Andy Grove, co-founder of Intel, talks about scaling up, a key difference between processes of invention and innovation:

Equally important is what comes after that mythical moment of creation in the garage, as technology goes from prototype to mass production. This is the phase where companies scale up. They work out design details, figure out how to make things affordably, build factories, and hire people by the thousands. Scaling is hard work but necessary to make innovation matter.

He also notes the decline of innovation-related jobs (scaling-up) in the US:

Today, manufacturing employment in the U.S. computer industry is about 166,000 -- lower than it was before the first personal computer, the MITS Altair 2800, was assembled in 1975.

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs.

tags: invention, innovation, scale, problem, technology, business, model, quote

Catch me if you can.

In a couple of generations human pilots will go extinct.

The US Federal Aviation Administration this month kicked off what could be the first step in a journey towards the full automation of the airliners we all travel on.

The FAA commissioned the Boeing subsidiary Insitu, based in Bingen, Washington, and the New Jersey Air National Guard to begin investigating ways for civil aircraft to share their airspace with remotely piloted uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Once UAVs can avoid passenger jets, remotely piloted cargo planes are likely to take to the skies, pushed by some compelling economics. "The cargo airlines want very much to lose their pilots. The money that would be saved in salary and benefits, including retirement and healthcare costs, is pretty staggering,"

Wright Flier II. 1904.

update: Ryanair to sell standing-room only tickets for under $10.

tags: tool, control, transportation, commerce.

History in the making.

According to VentureBeat:

Crowdstar is giving a big endorsement to Facebook Credits. The social gaming company has made a five-year commitment to using Facebook’s virtual currency.

The use of Facebook Credits is important to Facebook as a way to monetize its vast audience of nearly 500 million monthly active users. Davis said early results show that Facebook Credits is increasing both the revenue per paying user and the number of people who are buying things in apps. He acknowledged that changes that Facebook made to its platform this spring have slowed growth of games, but he said that newly launched Facebook games are seeing rapid growth.

History of money shows that introduction of a widely accepted currency is key to the development of a market for services. So far, we've seen trading in goods only. One reason for that would be narrow scope of most gaming scenarios and lack of service development tools. Another, a steep tax (30%) that Facebook imposes on all transactions.

tags: commerce, money, payload, service, control, market, scale, games, virtual

On Monday, President Barack Obama signed a memorandum that commits the U.S. to making an additional 500MHz of government and commercial spectrum available for auction and for unlicensed use within the next 10 years. This goal of getting 500MHz more spectrum in the hands of wireless broadband providers over the next decade is a key part of the National Broadband Plan that the FCC presented to Congress earlier this year.

This initiative is very important because it aims to unclog wireless pipes between the cloud and the mobiles. In the world of the 21st century's communications, this is equivalent to building railroads that connected American East and West coasts and provided a platform for country-wide industrialization.

tags: distribution, growth, mobile

AppStore economics

Like in any other Long Tail business models, iPhone/iPad applications seem to make money for the store owner, not the content developer.

The development of the typical app cost $35,000 and the median paid app earns $682 dollars per year after Apple took its cut. You see where this is going.. We get to break even on our App Development costs in... 51 years.

h/t marginalrevolution.com


tags: distribution, business, model, control, control point, mobile, apple

According to research cited in Wired, travelers seem to think that south-bound routes are shorter than north-bound ones of the same length. The authors of the study explain the effect by a common perception that north is "up" on all maps, therefore people instinctively associate "north/up" with working against gravity.

For journeys that averaged 798 miles, time estimates for north-going jaunts averaged one hour and 39 minutes more than south-going trips, he and his colleagues report in an upcoming Memory & Cognition.

“This finding suggests that when people plan to travel across long distances, a ‘north is up’ heuristic might compromise their accuracy in estimating trip durations,” Brunyé says.

Moving up through a company hierarchy is also more difficult than down. It must be the gravity :)

tag: psychology, effect, example

A new technology that has the potential to become a game changer in residential energy consumption:

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory has invented a new air conditioning process with the potential of using 50 percent to 90 percent less energy than today's top-of-the-line units. It uses membranes, evaporative cooling and liquid desiccants in a way that has never been done before in the centuries-old science of removing heat from the air.

FIFA and technology

Certain important game situations in soccer, such as offside or hand ball, can be easily resolved in real time with the new video technology. Today, many TV stations already have equipment capable of showing replays of controversial plays within seconds after they happen on the field. It's hard to imagine any TV game broadcast without video replays. In addition to that, during important international games refs wear wireless audio headsets.  A TV operator could easily use the system to tell them, whether a goal was scored legally or not. Thus, technology exists to make the right call at the right time. Nevertheless, FIFA is not in a hurry to use it. Why? Are they afraid to undermine the authority of the refs?

tags:  10x, technology, diffusion, innovation, games,

1963. A demo of a Graphical User Interface with the computer. During the interview, the reporter asks, "Can the computer work with a three-dimensional object?"

Isn't it amazing how in 50 years breakthrough ideas become "obvious".



tags: interface, computers, information, history, example, technology, video

The high fashion of iPad

Reuters reports on iPad's success in Asia:

In Japan, wedding service firm Novarese Inc is using iPads to help customers choose a wedding dress at its flagship store in Tokyo's Ginza shopping district, and plans to adopt iPads at seven other stores and its wedding ceremonial halls.

The firm now shows customers video clips of models strutting with dresses on the iPad, making it easier to see things such as how a hemline flares.

I still think iPad is the ultimate shopping device: from food to cars to media. A dedicated interactive product application can do much better than a browser script with embedded flash. Amazon, if they play it right, could be the company that benefits the most from iPad proliferation.

tags: commerce, interface, tool, source, interaction, apple

Experiments in creativity: Lucid Dreaming

Here are some top tips on how to achieve lucid dreaming:

Step 1: The reality test.

Ask yourself whether you are awake or dreaming throughout the day. Later on, in the land of nod, you might find yourself pondering this question. If you succeed, congratulations! You have opened the door to lucid dreams.

Step 2: Focus your thoughts.

People who focus single-mindedly on a task during the day, be it a computer game or playing a musical instrument, are more likely to experience lucid dreams, says Jayne Gackenbach at Grant MacEwan University in Edmonton, Canada.

Step 3: Plan your fantasy.

Almost as fun as the dreaming itself. Before you go to bed, think about what you want to dream lucidly about, in as much detail as possible.

Step 4: Total recall.

When you wake up, try to recall as many of your dreams as you can.

Step 5: Wake up and get motivated! ...And then go back to bed.

To solve a stubborn problem, on step 3 do a complete problem analysis, e.g. using the Three Magicians technique.

 tags: creativity, tool, method, magicians,  analysis

The future of abundant green energy might be nuclear:

TerraPower, a company seeking to commercialize a novel nuclear-power technology which has the enthusiastic backing of Bill Gates, has raised $35 million in venture funding.

The basic idea behind traveling-wave reactors is to use a small amount of enriched uranium and spent uranium fuel from traditional nuclear-power plants to produce electricity. Rather than needing to refuel every several years, these reactors would be able to operate for decades without refueling.

