IFTF's Future Now

Was the subpoena sent by txt message, too?

Earlier this year we noted a proposal by the NYPD to require that environmental monitoring devices used in New York City be registered by the police. Now the New York Times reports that lawyers representing the NYPD are asking for records from the TXTmob service, which was used by protesters at the 2004 Republication National Convention:

When delegates to the Republican National Convention assembled in New York in August 2004, the streets and sidewalks near Union Square and Madison Square Garden filled with demonstrators. Police officers in helmets formed barriers by stretching orange netting across intersections. Hordes of bicyclists participated in rolling protests through nighttime streets, and helicopters hovered overhead.

These tableaus and others were described as they happened in text messages that spread from mobile phone to mobile phone in New York City and beyond. The people sending and receiving the messages were using technology, developed by an anonymous group of artists and activists called the Institute for Applied Autonomy, that allowed users to form networks and transmit messages to hundreds or thousands of telephones.

Although the service, called TXTmob, was widely used by demonstrators, reporters and possibly even police officers, little was known about its inventors. Last month, however, the New York City Law Department issued a subpoena to Tad Hirsch, a doctoral candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who wrote the code that created TXTmob.

Lawyers representing the city in lawsuits filed by hundreds of people arrested during the convention asked Mr. Hirsch to hand over voluminous records revealing the content of messages exchanged on his service and identifying people who sent and received messages.

[h/t to Jess]

Technorati Tags: mobility, security, smart mobs

New study on Chinese-EU energy cooperation

SciDevNet reports on a new study proposing cooperation between the EU and China on alternative energy research and development:

China and the European Union (EU) can significantly advance low-carbon technologies if they cooperate closely on technological development and market access, according to a new report.

'Interdependencies on Energy and Climate Security for China and Europe', outlines common challenges faced by the China and the EU in dealing with the impact of climate change on energy security — despite differences in their economic development.

The report was presented in Beijing last month (28 February). Contributors include UK think tank Chatham House and the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS).

In order to meet its fast-growing energy demands, China will need to add power generation capacity of 1260 gigawatts by 2030. And despite stable economic development, the countries of the EU will need to generate 862 gigawatts of additional energy by 2030 to replace outdated generation facilities.

If conventional technologies are used, both China and the EU will be locked in a high-carbon development model, the report warns.

But if they work together, the EU and China — which together account for 30 per cent of the world's energy consumption — could create unprecedented opportunities for global transition to low-carbon energy generation, says the report.

China's huge energy demands, low-cost manufacturing, and cheap local technological talent offer a shortcut for the production of clean energy technologies such as wind, solar and clean coal.

China has already produced 80 per cent of the world's energy-saving lamps — many of which are based on technology created in the EU.

The report recommends that EU research bodies establish research and development centres in China and increase the involvement of Chinese expertise in the development of clean energy technology.

It also suggests that the EU builds 'low-carbon economic zones' in China and establishes a joint technology platform to improve energy efficiency in the building sector.

Technorati Tags: China, cooperation, energy, Europe

The Experience of Prediction Markets

I had been co-administering the prediction market for the Open Ex program at IFTF and pulled together a summary for people interested in Prediction Markets.  The IFTF market used InklingMarkets.com as a platform.

These ideas are pulled predominantly from the experience of running the market, rather than participating in the market.

Overview Observations

(1) Don't buy-and-hold. Prediction markets are less enticing the further into the future the event might be.  This is (obviously) because of staleness and the degree of uncertainty as a function of time, but also because a long-term market will hold someone's money trapped for a long time if they're "buy and hold." In other words, given no transaction costs for trading in and out, it's a poor strategy to buy and hold.

(2) Think ahead about how to prove something HASN'T happened. As a market administrator, you have to be very careful when constructing a market to clearly state winning conditions AND, in some cases, sources for establishing winning conditions. If you need to determine that an event has happened, since it's impossible to determine it *hasn't* happened I'd suggest requiring that the event needs to be reported in a limited number of specified, searchable venues. This might be a list of news sources, or even as specific as keyword search engine. Another route would be requiring that the players report on an event happening as proof that it occurred ( i.e. let them participate as news miner-researchers).

(3) Teach Game Strategy to Boost Confidence. There are two main flaws associated with trading. The first is given in this example:  If I believe that Obama's going to win the election, but I think it's about 60% likely and the market's trading at 95%, then I should SELL to bring the percentage in closer to my prediction. However if I sell and the market closes with Obama winning - as I expected him to do - I would lose my trade.  So the market force here actually pushes the market to an extreme price - 95%: the only people who buy at that price would think that 95% is an okay price.  People who believe he'd win but aren't quite so certain, do not sell because they'd be betting against their actual prediction.

The game strategy that would fix this would be to SELL at 95, but make sure that you cover your sell before the market closes regardless of the price.

Alternatively if you were constructing a prediction market software application, you could enable bids to be put in directly for any prediction, but the odds would be different depending on the existing distribution of the predictions. (This would be more of a betting market than a prediction market.)

The second flaw is the assumption that people will be unmoved by mob assessment.  Obviously the predictive value has been shown repeatedly in liquid markets with a lot of information and consensus building done outside the market (e.g. with elections, sporting events, etc.).  However I would imagine in a small market without information, participants might second-guess themselves. This could be a good thing if there is also a way to engage conversation; it could be a bad thing if accurate voices belong to people who lack self-confidence, such as people who rely on their intuition but who function in a strongly analytical environment.

There is an argument to the contrary, that in order for the market to be accurate there needs to be arbitrage players who are acting in uninformed ways and for reasons like entertainment, etc.



Recommendations for Market-Makers


(1) Players MUST trade into and out of the stocks frequently in order to ensure the markets are valid, rather than tending to show only the extremists' views.  This should be formally incentivized. One way would be that the winner is the person with the highest *weighted* score, where the weight is related to the number of trades placed.  (Some serious thought would have to go into that.) Players must also be explicitly taught how to sell an overpriced stock and cover before market close.

(2) Beware insider trading.  There should be conversations outside of the markets regarding the relevant news so that players can feel that they have some basic understanding of the issues. When I set up markets in the game I tried to consistently refer to at least one major news story so that players could get some context to begin with.  If there were more time available, a daily email news feed on all open market topics would be a great help if the markets aren't limited to highly visible news (e.g. the French Presidential Election).

(3) New players probably don't understand how quickly scores can change. Because trades are settled for $0 or $100 (to reflect the 0 or 100% probabilistic outcomes) it's not like real-life stock trading; if you Buy for 51 and you're correct, you make 49 on each share.  You can nearly double your balance in one successsful trade. (Or lose it.)  The leaderboard should be emailed frequently, and top winnings on each *trade* should be publicized .  "Fortunes" are made and lost quickly - this needs to be emphasized.  "The game isn't over until it's over."



Further Thoughts

I'm very interested in how to best capture the meta-market. 

(1) Options Markets. In financial markets, options are a way of pricing the expected future value of a security.  An options market with a rule excluding people from engaging in both the options market and the underlying stock market simultaneously might enable a long term forecast in a short-term timeframe.

For example:  Who will win the Nobel Prize in 2008? might have an associated options market: Will "other" in "Who will win the Nobel Prize in 2008?" be under 25% by midnight, Oct 31, 2007?

