Category: innovation

Learning To See At The Edge Of Darkness

Published April 19, 2011 by cgerrish

Night-vision goggles give you an advantage, you can see in the darkness. There’s a sense in which Google has these goggles for the Network. Google has the most complete map of the territory, and they’ve flooded the map with light. A search engine’s spiders feel their way through the darkness, tracing out the graph of links and nodes, and sending their sketches back home to be pieced together into a larger map.

To most of us, the Network is dark, it’s only through habit or maps that anything can be found. Theoretically, any public node on the Network is reachable, but as a practical matter you can’t get there unless someone gives you a hyperlink. An individual’s map of the the Network consists of the URLs that can be remembered and browser bookmarks. The average Network traveler moves through a fairly well-defined circuit of web sites. The value of a weak-tie social network is that people you don’t know well, but follow, are likely to be carrying links that you, and members of your strong-tie network wouldn’t have ordinarily encountered.

The Network also has a dark side that can’t be mapped by Google, these are the secure pools of data protected from a search engine’s spiders. Bank accounts, medical records and other personal information falls into this category. Unless you’re in law enforcement, you can’t Google someone’s financial records. We call this kind of darkness privacy. Some say it no longer exists, but last time I checked, I couldn’t Google Eric Schmidt’s checking account or Scott McNealy’s health records.

Facebook is also sheltered from the search engine’s spiders. Google’s spider can’t join Facebook and become friends with all 600 million members so that the contents of Facebook can be added to Google’s map of the Network. A spider is a kind of robot, and robots aren’t allowed to join Facebook. Interestingly corporations are allowed to join, and robots and other kinds of applications can be constructed to operate within the boundaries Facebook. Facebook has created a territory that can only be mapped by Facebook, or from within Facebook. While Facebook is a dark pool to Google, the open Network is available to Facebook. Humans don’t view Facebook as closed because they cross the boundary that keeps robots out with a minimum of friction.

And so we come to the question of darkness and enclosures. If we view the Network as open, perhaps we see a large field of light with pools of darkness at the margins. But for the user without a map, the Network is complete darkness. Thus an argument for an open Network is the equivalent of saying that the map makers must be able to do their work so that we can navigate through the darkness. Allow their robots passage so that they can light the way for us. Although it should be noted we can only navigate to places on the map, uncharted territory remains in darkness. Facebook is un-navigable without the maps provided by Facebook; the open internet is un-navigable without the maps provided by Google. The difference, of course, is that anyone with internet-scale data infrastructure can provide maps of the open internet, while only Facebook can provide maps of Facebook. And while some may perceive a difference in the barriers to entry, it may be a difference without much of a difference.

In the end, the purpose of these maps is to provide you with a hyperlink—a doorway to get you to your desired location. You stop and ask for directions: “How do I get to such-and-such a place?” The search engine replies with two million prioritized results listed on tens of thousands of pages. You might scan the top ten of two million results to see if there’s anything of interest. If Google was really confident in their results, they’d only give you their ten best answers. However it’s the two million results that shed some degree of light on the landscape of the Network. In the end, it’s only a small selection set of hyperlinks that’s needed—one can easily imagine other methods of producing a small set useful of links.

As the map gains more prominence, many attempt to build structures on the map itself. The map provides a boundary, separating the visible from the invisible. For instance, the page must be constructed in a specific way if it is to be findable. What cannot be found, cannot be read. The finding is the thing. For instance, despite the rise of the e-reader, and networked apps designed specifically for reading, these approaches don’t fit into the map. The pages fall outside the method of map construction. It’s in this way that the map serves as a limit, a kind of zoning law, for new construction.

Maps distort the territory, they create an abstraction of a specific layer of the territory for a particular purpose. We can also say that a map never exhausts the territory, there’s always something that remains unwritten on the parchment. Oddly, we can also say that the map always already lies within the territory. There’s no outside of the territory, one doesn’t come to an edge and see a transcendental map maker beyond the clouds. The map is constructed from within the territory to be used to navigate the territory.

