User Generated Content

Michael Sikorsky, in the Cybera Lunch 'n Learn presentation in Edmonton on March 20, 2008 talked about implicit and explicit user-generated content. He gave an example of timesheets. Should staff fill out timesheets explicitly or should information about activities be gathered and determined implicity?

Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School talks about a discussion around these two types of user-generated content (UGC). He provides some definitions.

"Explicit user-generated information is information that people knowingly and deliberately generate by contributing to online platforms. Examples of explicit information include a blog post or comment, a wiki edit, a vote or rating, a trade in a prediction market, a link, and a tag.

Implicit user-generated information is information that people unknowingly generate as they work online. It’s the digital fingerprints or traces that people leave as they follow links, look at content, consider one product then buy another, etc. This data can be aggregated to show what’s popular, what’s related, who has a good reputation, etc. My impression is that the collection and analysis of implicit online information grew out of Web analytics (clickstream data) and eCommerce recommendations (customers who bought [shopped for] this also bought [ended up buying] this). I find these recommendations tremendously valuable, and they’re entirely implicit."

McAfee Blog

And then ponders if it is a false dichotomy and whether implicit UGC can be gathered without explicit UGC.

I agree with Andrew in so far as it may be a false dichotomy and that without explicit UGC or explicit professional content, implicit doesn't work as well. Amazon book store is a good example. Blogs and some of their advanced features are as well.

It also reminds me of virtual organizations and the strength of weak ties. Weak ties are like implicit UGC. Strong ties are like explicit UGC or professional content. You need both to innovate, grow, and be successful. The secret is sauce is in the when and how much.

MBA, MFA, or MSC?

MBA, MFA, MSC Job Trends

MBA jobs - MFA jobs - MSC jobs

Visualizing Your Future Career

Starting university? Thinking of an advanced degree? Looking where the next big thing is? Indeed.com is a visualization tool that indexes job ads and tracks trends.  Here are a couple that are interesting.

Growth in cloud computing and social media is huge.

However, in absolute terms, computer science and software engineers are still in demand. New media is still important to those offering jobs.

So, what happens when we compare the top trends and job matching postings in the new media world with the computer science world:

This stuff is fun, you can look at sorts of things. Look up some programming languages:

Look at skills like bilingualism:

Earth Hour March 29 8:00 PM Local

Turn your computer off. Turn that TV off. Unplug all those hard drive and external devices that draw power 24/7. While they are off, put in a power strip that makes it easy to turn off the whole office, from lights, to speakers and hard drives. Don't forget to turn off the iPhone and the wireless router.

Of course, turning things off for an hour to support Earth Hour isn't going to make a difference in the long term. However, turning things on will. It will cost more money, waste energy, and pollute the air. So think about your IT set-up and look for ways to cut costs as part of your Earth Hour activities. Just a set of speakers that don't power down when not in use, costs around $12/yr run. 

Would a solar panel in your office work? These are now inexpensive and available at Canadian Tire. Put the speakers, the laptop, and cell phone charger on the solar panel and unplug from coal and save money.

If you are in a region that is powered through hydro and/or wind the greenhouse gas footprint is not as big as electrical generation through something like coal, but it is still an environmental footprint.

You are using energy for your home and office computer that you don't need to. Just have a look and make a change

Global Attention Profiles

Global Attention Profiles (GAP) from Ethan Zuckerman at Harvard University.  A neat visualization tool, showing different media outlets (CNN, Reuters, Google Altavista, etc) coverage in the media by country.  Today's maps and data are always up-to-date and archives are freely accessible.

Here is today's GAP from BBC.

Data Portability

The one thing about using the cloud to do your computing is that there are a lot of passwords. Well computers and other devices are now pretty good at managing all of that, but they are not that good about sharing with each other. Devices with clouds and one cloud with another are largely shut-ins. The ability to import friends from facebook to myspace has not been possible. Data portability, whether it is your profile, your friends, and other things you collect in one place don't move all that easily to another online place.

This is changing - real quick now.

Yahoo just signed onto Open Social. This is a non-profit project meaning to allow users to share data between social networks. Watch this effort if you are doing anything in collaboration online.

In a separate development, Microsoft announced contact export to different social networks such as facebook and bebo.

Rob Simmonds of Grid Research Centre at Cybera Lunch 'n Learn

Rob Simmonds of the Grid Research Centre (GRC) presenting on Ecosys, a Cybera pilot project that GRC is involved with. The presentation happened at Cybera's inaugural Lunch 'n Learn event on March 20, 2008, at the University of Alberta. With a strong turnout and even stronger presentations, Cybera plans on hosting similar events in the future.

The Ecosys modeling program is dedicated to the construction and testing of a comprehensive mathematical model of natural and managed ecosystems (agriculture, forests, savannah, grassland, tundra, desert).