(2) Contingency Markets. I'm also interested in contingent markets for this purpose.  A "contingent market" might be a pair of related markets:  One market states that a thing happens, and you're paid the price of something if it does happen and refunded otherwise;  one market states it doesn't happen and  you're paid the price of the same thing if it doesn't happen and refunded otherwise.  The difference in the prices is the markets' expectations of the thing happening on the price of the item.

An example:  What will be the Net Revenues of a company if the CEO is fired? and What will be the Net Revenues of the same company if the CEO isn't fired?  The difference in the pricing will show you the expectation of the CEO leaving on the Net Revenues.

In this way you could have a contingent market, stop it when the action is either taken or not (a definitive short-term action) and then return to benchmark at the end of the period of time -- let's say one year -- what has occurred.  (Presumably everyone who has participated will have use of the funds in the interim and the settlement will really be an adjustment a year later.)

Telepresence: it's the details?

In the first years after its founding in 1968, one of the biggest projects the Institute for the Future undertook was a study of online collaboration systems, and their impact on organizational behavior. The dream of the electronic system that's as good as a real meeting refuses to die; but unlike some futuristic technologies (I'm talking to you, personal jet pack), this one seems to be getting closer to reality, as this weekend's New York Times article on the latest high-end telepresence systems suggests.

High-end videoconferencing — the magical ability to be two places at once — has had a bumpy past, plagued by jerky gestures, out-of-sync lips and sound and cumbersome equipment. Few executives liked what they saw, including unflattering pictures of themselves, and most thought the business tool was not worth the price.

But now, thanks to new technology, videoconferencing is delivering on its promise as an alternative to traditional business travel. The high-definition TV images are sharp. Broadband fiber-optic cable has replaced tired telephone lines. And the equipment is often installed in studios that are handsome and appropriately corporate....

Two things are notable about this upsurge in telepresence.

First, the video, audio, and connections are all unquestionably getting better. But what's really interesting to me about these systems, and what makes them more successful, are the low-tech details that HP, Cisco and other companies use to fill in the gaps between video and reality.

Cisco’s virtual meeting room includes an IP (Internet Protocol) phone, three broadcast-quality cameras, three ultrasensitive mikes, three 60-inch plasma screens, a crescent-shaped table that seats six and soft back-lighting.

“The table is maple to complement faces,” said a Cisco spokeswoman, Jacqueline Pigliucci. The studios are painted in identical colors, to give the impression that the people on the screen are in the same room.

The couple people I've talked to who've used these systems say that the room design is what really makes the illusion work. Another is that the service on these high-end systems is very good: as one consultant quoted in the New York Times article says, "Walk in a Halo room, and everything is ready to run." (No one ever has to reboot a real conference room.) Of course, seamlessness comes at a cost: about $18,000 a month, to be precise.

In other words, it's not just that the technology is getting better in the conventional, specs-are-getting-more-impressive kind of way: the experience of using these systems is changing for the better because their designers are paying more attention to deployment and maintenance. Nothing breaks the illusion of seamlessness like having to reboot the computer the video conference was supposed to run on.

The second notable thing is who's really using these systems.

It might be just an artifact of a very small sample size, but the heaviest users I've heard of are groups who already have standing meetings, not people who are using these systems to substitute for first-time meetings with prospective clients. The technology isn't bringing together people who have never met before, but is strengthening an connection between colleagues. As Business Week reported earlier this year,

A typical user is private equity star Blackstone Group. Several times a week, CEO Stephen A. Schwarzman gathers senior managing partners around a polished conference table in the firm's New York headquarters on Park Avenue for a five-way video call.... Blackstone has 40 video rooms stationed around the world. One executive is so enthralled with the system that he keeps the conference connection running in his office all day long. "We're big proponents of videoconferencing because of the way it enhances the quality of meetings," says Harry D. Moseley, Blackstone's chief information officer.

Financial and consulting firms have been particularly avid purchasers. Deloitte & Touche USA is installing a dozen $250,000 video suites made by Polycom so that various business units can collaborate on outsourcing ideas or interview job candidates from India. AIC Ventures, a real estate investment company, has three video rooms: one in its home base of Austin, Tex., another in Dallas, and one in Chicago. They are used for everything from reviewing new Web page designs to celebrating the close of a big deal with a (now crystal-clear) ring of a tabletop gong.

This is a bit like the experience we've had at the Institute with Google Docs: that collaboration tool has its uses for asynchronous collaboration among geographically-dispersed authors, but the best uses come when authors are in the same room, and able to talk about the document in real time.

Despite this, at least one telepresence consulting company argues that this isn't the future: "effective inter-company business," they maintain, "will be propelling this industry forward in the coming years (remember where you heard it first!).... The future of telepresence will be about connecting with vendors, customers, and joint venture partners... to lower the shared costs of business relationships."

Technorati Tags: collaboration, displays, office, video, work

Ride sharing, parking markets, and the future of property

From time to time, we've written about experiments using pervasive computing technologies to turn private goods into sharable public ones: using virtualization tools to make computers more green, using computers and mobile phones to make carsharing programs easier to use or create dynamic ridesharing systems, using RFID tags to make sharing books more secure, building networking sites to create virtual libraries. (We're hardly alone: John Thackara identified the growth of sharing as one of six big design trends when he talked at IDEO.) Today I came across two more car-related examples.

The first is Peasy.com (like Parking easy-- get it?) a new "online marketplace for parking spaces, enabling drivers to search for and book spaces before they leave home, and letting British homeowners monetize unused parking spaces by adding them to the Peasy network."

To rent out a parking space, the owner needs to register and enter all relevant details, including price, when the space is available, and whether it will be rented out daily, weekly, or both. Those who require parking can then search for suitable parking spaces and securely book them online, or first negotiate a better price. To protect the privacy of owners, searchers can't view exact addresses. Instead, they're given the street the space is on, as well as its postcode and location on a map. Once booked, the renter is provided with the exact address. If booking on a weekly basis, renters are also given the owner's contact details, enabling them to introduce themselves and arrange for collection of keys or remote controls if required.

As Springwise notes, this hits a nice combination: a growing demand for a service (in this case, safe parking spaces), and a growing familiarity with online marketplaces.

The bigger picture is that it allows property owners (in this case, people who have parking spaces) to generate more use (and revenue) from that property. Such tools-- and the cultural attitudes that make such arrangements acceptable-- are potentially significant because there are many kinds of property that are used only a fraction of their lives. Most offices, for example, are used for a few hours a week; most power tools are used for minutes, when they're designed with useful lifespans of hundreds of hours. You might never want to rent your bed out to someone who works night shifts, but being able to generate some cash from that power tiller-- that's a different story.

The second example is an under-development New York service, Hitchsters, that facilitates ridesharing among air travelers.

Everyone loves New York, except for when they have to take a cab to or from the airport and it ends up costing almost as much as airfare. Which is why smart New Yorkers are starting to plan their airport commutes via Hitchsters.com... a combination of a social networking and a ride matching site. Hitchsters' software connects travelers scheduled on the same flight and living in the same area of the city so they can save money by sharing a taxi.

This is more an example of a service that tries to reduce the costs of a service by getting more users involved-- in a sense, it's like an ad-hoc buyers' club for cab rides.

