Google’s Net Neutrality: Lip-service or WSJ Sound and Fury?
Posted December 15th, 2008 by Patrick Harnett
The Wall Street Journal posted a pithy article about Google that made the front page of Monday’s edition. There’s also been a little back-and-forth in the blogosphere from the Wired blogs and Google’s Policy Blog (to be fair, it’s been more back than forth).
The article in the WSJ argues that Google’s not-so-new practice of using edge-servers—servers that are closer to dense user populations—as part of their content delivery network is an overture against their pro-net neutrality stance. According to Wired, these edge-servers are co-located at ISPs near their users (which would logically mean major urban centres), which improves the performance of Google’s sites (like YouTube). The WSJ contends that this faster access these edge-servers provide is a breach of net neutrality, as its only for Google content.
Citizen-created Open Source Project Discovers Ballot Miscount
Posted December 10th, 2008 by Patrick Harnett
An investigation in Humboldt County, California has discovered a miscount of up to 197 ballots by its commercially purchased vote-tallying machines from Premier Election Solutions (formerly Diebold). An article from Wired has identified how the miscount was unearthed: a citizen-made open-source auditing system.
Since 2002, Humboldt County has promoted the Humboldt County Election Transparency Project, an initiative set up to ensure adequate rigor in vetting the electronic balloting process. The software—called Ballot Browser—was developed by Mitch Trachtenberg, a local area software engineer. After the ballots (some potentially with chad, just wanted to throw a reference in there somewhere) are scanned by the Premier system, they get scanned a second time. Trachtenberg’s software is then run on these scans to identify where the punches were made.
A few posts ago, I wrote about Aardvark.im, a site using Twitter and a few of their own proprietary algorithms to smartly route inquiries to the “resident experts” on Aardvark’s social network. There was a great article in Venture Beat discussing another Twitter-enabled tool called StockTwits.
The site is effectively a Twitter aggregator, scouring the Twittersphere for tweets with stock symbols with a dollar-sign in front of them (e.g. “$AAPL”). When you log on to the StockTwits site and give it a ticker symbol, it gives you a list of the top sixty or so users that have tweeted with that symbol in the text. Ideally, this is meant to be another channel for small investors to communicate with each other in real-time about their opinion of how fresh news headlines will affect stock prices.
Cool? Yes. But what makes it really neat is that it’s another proof-of-concept of how Twitter-based social networks can work. StockTwits collects interesting tidbits about stock information in real-time. Aardvark does something similar, and routes questions in real-time to participants in your network.
Sites like Yammer (internally-facing Twitters) are gaining traction in the corporate world (Yammer boasts Xerox and Mahalo as users), but could they be made more robust with this aggregation service?
Recently, media magnate Rupert Murdoch delivered a series of lectures with the Australia Broadcasting Corporation’s through their annual Boyer Lecture Series. He had some interesting ideas about the future of media, especially on the relevance of newspapers in a world of digital media.
Mr. Murdoch is no stranger to political controversy and variety; his board seat with libertarian think tank the Cato Institute says one thing, his endorsement of Hillary Clinton certainly says another. His political ideas aside, he’s got some cogent ideas about the role newspapers need to take in competing with their solely-online brethren (The Huffington Post, Slate). In the third lecture of the series, titled The Future of Newspapers: Moving Beyond Dead Trees, Murdoch suggests we’re “moving from news papers to news brands“, and I agree.
Coworking – Making Lonely Freelancers Yesterday’s News
Posted November 13th, 2008 by Patrick Harnett
Outsourcing marketplaces have been a boon for business, especially in tricky economic times. I’ve talked about it in the past, and Naumi has discussed collaboration as a must-have. But the focus with telecommuting and freelance marketplaces has been on the potential for cost savings and the benefit of external expertise, rather than on the freelancers themselves. So what’s it like to be a freelancer or telecommuter without a permanent place to hang your hat?
Some articles I’ve read suggest that these people feel isolated—cut off from the human aspect of a normal office. Recently, Starbucks has marketed itself as a “Third Space“—a location where people congregate as an extension of their broader social activities (home and office are the other two spaces). For people without a conventional office, it seems like these “Third Space” settings move up a notch in their importance, replacing what was normally occupied by their workspace. That explains why there’s a guy in the corner summing columns on a spreadsheet, or a designer laying out the next Amazon hit as you order your skinny latte.