The company's goal is to have a working machine by 2020.

tags: energy, problem, solution, source,

The best keyboard for your iPad

tags: interface, creativity, mobile, apple

Road to new ideas: skiing in swim trunks

NYT writes in its obituary for a Russian genius mathematician Vladimir Arnold:

Dr. Arnold had an unusual approach when he got stuck on a problem. ...he would ski for 25 miles or more, wearing nothing more than swim trunks.

“According to him, this practice would always lead him to a new idea,” they wrote.

tags: creativity, example, quote, brain

The future of video conferencing

Here's how creators of the Avatar technology solved the problem of producing realistic facial expressions:

Weta’s specialty is motion capture, which relies on sophisticated software and hardware to transfer an actor’s body movements and facial expressions to an animated character. The actor wears a black suit with light-colored dots; to detect his movement, optical systems track those dots.

More virtual goods for your real money

June 7, 2010. VentureBeat:

Zynga is the biggest success story to come out of the new wave of social game companies, buт it has been curiously absent from one of the hottest new game platforms — the iPhone. That’s changing today with chief executive Mark Pincus' announcement that Zynga is releasing FarmVille for iPhone.

One question is whether virtual goods purchases on FarmVille for iPhone will be as lucrative as they have been on Facebook.

Buying and trading virtual goods using a mobile device is becoming easier, which means the frequency of transactions is going to increase dramatically. Furthermore, beginning with this generation of users, purchasing with digital money will become routine and start the process of gradual disappearance of physical bills, credit cards, and wallets. They will follow hand watches to the museum of extinct human artifacts.

tags: money, ideality, 10x, payload, system, social, market, commerce

Lying: an out-of-the box experience

Here's a study that may hint at a reason why so many people are bad at thinking "outside of the box":

A team of researchers has conducted a study which argues that liars betray their actions through drawing.

"Another distinguishing factor was the perspective of the drawing. Fifty-three per cent of truth-tellers penned a drawing from their own first-person perspective at the scene; 47 per cent opted for a birds-eye view. By contrast, 81 per cent of liars went for the birds-eye view and just 19 per cent for the first-person perspective."

When we invent and/or work to develop creative ideas we have to lie. That is, we have to use our imagination to come up with a description of events that haven't happen yet. These events are still in a possible future, therefore we can't tell the truth about them. But, since most of the people are trained to tell the truth, they have trouble creating the big picture, e.g. draw the birds-eye view of a problem situation and its potential solutions. Over the last six years that I've been teaching my Principles of Invention class at Stanford, seeing and drawing the big picture has been by far the most difficult exercise for the students. Here's a snippet from a recent e-mail from one of them:

Even in the class discussions one could see people getting trapped in linear thinking and unable to climb above the problem and see the big picture. Practicing “climbing on the roof” to see the big picture is what I will focus on to improve as an inventor.

Drawing by itself is not going to make people more creative. To produce good results, it needs to be combined with systematic tools that teach people how to step out of the first-person perspective.

tags: creativity, magicians, imagination, class, example, dilemma

reference: Vrij, A., Leal, S., Mann, S., Warmelink, L., Granhag, P., & Fisher, R. (2010). Drawings as an innovative and successful lie detection tool. Applied Cognitive Psychology DOI: 10.1002/acp.1627

The cloack and dagger war between Apple and Google continues. It appears that Google might be locked out of the emerging market for mobile advertisement on Apple devices:

Apple quietly changed the terms of service for the iPhone developer agreement Monday along with the release of developer version of iOS4 at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, according to MediaMemo and several other blogs. If preliminary interpretations of a key section are correct, Google's newly acquired AdMob subsidiary will be unable to share ad analytic information with its customers who have placed ads in applications on the iPhone, rendering those ads much less valuable.

Either this is a legal quirk, or, more likely, Apple intends to extract from Google a heavy price for playing on the wrong side of their prisoner's dilemma game. In the meantime, Google protests the agreement.

tags: battle, technology, apple, google, advertisement, business, law, information, tool, detection

Wanted: Invisibility Cloak

A new camera that makes the idea of privacy in public places a total joke:

[the camera] gives law enforcement high-def, 360-degree footage of a scene. The feeds are integrated with image-stitching technology.

The ultrawide camera system streams distortion-free, real-time stitched video and has a resolution capacity of 100 megapixels, which is "as detailed as 50 full-HDTV movies playing at once, with optical detail to spare," the DHS said in a release. It has been built with off-the-shelf cameras, image processors, and software.

If we put it on a drone or some other surveillance vehicle (a cat, a hat, a mouse) we get the ultimate multi-scale anti-privacy system. The amount of video processing, storage, routing and stream management is going to be staggering. Especially, if we add 3D capabilities, which should no be a problem whatsoever.

tags: video, control, detection, payload, system, evolution, problem,

Killing brain cancer cells with electricity

June 5 (Bloomberg) -- Doctors treating brain cancer have a limited toolkit. They can cut tumors out with a knife, burn them with radiation or try to poison them with drugs.

NovoCure Ltd., a closely held Israeli company, has added a fourth option for hard-to-treat tumors. It’s an array of electrodes resembling a tight-fitting helmet that bathes the cancer in a faint electric field, scrambling the inner workings of the rampaging cells and preventing them from multiplying.

We can probably expect a whole new range of cancer therapies to come out this initial application. In a few years, debilitating chemotherapy may be a thing of the past.

tags: health, problem, solution, tool, 4q diagram

Schools and Creativity

A 2006 TED talk by Ken Robinson. Sir Ken is a brilliant speaker and he raises an important issue of how children are taught to dull their creativity in school.

The Greatest Innovations of All Time

I will be teaching BUS 200 (The Greatest Innovations of All Time) this summer. The course starts on June 24 and will go for six weeks. Last time I taught it, in Winter 2010, we had a wonderful class, people had lots of interesting ideas, and we found a number of good innovation opportunities even in a recession-stricken economy.

Here's a brief description of the course and weekly syllabus. Feel free to pass along.

This hands-on interactive course treats the current global crisis as a unique opportunity for breakthrough innovations. Individuals, businesses, and societies that take advantage of such opportunities propel themselves to the next level of prosperity and growth. Our goal will be to explore five areas essential to modern human endeavor: energy, transportation, information and communications, money and commerce, and health services.

Mental time travel

Since past is fact and future is fiction, common sense might suggest that different cognitive mechanisms underlie recollection of past events and construction of future ones. There is a fundamental causal asymmetry, and one simply cannot know the future as one knows the past. However, various lines of evidence suggest that mental time travel into the past shares cognitive resources with mental construction of potential future episodes(Suddendorf & Corballis 1997). Normal adults report a decrease in phenomenological richness of both past and future episodes with increased distance from the present (D’Argembeau & Van der Linden 2004). The temporal distribution of past events people envisage follows the same power function as the temporal distribution of anticipated future events (Spreng & Levine 2006).
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975

It's quite possible that foresight is, at least in part, a skill that allows us to construct imaginary situations, either in the past or in the future. Maybe that is why exercises like The Three Magicians a The Nine-screen View are so useful during invention sessions.