Indeed, car and ride sharing schemes of one sort or another seem to be one focal point for experiments in either sharing services more effectively, or turning private goods into public ones. When I was a columnist for Red Herring, I wrote a piece about dynamic car sharing; its reproduced in the extended post.

Technorati Tags: cars, collaboration, property, sharing

Web 2.0 video creator writes about empathy on the web

Michael Wesch, PhD, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University, who made the popular Web 2.0 video answers some questions at Battelle's Searchblog about the motivation behind his video.  I like that he talks about the opportunity not in terms of information but in terms of visibility and the chance for empathy.  Empathy through a computer screen is pretty hard, but it's worth the effort to make the state of the world more visible online - as in Gapminder or World Mapper, or to highlight violations of peoples' human rights - as in WITNESS.

For me, cultural anthropology is a continuous exercise in expanding my mind and my empathy, building primarily from one simple principle: everything is connected. This is true on many levels. First, everything including the environment, technology, economy, social structure, politics, religion, art and more are all interconnected. As I tried to illustrate in the video, this means that a change in one area (such as the way we communicate) can have a profound effect on everything else, including family, love, and our sense of being itself. Second, everything is connected throughout all time, and so as anthropologists we take a very broad view of human history, looking thousands or even millions of years into the past and into the future as well. And finally, all people on the planet are connected. This has always been true environmentally because we share the same planet. Today it is even more true with increasing economic and media globalization....

So if there is a global village, it is not a very equitable one, and if there is a tragedy of our times, it may be that we are all interconnected but we fail to see it and take care of our relationships with others. For me, the ultimate promise of digital technology is that it might enable us to truly see one another once again and all the ways we are interconnected. It might help us create a truly global view that can spark the kind of empathy we need to create a better world for all of humankind. I’m not being overly utopian and naively saying that the Web will make this happen. In fact, if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.

Nice little mention in Slate

A new Paul Boutin article about Google Docs has a gratifying little linkback to Future Now:

Google's word processor starts saving the file to backup servers as soon as you start typing—you don't have to remember to save it yourself. Files are automatically stored online, where you have the option of sharing them with other users. (You can also save them to your desktop.) I've used Google Docs to edit a Wired article with a co-author three time zones away. Eagle-eyed futurists have spotted a more surprising use: Co-workers in adjacent seats can edit the same file at the same time instead of hunching over each other's screens.

Google Docs has quickly turned into a must-use tool for a number of us. It's very interesting: it's part of a general trend in which we're using online tools to enhance face-to-face collaboration, and to tighten up work processes-- more or less the opposite of how these tools were "supposed" to be used.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, IFTF, work

What the hive mind is really interested in

A caution to enthusiasts of collective intelligence: the just-released 2006 Year-End Google Zeitgeist. Did global warming, Iraq, globalization, Web 2.0, or Polonium-210 make the list? No... top 10 searches were:

1. paris hilton
2. orlando bloom
3. cancer
4. podcasting
5. hurricane katrina
6. bankruptcy
7. martina hingis
8. autism
9. 2006 nfl draft
10. celebrity big brother 2006

Broadly speaking, this confirms my contention, based on a careful analysis of the popularity of videos on YouTube, that the hive mind is interested in 1) cats doing funny things, and 2) people doing embarrassing things.... Only there aren't any cats in the Top 10 (and forget leaving a comment mentioning Paris Hilton, because everyone else has thought of that joke, too).

[via Rough Type]

Technorati Tags: collective intelligence

Web 2.0 for Day Traders

Inkling, one of the Institute's technology partners, just launched Worthio - an sort of prediction market meets social site for stock market speculators. The site lets you rate stocks quickly on whether you're bullish or bearish, and presents the aggregate group opinion. You can also add people to your network and watch what they think. There are also discussion around stocks.

Interesting twist - will the "wisdom of crowds" devolve into "herd mentality" on the trading room floor?

Prediction Markets at Yahoo! ConFab

I'm in California this week for a bunch of internal workshops at the Institute, and having loads of fun running around the Valley. Last night I went over to Yahoo! for their first "yahoo.confab" event, which was about using prediction markets inside corporations. It was an amazing event. (There are professional-quality webcasts at 100kbps and 300kbps)

It was an incredibly timely opportunity. One of the projects I'm working on right now at IFTF is a new research program that focuses on new business opportunities in the open economy, called OpenEx. As part of OpenEx, we're running a prediction market hosted by Inkling Markets(we want you to play too! Shoot me an email for an invite or to get a prospectus for the OpenEx program).

I was both buoyed and dismayed by what I learned at this event. Buoyed by how much potential there is in prediction markets for improving decision-making and forecasting. Dismayed by how shallow the body of knowledge is on how to make them work well, and how to make them work well inside large organizations. (But then again buoyed that this is a big opportunity for the Institute to help advance the craft of creating and running good prediction markets).

A Brief History of Prediction Markets

Prediction markets have been around since the late 1980s, when a couple of professors started the Iowa Electronic Market (IEM) at the University of Iowa. HP ran the earliest corporate experiments in the late 1990s (see Bernardo Huberman's presentation to Howard Rheingold's class at Stanford). As Leslie Fine from HP Research described last night, that experiment only tried to predict a dozen events and only had 10-15 active traders during the 3 years it ran (1996-1999).

The modern era for prediction markets - and Robin Hanson of George Mason University showed a slide that corporate use of prediction markets is growing exponentially (but still quite a small total #) - began after the political disaster of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market in 2003. PAM sought to create a market for predictions for political and economic forecasts, but was killed by a couple of Congressional zealots and the media, who zeroed in on "the fact that PAM would allow trading in such events as coups d'état, assassinations, and terrorist attacks." Senator Wyden said at the time, "The idea of a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism is ridiculous and it's grotesque" and Senator Dorgan called it "useless, offensive and unbelievably stupid". (source: Wikipedia article)

So while PAM failed, it brought the idea of prediction markets to a lot of people's attention, and as Hanson pointed out last night, he has been closely tracking media mentions of PAM over the last 3 years and there is a clear trend towards the media talking about PAM in a positive light. In the end, we make look back on the PAM debacle as a watershed moment for the broader institutional use of prediction markets.

Corporate Experiences

The discussion at Yahoo! brought to light some of the many useful characteristics of prediction markets for improving forecasting and decision-making inside companies:

• They aggregate information - the larger and broader the group, the more relevant information gets reflected in prediction market prices. In an ideal market, all relevant information is reflected in the price (the group's forecast), and any erroneous information is random and cancels itself out.
  
• They are better than polls and surveys at picking winners - both in terms of accuracy as well as what they measure. For instance, election polls often ask who you voted for, not who you think is going to win.
  
• They allow very granular forecasts - you can ask extremely specific questions, and break larger questions up into components to isolate trends and influences on broad indicators or measures like the company's stock price
  
• They encourage honest forecasts - because there is usually some sort of reward at stake in a good prediction market (money or prestige), people tend to vote with their mind not their heart. Also, since they are effectively anonymous if proper precautions are taken, people can make a bet without having to worry about what peers or bosses (or underlings) might think.
  
• They are fun - they get people interested and involved in forecasting, and can provide a platform for community inside companies.
  
