The Bewilderness

Some things facebook do, michigan can do better...

A good example of not getting it. Some Michigan agency, surprised and aroused by the success of social networks, thought that it would be a bright idea to replicate this for students undertaking the transition from school to university.

The state of Michigan is currently building a custom social network called the Michigan College Access Portal, at a cost of $1.5 million, to help students looking to transition from high school to college and beyond.

One point five million dollars of public funds. To build a Facebook knock-off.

This needs no further comment.

A new network: the Googleplex

The venture capital and private equity firms have been hit hard by the Great Recessions: business models that were pioneered on Wall Street and tempered by the wave of financial innovation are in retreat for now. A second set of institutions that also started during the age of commercialisation in the 1980s also face retrenchment. These are the gateways and interfaces between universities and the commercial world. The most successful will thrive, the interfaces are necessary for all universities, but the opportunity to gain a profitable return on investments have sharply diminished.

Against this background is set another rising network, where the company as university generates its own alumni. The company is Google, and its alumni are now investing their wealth in new start-ups: focused on technological areas where they are interested or know their business. Is it wrong to call this network the Googleplex?

Senkut, Gil, and their dining circle are alumni of Google, one of the greatest engines of wealth creation the U.S. has ever known. Since going public six years ago, Google has generated more than $170 billion for its employees and investors. Many of the millionaires the company has produced are young, wired into the latest developments in tech, and at ease with risk. Which explains why so many Google alums—including many of those at Senkut and Gil's gatherings—are active angel investors, attempting to add another zero to their bank accounts and another innovative company to their list of accomplishments. "I feel like we have such a strong network, it's almost like we've recreated Google outside of the Google walls," says Andrea Zurek, a 39-year-old backer of 26 startups.

We can see that Google is becoming ever more important for both commerce and technology: not because of the company, but because of the culture and network that has now matured. Twitter and Tesla are two developments that have risen out of this creative confluence. The rise of the network also trumps the traditional alumni networks that want money rather than ideas.

Perhaps Google should set up a university.

Open 'wi-fi' abolished

Another great technology ruined by a government using a sledgehammer to crack non-conformity. Since file-sharing could result in piracy, the Digital Economy Bill attempts to avoid this eventuality by outlawing free wi-fi. How this helps prevent piracy is beyond me, but what do small businesses and legal clarity matter?

Referring to BIS's comments about the low bandwidth of coffee-shop connections, Lilian Edwards suggested it was "not correct to draft laws hoping they are difficult to break".

Edwards also pointed out that BIS's guidance for universities shows the government admitting "they don't know themselves how universities fit into the Digital Economy Bill".

"[Universities] don't know if they're subscribers, ISPs or neither," Edwards said. "If the government is not clear, how on earth are the universities supposed to respond? This seems almost unprecedented to me, for a government document."

To protect the George Michaels and Hollywoods of this world (as lobbied), the network effects of open-to-air wi-fi must be destroyed in universities, libraries, coffee-shops, pubs and anywhere else that people could congregate to share information online. Just because one aspect of sharing online could be illegal, all sharing online must be rendered difficult or impossible.

Five billion mobile phones

The Great Recession has had no discernible effect on the spread on communications. The number of mobile phone subscriptions will rise above five billion this year, followed by broadband subscriptions leaping the one billion threshold.

"Even during an economic crisis, we have seen no drop in the demand for communications services," said ITU Secretary-General Dr. Hamadoun Toure at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week, "and I am confident that we will continue to see a rapid uptake in mobile cellular services in particular in 2010, with many more people using their phones to access the Internet."

Google places its bets in the hope of renewal

Sometime in the last two years, there will be a realisation that Google achieved overstretch and shifted from a nimble, Internet company to a sprawling conglomerate. With its focus on many areas, it has been ambitious to obtain a dominance over all aspects of web experience, moving beyond search to social networking, operating systems and browsers. Their dominance in search has not allowed them to recreate this network effect in other areas. Increasingly, Google is jostling amongst new peers, protected by its market dominance in its core competence. Will it venture down the path where restless acquisition and multiple projects seem to tempt it?

A conglomerate with tentacles in myriad industries is not necessarily a good thing. It’s an inordinately tough act to pull off: GE has done it, but it took decades of work. And for Google it will mean giving up the culture of Internet innovation that made it a success in the first place. Conglomerates pour their innovation into management and process — that is, into improving what exists — not necessarily into creating what will be.

This misreads the fast changing pace and innovation of the Web: companies do not straddle industries, they create them. Conglomerates rarely work, and if Google has to sacrifice its core culture to achieve this goal, then such a beast will arrive sickly and soon succumb to sharper carnivores.

If I am right, Google could play a cannier game, placing many bets and allowing innovation to thrive, so that the new developments take place within its walls or can be co-opted. However, they have not yet learned to let go. Social networking will belong to other companies and the mobile network will be a competitive arena. It may take a few failures to learn this lesson, though splinters like Apple have no long-term future (keyman risk and cashflow seduction overcoming the lure of innovation once Steve Jobs goes).