Reference:
DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X07001975 Suddendorf & Corballis, 2007. The evolution of foresight. BEHAVIORAL AND BRAIN SCIENCES (2007) 30, 299–351.

tags: creativity, forecast, magicians, 3x3, technique, teaching, method, quote

Trade-off of the day: Innovation vs Copying

A 2009 paper in the Journal of Theoretical Biology contrasts a-social (independent) and social (imitation, emulation, etc) learning:

Asocial learners (information producers) typically incur additional temporal or energetic costs as well as risk of mortality or injury associated with learning from direct interaction with the environment. While social learners (information scroungers) can acquire information relatively cheaply (i.e. they are free-riders), they are more liable than asocial learners to acquire outdated information that has no associated fitness benefit in a changing environment.

Two important consequences: a) copy-cat behavior is evolutionary successful and, therefore, should be rampant in a population; b) innovators are always at a disadvantage, unless they can preserve informational "distance" between themselves and the copy-cats.

Since the majority of the population consists of copy-cats, it benefits the society as a whole to distribute new useful information as fast as possible. On the other hand, if innovators cannot use the information to their own advantage, eventually, all innovation stops.
In many ways, human history is a series of continuous attempts to break through the trade-off. Today, we've got patent systems to, more or less, protect inventions; we've got Nobel Prizes and celebrity awards to encourage people share their ideas; we've got the open source movement where people earn reputations in exchange for their code contributions; etc. Most likely, social networking will create completely new incentives for sharing ideas and exploiting human propensity for social learning.

References:
1. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2009.05.029 Kendal J. et al., 2009. The evolution of social learning rules: Payoff-biased and frequency-dependent biased transmission. Journal of Theoretical Biology Volume 260, Issue 2, 21 September 2009, Pages 210-219


2. DOI: 10.1126/science.1184719 Rendell L, et al. 2010. Why Copy Others? Insights from the Social Learning Strategies Tournament. Science 9 April 2010: Vol. 328. no. 5975, pp. 208 - 213.

tags: innovation, invention, problem, solution, tradeoff, dilemma, information, evolution, games, learning, education, market

Social networking space is increasingly becoming a marketplace of digital goods. Like any other marketplace in the history of human civilization, it needs an exchange medium, aka money, to scale wrt volume and kinds of transactions. Enter Facebook Credits, which are going to become for Facebook what gold was for King Croesus:

The question asked what Facebook’s next big source of revenue would be? Parker, who was the founding President of Facebook, still works closely with the company as he’s a major shareholder. He noted that Facebook PR might not like his answer too much, but he decided to give it anyway: the Credit system.

Parker believes that the Facebook Credit system (that is, its payment platform), or any other things Facebook uses as a “tax and toll” on the Platform, will become a third of Facebook’s income in the next 12 months.

30% is extremely high. If they figure out how to lower the tax, the number of transactions, especially on mobile devices, is going to explode. And if they don't, somebody else will take over. For example, Zong.

tag: money, social, networking, market, control, payload, signal, course

Bloomberg reports how Walmart is working to squeeze costs out of their supply chain:

The company is contacting all manufacturers that provide products to its more than 4,000 U.S. stores and Sam’s Club membership warehouse clubs, said Kelly Abney, Wal-Mart’s vice president of corporate transportation in charge of the project. The goal is to take over deliveries in instances where Wal-Mart can do the same job for less and use those savings to reduce prices in stores, he said.

Given Wal-mart's scale of operations, I wouldn't be surprised if, over time, in some markets they will compete for commercial delivery business with Fedex and UPS.

tags: distribution, efficiency, problem, solution, transportation, scale,

From a system perspective, this would be an example of a solution to an efficiency problem. Distribution is being tightly integrated with Sources (manufacturers) and Tools (stores and warehouses) to optimize the system's overall performance. It's an indication that today's brick-and-mortar retail infrastructure is entering the stage of extreme maturity. Once the infrastructure is in place, Wal-mart will be able to either add "out-of network" manufacturers and stores or put them out of business altogether.

Phenomenon of the day: Information Cascade

In 1995, management gurus Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema secretly purchased 50,000 copies of their business strategy book The Discipline of Market Leaders from stores across the nation. The stores they purchased from just happened to be the ones whose sales are monitored to select books for the New York Times bestseller list. Despite mediocre reviews, their book made the bestseller list. Subsequently, the book sold well enough to continue as a bestseller without further demand intervention by the authors.' Presumably, being on a bestseller list helps a book sell more because consumers and reviewers learn from the actions of previous buyers.

Source: Learning from the Behavior of Others: Conformity, Fads, and Informational Cascades. Sushil Bikhchandani, David Hirshleifer, Ivo Welch. The Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 12, No. 3 (Summer, 1998), pp. 151-170.

A System perspective note: by hacking the detection system, which was supposed to identify bestsellers, the authors managed to activate a desirable control scenario.

The will to think.

I pulled the quote below from a 1976 paper by William Shockley, Nobel Laureate, inventor of the junction transistor.

A competent thinker will be reluctant to commit himself to the effort that tedious and precise thinking demands - he will lack “the will to think”- unless he has the conviction that something worthwhile will be done with the results of his efforts -- and, of course, there is always also the risk that his hard thinking may not produce any creative ideas.

A meaningful simplest case stimulates the will to think by reducing the threat of being forced to accomplish repugnant and tedious tasks.

Models often provide such meaningful simplest cases. For example, Copernicus' planetary system was a meaningful simple case that explained a lot of very complex astronomical data. The proverbial apple that fell on Newton's head was instrumental in making the gravitational theory simple and relevant despite all the calculus that had to be invented from scratch to prove the theory.
In my own experience, Altshuller's trade-off resolution technique is the easiest concept to explain in TRIZ. It's also the least powerful one. As a result we have a problem: people perceive something that is used to wake up their "will to think" as the real thing. Which is unfortunate because it prevents them from pursuing better invention methods.

References: W.Shockley. The Path to the Conception of the Junction Transistor. IEEE Transactions in Electronic Devices., Vol ED-23,   No 7,  July 1976.


tags: theory, problem, quote, education, triz, theory

Money as a mobile application.

Credit cards are becoming extinct:

just wave your iPhone at any Visa payWave terminal, which can already be found at some 32,000 retailers, and voila, you've made your transaction.

Visa has the market power to make interface devices ubiquitous, while the banks can be made responsible for distributing mobile applications. As the result, we've got the credit card business model, but without the credit card.

tags: money, ideality, distribution, packaging, tool, digital, information, commerce

How to detect a patent bomb in the making

If patents were people they would tell tales of ingenious transformation that would eclipse Oscar-winning movies like The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

This month, SoftView, a small software development company, sued Apple for patent infringement. The patent mentioned in the suit is US7461353 "Scalable display of internet content on mobile devices." It was filed in January 2005 and issued in December 2008. The patent has 319 claims. This is almost 20 times greater than the average number of claims in a US patent issued in the same year! Clearly, this is a custom IP weapon of mass destruction created to attack large technology companies.

So, how was it made? As we dig deeper into the patent history, we discover that the original invention goes back to a provisional application filed in 2000. In 2001, the provisional was converted into a utility application, which issued in 2007 with 50 claims (US Patent 7,210,099). 50 claims is a relatively big number, but nothing extraordinary. It is when the initial 50 claims turned into 300+ claims things became really interesting. At this point, we could figure out that, by filing divisional patent applications with a dramatically increased number of claims, the patent owner was pursuing an IP attack strategy.