The Network’s pools of light and pools of darkness each have their own kind of maps. While some may call for eternal sunshine, with everything standing in the light, always waiting to be seen—it’s in the chiaroscuro that we see unknown figures emerging from the darkness.

How Poetry Comes to Me
Gary Snyder

It comes blundering over the
 Boulders at night, it stays 
Frightened outside the
 Range of my campfire
 I go to meet it at the
 Edge of the light

ИкониikoniПодаръциикони на светциИдея за подарък

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Tyranny, Stealing Office Supplies and Arbitrage Among Networks

Published March 7, 2011 by cgerrish

Tools give us leverage, they augment our human capabilities. In the corporate business environment, software tools continue to increase productivity at ever growing rates. In many occupations, the employee’s primary tools consist of some type of computer, an office software suite and network connection. Much of the existence of the corporate enterprise is now inscribed in software. And for the most part, the people who manage the enterprise have little or no idea how the software works. They see better productivity and increased visibility into business processes—and that’s sufficient. The hardware and software toolset is owned by the IT department. This group knows about hardware and software, but generally, not about running a business. But they have power over the toolset and its provisioning—in essence the vehicle of augmentation and therefore leveraged productivity.

When tools are working well they disappear, we don’t think about them. Software disappears into our working lives to the extent that it works well. When it breaks or frustrates us, we see the critical dependencies that have formed and how we’ve become embedded in a system of software. The leverage we gain from augmenting our productive capabilities is critical to satisfying the demand for ever more growth from our corporations. One can do what it took many to accomplish in the past, or as it’s sometimes called revenue per unit of headcount. It could be said that for many businesses it’s only by increased leverage through networked software that productivity gains will be achieved.

Before the iPhone opened a port to the Network from anywhere with public WiFi or cellular coverage, I often wanted a personal network overlaying the corporate network. I missed the ability to pivot from one network to the other. This isn’t multitasking, but rather fast switching among different networks, electronic and otherwise. Quarantine to a single network is an unnatural state of affairs—it’s the reduction of the human to gadget or prisoner. Because of the arrival of Network access through the cellular system, the personal network now overlays the professional network—and it’s resulted in an interesting change in the balance of power.

Scott Brinker, in his Marketing Technologist blog, pulled a quote by Dave Codack, vice president of employee technology at TD Bank, from a ComputerWorld story. Codack indicated that he’d coined the phrase “the tyranny of consumerization.”

He called the process a form a tyranny because “the enterprise is not dictating technology with these devices, the revolt is coming from the end user community

Codack’s comment refers to the launch of the iPad2 and the excitement that it caused within his department and in the enterprise in general. The feature set combined with its ease of use makes the very existence of the iPad a challenge to corporate IT departments. These devices provide workers with working leverage from outside of the standard issue corporate toolkit.

Sociology professor Mark Granovetter, in his paper The Impact of Social Structure on Economic Outcomes, talks about the idea of social embeddedness of the economy. This has to do with the fact that economic action lives within the mesh of social networks, culture, politics and religion.

The notion that people often deploy resources from outside the economy to enjoy cost advantages in producing goods and services raises important questions, usually sidestepped in social theory, about how the economy interacts with other social institutions. Such deployment resembles arbitrage in using resources acquired cheaply in one setting for profit in another. As with classic arbitrage, it need not create economic profits for any particular actor, since if all are able to make the same use of non-economic resources, none has any cost advantage over any other. Yet, overall efficiency may then be improved by reducing everyone’s costs and freeing some resources for other users.

… But despite intimate connections between social networks and the modern economy, the two have not merged or become identical. Indeed, norms often develop that limit the merger of sectors. For example, when economic actors buy and sell political influence, threatening to merge political and economic institutions, this is condemned as “corruption.” Such condemnation invokes the norm that political officials are responsible to their constituents rather than to the highest bidder, and that the goals and procedures of the polity are and should be different and separate from those of the economy.