• They update themselves - unlike polls and surveys which are a "push" forecasting mechanism, prediction markets are a "pull" mechanism. As new information emerges, traders react quickly by changing their positions and the market quickly moves to incorporate that new information.
  

The speakers told of some experiences at their firms:

Google, Bo Cowgill - is moving away from monetary rewards towards reputation/social rewards. Companies have to create elaborate schemes to use monetary rewards because of the regulatory restrictions on prediction markets that use real money. Also, people didn't pay attention to the rewards, but pay lots of attention to the lists of top traders. Exploring new ways to indicate performance - by team, by date of hire (newcomers vs old-timers), etc. Thinking about putting prediction market ranking into the company directory as a prestige measure. Thinking about how to allow traders to publicize/brag about their trading decisions within the platform or corporate directories.

HP, Leslie Fine - focused on what happens when prediction markets fail, which often happens in small groups. HP is rolling out a new product called BRAIN: Behaviorallly Robust Aggregation of Information in Networks, which combines aspects of prediction markets and polls. Pointed out that sometimes prediction markets disseminate too much information, which is not always good in corporate settings. BRAIN works by letting traders place bets on outcomes. They get rewarded if they win (and high performers are weighted higher), but traders don't see the aggregate forecast, only market sponsors do. HP used it reduce errors in DRAM price predictions (highly volatile commodity) from 4% to 2.5%, which had huge positive financial implications for HP. They also replaced a forecasting process that took many meetings over a period of weeks with a single meeting and an hour or so per person on the BRAIN system inputting forecasts! First production client will be Pfizer, which will use it internally to predict which new drugs in the research pipeline will be successful.

Yahoo! Research has a public prediction market to predict tech trends but is also building an entire virtual currency system for use inside Yahoo! called Yoo-topia. the virtual currency can be used for trading in prediction markets, for buying favors from other employees, or for bidding on what kind of restaurant to go to for dinner (the people that lose get Yoo-topia dollars as compensation for having to eat the food they didn't want). And it all runs off mobile devices. Cool!

Microsoft's Todd Proebsting told of a prediction market experience at Microsoft used to forecast a ship date for an internal software tool. They created a prediction market with assets for various estimates of the ship date: ahead of time, on time, one month late, etc. Within 3 minutes of trading starting, the share price for an on-time ship was down to 3 cents per share - the group was forecasting a 20:1 bet against shipping on time. The project manager was mortified. He quickly held a meeting and the team stripped out some features. The on-time stock jumped. Then the internal customers complained and the features were put back into the product. The team traders sent the on-time stock back down. The product eventually shipped a few months late, just as forecast by the prediction market.

Best Practices

So what was the takeaway? How do companies effectively utilize the many software and hosted prediction market tools available? The most surprising thing to me is how little advice or information the group had to share on this. Or more precisely, how little consensus there was. In theory, and James Suroewicki talks about this in his book The Wisdom of Crowds (he was the host last night), you do not want traders to have a stake or be able to influence outcomes. Yet many of the corporate examples did not comply with this important theoretical requirement for an efficient and accurate market, but they seemed to work anyways.

I think what it means is that companies need to experiment widely and watch closely what happens in prediction markets. But as Adam Siegel, IFTF's partner at Inkling pointed out, there are 3 main reasons why prediction markets fail:

1. People don't understand the concept
   
2. The interface isn't easy enough to use
   
3. Market structure was wrong: causes include questions that ask for opinions, poor descriptions, biased questions, and too long timeframes
   

Going forward with our OpenEx Prediction Market, it's that last issue that is going to provide the greatest challenge and the greatest opportunity. At IFTF, we generally focus on the 5-10 year time frame when we work with our clients. But this is really too long for effective prediction markets. Few have even been around long enough to even run something where 3 or 5 or 7 year markets have come to fruition, though one of the speakers said that the 10-year old Foresight Exchange has had some limited successes with long-term forecasts. This is something I really look forward to working with Inkling and our clients and anyone else who wants to play in our market to learn how to do well. It could just be the most exciting thing I ever work on here.

The death and rebirth of the manufacturing sector in Silicon Valley

Earlier this year, search engine giant Google paid over $1.6 billion to acquire the video sharing service YouTube. The 18 month-old startup had just over sixty employees, and made nothing of its own, other than a little software code; the value of the company rested in the vast audience that uploaded and shared videos. For many, the sale seemed to mark the return of the dot-com boom days, and the coming of age of "Web 2.0."

Once upon a time, though, Silicon Valley was famous because it made things. In fact, one of the best recent books about the Valley, Christophe Lecuyer's Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, argues that the unique challenges of making electronics drove the creation of the Valley's distinct culture. The book starts with one vast insight about the nature of technology. This is it: manufacturing isn't boring. Figuring out how to produce thousands or millions of units of complicated, high-performance components requires as much ingenuity and creativity as inventing a new device in the first place, and sometimes even generates new innovations. In fact, Jean Hoerni invented the planar process for manufacturing semiconductors-- a process that is the Valley's equivalent of mass production, interchangeable parts, and sliced bread, all in one-- in response to military demands for ultra-high performance components. No military demands, no planar process, no Silicon Valley.

This attention to the factory floor leads Lecuyer to another discovery. Long before the place was famous for attracting engineers from around the Pacific, it was drawing strength and creating world-class technical skill by remixing technical and national cultures. In the 1920s, the radio scene was a mashup of professional radio engineers, amateur radio enthusiasts, and naval intelligence officers; this is one reason San Francisco-- far from either the procurement wizards in the Naval Shipyard in Washington, or the East Coast electronics factories-- had a world-class radio tube industry in the 1930s.

This is a timely book, because manufacturing isn't completely gone from Silicon Valley; in fact, it might be coming back. Nanosolar, one of a slew of new Silicon Valley companies that works on alternative energy, just announced plans to build its new factory not in China or India, but in San Jose. As one venture capitalist put it, the photovoltaic solar cell company is "trying to move the photovoltaics industry from the economics of the semiconductor business to the economics of the printing business"-- precisely the kind of move that requires manufacturing genius of the sort Lecuyer describes. Who was one of Nanosolar's early investors? Google.

Technorati Tags: books, design, innovation, manufacturing, Silicon Valley

Another "amateur expert community improved by the Internet" story

Actually given its brevity, less a story than an anecdote from the Times Online:

After a lifetime of rowing in club boats, I recently started building my own. Before the internet, it was difficult to get information or plans for amateur construction. There was a show for small wooden boats in London and some further education colleges did courses, but most boatbuilders were on their own, learning from books and bitter experience.

The web has brought about a global amateur boat- building community. We have forums and newsgroups to discuss designs and construction methods online and to keep inspiration going by swapping stories of voyages.

Members log on from around the world, although the hobby seems to be concentrated mainly in the English-speaking countries and, for some unknown reason, Poland.

It is not just contact either. The web has revolutionised the supply of materials for boatbuilding. It is now possible to download plans and order materials electronically, instead of having to motor for miles to various chandleries. This year, for the first time, a meeting was held for amateurs to bring their boats, sail each other’s creations and exchange notes.