Who would be the target of the attack? Well, it's any company that provides a mobile wireless device hosting a web browser that allows users zoom and pan on web pages. Sounds like Apple to me. Or, as a matter of fact, all iPhone/iPod/iPad copycats. From 2000 to 2009, the patent owner had the time and smarts to monitor developments in the mobile industry, and fine-tune patent claims to read on one of the emerging killer features. This is not a defensive "picket-and-fence" play that is taught in patent textbooks. Rather, it's a well-designed weapon, which, as any other patent, is supposed to enable a legal attack capability. The patent has its weaknesses, but it'll take a lot of effort to deflect all its claims. Detecting a pending attack, e.g. by spotting divisional applications with a large number of claims, can be a part of an early warning system that gives companies time to develop effective defensive strategies.

As a side note, the value of SoftView patents is much greater than the value of its technology. This shows that with the right IP strategy startups can be successful even if their innovations don't materialize in the market.

tags: patent, example, problem, solution, strategy, system, payload, tool, mobile, apple

Dilemma of the day: dieting vs self-control

Several studies showed that self-control leads to blood glucose depletion. This phenomenon occurs not only in humans but in dogs too! The obvious connection between sugar and weakness of will prompted M.T.Gailliot et al to formulate the following problem:

...self-control tasks that have a direct impact on blood glucose may raise particular problems for self- control. Most obviously, dieting essentially involves restricting one’s caloric intake, and there may be an ironic conflict in which the dietary restriction produces lower glucose, which, in turn, undermines the willpower needed to refrain from eating.

Currently, only diabetes patients regularly check their blood glucose level. It's quite possible that dieters or generally healthy people need it to monitor it too. Even better, a diet should be a part of a life-style change program that helps anticipate and deal proactively with self-control (stress) situations.

References:


Gailliot MT, et al. Self-control relies on glucose as a limited energy source: willpower is more than a metaphor.J Pers Soc Psychol. 2007 Feb;92(2):325-36.
Miller HC, et al. Self-control without a "self"?: common self-control processes in humans and dogs. Psychol Sci. 2010 Apr 1;21(4):534-8. Epub 2010 Mar 11.




tags: control, health, detection, scale, dilemma, problem

Winner-takes-all market in social media.

Another example of Prisoner's Dilemma playing out in the high-tech world:

If this is all true, I find it hard to believe that either side will actually pull the plug on a relationship that has generated most of the top-10 most popular applications on Facebook. Without Facebook, Zynga could lose easy access to millions of its most regular users, and without Zynga, Facebook would lose several of the applications that keep its users coming back to the site so often.

Earlier, I wrote about a similar situation between Google and Apple. Now, I am wondering whether Prisoner's Dilemma is endemic in relationships within high-tech industries.
In his recent book, The Nature of Technology, W.B.Arthur showed that most of technology innovations require concerted efforts from multiple companies and individual contributors. It's highly unlikely that all of them will get rewarded by the market proportionally to their contributions. Quite the opposite, over a period of time a dominant player emerges and gets into a position to dictate the pace of innovation, and as a result, collects a much higher return on its technology investment. Google dominates search advertisement market, Intel - PC-related semiconductors, Microsoft - PC OS, Apple - portable audio and smartphones, Facebook - social networking, and etc.
I suggest that on its path to domination, a high-tech player has to build a series of coalitions (just because the technology contains multiple parts), and then, in Prisoner's Dilemma terms, defect from the cooperation strategy in order to claim the top spot.

Related: Hal Varian's talk on technology where he discusses the role of substitutes and complementers.

Free mobile cheese

Despite iPhone's success among consumers, enterprise mobile space is still wide open. This is where Google and HP, with its recent Palm acquisition, would like to step in. And, as we learned from the internet browser wars, nothing beats free:

Adobe and Google want to encourage Adobe employees to spend as much time using Android and the Flash Player 10.1 as possible.

Google gives away Android phones like they are party favors: it's planning to give every Google I/O attendee their choice of a Motorola Droid or Nexus One, and it gave away Nexus Ones to an audience of CIOs earlier this month at an event for Google Apps.

tags: mobile, tool, business, model, information, synthesis, problem, solution, bandwagon

The world wide web, as invented by Tim Berners-Lee in the 80s, is now dead. Graphics and video have become the primary applications for consumer internet. Here's how Intel addressing and advances this trend in its next generation Sandy Bridge processor architecture:

• Shared memory: on-chip memory called cache is shared between the CPU and graphics processing unit, or GPU.
  
• GPU now part of CPU: Intel combines the CPU and GPU on the same piece of silicon. ...the GPU takes up roughly 25 percent of the processor's real estate.
  
• New instructions: Sandy Bridge will be the first chip to support Intel's Advanced Vector Extension (Intel AVX) instructions. AVX accelerates a host of multimedia tasks, including video and audio processing.

We have to remember that processing is only a part of the networked media equation. For the system to work, we need lots of bandwidth and server-side performance.

tags: evolution, media, system, tool, information, video, internet

A good synopsis and a list of books/texts for technology entrepreneurs, as recommended by Professor Tom Byers:

1. Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise, by R.Dorf and T.Byers.
2. Built to Last, and Good to Great by Collins et al.
3. Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by T.L. Friedman.
4. Customer Development, by Steve Blank.
5. How to Write a Great Business Plan article in Harvard Business Review, by Sahlman.
6. The Art of the Start, by G.Kawasaki.
7. Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur, by Berkery.
8. The No A**hole Rule, by Robert Sutton.
9. Smartest Guys in the World, by McLean and McLean.

I'd be particularly interested in ## 4 and 8.

tags: innovation, invention, book, course, information, business

Mind-boggling engineering

Precision printing technology finds new applications in totally unexpected areas:

A new technology early in clinical trials could make it possible for doctors to use specialized 3D printers to fabricate new human tissue based on a patient's own cells.

When people see this type of devices they often think about artificial organs that can be produced to replace failed ones. But what about totally new organs or new ways to extend human abilities? For example, a third eye that can see in the dark, smell implants, novel taste buds, blood vessels that feed certain brain areas, so we don't get tired while doing demanding mental tasks. Once the technology is sufficiently developed and tested, the impact on the society could as big as gene engineering.

tags: health, tool, system, imagination, technology, system

Prisoner's Dilemma: PC vs mobile

Prisoner's Dilemma is a descriptive title for a strategy problem in game theory. It got its name from a hypothetical situation when two prisoners who stand accused of committing a major crime, e.g. an armed robbery, are interrogated separately by the police. The police have arrested them on a smaller charge and currently doesn't have any direct evidence that connects the prisoners to the armed robbery. If both prisoners stay silent they will receive a short sentence of several months in jail. If both of them confess they get 5 years in prison each. If one of them confesses, but the other stays silent, the first one goes free, while the second gets a 10 year sentence. It's a famous example - you can read an extensive description of how it works in Wikipedia and other sources.

Obviously, it would be better for the prisoners if both of them stayed silent and as the result got the lighter sentence. But game theory analysis shows that the most likely outcome of the game is when both of them confess and each gets 5 years in prison. The key to understanding this craziness is to appreciate the fact that the prisoners cannot communicate with each other and they don't trust each other. As a consequence, they choose to confess and get 5 years, rather than stay silent and have the other guy confess, which would cause him go free and you'd get 10 years in prison.

