eye images are a different story. because of the way they are captured, there is no easy way to stitch them at their edges without introducing nasty distortions. The result is that Birds eye imagery is viewed as discrete 'scenes' instead of 1 giant tapestry. when you navigate to the edge of the current scene, the most appropriate next scene is dynamically determined, then displayed. Since Birds eye imagery is captured from 4 angles, we have North, South, East and west views of each point on earth adding another dimension of complexity to navigation.

I'll be talking with Erik Jorgensen, GM of Virtual Earth, at Web 2.0 Summit about their new release and their future plans.

Dash, The Internet-Connected GPS

by Brady Forrest | @brady | comments: 12

The Dash Express is an internet-connected GPS for your car. The image above shows off the results of their redesign. It is going to be coming out later this year (sorry, initially US-only).

The GPS unit has generated excitement due to its internet-based features. With it you can search Yahoo! Local from the road, send the unit an address from the browser, and get alternate routes based on other Dash user's traffic experiences. Dash showed the original device at Where 2.0 and have since re-designed the unit making it smaller, lighter, and with a 2-hour battery life. They also added a larger screen, removed the side buttons, added new map views and an improved menu system.

At the beginning of the summer they gave out 2000 units in a large hardware Beta (Radar post). On Sunday they announced the results of the Beta and some of the learnings.

Device usage
1,229,598 miles driven by testers*; 43,000 hours logged*
80% of testers turn on their Dash device every time they get in the car**
Yahoo Local! search
More than 119,000 searches conducted*
Active testers average 1.62 searches per day*
Most popular searches –food and retail locations by far
Send to Car
Nearly 10,000 Send to Cars conducted*
Real-time traffic
Nearly 2/3 of testers said they check traffic conditions every or most of the time before they drive

(All numbers as of 9/11/07)

I've been using one for a while and though I cannot comment about it specifically I will say that I can't wait for the final device to come out. The numbers above definitely reflect my own usage. If I was leaving my neighborhood I would turn it on. I generally conducted a search or two per trip and I sent a ton of addresses The Dash made it easier to react to traffic backup or a hotel being full. Having internet-access in the car is something that I have wanted for a while and I am looking forward to the new device.