Creative Solution of the Day: the Publication Dilemma

Typically, inventors face a disclosure dilemma: on the one hand, you want to explain your idea to a potential investor or a customer; on the other hand, you don't want to explain it because the idea can be easily stolen. Researchers face a similar dilemma when they consider publishing their results that  might have valuable commercial implications.

In the 1840s, Samuel Colt used the US patent system to overcome the dilemma:

When Samuel Colt, of revolver fame, was trying to sell the U.S. government a system of naval mines, he had to establish that his device was original without giving away its secret. His imaginative solution was to submit the plan to the Patent Office, obtain a confirmation of its originality, and then withdraw the application before the patent was granted, thereby avoiding the publication of the patent specifications.*

The Colt's approach exemplifies a powerful problem-solving technique often called "Separation in Time." According to the principle:
- you perform the useful action first — in the Colt's case: explaining the invention via a patent application — at the time when your potential customer needs to be convinced;
- then you perform a reverse action — withdraw the patent application — at a different time, so that the competition doesn't learn about the idea.

Snapchat provides the most recent example of a successful application of the "Separation in Time" principle along the lines of Samuel Colt's solution. That is, a Snapchat picture or a post is published for a short period of time to a limited group of subscribers; then, the post disappears, so that the information doesn't leak out to the general public. Clearly, the technique can be used for a broad variety of "limited offers."

* Source: Alex Roland, "Secrecy, Technology, and War: Greek Fire and the Defense of Byzantium, 678-1204." 1992.

tags: dilemma, problem, solution, social, separation

Lunchtalk: TED - Why humans run the world

A TED talk by Yuval Harari, the author of The Sapiens. From the talk description:

Seventy thousand years ago, our human ancestors were insignificant animals, just minding their own business in a corner of Africa with all the other animals. But now, few would disagree that humans dominate planet Earth; we've spread to every continent, and our actions determine the fate of other animals (and possibly Earth itself). How did we get from there to here? Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests a surprising reason for the rise of humanity.

Facebook patents recommendations from contact lists

The USPTO awarded Facebook US Patent 9,338,250, titled "Associating received contact information with user profiles stored by a social networking system" (inventors: Michael Hudack, Christopher Turitzin; Edward Baker; Hao Xu). The patent covers the now standard feature in many social networks, both consumer and professional, where the system finds potential connections in your imported contact list and recommends adding a person who is currently not in your network.

From an innovation methodology perspective, the invention solves a typical problem that arises when users need to be migrated from an old technology space into a new one. In the System model, an effective solution improves scalability, by dramatically reducing costs of adding Sources and Tools during the synthesis phase.

tags: facebook, innovation, invention, patent, social, networking, synthesis

Scalability: from Neanderthals to Twitter

A quote from "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind",

Twitter is having trouble competing for users against Facebook and Youtube because it has failed to scale human relationships beyond the threshold of 150 individuals. That is, the social networking niche of "less than 150" is already occupied by Facebook and for Twitter to become successful, the company has to make it easy for each user to organize and curate information dynamically from thousands of people who are not in the immediate network. Moreover, since connections and information on Twitter is more (10X!) dynamic than on Facebook, the degree of organization of information streams has to be at least 10X more sophisticated as well.

Youtube has met its content scalability challenge by enabling users to create and share playlists, channels, and subscriptions. Every user on Youtube is a developer who produces new ways to access contents at a collection or stream level, rather than at single video level. In Scalable Innovation we call it scaling at the aboutness" layer. So far, Twitter can't find a way to enable its users to become developers. All they can do is propagate gossip, which worsens the information overload problem for everybody who gets over the "150 individuals" threshold.

To summarize, Twitter needs to find a way to help people become better Information Sapiens because the Information Neanderthal niche is already occupied by Facebook and Youtube.

tags:scale, innovation, control, aboutness, twitter, social

Predicting smartphone addiction in kids

A study of South Korean elementary school kids has found that stress and lack of self-control are the strongest predictors of the "smartphone" addiction. Although the device to deliver the addiction is the smartphone, the real hooks for the addiction are Social Networking (SNS) and entertainment services (via BBC news).