Now, let's turn to consider the world of mobile communications. It seems to me that Apple and Google are playing Prisoner's Dilemma in this space. Had they decided to cooperate in making iPhone a dominant destination device for media and cloud services, both companies would have benefited enormously: Apple on the hardware and media side; Google on the search and cloud computing side. But, Google seemes to choose the "confess" position. That is, rather than building apps and services exclusively for iPhone/iPad/iWhatever, they make an extensive effort to develop software and services for competing hardware. As a result, we can observe how Apple and Google are increasingly becoming marketplace adversaries. For example, recently Apple announced iAd, its own ad platform, which threatens Google's ad business on iPhone.

This situation stands in marked contrast with the 30-year old Intel-Microsoft relationship that made both companies dominant in their respective hardware and software PC business domains. Comparing the situations, I can't help but conclude that there's a lot more trust and communication between PC industry leaders than between Apple and Google.

tags: battle, technology, strategy, system, information, evolution, competition, mobile, cloud

Magical, Beautiful, Amazing

On dog walks I usually listen to UC Berkeley podcasts. Today, it is Cognitive Neuroscience course taught by Prof. Richard Ivry. In one of the lectures he talks about the difference in how we perceive live vs non-live objects. When asked to describe a live object people are most likely to mention its properties or attributes. For example, they would say that cat is soft, black, friendly, etc. But  describing a non-live object, they would focus on its function. For example, hammer is good for pounding nails, car for driving, and etc.

Armed with this knowledge, let's turn our attention to how Apple markets its products. For example, Steve Jobs describes iPad as wonderful, magical, beautiful, amazing device.



Apple's Mac vs PC ad campaign also focuses on Mac as a person, rather than device. What is being sold is a fashion item; when consumer buys it s/he adds personality first and functionality second. And here's the line-up of Apple's portable products:

iPod - $100-200
iPhone - $200-400
iPad - $500-700
MacBook - $1,000 and up.

As we can see, iPad fills nicely into the niche between iPhone and MacBook. Now, everybody who wants to make a computer fashion statement can do it at will.

tags: apple, information, social, psychology, science

I'll be silent for a couple more days - working on new project proposals, paper, taxes, etc.

In the meantime, let's take a break and watch South Park episode "You've got 0 friends".

Trade-off of the day: Commitment vs Costs

Commitment to a service is a good deal for the service provider, but bad for consumers:

...prepaid customers [month-to-month vs 1-yr+ contract] generate less revenue per month than post-paid customers. They are more likely to switch back and forth between service providers. And they typically use more network resources, averaging around 2,000 voice minutes per month compared to about 1,000 minutes per month, than post-paid customers, according to Craig Moffett, a Sanford Bernstein equities analyst.

Commitment to a regular long-term service reduces the hassle of looking for the best deal and setting up a new account. And you end up paying for the convenience through over-priced plans.

tags: trade-off, communication, network, problem, solution, infrastructure, velocity

A healthcare system for trucks

Large fleet operators, such as UPS, Hertz, FedEx, and others, perform regular scheduled maintenance on their vehicles. UPS has moved one step further and introduced a "lifestyle-depended" maintenance system, which takes into account real-time and historical diagnostics data. The data is gathered by a "dumb" telemetry device embedded into each truck, then transmitted, stored, and compared to similar information captured from other trucks. As a result, the company is able to save millions of dollars by discovering and changing patterns of behavior of truck drivers, mechanics, and suppliers.

For the sake of comparison, UPS runs a population of tens of thousands of trucks. This is the size of a small town in the US. And we don't have anything even close to such lifestyle-oriented healtcare system for humans. Trucks' health is better managed than people's.

tags: detection, control, storage, distribution, problem, solution, information, cloud, health, 10x,

More 3D news

The market for 3D content continues to grow. Bloomberg reports that a US factory making 3D cinema equipment is working around the clock.

The three largest U.S. chains are outfitting 14,000 screens for digital projection after raising $660 million.

There are about 2,000 digital screens in China, including 800 that are equipped to show movies in 3-D, Li said in an interview. Even small cities in China are installing 3-D equipment, he said.

In addition to that, in September 2010 Sharp will introduce small 3D displays that don't require special glasses. The company bets that eventually all portable devices will be 3D-capable.

As a result of this expansion, demand for 3D content will increase dramatically, which in turn will put pressure on storage and bandwidth. From a system analysis point of view, we are witnessing a change in payload packaging (from 2D/analog to 3D/digital) - a clear sign that the whole system, including production (source), control, and distribution infrastructure, will have to change.

tags: tool, system, content, source, payload, system, information, entertainment, games

Toward a personal brand

Just wanted to capture a thought that today's social networking infrastructure provides
1. a platform for personal branding based on reputation;
2. a marketplace for digital goods.

Therefore, we should expect emergence of completely new kinds of commerce, including money, development tools, transaction mechanisms, and etc.

Background reading:
Gallup: "The Value of Personal Branding. July 23, 2009.

Science Magazine: Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment. Science 19 March 2010: Vol. 327. no. 5972, pp. 1480 - 1484 DOI: 10.1126/science.1182238


tags:  10x, tradeoff, problem, solution, social, information, money, market, niche construction, infrastructure, payload

Invention of the Day: Social Gaming

Milton Bradley (1836-1911) invented the first board game, Checkered Game of Life, in 1866. Here's an excerpt from his patent (US 53,51):

The subject of this invention is a game peculiarly adapted to the home-circle from the fact that it can be played by two or more players.
...in addition to the amusement and excitement of the game, it is intended to forcibly impress upon the minds of youth the great moral principles of virtue and vice.

As "Happy old age" is surrounded by many difficulties, fifty may oftentimes be gained as soon by a succession of smaller numbers as by striving for "Happy old age".

A very humble beginning for today's multi-billion dollar industry.

tags: invention, innovation, games, entertainment, information, network,  social

Creative thinking is slow thinking

Once again, our education and job experiences that emphasize timed tests and quick solutions during brainstorming sessions may hinder our creative abilities. Moreover, the education system may discriminate against creative students.
Here's some brain research evidence for that:

AS FAR as the internet or phone networks go, bad connections are bad news. Not so in the brain, where slower connections may make people more creative.

Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues had found that creativity correlates with low levels of the chemical N-acetylaspartate, which is found in neurons and seems to promote neural health and metabolism.

The volunteers' capacity for divergent thinking - a factor in creativity that includes coming up with new ideas - had already been tested. Jung found that the most creative people had lower white-matter integrity in a region connecting the prefrontal cortex to a deeper structure called the thalamus, compared with their less creative peers (PLoS ONE, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009818).

tags: creativity, science, brain, mind, education, brainstorming, distribution, biology

Asking for directions

tags: youtube, media, imagination

and the pursuit of fantasy

Games and movies are becoming a self-reinforcing platform for the new media:

...the $46 billion worldwide video game market in upheaval--budgets are soaring for console titles even as free online games sharply cannibalize sales--agents are suddenly awfully useful: finding the right talent to complete increasingly complex titles, structuring deals across media, bringing in third-party financiers.