If you live in cooler climes (or in my case, near the sunny beaches of Canada), this time of year marks some fun rituals. Flu shots, chicken soup, and Buckley’s Cough Syrup are just as festive as the snow that blankets the city. While not fun for the flu sufferers, city public health officials see this time of year in a different light. Spikes in disease activity often come as a surprise, inundating emergency rooms and walk-in clinics with the relief-seeking masses. Being able to predict when those masses will turn up at your emergency ward has some distinct benefits. You can schedule the appropriate staff to ensure that people get the right attention promptly, and you can get a jump on pinpointing the causes of these outbreaks (food, water, the person beside you while you were trapped on the tarmac). So how do these medical oracles get their information? And what does Google have to do with it?
Social media communication sites like Twitter generate a massive amount of traffic. Its 2.3 million users generate over 3 million “tweets” per day (figures are likely higher, it’s growing as you read this). Depending on which side of the coin you’re on, that’s either a very cool stat about how much collective information Twitter’s users are generating, or a harbinger for the tangled mess of information that these will create (which might limit its usefulness). This deluge of data across the Internet has driven knowledge markets which aim to match subject experts (or just savvy Googlers) with people seeking information.
The traditional knowledge markets like Yahoo! Answers do little active work in matching a question with a resident subject expert, instead relying on the community to keep an eye on the topics they’re best equipped to answer. A new social search service (still in beta) called Aardvark.im from the folks at The Mechanical Zoo aims to actively feed questions to self-proclaimed “subject authorities” who take it from there. As you pose and answer questions you build your “knowledge network”—a social network of your conversation participants. The question routing is done via Aardvark’s algorithm, which according to a VentureBeat article, will involve favouring “friends-of-friends” as the first-line recipients, but does the expert finding for you.
On October 30th, 2008 the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit released their decision on Bilski a case questioning the validity of a business model patent. The decision overruled the Bilski patent, on the basis that it failed the “machine-or-transformation” test (I’ll explain momentarily).
The Bilski patent involved a method to determine appropriate pricing and apportioning of commodity hedging instruments—a process by which companies can mitigate price risk in volatile markets. Hedging and risk management are on the tips of everyone’s tongues these days: Don has written thoroughly about it, and “risk managers” seem to be the only people on Bay and Wall Streets who still get calls from recruiters (not ones who worked for these guys, of course). But the fundamental question, as seen by the court, was “Is this ‘machine-or-transformation’ test satisfied?”
For a guy who loves reading online, I still feel mild excitement on magazine delivery day. Yes, I’m a Neanderthal who reads print on dead trees (or wheat, which fits the bill nicely for I live in a country whose rockers pay tribute to all things agrarian). There’s something about having a tactile experience with what you’re reading, something decidedly absent when scrolling on my laptop or PDA. Despite my fondness for the printed word, my Google Reader feeds keep me more than busy online (and are partially to blame for my increasing prescription).
I’m fairly confident that print is not yet dead, but what caught my attention was an article in Wired sounding the death knell for the blogosphere. Paul Boutin feels that the medium isn’t the pithy purveyor of pointed polemic, but an impotent (and often “catty”) soapbox for comment trolls and professional spammers. He decries that the medium is now disconnected with what made it popular and that ubiquitous social media sites make it so easy to post pictures and video, that the written word is now a distant second. Boutin believes that those communiqués are better suited for Facebook and Twitter rather than a blog.
CloudContacts – Web-Enabling Your Business Card Library
Posted October 17th, 2008 by Patrick Harnett
If you work at a start-up (or are an investor with deep pockets), you undoubtedly get dozens of business cards every time you enter a room. If you’re like me, you go home, skim through the ones that pique your interest and file them. The rest get either put in a drawer that I dub “The Black Hole” or the recycling bin.
In the spirit of honesty, I’m not a VC but I did have fun masquerading as one at a recent conference called BioFinance and got some interesting cards. But if you’re a road-warrior, lugging your card album with you is a pain. Some people have nifty (read: pricey) card scanners, and keep a collection on their laptops/Flickr, but a new startup called CloudContacts offers a service to scan the cards for you, and upload them into the “cloud”.
Peer-to-peer lending sites like British-based Zopa are starting to reflect the weakness cutting through the global economy. Their U.S. operations will now be handed over directly to their Credit Union partners, rather than remain as the intermediary (their Italian and UK operations remain). Regulations had forced them into a partnership with these Credit Unions, as opposed to sites like Prosper, which bill themselves as pure P2P lending plays. Zopa attributes their hardship due to tighter credit markets.
P2P lending involves borrowing and lending between participants without the use of traditional financial channels. This is a flagship example of how Wikinomics (and the Internet in general) is fostering a “disintermediation” trend, stripping down marketing and distribution channels. To be fair, P2P lending marketplaces are a version of “disintermediation-lite”, as they do broker transactions, and add a layer between counterparties.