Personal consumer networks now overlay professional business networks, and the arbitrage moves from the personal and public to the corporate. We now steal office supplies from home to use at work. We’re still looking for leverage, for new ways to augment our capabilities, to get more done with less effort. And just as in the example of the merging of political and economic networks, the corporate IT department sees this as an illegitimate exercise of power and an undermining of the chain of command.

Person-to-person video calls used to be the province of science fiction. When we imagined what it would be like, we assumed it would start in the halls of government and the biggest corporations and eventually make its way to the broad consumer markets. If you’ve ever tried to use a corporate video conferencing system you’ll understand that’s not what will happen. While it looks good on paper, it’s never delivered on the promise. Corporate video conferencing is the equivalent of an operator-assisted phone call. The parties must always be connected by a representative of the corporate IT department. Compare this to the simplicity of Apple’s FaceTime—mobile video conferencing built into the device. Select, connect, talk. More office supplies taken from home and leveraged to make business work better.

How can the corporate IT department respond to the Tyranny of Consumerization? It’s too late to lock the personal network out of the corporate network. The castle walls have already been breached. And while the iPad and real-time message streams can be adopted as corporate tools, that’s only part of the arbitrage taking place. If economic growth can only be achieved through increased augmentation and leverage, the power of the personal network will have to be legitimized. But this won’t be a case of the corporate IT fish eating the personal IT fish, something else has come along to eat them both.

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Electronic Yellow Sticky Routing Slips: Tweets As Pointers

Published August 1, 2010 by cgerrish

After all this time, it’s still difficult to say what a tweet is. The generic form of the word has been expressed as microblogging, but this is the wrong metaphor. Blogging and RSS advocates see Twitter as a short-form quick publishing platform. What blogging tools made easy, Twitter, and other similar systems, make even easier. Given this definition, the 140 character limit on tweets seems to be an unnecessary constraint— microblogging could simply be expanded to miniblogging and a 500 character limit for individual posts. Blog posts can be any length, they are as small or large as they need to be.

“All my plays are full length, some are just longer than others.”
– Samuel Beckett

But Twitter didn’t start with blogging or blogging tools as its central metaphor, it began with the message streams that flow through dispatching systems. The tweet isn’t a small blog post, it’s a message in a communications and logistics system. There’s a tendency to say that the tweet is a “micro” something— a very small version of some normally larger thing. But tweets are full sized, complete and lack nothing. Their size allows them to flourish in multiple communications environments, particularly the SMS system and the form factor of the mobile network device (iPhone).

The best metaphor I’ve found for a tweet is the yellow sticky. The optimal post-it note is 3 inches square and canary yellow in color. It’s not a small version of something else, its size is perfect for its purpose. There are no limitations on what can be written on a yellow sticky, but its size places constraints on the form of communication. Generally, one expects a single thought per yellow sticky. And much like Twitter, explaining what a yellow sticky is to someone who’s never used one is a difficult task. Initial market tests for the post-it note showed mixed reactions. However after extensive sampling, 90% of consumers who tried the product wanted to buy it. Like the tweet, the post-it note doesn’t have a specific purpose. Arthur Fry, one of the inventors of the post-it note, wanted a bookmark with a light adhesive to keep his place in his hymnal during church choir. The rapid acceptance of the yellow sticky, in part, had to do with not defining what it should be used for. It’s hard to imagine someone saying that you’re not using a post-it note correctly, although people say that about Twitter all the time.

One thing people use yellow stickies for is as a transmittal. I find a magazine article that I like and I pass it on to you with a short message on a yellow sticky that marks the page. I might send this package to you through the mail, use inter-office mail at work, or I might just leave it on your desk. More formal routing slips might request specific actions be taken on the attached item. Fax cover sheets are another example of this kind of communication. And Twitter is often used in a similar way. The hyperlink is the adhesive that binds the message to article I’d like to pass on to you. With Twitter, and other directed social graph services, the you I pass things on to includes followers, potentially followers of followers and users who track keywords contained in my message. At any given time, the who of the you will describe a different group. The message is passed on without obligation, the listeners may simply let it pass through, or they may take up the citation and peruse its contents.