Add to it social networking, better graphics, faster processors, ubiquitous mobile computers and you get a market revolution in the making.

tags: information, entertainment, content, source, process, innovation, payload, mobile, social

The value of aproblem: finance.

From George Soros' book "The Alchemy of Finance" (2003 paper back edition):

The major insight I gained ... is that all human constructs (concepts, business plans or institutional arrangements) are flawed. The flaws may be revealed only after the construct has come into existence... Recognizing the flaws that are likely to appear when a hypothesis becomes reality puts you ahead of the game. p. 37.

This is a good argument for starting a project with Reverse Brainstorming, a technique I've developed to search for problems rather than solutions. In a Reverse Brainstorming session participants are required to generate a 50+ problems within an hour; 100 is my preferred number. The vast majority of the flaws discovered during the session will never be exposed, or will never become important enough to entail a corrective action. But there will be several that will reveal critical issues. Understanding and inventing ways to address them will put us ahead of the game.

tags: reverse brainstorm, method, problem, solution, high value, money

Trade-off of the day: Efficiency vs Care

NYT reports about the growing industrialization of healthcare in the US:

As recently as 2005, more than two-thirds of medical practices were physician-owned — a share that had been relatively constant for many years, according to the Medical Group Management Association. But within three years, that share dropped below 50 percent, and analysts say the slide in physician ownership has continued.


For patients, the transformation in medicine is a mixed blessing. Ideally, bigger health care organizations can provide better, more coordinated care. But the intimacy of longstanding doctor-patient relationships may be going the way of the house call.

I think deployment of IT in healthcare is likely to increase. Small practice doctors will have harder time competing with large hospitals not only because they'll have weaker position negotiating with the government, but also, due to the economies of scale/scope effects, their malpractice insurance premiums will be higher and return on IT investments lower.

Dmitry Gorchev, Russian author and arist, died today at the age of 46.

Rest In Peace.

Thinking by twittering

Twitter can be considered as one of the thinking systems employed by the Borg. Here's how it works:

Short messages about environmental objects or events are broadcast by "shouters" to a group of connected individuals. The few who have the motivation and resources (e.g. time, neurons, slaves - let's call them "symantics") choose to analyze the information and make sense out of it. Then, the sense is shouted down the twitter, so that the rest of the Borg can use it for operating in the environment. As a result, the Borg has an inexpensive, distributed, highly specialized sense extracting hierarchy that consumes flat randomized media.

It would be an interesting task to identify various Borg networks and determine "shouters" and  "semantics". It would also be useful to find and extract the Borg's memory (blogs?) because twitter as a medium is inherently memoryless.

also see: "Firing on all neurons: Where Consciousness Comes From."

tags: mind, brain, social, network, information, system, control,  innovation

Hong Kong's air polution: 500 on a 0 to 500 scale.

An update to my yesterday's post about China's need for new energy infrastructure:

NYT: Air pollution in Hong Kong, one of the perpetual banes of living and working in this Asian financial hub, reached record levels on Monday, setting off an official government warning to avoid outdoor activities and physical exertion.

Pollution levels are now 12 to 14 times the amount recommended by the World Health Organization, according to the Clean Air Network

Some of it is due to a major sandstorm in northern China. But sandstorms are a regular event in this part of the world; they are not going away any time soon. All this makes deployment of clean energy technologies even more desirable.

tags: problem, energy, effect, economy, system

Last January, during our "The Greatest Innovations" course, we concluded that energy innovation has a much better chance to succeed in China, rather than US.

Firstly, should China continue its rapid growth while using today's conventional energy technologies, the impact on the environment will be devastating. Why? Because over the last 45 years losses have become the fastest growing energy segment in our fair country. If this technology is simply transferred to China, it will reproduce existing wasteful practices on a much larger scale - China's population is already 4 times greater than ours. Whether we believe in global warming or not, a lot of pollution would be bound to happen. Thus, the need for energy innovation in China is higher.

Secondly, China doesn't have a mature energy infrastructure. Compared to the US, where industrial electricity consumption started growing rapidly about a hundred years ago, China's a relative newcomer to the info-industrial age. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to create an infrastructure that is based on new technologies, i.e. leapfrog, not copy.

As we can see, the need is higher (environmental impact) and the opportunity is greater (new infrastructure buildup). Also, China has some two trillion dollars to burn, which we don't.

And here's some empirical confirmation for our two-month old hypothesis:

NatCore Technology of Red Bank, N.J., recently discovered a way to make solar panels much thinner, reducing the energy and toxic materials required to manufacture them. American companies did not even come look at the technology, so NatCore reached a deal with a consortium of Chinese companies to finish developing its invention and mass-produce it in Changsha, China.

From this perspective, technology licensing and intellectual property rights are going to become even more important for US R&D firms.

tags: energy, infrastructure, example, problem, solution, trend, innovation

Another argument for early education

Puberty worsens children's learning abilities. Unfortunately, our education system was created over a hundred years ago, when kids, on average, reached puberty later in their lives, and very few of them could afford high school. As a result of changes in human biology and culture, we've got schools that teach languages and science (which, arguably, is just another language) at the worst possible time: during last years of junior high and first years of high school.

When children hit puberty, their ability to learn a second language drops, they find it harder to learn their way around a new location and they are worse at detecting errors in cognitive tests.

Why is this? Sheryl Smith and her colleagues at the State University of New York now reckon that all of these behavioural changes could be due to a temporary increase in a chemical receptor that inhibits brain activity in an area responsible for learning.

On the other hand, teenage boys learn very quickly how to play complex computer games. It's quite possible that the academic learning model doesn't fit their natural learning abilities.

tags: biology, education, information, system, constraint, trend, biology, information

What's good for information is good for Google.

The buildup of internet infrastructure continues across the world:

The Unity Consortium, which consists of Google, Bharti Airtel, Global Transit, KDDI, Pacnet, and SingTel, has nearly completed the testing of the $300 million project. Internet users in Asia will start seeing faster Internet speeds over the next several months from the new cable, which has the potential to create a 7.68Tbps (terabits per second) connection under the Pacific.

In the meantime, Australia Pushes to Ensure New Built Homes Have High-Speed Internet Access.

Get ready: 3D videoconferencing is coming to a screen near you.

tags: information, infrastructure, google, internet, niche construction, distribution, video, 10x

Patent #26

US Patent 7,681,194 with inventors Jan Van Ee and Eugene Shteyn, i.e. truly yours, issued this week, just over 11 years since the original application was filed. At the time, we put enough information in the disclosure to cover several future scenarios.

The claims look very complex, but at the bottom of the invention is a solution to the following dilemma:

1. on one hand, user interface of a controlling device should have a lot of icons (representations) of controllable devices, so that all of them can be controlled;

2. on the other hand, the interface of the controller should have very few icons, so that when needed user can easily find the right one.

We solve the problem by applying, in two steps, the separation in time/space principle. First, we aggregate devices into tasks; second, we make the interface time- and place-dependent. As the result, at any given time user is enabled to see only actionable icons. This is the basic idea.

Further, from studying patterns in system evolution, we know that control problems are preceded by detection problems. Therefore, we make our controller context-aware, i.e. capable of detecting what's around it. Once devices around the user are detected, we bring up tasks that can be accomplished with these devices. Voila!

tags: problem, solution, dilemma, patent, invention, interface, control, detection

Trade-off of the day: Efficiency vs Stress

Two recent papers reached a similar conclusion: frequent e-mail exchanges improve organizational efficiency, but lead to more stress among employees.