Cybera hosts Michael Sikorsky in Edmonton

Peter Singendonk of Cisco Canada, left, introduces Michael Sikorsky, CEO of Cambrian House, at Cybera's inaugural Lunch 'n Learn event. Cambrian House is home to the world's first crowdsourcing community: a diverse collective of creative, tech-savvy and entrepreneurial minds. Cambrian House is community owned. It's the first Web 2.0 company where members are owners.

Wired Seminal Article on Free

Chris Anderson, author of the Long Tail and editor of Wired Magazine is working on a new book, Free.  This month an article published in Wired Magazine will build on concepts that are tough to grasp for a lot of people.

Commodities like information are moving from cheap to free. Pushed along by the web and Internet. Other commodities like bandwidth (fiber), processing power (semiconductors), and storage (ferromagnetic compounds) are also moving from cheap to free.  Media and entertainment are also moving from cheap to free.

The article provides a good argue for why the future of business is priced at $0.00. He provides scenarios that would see a movie theatre give away tickets and make money on pop and popcorn. And others were advertising pays for seats and eyeballs and access. And of course, marketing tools such as loss leaders, cross subsidies and the eternal example of the Gillette razor where you can give away razors, but charge for the blades.

What are the implications for business if you can't charge anything? Anderson's assumption is that we need to embrace free and pay more attention to the economics around the scarcity in time and reputation. 

If resources such as information, media, bandwidth and computer processing are not scarce, then what is? Time and reputation is scarce. Who do you trust and how do you do more in less time. Who do you trust to save you time? You shouldn't have to give that away.

An example from TiVo.

We pay for cable. We don't have time to watch the shows we like. Who do you trust to save you time?

In the US, a lot of people trust TiVo. They buy a TiVo box and pay for a subscription to a TV guide. They already pay for cable (and continue to) and get a free TV guide in their newspaper, but that is not going to save them time and they lost trust in their cable company and newspaper because the newspaper never lands on their doorstep and there are too many ads in their shows.

What % of the TiVo costs are convenience? What % are ad avoidance? The TiVo also helps people put shows on their iPod and cell phones. And how much of that TiVo price is vanity. People do pay to be perceived as cool - we all know that. What % is being paid to be cool? What % for portability?

In Canada, we have not come to trust TiVo and so we buy a Personal Video Recorder from Bell.

So partially free content, partially paid by advertisers, is not the only business opportunity. In fact, it may be a good way to lose business. In fact, Apple made around $1 billion in the US selling TV shows to people that wanted more convenience, portability and few ads. 

In Canada, MoboVivo, CBC, and CTV are seen as trusted TV sources for convenience, portability and as it turns out, CBC and CTV can't sell ads online so they end up with, fewer ads.

Implications for Canadian businesses. 

1. Be careful a US company could easily become the trusted brand.

2. Free is good, but time is scarce.

3. Can you be trusted to save your customers time? Forget about the money - that will come.

Cloud Providers

Here is Forrestors list of cloud computing providers.

No Canadian companies in this space? Where are the telcos - they are also trying to be broadcasters these days? 

Anybody that has some infrastructure could be in this space quickly. No infrastructure, just sign agreements with others and offer a set of services. It will take a while for incumbants in Canada to understand and act on this opportunity.

Salesforce.com CEO Talks about the "End of Software"

"These days, people go home and they're having a realy great experience on the Internet. They're already using Web 2.0, with all these great applications and they are blogging and collaborating with their friends. But then they go to work and they don't have the same quality of application."

"The power of software as a service is that it's less risk than software, no matter what."

Benioff takes stock of software shifts

HP Announces Cloud Computing Service

HP has announced a cloud computing enterprise service it is calling Adaptive Infrastructure as a Service (AIaaS). Using existing HP data centres in the US and Europe, HP will join Akamai, Amazon, Areti, Enki, Fortress ITX, Joyent, Layered Technologies, Rackspace, Salesforce.com, Terramark and XCalibre in offering cloud computing services. HP will target large companies with MS Exchange and SAP services. 

Disruption

We hear about disruptive technologies. We know that Internet and the visual browser are recent examples. We see Web 2.0 consumer services as disrupting everything from music and film to client management. We know that early adopters are... well they are going to adopt what innovators create. Most companies will focus, should focus, on moving from early adopters to the mass market. What determines a market disruption?

Clayton Christensen of the Harvard Business School write about market disruption in the Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution. I listened to a podcast of Christensen explain his theories by giving examples from the automobile industry. It made sense to me. Remember those crappy Datsuns? Christensen calls these "low-end disruptors" and they were low-end. But they were good enough for a segment of the market. The reason the Datsun was able to exist is because customers at the high end were getting more than what they needed, at the time, from the incumbents - Ford, Dodge, GM.