Since the mobile has become a dominant platform for delivering entertainment services, in a period of two generations we can expect a migration of television advertisement money into online services. The TV and the web are going to go into oblivion like the newsprint. We can also expect that Twitter will not catch up with Facebook or other major SNS'.

Also, it appears that the humanity is running a large-scale Stanford Marshmallow Experiment, dividing kids into those who can exert self–control and those who cannot. 

The first follow-up study, in 1988, showed that "preschool children who delayed gratification longer in the self-imposed delay paradigm, were described more than 10 years later by their parents as adolescents who were significantly more competent."
A second follow-up study, in 1990, showed that the ability to delay gratification also correlated with higher SATscores.^[5]

From an innovation theory perspective, the smartphone represents the Dominant Design, while online services - the Dominant Use.

Smartphone: the greatest personal device ever?

According to Gallup, more and more people can't imagine their life without their smartphone:

The device has become our ultimate interface into the world of social interactions and productivity. It's hard to find in the history of technology a device that is more personal than that. Adding more devices to one's personal network is likely to increase our dependance on the smartphone.

tags: invention, innovation, mobile, interface, social, biology, networking, psychology

Facebook patents video messaging (again!) US 9,071,725

Facebook continues to mine successfully the AOL patent portfolio the company acquired from Microsoft. On June 30, 2015 the United States Patent Office issued US 9,071,725 titled "Methods and user interfaces for video messaging."

The patent dates back to U.S. provisional application No. 60/220,648, filed Jul. 25, 2000. (15 years in prosecution!). The application has already resulted in two good patents – US 8,087,678 and US 7,984,098. The new Facebook claims cover a concurrent video and text interactions between two computing devices, including mobiles (See claim 7).

This is a broad, strong patent that possibly reads on many existing video systems, including Skype, Google Hangouts, Snapchat, etc.

tags: patent, facebook, mobile, video, social, networking

NY Times picking your friends' noses

"You can pick your friends, you can pick your nose, but you can't pick your friends' noses," so an old saying goes. This notion has become largely obsolete in the age of social networking. For example, when you sign up with your Facebook account on a popular website they typically get not only your public profile, but also your friend list.

Imagine now doing real business, e.g. making a purchase or contacting customer service, using your social networking profile as a login. For the price of the transaction the other party gets access to your entire social graph, which (with a little bit of triangulation through other customer logins) provides an incredible wealth of marketing information. As a result, you give up a large chunk of your privacy for free, without even being aware of it.

We used to think about privacy as a trade-off: you get access to free content by giving up your right to stay anonymous, i.e. providing the content distributor with the information about what kind of content you like to read. If the current trend continues, people will be giving away for free not only their own privacy, but also their friends' privacy too.

tags: trade-off, trend, social, networking, composite actor, privacy, internet

Want to understand your own personality? Ask Facebook!

Stanford researchers have found that computers can judge personality traits more accurately than one's friends and colleagues.

The computer predictions were based on which articles, videos, artists and other items the person had liked on Facebook. The idea was to see how closely a computer prediction could match the subject's own scores on the five most basic personality dimensions: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.

The researchers noted, "This is an emphatic demonstration of the ability of a person's psychological traits to be discovered by an analysis of data, not requiring any person-to-person interaction.

http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2015/01/07/1418680112

The original idea of using Thumbs UP and Thumbs DOWN buttons in the digital world belongs to TiVo. Facebook took this idea — knowingly or unknowingly — and scaled it across the entire range of digital content, making every piece of communication "likeable."

In System Model terms, Like helps solve Detection and Control problems. We discuss it briefly in Scalable Innovation, Chapter 22, Seeing the Invisible. "Like" represents the Aboutness of an element. Once the Aboutness detected, the Control sub-system uses it to compose and channel content streams according to its policies.

Scalable Innovation - a quiz (Session 2-2). Social Networking.

1. What trends can be identified in this Venture Beat article about Mark Zuckerberg's predictions?

2. Name major technology innovations that power the trends you've identified.

Examples of trend categories:

- Business
- Technology
- Science
- Finance
- Demographics
- Social
- Market
- Regulatory
etc...