The first study looked into the impact of interruptions caused by e-mails:

Our data suggests that people compensate for interruptions by working faster, but this comes at a price: experiencing more stress, higher frustration, time pressure and effort.

The second study investigated the relationship between e-mail and work performance:

...we obtained solid evidence that e-mail supports work performance, but at the same time contributes to negative effects [stress and distress - ES] that in the long run may affect motivation and satisfaction.

What do you think about the problem? Drop me an e-mail.

tags: trade-off, problem, information, dilemma, internet, control, 10x


Sources:


1. Gloria Mark, et all. The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress. CHI 2008, April 5–10, 2008, Florence, Italy.
2. E-mail characteristics, work performance and distress Rita S. Mano, Gustavo S. Mesch. Computers in Human Behavior 26 (2010) 61–69. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2009.08.005.

In the domain of science publications transition to electronic documents causes "twitterization" of research media:

The move to online science appears to represent one more step on the path initiated by the much earlier shift from the contextualized monograph [books]... to the modern research article.

As 21st-century scientists and scholars use online searching and hyperlinking to frame and publish their arguments more efficiently, they weave them into a more focused—and more narrow—past and present.

Science 18 July 2008:
Vol. 321. no. 5887, pp. 395 - 399
DOI: 10.1126/science.1150473

It's quite possible that proliferation of e-book devices will benefit magazines more than books. Shorter chapters/articles are easier to jump in and out on the go; embedded audio and video clips are better suited for the "show, not tell" style of presentation; more recent events mentioned in the text are more fresh in the mind and psychologically close to connect for the reader. To summarize, attention spans are getting shorter, authors and publishers will have to find ways to feed readers with small easily digestible info-chunks.

tags: information, payload, system, time, internet, digital,  media

Healthcare update: back to basics

It looks like personalized gene-based medicine is further away that was originally thought. To develop working therapies for most common diseases, scientists will have to collect a lot more DNA data and figure out better ways to analyze it. In the short run (3-10 years), personalized approach to medical treatment will be based on lifestyle choices, e.g. diet, exercise, stress management, etc. Though basic, lifestyle changes were very difficult to implement; they worked mostly for highly organized and motivated people. Now, with the proliferation of social networking, availability of connected diagnostics devices, and, more importantly, rising healthcare costs, it'll become easier for many of us to decide upon and implement good lifestyle choices. In any case, magic DNA bullets are not going to be ready for quite some time.

Here's an excerpt from a NYT article (3/10/10) that describes a significant scientific setback in the gene-based approach to treating diseases:

More common diseases, like cancer, are thought to be caused by mutations in several genes, and finding the causes was the principal goal of the $3 billion human genome project.

The results of this costly international exercise have been disappointing. About 2,000 sites on the human genome have been statistically linked with various diseases, but in many cases the sites are not inside working genes, suggesting there may be some conceptual flaw in the statistics.


The finding implies that common diseases, surprisingly, are caused by rare, not common, mutations. In the last few months, researchers have begun to conclude that a new approach is needed, one based on decoding the entire genome of patients.

tags: health, information, problem, science, source, control, strategy

GSM patents asserted by Nokia against Apple:

5,802,465 5,862,178 5,946,651 6,359,904 6,694,135 6,775,548 6,882,727 7,009,940 7,092,672 7,403,621

According to Nokia, the patents were recognized as essential to the GSM standard.

tags: patents, apple, mobile, control, battle

Content as Software - 2

This is a follow-up to my yesterday's post about Content as Software (CAS).

Recently, Steve Jobs said that, despite abundance of Flash-compatible content, Apple is not going to support Adobe Flash on iPod or iPad. In his words, Flash is a CPU hog. Google expressed a similar view. Why is it so? Is one of the most popular web platforms going to die in the mobile space due to turf battles, or there's something else going on here? Is CPU hogging the only problem with Flash, or are there other reasons why it is going nowhere? To find answers to these questions, I looked up Flash timeline and compared it side-by-side with browser technology developments.

Remarkably, evolution of Flash looks like a continuous effort to overcome web browser deficiencies. First, it was a simple animation engine that allowed developers to embed dynamic content into static HTML pages. Then, media play-out and limited, but certain, scripting capabilities followed. At the time, web authors could not rely on consistent browser behavior beyond the very basics. In terms of browser as an application platform, Microsoft supported ActiveX in Internet Explorer (Windows-only), while Mozilla pushed JavaScript in Netscape and its open source descendants. MP3 audio was handled by a separate browser plugin, so it was difficult, if not impossible, to use most popular media to create a coherent browser-based web experience. On top of that, session management had to rely on cookies and annoying pop-ups, which could be easily disabled by the user. If you as a developer wanted to have a live page or stream content, you had to rely on Flash to provide a stable platform for your application.

Later, more video codecs, a full-blown object-oriented scripting engine (ActionScript), and web services integration layer were added to Flash. In 2007, after the acquisition by Adobe, new versions, Flash CS3 and beyond, could run whole applications inside its own application, had integrated support for Photoshop and other Adobe graphics manipulation products, 3D animation, and etc. The software has become a software platform that itself runs within a browser application that runs on top of a sophisticated windowing operating system, either Windows, Mac OS, or Linux.

A PC with plenty of electric power, processing power, memory, and storage space can easily afford this behemoth. A smartphone (or an e-book) cannot. And it doesn't need to, because its operating system, rather than a web browser, runs user applications. The OS, be it iPhone OS or Google Android, provides a consistent set of APIs that developers can rely upon when they write their code. Since browser on a mobile phone is no longer "The Web Application", but rather one of many web apps, there's no need for Flash to be a media presentation intermediary. The hog can be slaughtered.

Sales of smarphones are predicted to outnumber PCs by 2012. Unless a dramatic change in Flash architecture for mobile devices happens, the product is going to die a slow death. It's not about Steve Job's ego or his design preferences. Rather, it's about the process of creative destruction of obsolete technologies and business models.

tags: 10x, payload, information, mobile, content, software, cloud, system, evolution, niche construction, social, network

Content as Software (CAS)

An increasing number of providers are discovering that packaging their web content as a mobile application is a very attractive business proposition. The same content that is free on the net can be sold for real money when delivered through an iPhone app. NYT has a story about two such apps: Zillow (real estate) and Yelp (business recommendations). Both of them have a location-based component, which makes a lot of sense for people who have a purpose while on the go.

It's easy to predict that delivering content as software (CAS) will grow in popularity among users and providers. First, people are willing to pay for mobile apps; second, content providers have greater control over presentation (browser-independent implementation); third, CAS screens have a greater focus than PC, both time- and space-wise, which enables insertion of highly-relevant ads, including video. All signs point to a new stage in the development of internet commerce. For example, in the nearest future travel guides will stop being books and become integrated mobile apps.

tags: 10x, payload, information, mobile, content, software, cloud, system, evolution, niche construction, social, network

The spinning woman illusion. To me, she always seem to spin clockwise: from right to left; and I have to make a conscious effort to look at the figure sideways to it reverse the direction.