Media outlets are rolling in clichés about the current economic nastiness (”The U.S. Sneezes, The World Catches Cold”). Warren Buffett couldn’t help himself with his “toxic Kool-Aid” references and a most recent Charlie Rose interview likening the U.S. economy to a “patient lying on the floor”.
The shockwave is moving quickly: venture capital stalwarts Sequoia Capital have been instructing their portfolio companies to prepare for a “doomsday scenario”. Cutting fat, eliminating redundancy, and finding the cheapest darn way to do business is now the imperative of all those wide-eyed, once-well-funded start-ups.
My dad once gave me good advice which I didn’t take. “Son, doctors, dentists, lawyers and teachers are recession-proof. Work smart.” For the most part, it holds true (it seems some lawyers are having a hard time). But it seems like you don’t need to be bricks-and-mortar or an M.D. to stay “recession-resistant”. Like magic, outsourcing marketplaces have been going like gangbusters despite economic woes.
The more people who take pages from Sequoia’s warning to slim down to essential personnel and services find that outsourcing fits the bill nicely. It’s like having talent attached to a spigot—you can match the resource-flow to your cash-flow (and work-flow) on-demand. A Reuters article boasts that Elance (a popular outsourcing marketplace) has increased billings by 65% this year—driven by the need for smaller firms to have a flexible, highly-trained workforce.
If this downturn finds you sitting on the couch, reluctantly watching daytime TV, outsourcing marketplaces could be just ticket to get you off The Young and The Restless and back to the ranks of the gainfully employed.
Last week I wrote an article about Trion World Gaming in which I made reference to their impressive venture capital backing. More importantly, I made an error. I said that Peacock Equity was an NBC venture when, in fact, it was a joint venture between NBC and GE Commercial Finance - Media, Communications & Entertainment.
So I was wrong and a good reader pointed it out, and the mistake was promptly corrected. That’s one of my favourite aspects of the blogosphere: many eyes can spot even small mistakes. So after the favour, I wanted to see if the commenter had a blog of their own I could check out their handiwork. The poster left their email address when they posted the comment so I googled them.
Don’t be evil. That’s the informal slogan at Google. It’s hard to believe that it’s been ten years since Larry and Sergey’s brainchild has entered the world in its current incarnation. Since then, that precocious ten-year-old has introduced us to:
- The verb “to google”
- SaaS that was easy and transparent to use
- Upping the ante in the e-mail storage capacity wars
- Innovation Time Off (20% of employees can devote time towards projects beyond their daily activities)
- Android and Chrome
- Google.org (their for-profit philanthropy arm)
Trion World Gaming: Revolutionary or Just a Bunch of Hype?
Posted September 23rd, 2008 by Patrick Harnett
I’m sure many of the Wikinomics blog readers are familiar with Massively Multiplayer Online Games, but there is an off-chance you haven’t heard of Trion World Gaming. They have yet to release a game, but Trion has been very active in securing funding. They just landed a deal worth $70MM from a consortium of Venture Capitalists, which brings their total VC-take to over $100MM.
So why are they “worth” that much? Well, according to their CEO Dr. Lars Buttler (a former Electronic Arts executive who worked on Might and Magic and Heroes), the reason is two-fold:
If you’re anything like me, you tend to enjoy things that may be a little beyond your budget. And if you’re really like me, you tend to enjoy them far more often than you should. But I’m going to avoid any discussions of my own indulgence, but use them as a segue to mention Wesabe. It’s an open source community that tracks your spending habits and shares them with the group. If prediction markets are for harnessing the “Wisdom of Crowds”, this truly does try to capture the “Frugality of Crowds”.
Giving Up Control with Software as a Service: Reliability Concerns?
Posted September 16th, 2008 by Patrick Harnett
On September 8th, the London Stock Exchange suffered its second black eye in eight years, as a network glitch caused trading to grind to a halt. The system went down about one hour into the trading day, and was only fixed at 4:30 p.m. – leaving only thirty minutes for traders to complete their trades for the day. Adding insult to injury, Monday’s glitch effectively shut out much of the European market from participating in the broad-market rally after the U.S. Treasury Department’s backing of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
Fortunately, European traders had recourse in several new electronic exchanges, such as Chi-x and Turquoise. After imagining huddled masses of traders without their exchange, I took some solace that they had those alternatives (even though they come with their own liquidity issues).
Then I got to thinking: what about other mission critical functions that companies and people have come to rely on? Namely those with systems beyond the control of an IT manager just a four-digit extension away? SaaS comes with its well-documented benefits of low capital costs and more, but what about uptime and reliability? The LSE hiccup isn’t exactly SaaS, but it is an example of a centralized service that is crucial day-to-day going awry.