Just as the special low-tack adhesive on the back of a yellow sticky allows you to attach it to anything without leaving marks or residue, the hyperlink allows the user of Twitter to easily point at something. Hey, look at this! Rather than a long explanation or justification, it’s just my finger pointing at something of interest. That’s interesting to me. It’s the way we talk to each other when the words aren’t the most important part of the communication.

This model of passing along items of interest is fundamentally different from web syndication. Syndication extends the distribution of published content to additional authorized contexts. Some may argue that the mostly defunct form of the ‘link blog‘, or an aggregation of link blogs, offers exactly the same value. The difference is that the tweet, as electronic routing slip, exists in a real-time social media communications system. It operates like the messages in a dispatching system. There’s an item at 3rd and Webster about cute kittens, here’s the hyperlink for interested parties. Syndication implies that I think what I’ve published is valuable, I’ve extended my distribution area and you should have a look at it. With a tweeted electronic routing slip, the value is assigned by the reader who decides to pass something along and the readers who choose to take it up within a real-time (instant) messaging system. Value is external to the thing being evaluated.

As we start to look at new applications like Flipboard, an app that collects routing slips from your social network and lays them out into a magazine format, it’s important to understand the basic unit from which the experience is built. We’re used to a newspaper filled with a combination of syndicated wire stories and proprietary ones. We know about magazines where all the stories are proprietary. A few of us are familiar with web syndication aggregators that allow us to pull in, organize and read feeds from thousands of publication sources. Building an electronic publication from sets of real-time routing slips is a fundamentally different editorial process than we’ve seen before. Of course, it could be that you don’t find the stories that your friends pass on to be very interesting. In the end, this method of assembling a real-time publication will be judged based on the value it provides. A magazine with a thousand stories isn’t really very useful, just as a Google search result with a million answers doesn’t help you find something. Can you imagine a real-time magazine that captures the ten stories that are worth reading right now? Can you imagine a time when such a thing didn’t exist?

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Fashion: A Remix Economy

Published June 25, 2010 by cgerrish

Listening to Russ Roberts of EconTalk discuss his wardrobe and his relative cluelessness with regard to fashion, my thoughts turned to software engineers. I wondered if both economists and software engineers believe that there’s some kind of optimization algorithm for selecting clothing.

In an episode of EconTalk, Johanna Blakely talks with Roberts about how the lack of copyright protection in the fashion industry turns it into an economy of continuous innovation. There are some interesting lessons here regarding the relationship between originals and copies, remixing and the circulation of design motifs.

Download EconTalk: Johanna Blakely on Fashion and IP

Somehow it seems unlikely that the technology/media business will look to fashion as an inspiration for viable business models. But it’s clear they could learn a thing or two. As you look across the landscape of technology companies, only Apple (despite the fact that Jony Ive never changes his T-shirt), has managed to create a release cycle that in many ways mirrors the major fashion houses. They release new designs annually and then watch the knock-off shops go to work trying to replicate their products. And like the top fashion houses, Apple is driven to be creative, to set the next trend that puts them one step ahead.

The fashion world still honors and rewards the creators of fresh and original looks. Since there’s no regulatory friction hindering fast followers with good-enough copies, the market is filled with cheap knock-offs. Both seem to survive in the ecosystem. One reason for this is that the copies are not digital— they aren’t exact atom-for-atom copies of the originals. Generally, to lower the price of the knock-off, the materials have to be cheaper. In the world of bits, exact replication is just a matter of a few key strokes. There’s no such thing as cheaper or more expensive bits. One of the more interesting trends in fashion is the designer who copies herself. Rather than cede the low-end knock-off market, the designer executes low-end copies of her signature styles for mass distribution through the fast-fashion retailers.

You can learn a lot about the economics of the technology business by simply viewing each of the major vendors as a fashion house.

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