So Datsun serves a need in the marketplace and gains a foothold. A few decades later, Toyota is #2 in the world on its way to #1. Linux did it to NT and Unix. What will Web 2.0 do to which incumbents? Google docs take on MS Word? Will the iPhone be vulnerable to Datsun version of the iPhone? 

The iPhone has lots of features. Maybe it is beyond good enough for a segment of the marketplace - the low-end.  There may be a lot of customers on the low end in India. Google Trends shows that there are a whole lot of people in India very interested in objective C - a programming language used exclusively for programming applications in OS X the operating system of the mac and the iPhone. 

Will Apple create the iPhone nano or will an Indian start-up? 

Why does Sun use Cyberinfrastructure? The same reason you should.

According to Brian Cinque of Sun, their organization is "driving towards a consolidated and unified data center approach by 2015." They want to eliminate all their data centres. 

Why? Primarily to cut costs - human resource, power, cooling, and space; and align with technical and business architectures.

How? Virtualization, consolidation, network acceleration and adoption of software as a service (SaaS) and mash-ups - by using cyberinfrastructure and Web 2.0.

SaaS is a way to deliver software applications in a web-browser hosted elsewhere and accessed over the Internet. The revenue models vary from paying to use vs. paying to licence or own to ad supported. The consumer version of SaaS is usually called Web 2.0, the differences between the consumer and enterprise version of browser delivered software could get even more blurry than it is today.

So Web 2.0, or SaaS tools sit on top of network, data, and compute infrastructure to deliver reduced costs and infrastructure for Sun to take full advantage. Most companies, if they are not already moving this way, should be. 

Which ones should not? Only those that are going to provide utility to the rest. Amazon, Google. What about Canadian Telcos? CableCos? Governments? Universities? Broadcasters?

Cyberinfrastructure for Business

Cybera has initiated its first industrial pilot projects with several Alberta-based companies. These industry research and development projects join a strong list of university research and development pilot projects currently underway. 

The new projects  represent innovation in the form of application of technology; market disruption through new business approaches; Big Data, Big Compute, and Big Network requirements; middleware such as workflow and management. More details on these projects and their participants is being developed as they work towards being able to demonstrate how local companies can collaborate with research organizations to establish new and better approaches and uses of technology cutting costs for computing and human resources.

The model of bring industry and research organizations together to innovate is following the lead of similar initiatives in Europe. A European research organization and grid computing manager, EGEE has been working with European companies to enable grid computing in their products and services. 

What can others learn from some of their industry projects? An excellent example, according to Stephanie Parker, the chair of the EGEE Industry Forum, is that of a start-up company using grid middleware to innovate in the area of image search. Imense co-founder David Sinclair says, "Our work with the grid let us demonstrate that our software can handle millions of images, at a time were a small company could not supply the computing power needed ourselves. This in turn impressed the investors, and led to funding for our company."

The bottom line for cyberinfrastructure in business says Stephanie, "The biggest selling point is that grids can save you money: companies can access more computing power with shelling out for new hardware. Grid delivers major value by improving business performance, by helping to get products to market faster, and by enabling companies to do new things."

Like the EGEE in Europe, Cybera reaches out to businesses of all sizes to help them save and make money using cyberinfrastructure. Cybera uses pilot projects to build case studies and evaluate adoption across industrial sectors. The organization brings university researchers together with innovation leaders in the private sector through pilot projects, workshops, and its Fall conference.

The next workshop, the first in Cybera's lunch 'n learn series will be held on March 20, 2008 in Edmonton. The afternoon features private sector and university innovation leaders around mass collaboration and crowdsourcing. 

Innovator seeks Early Adopter for Casual Encounters

The adoption of new technology like cyberinfrastructure and cloud computing; and the adoption of new business approaches like crowdsourcing or mass collaboration is a cultural and financial in nature. The financial problems of change are obvious of course.  Don Tapscott's Wikinomics features The Entrenched Player's Dilemma. The authors attempted to find out why corporations resisted crowd sourcing and mass collaboration.

"The problem with mature companies is that the very commercial success of their products increases their dependency on them. Making radical changes in the product's capabilities, underlying architecture or associated business models could cannibalize sales or lead to costly realignments of strategy and business infrastructure. It's as though popular and widely adopted products become ossified, hardened by the inherent incentives to build on their own success. The result is that entrenched industry players are generally not motivated to develop or deploy disruptive technologies." 

Moving towards change impacts the existing business models. The incentives to improve cannot always be overcome with the cost of change.