Technorati Tags: amateur, pro-am, Web 2.0

Webscience

via Langreiter,

a commentary at the Journal of Neuroscience speculates on the future of research journals and peer-review:

Research studies appear on databases, not in journals
First, I don't think that it makes any sense to continue with paper copies of research articles. Instead of the "quasi-legal" document that is the current scientific article, we should be moving to full data being available on the web together with the software that might have been used to manipulate the data, as well as multimedia presentations to back up the data. Research papers are primarily of interest to other researchers in the same area, and they usually don't need the introduction and certainly not the discussion, which mostly degenerates to hype anyway
...
If an absence of peer review (or post-publication review, as I call it) is a step too far, then we should have an author (or rather funder) pays model. These fees could support a peer review mechanism, which should be open in that both authors and readers would know who was reviewing studies. It's ethically unacceptable that such important judgements should be made an unidentified judge. Like it or not, we live in a world where what is not transparent is deemed to be biased, corrupt, or incompetent until proved otherwise. Plus I believe that peer review should be a scientific discourse rather than an arbitrary judgment. This is far from radical: it's simply science returning to its roots when science was presented and discussed at meetings rather than published in journals.

Perhaps we will invent new forms of peer review by learning from innovations like Wikipedia. It is in some ways a form of peer review, only reviewers make changes directly rather than simply commenting.
...
Another worry from the conservative about such a system is to wonder how credit would be allocated. At present credit comes from publishing in prestigious journals. Often the impact factor of the journal (a dubious and manipulated statistic) is allocated to the paper, which is wholly unscientific because there is little correlation between the citations to studies and the impact factor of the journals in which they are published, because the impact factor of a journal is driven by a small number of highly cited studies (Seglen, 1997). In the new world I'm imagining, credit would come from the buzz from researchers and hits on the study. These hits can be disclosed in real time, unlike citations, which come years after studies are published.

The part about multimedia presentations makes a lot of sense as we expect simulations to play an increasingly important role.  I'm eager to see researchers experiment with new ways of publishing and finding each others work. I met someone from Georgia Tech who had setup some kind of display to notify researchers when they were working on portions of the genome that overlap with someone in the building.  It's impossible to know what will work or not beforehand - what would encourage research and what would bring the whole system to a screeching halt. For more webscience speculation, look at these Machine Learning (Theory) posts:

9/18/2006 - What is missing for online collaborative research?
12/1/2005 - The Webscience Future

Designing Business for an Open World

Andrea Saveri, Howard Rheingold, Kathi Vian, and Ming-Li Chai with a team at Herman Miller have released a report on applying knowledge of cooperation theory to the practical problems of business today. A short PDF, Creative Commons licensed, is now available: Designing Business for an Open World.

The experience of using Google docs and the future of collaboration

Today one of my colleagues at the Institute and I finished up a draft of a piece on the future of biomimicry. We've been working on it for a while, and had divided up the piece into several sections. But when it came time to write the opening and conclusion, and do the editorial work necessary to make the pieces flow together, we decided to try something new: we put it up on Google docs (formerly Writely), and worked on it together.

The experience was a very interesting one, for a couple reasons.

First, the technology. Google docs has a basic word processor, and while it doesn't do footnotes, it has most of the essentials for styling and structuring documents (though most people mistake the former for the latter). It also has a pretty good revisions tracker, which is a cross between the "track changes" functionality in Word, and the view changes feature you see on many wikis.

I suspect that when people design (or start to play around with) such systems, they imagine the collaborators being separated by oceans and time zones: that the real benefits will come to coauthors in Berlin and Berkeley, or Paris and Perth. And for lots of groups, that's probably a plus. But what struck me, as my colleague and I were working on our article, was how valuable it was for the two of, even though we were right across from each other. We'd brainstorm a transition, or talk about how to restructure a paragraph; one of us would make the changes, and save the version; we'd hit refresh, look at it on our respective machines; and rework it until we had it right.

In a couple hours we had written as much as we'd each written in the previous month. Why? In part, writing together serves to tighten attention. I'm easily distracted, and can hit Google to look up some very specific fact, only to find myself ten minutes later looking at a Web site about animal pictures on the London Underground.

It also serves to eliminate some of the rationalizations that slow traditional multiauthored pieces. There are always turns of phrase or pieces of argument that really need to be worked out with your co-authors; when you're writing alone, it's easy to put those sections off until later, and tell yourself, "Well, I can't write the next paragraph until we work out that transition. I wonder if there are any new cat videos on YouTube?" When your coauthor is right beside you, and it's easy to make changes right in the document, the bar to completion gets lower.

It's also much easier to make changes directly onscreen, in a way that everyone can see, than to put edits on a printed page, which have to then be carried later (if you can remember exactly what they meant).

Of course, the technology could be a little better: having automatic line or paragraph numbering, for example, would make it infinitely easier for collaborators to stay on the same page (as it were). Instinct suggests that this isn't hard to implement, but if you assume that coauthors are going to be working asynchronously and at a distance, you don't need it.

But that doesn't detract from the big point: the system may facilitate collaboration at a distance, but it supercharges collaboration in person. More broadly, I suspect that this is where the really big gains in collaborative and social software will be made in the future: not in teams whose members are on opposite sides of a continent, but teams whose members are on opposite sides of a coffee table.

Update, 2 January 2007: Paul Boutin has an article on Slate that links to this post. I for one welcome our new Slate reader overlords!

Technorati Tags: collaboration, collective intelligence, social software, work

Why Wikipedia works (it's not the hive mind)

Dirk Riehle posts an interview with several active Wikipedians on "How and Why Wikipedia Works." Lots of detail, plus this interesting nugget (that Science Library Pad caught):

DR: What about the 'collective intelligence' or 'collective wisdom' argument: That given enough authors, the quality of an article will generally improve? Does this hold true for Wikipedia?
EB: No, it does not. The best articles are typically written by a single or a few authors with expertise in the topic. In this respect, Wikipedia is not different from classical encyclopedias.
KN: Elian is right. Also, most of the short articles remain short and of rather poor content.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, wiki

Swapthing

Recently the Institute hosted a talk by Jessica Hardwick, the co-founder of Swapthing. As she describes it, Swapthing is "eBay for barter, and a system for providing social networking around things." Pretty simple concept, really.

Two things struck me during the talk. First, it's another version of what I first noticed with del.icio.us and ThinkLink: a relatively small outfit that's able to grow thanks to the abundance of IT.

Second, Swapthing is spending infinitely more energy on the social networking and community stuff than on the economics. This might seem counterintuitive, but I suspect it's a smart gamble. One model they're not following is that of barter trading markets, where participants get credit for things they donate, then "spend" that credit on other things. (I also suspect that eBay may have lowered the barrier for auctions enough to challenge systems that rely on proxies for currency; I don't know how you'd test that hypothesis, thought.) There are some tax reasons for staying away from all this-- once you start to handle money, you become an entirely different kind entity as far as the IRS is concerned-- but mainly Swapthing assumes that participants can figure out the value of items on their own, but could really benefit from networking tools. More value can be created by concentrating on the social side, most notably by building the reputation system (which is obviously essential), and giving participants the opportunity to build swap circles and groups (e.g., new moms in Portland, the First Methodist Church of Springfield, Peninsula School families).

There might be a parallel here to a real estate developer who tries to create a vibrant new downtown area. They aren't trying to create new economies; they're trying to create a space that supports economic activity.

Jessica is also interviewed on the wonderfully transparently-titled A Hot Web 2.0 blog from Silicon Valley.