Primitive working conditions in five years

A good article on how social networking might affect the business model over the next three years. Good, because it highlights the need to realise failures before successfully implementing social networks within larger organisations. Some would have hoped that the internet would break down larger organisations but nimble response cannot replace scaling effects or the lure of large repositories of capital (much of which is wasted by dreadful management). After all, the initial response is to place social networks outside the firewall: ringfencing the primitive and watching their own employees use smartphones to do the really cool stuff.

Two developments that appeal are the vital interpenetration of the social network and email. This is beginning to take off here and now with Facebook's announcements on their email addresses and the launch of Google Buzz. The other is the lack of critical mass to support microblogging in a corporate context. Such activities will be forced onto the internet.

"However, it will be very difficult for microblogging as a stand-alone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter's scale is one of the reasons for its popularity," said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for Gartner. "When limited to a single enterprise, that same scale is unachievable, reducing the number of users who will find it valuable. Mainstream enterprises are unlikely to adopt standalone, single-purpose microblogging products.

The other change that we can expect to see over time is the gradual alteration of the personal computer to accommodate smartphone protocols. This has not really penetrated the mouse point click universe yet, but the merger of net and phone is dictating change.

Is the interpenetration of net and company about to accelerate? We have not yet seen a fierce attempt to raise productivity or increase the adaptation of knowledge with these tools. To actually use Google Wave at work would be a godsend, but corporate structures remain wedded to the primitive and vulnerable to new ways of working. They will surely be coming soon.

Within five years, any company that still relies on email alone will be defined as primitive working conditions.

Here is the news, aggregated and precisely advertised

Techcrunch shows the way on why news aggregators have proved so popular and reactionary paywalls will just piss off your customers:

But forget all that navel gazing for a minute while I jump back up to my first paragraph. Aggregators are popular because they help users find the news they’re interested in. They serve a very real purpose and add value to the system. Without aggregators and social links users would be forced to choose which news sites they want to pay for, and trust that they’ll get everything they need from those sites.

I don’t want to jump back to 1993. I want to live in the present where each piece of news lives and dies by its own merit as it spreads virally around the Internet. That means I spend less time finding better content.

More filters equals better rewards: and paywalls will not prevent further disintermediation. If Murdoch proves as successful with paying for news as he did with Myspace, the rivers of information will divert elsewhere and he will be the poorer for it.

Demented reality augments hype over hope

Augmented reality is on its way as a demented marketing label for new tech wizardry: the latest catch-all term for describing innovations on your telephone or trainers.

They're standard wearable sneakers, but with a little extra: each one has a code on its tongue. Show this code to your webcam to call up the 3D Adidas Originals Neighborhood through your browser.

At this point, your shoes are now game controllers, as your Webcam translates your shoes' movements into the virtual world. Walk the neighborhood and choose one of three games to play. A Star Wars storm trooper game, where you use your shoes to aim and fire paintball balloons, will launch February 10. Two more games, a skateboarding game and a DJ Hero-style game, will follow this spring

Not convinced by this trainer trash, then just begin to hear the rush of media releases on how their phone hits reality. The new Samsung will suffice:

However, Samsung has also added the Layar - yes, that's how it's spelled - Reality Browser app, which provides “detailed visual guides” of your current location using augmented reality technology and GPS.

The feature could be used, for example, to discover which nearby pubs are showing that all-important football match. Each drinking hole showing the match would instantly appear on your virtual map as you move the phone around.

That seems to be an all-singing and all-dancing map. The label precedes the magic, methinks.

Augmented reality is defined as the

the next big thing in the digital sphere, allowing computer generated images to be superimposed into real-life scenarios using camera technology.

We are in the initial phase where hype outruns hope and market errors funnel products towards a profitable demand space. Will it be as profitable and as disruptive as they hope? Only if it connects with the social net, but that will be another story.

Who will defend us from the Tory boondoggle?

The most interesting part of the Conservative proposals on national security is the establishment of a Cyber Security Operations Centre. Cyber attacks on commercial and national infrastructure have gained greater attention since the attacks on Estonia and Google's withdrawal from China.

A question mark arises over this new institution. Is it a new boondoggle, flagwaving the threat in red and then heading towards overkill, magnifying the scare in order to perpetuate its existence? We see this a lot with Cameron and the Tory campaign for impoverishment. The radical shrinking of the state which acquired some echoes this summer has been replaced with the announcement of quangos, replacing some useless entities with others.

This does not denote my own scepticism over the growing threat to our cybersecurity which I clearly see as a rising risk. Just the current methods for dealing with it...Britain's reaction to enemy hackers: inaction and boondoggles.

Technology defines the generation gap

Technology now shapes the formative years of every child. Just as children in the 1970s and 1980s are geared to reminisce about television programmes (perhaps a cultural continuum from 1960 to 1990), so a series of generations are defined by their devices:

Researchers are exploring this notion too. They theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences with technology,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

But we may have seen this phenomena before in an attenuated form (black and white, colour, video recorder). Are we reaching sufficient rapidity in consumer devices to create this phenomenon? It may speed up differences in attitude, not differences in technology, just the way it is used.