The cultural diffusion of change or technology is another important factor in the Diffusion of Innovation. When communicating change or technology innovation it is key to understand the audience and their willingness or receptiveness to innovation. Are they innovators, early adopters, part of the early majority, late majority or laggards? The characteristics of these people, their culture has been well defined starting with the communications guru Everett Rogers in the 1950's:

• Innovators – venturesome, educated, multiple info sources;
  
• Early adopters – social leaders, popular, educated;
  
• Early majority – deliberate, many informal social contacts;
  
• Late majority – skeptical, traditional, lower socio-economic status;
  
• Laggards – neighbours and friends are main info sources, fear of debt.
  

More recently in Geoffrey Moore's modified Everett's model in his book Crossing the Chasm. He basically applied the original Diffusion of Innovation theory to technology markets and added a chasm. According to Moore, the marketer should focus on one group of customers at a time, using each group as a base for marketing to the next group. The most difficult step is making the transition between early adopters and the early majority. This is the chasm.

A lot of this work was based in assessing the effectiveness of television advertising. Starting in the 1950s it became apparent that advertised products or services were "innovations" in the culture. The study found that the ads themselves were not the most influential in the adoption of innovation. It found the most effective marketing strategy is to first sell to the early adopters, then reinforce the diffusion to each successive level, but not to waste resources on trying to reach any given level before it is ready for it.

Cybera is, at its roots, a change agent. Looking at technological innovation and encouraging its adoption in universities and industry in Alberta. Putting innovators together with early adopters. Using pilot projects to enable early adopters. And over time, priming the early majority with education, outreach and communications. Helping to optimize industry so that the 68% majority can take advantage of new innovation. That is so the marketplace can cross the chasm, without getting caught in the trough of disillusionment (more on that later).

Microsoft vapour which could form a cloud - SSDS

Microsoft's answer to Amazon Webservices is called SQL Server Data Services. The made the announcement at MIX08 in Las Vegas earlier this month. A name that is sure to get the enterprise IT crowd excited. Even the short name is Web 2.0 unfriendly, it is in-elegantly referred to as SSDS.

Amazon has been in this space, although not in the enterprise, for a couple of years already. Microsoft coming late to the cloud is not a surprise, but what impact will it have?

According to the SSDS website FAQ they are targeting small business to enterprises with this service.

What is the price? Come on that is all that people really want to know. Well according to the product website, we will have to wait to find out. $$D$ has no $. Microsoft's technology vapour has yet to come to together to form a cloud.

Millennials

Born after 1982
Bigger than the baby boomers
Ethnically diverse
Cherished generation - millennial on board.
Fun and high energy parents
Prozac is the new Valium
Sheltered, confident, team players

According to Dr. Mike Atkinson
Western university at canadian music week March 5, 2008

Where will the data go?

The cost of storage is going down. The cost of real estate is going up. The cost of energy is going up. Some estimates are that for every $1000 spent on hardware another $500 is spent on power. Green hardware will help, but it still needs real estate. Share cyberinfrastructure, virtualization, Web 2.0, cloud computing, and just working smart will help even more.

For example (and this is a really simple example). I'm working on a business plan and need to send updates to 30 people. The document is 25MB. I send updates 5 times a week. This file is taking up space on servers in several organizations. It is consuming bandwidth like crazy. Several times a week I get a message from a system saying that my email was too big to send - so I send again. One week, one document = 4GB and that is only if the 30 people just read the document. What if they send me back changes and then others comment on those changes and then send along again? And IT departments are focused on P2P traffic.

There are lots of solutions of course, you could use sharepoint, but that requires a dedicated sharepoint server somewhere in the organization. This does not solve any real estate issues. Utilizing smart solutions within your enterprise like VMWare and virtualization can also assist, but as we all know collaboration also occurs outside of the enterprise. Real estate in the clouds. Using cloud computing solutions like a Google Docs solves your organizations energy and space issues. Of course, it just centralizes it with other organizations like Google - co-locating at Niagara Falls is better than powering with coal.

Mass Collaboration - Crowdsourcing

Later this month, Cybera is hosting an event in Edmonton on mass collaboration. Michael Sikorsky of Cambrian House, the Home of Crowdsourcing will be the invited speaker. Check out the Cybera site for more information on the Lunch 'n Learn event in Edmonton. 

Cambrian House is home to the world's first crowdsourcing community: a diverse collective of creative, tech-savvy and entrepreneurial minds. Crowdsourcing was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired Magazine in 2006 to describe a business model in which a company or institution takes a job traditionally performed by an employee and outsources it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call over the internet.

So what is Crowdsourcing or mass collaboration. Of course, there are examples like Wikipedia.org, GoldCorp, and Amazon Mechanical Turk. In Alberta, there is a company called FilmRiot. Where film-makers fund their next project through crowd-funding. Any doubt if this approach is possible, just ask the Obama campaign in the US about the millions of dollars they have raised through crowd-funding.

Even large companies know the power of collaboration. However, what do they have to gain through mass collaboration? Ask the recording industry what they have learned through the massive collaboration in trading music.