Technorati Tags: collaboration, IFTF, Institute for the Future, social software, Web 2.0

Competition, cooperation, and the Tour de France

Someone recently gave me a copy of a recent article, in Fortune, "Pack Mentality," that extracts the "free-market lessons of long-distance bike racing" as seen in the Tour de France:

[A] stage race is less a sporting event than a commodities exchange on wheels. What appears to be a random mass of bicycles is really an orderly, complex web of shifting alliances, crossed with brutal competition, designed to keep or acquire the market's most valued currency: energy.

Amassing it (i.e., letting as little of it as possible drain away) is the only way for a racer to survive the brutal physical strain of a Tour de France, the metabolic equivalent of running 21 marathons in 23 days. Bikers save energy by riding together in a massive slipstream....

But here's the key: To thrive in the angry little swarm that is the peloton, enemies often have to stick together and make deals with one another. Cooperation across enemy lines is the centerpiece of a winning game plan.... Why play nice with someone who might beat you? Racers in the peloton are not pals; they're enemies without options.

So what does cooperation develop? Why isn't it just every man (or team) for himself?

The reason for the cooperation has its basis in physics: Wind resistance is a huge factor in energy use. According to studies done by Nike during its development of Lance Armstrong's speed suit, a bike racer consumes almost 80 percent of his energy cutting through the air and only 20 percent moving his bike.

To overcome that resistance, racers employ "drafting" - tucking your front wheel just behind rear wheel of the man in front of you, thereby gliding in his wind-free slipstream and greatly reducing the amount of energy it takes to ride.

Not surprisingly, there is an etiquette to drafting. Riders who draft too much without volunteering to slice through the wind for others are "wheel suckers."

It's an entertaining piece, though I find it a bit heavy on the "hey Americans, there's this crazy sports thing going on in, of all places, France" angle: it overplays the strangeness of the Tour de France. But I hesitate to criticize it too much, if only because it confirms something I wrote a couple years ago about "Smart Mobs and Sports."

You might think that cycling would just be every man for himself, but it's not: there's a lot of strategy that's involved, and also some cultural norms about what you're obliged to do as part of a breakaway or leading team. (It's bad form, for example, to just stay in someone's slipstream; you're supposed to take a turn leading.) There are also rules about not taking advantage of people's misfortunes, though that's a little trickier. The other day [in summer 2003], when leader Lance Armstrong was in a wreck, his closest competitor slowed down and waited for him to remount and catch up; Armstrong had done the same for him three years earlier. (On the other hand, the race doesn't stop for the person who's dead last.) Part of this is old-fashioned gentlemanly conduct, but it's also a recognition that a bicycle race is a small world, and while everyone wants to win, no one can afford alienate themselves from the group....

it seems to me that the Tour is a great example of an institution in which you see combinations of flocking behavior, smart mob behavior (the teams all have little radios, and can communicate with their coaches to plan strategy on the road), and an interesting tension between cooperation and competition. You have to cooperate to survive: you have to compete successfully to win.

We often think of cooperation and competition as polar opposites, but in the modern world I suspect that's rarely the case: the norm now is something far more complex. A few years ago, high-tech pundits talked about "coopetition" as a new business model: but this notion of cooperation among competitors strikes me as highly tactical, and not terribly profound. (I could be wrong, of course.) Games like cycling and car racing point to something more basic: under many circumstance, you have to cooperate to compete.

But the one place the article really goes wrong is in its argument that "Nothing in American sports resembles the bizarre dynamic of the cycling peloton." First, as the article itself makes clear, there's nothing bizarre about it: cooperation in the context of competition often is perfectly rational, whether in playing-fields or markets.

In fact, it's rather like companies cooperating around technical standards. Computer companies agree to standardize around USB, Google and Yahoo both use HTTP protocols, shipping companies all use standard sized containers. Deviate from the standard, and you may gain a vast advantage (as Apple arguably has with its music system); more likely, you're make yourself irrelevant. Nobody makes money off standards. But everybody makes money because of standards. Likewise, in the Tour, you have to compete to win, but you have to cooperate to finish.

Second, there is at least one rather popular American sport in which the peleton dynamics, and a set of cultural norms that define what constitutes good versus unfair competition: Nascar. As David Ronfeldt argued several years ago,

In aerodynamically intense stock-car races like the Daytona 500, the drivers form into multi-car draft lines to gain extra speed. A driver who does not enter a draft line (slipstream) will lose. Once in a line, a driver must attract a drafting partner in order to break out and try to get further ahead. Thus the effort to win leads to ever-shifting patterns of cooperation and competition among rivals.

And as anyone who's seen the Pixar movie Cars can tell you, competitors who play too rough don't get respect.

Technorati Tags: bicycles, cooperation, sports

I think I'll start a global standard today

Recently I spent an afternoon with Ulla-Maaria Mutanen. She's author of the Crafter Manifesto, and recently launched ThingLink, a "free product code for creative work." The basic idea is very simple:

Thinglink.org is an open database where makers can register free unique identifiers for their work and create labels for their products. The beta was launched at the Maker Faire/San Francisco in April.

Artists, crafters, designers, and small producers stand to benefit from online recommendation systems because recommendation systems place their products on equal footing with those of the large corporations. However, recommendation systems require unique identifiers for products. UPCs, EANs and EPCs are examples of standard ID schemas. These codes are not accessible to individuals and small producers especially in developing countries because the codes cost money and reserving them is a complex process.

Thinglink is a free, alternative product ID code that can be attached to products in the form of a human-readable label, a barcode, or a RFID tag. The idea is that anyone can thinglink a product, and anyone with the will and the skills is free to create a recommendation system for thinglinked products.

I think there are a bunch of provocative things here, all wrapped up in a very simple object.

First is the idea that there's value in attaching digital IDs to handmade-- or really any unique-- objects. Ten years ago, creating a unique identifier system that closes the gap between an object and information about that object would have seemed really weird, or just sinister; but now, at least among some circles, the value of such a system is easier to see. (ThingLinks are little bits of spime.)

But this isn't just a matter of creating a UPC scheme for crafts. Industry codes establish objects as members of a family, and do so largely for purposes of supply chain and inventory management. While you might be able to build such functionalities around ThingLink, its purpose seems to different: ultimately, it's not about helping establish some object as part of a category, but capturing unique information about it. This is particularly cool because, as Dan Pink might put it, more and more of us don't buy things; we buy things that have interesting stories.

Of course, the two functionalities aren't mutually exclusive. Consider books, which have ISBN numbers. Booksellers who deal in rare or used books can use ISBN numbers just like Amazon; but they also want to collect information about specific books. Antiquarian booksellers record information about a book's overall condition, dust jacket, marginal notes, inscriptions, dedications, water and mold damage, and other things; having a way for that information to be associated with books would be quite useful.

The fact that the system is low-tech compared to UPC codes is also something that works in its favor. It means that the barriers to entry are pretty low, and may create more room for experimentation and evolution. For example, I could imagine a in which weavers could send pictures of their latest creations to ThingLink via their camera cell phones, and have the system send back an ID for that object, and create a record of it in the database (with the ID number, the picture, creation date, and information about who sent it). Such a system might be like folksonomies or Wikipedia: informal and imperfect, but good enough for everyday use, and very attractive when the alternative is nothing at all.