Linking users and concepts - a Facebook patent

Facebook continues building up a strong patent portfolio for graph-based technologies. On January 6, 2015 the USPTO awarded the company US 8,930,378 patent on a social-like network between users and concepts. The patent is titled "Labeling samples in a similarity graph", inventors Pierre Moreels and Andrei Alexandrescu.

On the figure above, circles with Us in them mean users and circles with city names mean concepts. The dotted lines show a calculated confidence level that a particular concept is "linked" to a user who is not connected to it directly.
Since the concept can describe anything in the real as well as abstract world, Facebook patented a technology that figures out the user's connection to objects, places, and other stuff based on the user's social connections.

For completeness, here's Claim 1 (click to enlarge):

The claim looks very clever, but it's hard to believe that the idea has not been covered in the prior art. Detecting infringement of the patent would also be quite difficult because an accused piece of software would be embedded deep down in the guts of a server-based implementation.

tags: patent, facebook, graph, social, networking, internet, portfolio

Facebook patents a tech to provide socially relevant ads - US 8,924,406

On December 30, 2014 the United States Patent Office awarded Facebook a patent titled "Ranking search results using social-networking information" US 8,924,406 ( Inventors: Christopher Lunt, Nicholas Galbreath, Jeffrey Winner).

The patent covers a technology that provides a new way to determine relevant ads and/or additional content shown to the user along the search results. According to the invention, a search engine takes into account the popularity of sponsored links associated with the results. The popularity is calculated based on clicks in the user's social network and a social relevancy threshold (degrees of separation).

From a business perspective, Facebook continues strengthening its challenge to the Google "relevant ads" model created in the early 2000s. Today, some of you may already see sponsored relevant links inserted in your Facebook stream or page. The patent would be a good illustration to the brief discussion "GOOGLE VERSUS FACEBOOK: THE BATTLE FOR THE CONTROL" Max and I outlined in Chapter 22 of our book Scalable Innovation.

Another interesting aspect of the patent: it shows the brave new "Me-centric" world of social networking (see Fig 1 above). From a technical and business perspective it indicates a large-scale transition from relational (excel-like rows and columns) representations of data to a graph-based one, with nodes and edges. The patent also provides a good working definition of a social network:

the social-networking system comprising a graph that comprises a plurality of nodes and edges connecting the nodes, each edge between two nodes representing a relationship between them and establishing a single degree of separation between them, wherein the first user corresponds to a first node of the graph.

tags: patent, facebook, innovation, invention, social, networking, search, control, internet

Facebook's market power

The Facebook patent I briefly discussed yesterday points to a business and technology revolution, similar to the one that made Chicago a major commercial center in the United States in the 19th century. Back then, the proliferation of railroads helped move grain and cattle from small, scattered farms to large grain elevators and slaughterhouses. As the result, Chicago merchants benefited enormously from the new economies of scale. Similarly, Facebook enjoys enormous economies of scale by aggregating and processing huge amounts of scattered pieces of user preferences data. 

Furthermore, Chicago merchants developed a new standardization system that

...partitioned a natural material — a steer or a bushel of wheat into a multitude of standardized commodities, each with a different price, each with a different market (Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon).

The new partitioning system allowed the merchants to sell their commodities to those consumers who were interested in a particular grain variety or beef cut and willing to pay the right price for the right commodity.

Similarly, Facebook has the ability to partition their user social graphs (and even individual users like you and I) into a multitude of parts that can be sold to advertisers and content providers for the right price at the right time and in the right place. The only difference is that instead of the Beef Chart of the 19th century they have the User Interest Chart of the 21st century.

tags: innovation, technology, control, packaged payload, distribution, scale, facebook, social, advertisement

Facebook patents user tracking for advertisers and content providers

Today, August 19, 2014, USPTO awarded Facebook patent 8,812,591 titled Social networking system data exchange (Inventors: Kent Schoen and Gokul Rajaram)

The patent covers a technology that tracks users across multiple service providers by matching service provider ID and social network ID. The match results in an aggregated user profile that determines user eligibility for content and ad targeting. The system uses a tracking pixel instead of the web cookie, which makes it suitable for mobile applications.