The link comes courtesy a New Scientist article that proposes:

...when people make decisions, their pupils dilate, a subtle cue that could be used to predict a person's intentions, or even converse with people with locked-in syndrome.

A useful clue in negotiations. It would be good to have a monitoring device that tracks, Blade runner-style, your opposition's pupils.

The title of the article is slightly misleading, though. It mentions wide eyes rather than dilated pupils. The "wide eyes" effect is a sign of interest from another person, rather than decision-making activity. That's why men prefer women who listen to them with eyes wide open. Maybe the reporter for the story, Ewen Callaway, who is male, got carried away by his imagination. Or maybe it's a plot to grab our attention. Or maybe it's a little bit of both.

tags: psychology, effect, science, detection

Text is finite; video is infinite.

Emerging internet infrastructure is shaping up to look a lot like traditional high-traffic networks (rail, auto, air, water, etc.). Increasingly, it connects large centers of content aggregation with high-volume information "retailers". The trend is driven by availability of digital video:

(NYT 3/1/10). Arbor’s Internet Observatory Report concluded that today the majority of Internet traffic by volume flows directly between large content providers like Google and consumer networks like Comcast. ...“Out of the 40,000 routed end sites in the Internet, 30 large companies — ‘hyper giants’ like Limelight, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and YouTube — now generate and consume a disproportionate 30 percent of all Internet traffic."

The company[Cisco] estimates that video will account for 90 percent of all Internet traffic by 2013.

Furthermore, the next generation wireless networks are built with video streaming as a primary user scenario:

Verizon Wireless has been testing its forthcoming 4G LTE network in both Boston and Seattle since August, 2009. Successful data calls involved streaming video, file uploads and downloads, and Web browsing, as well as calls with Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) to enable voice transmissions over the LTE network.

The next series of biztech battles are going to be about video formats, content recommendation systems (e.g. iTunes vs Netflix vs Facebook, etc.), and processing power/efficiency of mobile devices.

tags: payload, distribution, system, evolution, information, google, apple, , infrastructure, innovation

The day the second shoe dropped.

Several months ago I used example of Google' Outlook plug-in to explain how to solve a typical dilemma. Today, by buying DocVerse, a "startup that allows people to edit Microsoft Office files online", Google provided another example of the same problem-solution pattern. What's the difference between the two cases? Last time, Google's target was Outlook; this time, it's the rest of MS Office. Last time, Google engineers built the software themselves; this time, Google business people bought the company that makes the desired software.

In an interview, Jonathan Rochelle, group product manager for Google Apps, said Google acquired DocVerse to make it easier for people to transition from desktop software to online software. The latter is an area where Google is trying to get a leg up over Microsoft, with its Google Apps service, which includes online word-processing and spreadsheet software.

Google is now involved in two strategic battles:

1. against Apple, to dominate mobile software with the Android/Chrome combo;
2. against Microsoft, to dominate server software with Google Apps.

The only question is, Will Google's search cash cow produce enough money to sustain the troops?

tags: dilemma, google, problem, solution, battle, apple, microsoft, course, example, control point

Apple patents listed against HTC:

• Patent No. 7,362,331: “Time-Based, Non-Constant Translation Of User Interface Objects Between States”
• Patent No. 7,479,949: “Touch Screen Device, Method, And Graphical User Interface For Determining Commands By Applying Heuristics”
• Patent No. 7,657,849: “Unlocking A Device By Performing Gestures On An Unlock Image”
• Patent No. 7,469,381: “List Scrolling And Document Translation, Scaling, And Rotation On A Touch-Screen Display”
• Patent No. 5,920,726: “System And Method For Managing Power Conditions Within A Digital Camera Device.”
• Patent No. 7,633,076: “Automated Response To And Sensing Of User Activity In Portable Devices”
• Patent No. 5,848,105: “GMSK Signal Processors For Improved Communications Capacity And Quality”
• Patent No. 7,383,453: “Conserving Power By Reducing Voltage Supplied To An Instruction-Processing Portion Of A Processor”
• Patent No. 5,455,599: “Object-Oriented Graphic System”
• Patent No. 6,424,354: “Object-Oriented Event Notification System With Listener Registration Of Both Interests And Methods”

At first glance, they don't look that broad. The lawsuit is likely to cause a one- or two-year product deployment delay, not a knockout punch against Google and/or its hardware partners.

tags: patent, apple, google, mobile, law, battle

History rhymes

Today's most important financial innovation happens away from Wall Street. Early gaming transactions in the world of social networking are a good indicator of a major shift in internet business models. As goods and services become increasingly digital, money will flow away from ads to true virtual transactions. Very similar to the commerce/banking revolution that happened in the 17th century Europe:

The Amsterdam Exchange Bank (Wisselbank) was set up in 1609 to resolve the practical problems created for merchants by the circulation of multiple currencies in the United Provinces, where there were no fewer than fourteen different mints and copious quantities of foreign coins. By allowing merchants to set up accounts denominated in a standardized currency, the Exchange Bank pioneered the system of cheques and direct debits or transfers that we take for granted today.

Ferguson Niall. The Ascent of Money. 2008. p.48.

and 400 years later:

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) -- Facebook Inc. is expanding a service called Facebook Credits that gives it a 30 percent cut of sales from tractors, fish food and guns in online games...

Today, gamers on Facebook can either buy Facebook Credits to obtain items in games, or pay for them through third-party services. Of the $3.6 billion in U.S. virtual goods sales in 2012, about $2.2 billion will be on social networks, with 80 percent on Facebook, said Atul Bagga, a ThinkEquity analyst in San Francisco. If all payments on the site use Facebook Credits, that would mean $530 million in revenue for the company, he said.

Facebook has become a market of markets. Their social identity management system is ideally suited to support a variety of digital transaction models. They just need to fix gaping security holes. As they say in Russian, "начать и кончить" :)

tags: innovation, money, control, scale, security, internet, social, network, information

From John R. Searle's "Rationality in Action":

...most practical reasoning is about adjudicating between conflicting, inconsistent desires and other sorts of reason...Typically in practical reasoning you have to figure out how to give up on satisfying some desires in order to satisfy others... By satisfying one desire your frustrate others.

Ch.1, p.30.

This is where practical (engineering, economics, business, etc.) reasoning differs from inventive reasoning. One of the core principle of the TRIZ tradition is commitment to Ideal Solution, i.e. a solution that enables us to satisfy one desire without frustrating others. As inventors and innovators, we should be looking for situations where widely accepted trade-offs between conflicting desires become more and more lopsided, e.g. due to new technology developments.

For example, today practically all printed content (books, magazines, newspapers, scientific articles, etc) is produced digitally but distributed "paperly." This tells us that the previous conflict between the two forms of content, digital vs paper, was adjudicated toward the old publishing world. That is, publishers benefited enormously by optimizing the process of content creation to fit their physical goods distribution model. When you go through any airport you see that books and magazines are sold side by side with salted peanuts and souvenir mugs. Even Amazon's Kindle, an all-digital device, is no more than a glorified paperback because its reading content was originally developed to be printed on paper. Paradoxically, this new device and distribution technology proliferate an old trade-off.

Looks like an opportunity for a good invention.

tags: tradeoff, payload, system, evolution, invention, innovation, tool, source, problem