But what struck me most forcefully wasn't anything about ThingLink itself, but the casual ambitions behind it. Have we really reached the point where a graduate student in Helsinki, Finland, working with a few friends and a couple off-the-shelf commercial services, create an international standard? Are there enough servers in the world, enough cheap computers, and sufficiently ubiquitous Internet access-- not to mention an instinct regarding the value of using common protocols, if not absolutely formal standards-- to make this possible? Can individuals now command the resources to do what used to require formal organizations, lots of special interest group meetings, and offices in Geneva? Josh Schachter pulled off something like this with del.icio.us; of course, Tim Berners-Lee arguably did this with the World Wide Web protocol (though being at CERN and being able to build on a trend toward standardization in publishing formats helped).

Maybe.

Technorati Tags: business, cooperation, culture, digital-physical, RFID, Shaping Things, Web 2.0

Carsharing conference

The principality of Monaco (best-known to a certain generation of Americans as the place where Grace Kelly went after leaving Philadelphia) recently hosted a Monaco Euro Cities Carshare Implementation Workshops:

What is carsharing?

The idea of carsharing - basically an arrangement whereby you no longer have to own and bother about your car but still have one easily available to use when you need it (think no-wait car rental right around the corner with no paperwork or hassle) - has been around for several decades, and Europe early emerged as a world leader in the field. You may not ever have heard of it, but today there are more than six hundred cities in the world in which you can have handy use of a car when you want without owning one.... The World Carshare Consortium, an NGO out of France (http://worldcarshare.com) reports that based on actual experience, if you live in a city, drive less than ten thousand kilometers (6000 miles) a year, and don't use your car every day, you may be a perfect candidate for carsharing.

Why cities are looking at it?

While carsharing growth in the past has primarily been driven by individuals making the switch for their own personal reasons of economics and convenience, cities and government agencies concerned with matters like the environment, transportation, energy and the economy are starting to give it more attention for reasons of their own.

From the perspective of the city, carsharing offers a number of advantages - not least because a single shared car can... [replace] anywhere from six to twenty privately-owned] cars depending on the city and the project.... Carsharing [also] permits major economies of parking spaces....

But the collective advantages of carsharing do not stop there.

Studies in cities around the world in which carshare has become part of their transportation arrangements show that the switch to carsharing also works to improve environmental and air quality significantly, and works to encourage increased use of public transport, as well as more use of bicycles and walking.

Carsharing schemes are interesting examples of how unique, trackable objects can morph from being exclusively privately-owned goods, to something of a temporary commons.

Technorati Tags: cars, cooperation

Mycroft: Open source peer production in convenient banner form

In his classic article "Coase's Penguin," Yochai Benkler makes the argument that two of the key features of successful open source projects is that they decompose tasks into very small parts or problems, which can be executed or answered relatively easily; and they can draw upon a very large labor pool. (I talk about Benkler's work here; here's Benkler's own abstract of the article.)

Today I ran across something called Mycroft, a still-in-beta product developed by some people at Berkeley. Basically, it consists of a banner-- like the banner ads you see on many Web sites-- that serves up a question: What is this piece of scanned text? How would you describe this picture?

At first, I assumed it was some kind of scam, only there was no "click here to win a free iPod!" button. Turns out it's essentially a system that tries to capitalize on Benkler's insight. (It's a bit like Clickworkers, only generalized.)

As the site explains,

One of you has a problem to solve that your computer can't figure out. And you could use 10 more people like yourself to get the job done. Or how about a million? Even the most powerful computer can't tell what messy handwriting really says or whether the sunset photo on your last roll is very good. But you can, without even trying. Each of you has a wealth of valuable knowledge and skills that other people are searching for - and you might not even know it. We're here to bring you together.

We take a large, complicated job and divide it in to friendly, manageable chunks. We call them puzzles, and each one takes only a few seconds to solve. We serve them up to you in the space where that annoying web ad used to be. Without ever leaving the web page you were looking at, you can contribute what you know to the job that needs to be done, just by answering a few questions in the Mycroft banner.

Taking a complex task, dividing it into a lot of little parts that only take a few seconds to look at and respond to, then sending the pieces out to millions of people: it's open source lite (which is not to speak ill of it). It'll be interesting to see if it actually turns into something. Certainly it's an intriguing idea.

And where's the name come from?

The Mycroft Network is named after Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes' older and wiser brother.

Technorati Tags: cooperation, collaboration, Web 2.0, social software, open source

New cooperation blog

The subject of the future of cooperation and collective action is one that the Institute has been dealing with for a couple years now. Now, several members of the Institute universe have started a new blog on cooperation. Howard Rheingold explains what's going on:

Even a small increase in our understanding of the dynamics of cooperation and collective action could have enormous payoffs in regard to international relations and conflict-resolution, the evolution of economic institutions, and the future of democratic governance and civil society. The cooperation project proposes to catalyze an interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. We do this by compiling and synthesizing current knowledge, mapping the outlines of the emerging field, convening meetings of the best minds in relevant disciplines, and encouraging ongoing discourse, research, and practice.

Jim Benson elaborates:

In this blog we will link to new studies, organizations, or other materials doing interesting work when viewed through the lens of cooperation. We will interview people working in fields that require cooperation. We will also try to synthesize some of this information and put forth some of our own theories.

Our goal for this blog and this study is to make it as open and inclusive as possible. The Cooperation Commons as a group is evolving. We invite anyone to participate through the blog’s comment feature, by blogging themselves and linking back, through e-mail, or however you feel comfortable. Guest bloggers are also welcome.

The project and this blog will be looking resources and developing thought surrounding cooperation phenomena. Cooperation studies are a multidisciplinary field. Objects from the quantum to the mega exhibit certain cooperative properties.

Technorati Tags: cooperation, IFTF

Innovation and Teamwork

This is an interesting paper, The Burden of Knowledge and the 'Death of the Renaissance Man': Is Innovation Getting Harder? , which is a $5 download (boo! hiss!) from the National Bureau of Economic Research , which finds among other that:

1. As the volume of knowldge grows over time, invention requires a depth and breadth of knowldge that is impossible for single individuals to attain,
2. this will encourage researchers to become more specialized
3. innovation will require more teamwork

Some of the vindicating data - it is taking longer for PhDs to finish their dissertations, innovation in more mature fields is generated by larger teams comprised of more specialized members - and its all in the patents.

Cafes, the new garages?

Jackson West writes about the growing importance of cafes in the Bay Area as workspaces:

Forget Palo Alto garages-- San Francisco coffee shops are where to get your
startup off the ground. Internet cafes are emerging as an important place to get work done, hold meetings and network. Since writers, designers, developers and anyone else who can work from their laptop are going to show up, you can even recruit talent, publicize your project and even demo your product for potential users and investors.

I think this won't come as news to many, but the notion that cafes can legitimately be thought of as business places (and not just to sell coffee, but to conduct a wide variety of businesses) has a lovely early modern quality about it.