The technology breaks the wall between different publishers with regard to what they know about the user. As the patent says:

...a publisher may know very limited information about a user visiting the publisher's web page or the publisher's application. Thus, a publisher is unable to effectively target content item and advertisements to the user based on the user's interests and characteristics. The exchange server aggregates a user's information from several sources, including a social networking system, publishers, retailers, content item providers, etc.
The exchange server matches advertisements to users based on whether users' characteristics as provided by the aggregated social graph match the advertisements' targeting criteria. Additionally, the exchange server selects one or more advertisements to display to the user based on expected revenue to be generated from displaying the advertisement to the user.

tags: patent, invention, innovation, facebook, social, networking, graph, content

More organic food => harsher moral judgements.

A recent research paper on the influence of organic foods shows the "moral licensing" effect:

After viewing a few organic foods, comfort foods, or control foods, participants who were exposed to organic foods volunteered significantly less time to help a needy stranger, and they judged moral transgressions significantly harsher than those who viewed nonorganic foods.

(Source: Kendall J. Eskine. Social Psychological and Personality Science 2013 4: 251 originally published online 15 May 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1948550612447114).

People feel morally superior when they have even an unconscious perception of doing good things (eating organic, being "green," describing self in positive terms, etc.). There seems to be a trade-off between doing something prosocial now and anti-social later; as if we have limited "goodness" resources in our minds.

Another paper on the effects of green purchasing concludes:

...people act less altruistically and are more likely to cheat and steal after purchasing green products than after purchasing conventional products. ( Source: Do Green Products Make Us Better People? Nina Mazar and Chen-Bo Zhong Psychological Science 2010 21: 494 originally published online 5 March 2010 DOI: 10.1177/0956797610363538 )

tags: trade-off, psychology, social

Lunch Talk: (@Google) Cognitive Science and Mediation.

Speaker: Philippe Goldin
Philippe is a research
scientist and heads the Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience group in
the Department of Psychology at Stanford University.

He spent 6 years in India and Nepal studying various languages, Buddhist philosophy and debate at Namgyal Monastery and the Dialectic Monastic Institute, and serving as an interpreter for various Tibetan Buddhist lamas. He then returned to the U.S. to complete a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University. His NIH-funded clinical research focuses on (a) functional neuroimaging investigations of cognitive-affective mechanisms in adults with anxiety disorders, (b) comparing the effects of mindfulness meditation and cognitive-behavioral therapy on brain-behavior correlates of emotional reactivity and regulation, and (c) training children in family and elementary school settings in mindfulness skills to reduce anxiety and enhance compassion, self-esteem and quality of family interactions.




lunchtalk, psychology, biology, social

Facebook US Patent 8,627,506: a blunder or strategic omission?

The vagueness of Facebook patent claims keeps surprising me. Take, for example, their latest one: US 8,627,506 "Providing privacy settings for applications associated with a user profile," (Inventors: Nico Vera, James Wang, Arieh Steinberg, Chris Kelly, and Adam D'Angelo).

The patent is supposed to cover a transfer of user private information to third party apps based on friendship relationships (social graph) in a social networking system. I wanted to use the invention to illustrate the concept of "aboutness" in our system model (Scalable Innovation, Chapter 5).

Even a brief system analysis of the claims shows that the third party app does not provide any definite information about the second user to the social networking system, i.e. a key "aboutness" element is simply missing. Only in claim 4 we find a vague statement about a second user "who is connected to the [first] user in the social networking system." We don't know the nature of the connection, nor the degree of connectedness. Maybe she is a direct connection, or maybe she is one of the billion people on Facebook. Who knows...

Since the social networking system doesn't know much about the second user, it can either give out all private data or no data at all. In short, according to the patent, where third party apps are concerned privacy is non-existent; the apps are entitled to receive the first user's entire social graph. Using this graph, they can fish for other users' social graphs, and so on.