At the same time, it reinforces a point that many smart writers about the relationship between the Internet and physical places have made: Web access (and especially wireless access) doesn't make place irrelevant, it just changes the criteria people use for deciding which places they're going to work in. In an interview we conducted a couple months ago, MIT professor William Mitchell explained how unwiring Internet access and other facilities was changing both the ways users think about workspace, and the opportunities architects have to design interesting spaces:

In architecture, in making the layout of a building, adjacency is a scarce resource. You can never satisfy all of the adjacency requirements that exist. Everybody would like to be next to the coffee machine and simultaneously next to the best view and simultaneously next to the people they work with. That's impossible.

When you introduce wireless connectivity, though, you eliminate a bunch of requirements for adjacency. You no longer have to be adjacent to a network jack in order to have connectivity, or adjacent to paper files in order to do your work. You can take them, sit down anywhere, and work.

What happens then is that adjacency demands that had previously been latent and unsatisfiable have now become satisfiable, so they take over, and reclustering begins to emerge.... If there's been a kind of latent demand for clustering, socializing, serendipity, getting together, all of that kind of stuff, if you loosen up the old adjacency constraints people are going to satisfy those demands. If people are working in loud environments and they'd really like to be working in the garden or in the sunshine or something, then that's what's going to happen.

This is something that will only become more pronounced as time goes on:

I think we are seeing a very clear movement towards much more flexible and nomadic occupation of space -- of architectural space, of urban space.... [Furthermore,] as digital technology becomes really good -- becomes really small, really reliable, really capable, and really ubiquitous -- it can disappear... [I]t becomes less and less necessary to build architectural environments around specialized technical requirements. If you've got better control systems you can have operable windows and natural light. Do you remember old-fashioned computer labs that used to be darkened spaces because the screens were so dim? Well, you don't need that anymore because screens are bright -- they just work better. Similarly, it used to be that classrooms were darkened because the audiovisual equipment meant you had to darken the space. Well, now we can put natural light into classrooms because, again, the display technology is powerful enough.

The interesting paradox is the more high-tech a space really is, the less high-tech it looks. And you can go back to very basic human things like light and air and view with operable windows and sociability. So you start to go back to being able to build the architecture around the human beings rather than the technical systems. And it's the opposite of what everybody thinks, what most people think, and it's a tremendously exciting thing for architects.

Likewise, the shift from garages to cafes reflects not a sense that you can completely do away with offices or meeting-spaces, but a shift in preference away from spaces that are privately owned and isolated, to ones that are more public, that provide services, and offer the potential for fruitful random encounters and social interactions.

Technorati Tags: business, cafe, collaboration, Silicon Valley

Fed Bank on Prediction Markets

Not necessarily reading for the faint of heart, the Fed Bank of S.F. just published a  very comprehensive review of the economics literature on prediction markets. The authors raise a number of questions that need to be addressed in order to understand how to employ these tools to improve forecasting, decision making, and risk management.

Location, Location, Location - Getting Your LAN Social Software Funded in the Valley

Meetro is a really cool presence/social networking app developed by Paul Braigel and crew in Chicago, and now relocated here to Palo Alto (presumably in search of venture funding).

I love the fact that startups are coming to Silicon Valley to make it big, and Valley companies are going out to places like Vancouver (Flickr) and New York (del.icio.us and Dodgeball) to court innovators.

Oh, and I love Meetro. It figures out where you are based on your network location and shows you pics of people nearby and then helps you connect by IM. This should be part of any modern laptop operating system.

And now, tah-dah, there's a Mac OS X alpha client available (in addition to the previously released Windows client). Email Paul at mac@meetro.com if you want to try it out.

There's similar products out there that add location to messaging - like Plazes and PlaceSite - but to me Meetro seems the most ready to challenge existing IM apps.

p.s. I wrote this before realizing Alex had posted earlier about a very different, meatspace solution to the same problem - the cafe zombies!

p.p.s. The World Knowledge Competitiveness Index was released today, and Silicon Valley is still the world's center for innovation.

A cool thing to have around the office

We have a very open office space, and while most of the time it's great, occasionally you want to be able to create some little mini-rooms or partition off some space. So something like this catches my eye:

paper softwall by forsythe + macallen

the paper softwall is a lightweight, freestanding wall that can be arranged into almost any shape, or easily compressed into a compact sheaf and stored away. softwall dampens sound and can both absorb and transmit light. the paper softwall is made from 400 layers of honeycombed translucent white, fire-retardant paper, bounded by natural wool felt ends. the thick felt ends fold to create handles when the wall is open, and form a casing when the wall is compressed. paper softwall is modular, as the felt ends have velcro fasteners which can link walls together.

More broadly, I wonder: Most of us develop a capacity to organize our desk space, and the space within arm's reach, and get fairly good at it. But how many of us can design an office, or a small room in which we're working with others-- either brainstorming for a couple hours, or working on a project for a few weeks? I suspect there's an inverse square law that limits our native ability to arrange collaborative space-- and that groups of people aren't much better at designing their spaces, either. Just a thought.

It's also definitely the case that, so long as it's still functional, a novel space can encourage creativity in groups: it's something I've seen repeatedly, and one of the virtues of the Institute's current space. Being more mindful of how to create interesting space-- through how it's configured, through lighting, ambient noise, whatever-- might be a useful skill for anyone who wants to boost group creativity to develop.

[via The Adventures of Teapot the Cat]

Technorati Tags: architecture, design

d.j. DIY

A couple months ago, I had the chance to write an op-ed piece for the San Jose Mercury News about how the iPod becomes the myPod (short version: it's the music, stupid), and how, while we think of personal music players as, well, personal, they're likely to get more social in the future. Wired News reports on a phenomenon moving the iPod in that direction: bars and clubs having the equivalent of open mike nights, or stereo systems in which people can plug in their iPods and share their music with other patrons:

iPods Top Jukeboxes, DJs

The jukebox at the bar Brian Toro manages isn't gathering dust just yet -- but it may only be a matter of time. The popular nightspot is among a growing number of places across the country where people can bring their iPods and other portable music players and, for as long as the bartender allows, share their personal favorites with the crowd.

"Everybody wants to be a DJ," says Toro, a 29-year-old Californian who recently moved to Chicago and now manages Bar Louie in the city's Gold Coast neighborhood. "People enjoy having a little control in their lives."...

Experts who track technology trends say they're not surprised people are sharing more music in public.

"It's the same thing as sharing a hot new 45 or tape or CD," says Susan Barnes, associate director of the Lab for Social Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York.

She also sees it as more proof that -- while some have accused a new wave of music listeners of shutting out the world with their headphones -- technology is actually encouraging people to socialize.

"All this stuff is set up for people to meet other people -- not isolate," Barnes says.

John von Seggern, a laptop DJ and producer in Los Angeles, also sees DJing as part of an overall movement toward decentralizing control of many forms of media -- whether it be through podcasting, blogging or musicians and authors offering their work direct for downloading on the internet.

This is also interesting as an early, DIY example of one of the fixtures of the pervasive computing vision: the availability of hardware that users can borrow for limited, negotiated periods of time. (See Roy Want's discussion of the personal server for an example.)

Technorati Tags: cooperation, ipod, music, pervasive computing

Enterprise social bookmarking

Interesting article on bringing social bookmarking inside companies:

The apparent success of Internet-based social bookmarking applications begs the question of whether large enterprises or organizations would also benefit from social bookmarking systems. To investigate this question, at IBM we are designing and developing an enterprise-scale social bookmarking system called dogear.