Let's give the patent the benefit of the doubt and assume that it tries to cover a minimally useful configuration with no privacy. Then, there should be at least one dependent claim that describes what information about the second user is required to determine the amount of private data transferred to a third-party app. Unfortunately, no such claim exists in the patent.

Some people believe that such vagueness — they often confuse it with broadness — is harmless. But is it? Imagine that a patent troll looks up Facebook patent applications when they are just published and files a patent application that covers a scenario with a more specific privacy information exchange. When the troll gets its patent issued, it can sue Facebook for damages because in a real social networking system specific "aboutness" for the second user has to be exchanged to determine privacy boundaries. As a result, Facebook is going to be rightfully punished for sloppiness and vagueness in its patent portfolio.

Complaining about trolls and software patents is easy. Getting your patent house in order is more difficult.

tags: system, aboutness, patent, invention, social, networking

Logical Reasoning: Twitter popularity numbers

According to @Mediabistro, the current popularity ratings for individuals look like this:

Find a name that DOES NOT belong with the others.

tags: media, aboutness, logic, social, networking

Social Networking is the new TV, only much better

A study of new mothers shows that social networking has a strong positive effect on their well-being:

On average, mothers were 27 years old (SD = 5.15) and infants were 7.90 months old (SD = 5.21). All mothers had access to the Internet in their home. New mothers spent approximately 3 hours on the computer each day, with most of this time spent on the Internet. Findings suggested that frequency of blogging predicted feelings of connection to extended family and friends which then predicted perceptions of social support. This in turn predicted maternal well-being, as measured by marital satisfaction, couple conflict, parenting stress, and depression. In sum, blogging may improve new mothers’ well-being, as they feel more connected to the world outside their home through the Internet.

Source: Brandon T. McDaniel • Sarah M. Coyne • Erin K. Holmes. New Mothers and Media Use: Associations Between Blogging, Social Networking, and Maternal Well-Being. DOI 10.1007/s10995-011-0918-2
 

Another study of random 79 undegrads shows that:

In Experiment 2, those who focused on their Facebook page scored significantly higher in general self-esteem, but not narcissism, than a control group.

Across both experiments we found consistent evidence that narcissists reported having more ‘‘friends’’ on the SNSs. Partici- pants with higher NPI scores reported having more friends and more page views on MySpace and reported having more friends on Facebook.  

 The paper also notes that the new generation of students is quite different from the general population

 A recent Pew Research Center survey found that, com- pared to 20 other countries, rates of SNSs usage in America were among the highest (Pew Research Center, 2011). Among Americans, 80% of respondents aged 18–29 used SNSs (compared to 62% of those aged 30–49 and 26% of those 50 and older) and that 61% of users had college degrees, indicating that SNSs users are dis- proportionately young, educated adults. 

Looks like SNSs provide opportunities to improve social well-being by starring in one's own show.

tags: network, social, information, graph, research, science, book, facebook

Google Glass is the ultimate surveillance machine.

Google Glass has the potential to turn everybody into a surveillance camera. By capturing and analyzing video streams coming from multiple sources, Google would be able to cross-reference its image recognition algorithms with GPS data gathered by the target's Android or iOS device.

For example, when Bob's Google Glass device captures Alice on University Street in Palo Alto, Alice's mobile sends its location data to a Google Maps server. Although the two devices work independently, the information can be easily matched by timestamps and location data. Moreover, if Charlie sees Alice from a different angle, his Google Glass stream can be used to complement data received from Bob's and Alice's devices. If David — independently — tags Alice in his G+ post, the process of verification is complete. Unknowingly, Bob, Charlie, and David form a Google Glass spy network capable of tracking Alice's every move.

Although this scenario sounds a bit far fetched, Google has already implemented it in its web search engine. Because Google strives to download and index every available web page in the world, it knows which pages contain links to a particular page. Knowing the relationship helps Google assign high rank to pages that have a greater number of "incoming" links — the algorithm was Page's and Brin's research topic at Stanford. In short, if Alice, Bob, Charlie, and David are web pages, Google knows who sees whom. Similarly, Google has the ability to implement this logic for video streams, location data, and other bits and pieces of information collected from mobile devices.

tags: control, detection, social, network, packaged payload, google