As the FTC lays the groundwork for a possible challenge to Google’s purchase of AdMob, it is instructive to look at something else Google has already done to gain a strong foothold in the mobile ad business. Any advertiser that bids through the AdWords system gives Google complete authority over which devices its messages are seen [...]
In another validation of the suddenly hot collective buying trend, LivingSocial has landed $25m in Series B funding from a group of investors including US Venture Partners and Steve Case’s Revolution, LLC. But even with new money backing several similar companies, it is still unclear if the latest thing in e-commerce will last for long. LivingSocial [...]
Sony has every right to feel sore that Nintendo and Microsoft have stolen the limelight from it in adding motion-sensing to games. Sony had the EyeToy camera for sensing motion and putting players inside games on the PlayStation 2, long before Microsoft’s forthcoming Project Natal . Its six-axis controller has always had more motion capabilities than the [...]
We now have a date - June 17 - for the launch of OnLive, but uncertainties about the pricing and availability of the revolutionary cloud gaming service remain. Steve Perlman did tell us the service would cost $14.95 a month and would be available in the 48 contiguous US states in his presentation today at the [...]
Silicon Valley’s best-known CEO blogger now wants to become its best-known ex-CEO blogger (and yes, there may be a book in the works as well). Jonathan Schwartz, formerly of Sun Microsystems, has used his new pulpit to poke a stick at Steve Jobs. The Apple boss tried to bully Sun into submission back in 2003 [...]
At long last the FT has started to publish a list which celebrates the female contribution to business:
Although some of the entries are being debated on the FT’s forum, I for one am thankful to the FT for their move in a good direction. Personally, I believe that stronger companies are fostered when senior level executives are a mixture of male and female minds.
Interestingly, Fortune created their own Top 100 Most Powerful Women in 2004 so the FT is lagging about five years.
For the record, my best boss so far was male and my worst one was female — although gender had nothing to do with their competence or managerial effectiveness. Some people simply have that brilliant combination of being super-smart, strategic, dynamic, inclusive, meritocratic, collegiate and having a GSOH which makes reportees not only want to be part of their team, but also prepared to go those extra miles and do that extra work with them.
Anyway, I noticed that several key female technologists aren’t on the list like Marissa Mayer of Google, Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and they didn’t include Oprah Winfrey who seems to make most lists.
GOOGLE WAVE IS RELEASED THIS WEEK. Here are some videos:
TWAIN LIFE
I’ve been a wee bit busy these last few weeks:
(1.) Putting a trademark application together.
(2.) Sanity checking some guidelines on entrepreneurialism for some friends.
(3.) Sourcing furnishings for a friend’s new apartment.
(4.) Meeting search and advertising people.
(5.) Contributing to the shaping of the BBC’s documentary production on the 20-year history of the Web.
Let’s just say that since my involvement on the BBC project, the production team have clearly put the need to include a wider and deeper demographic of contributors onto their “to interview and source from” list. I’ve been championing these:
* women who are contributing not only to tech companies like Marissa Mayer of Google, but who also have a history of genius and revolutionary code work like Adele Goldberg who along with Alan Kay did amazing innovations with smalltalk => Squeak;
* teenagers who — contrary to absurd neuroscientists’ unnecessary patronization about how the Web is destroying their brains and concentration — are flourishing with these new technologies and some are even US$ million tech entrepreneurs;
* silver surfers who contribute a tremendous amount with their wisdoms and their wit to help us youngsters understand more about Life, open us up new resources (like musicians, authors and sports stars of yore) we should educate ourselves about because it’s fun and good-to-know, and who kindly temper our exuberance when we’re being a wee bit silly; and
* non-Anglo-Saxon contributors, e.g. from South Korea, since the Web is supposed to be a global village online and it’s important to benefit from the insights of others; the WWW is as much the property of Asians, Africans, South Americans, Slavics, etc. as it is of the US of A.
During various conversations I also managed to point these facts out:
(1.) Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergei Brin, Larry Ellison etc have been surfing for DECADES and we haven’t seen any evidence that it affects their concentration or brains in a negative way, have we?
(2.) Chris Anderson’s theory of free is flawed and so is Rupert Murdoch’s one with its paywalls.
Without going into all the economic arguments I presented — I quoted a paper I wrote when I was 20 that included analysis from Alfred Marshall, JK Galbraith and CW Mills about the inclusion of advertising as a cost premium — to essentially decimate any Mickey Mouse economic theories about Moore’s Law pushing down the cost of circuit boards and transistors, essentially resulting in a zero cost scenario.
The “Free Web” is unrealistic, unsustainable and it’s also not capitalism at its optimal but rather communism at its worst because it implies people will contribute their content for free indefinitely and don’t have household bills or their children’s education to pay for.
The “Pay to Play” model is also unrealistic, unsustainable and it’s extreme capitalism because it creates a chasm of digitally entitled and digitally deprived (or as JK Galbraith coined it “the haves and have-nots”) which only serves to exacerbate societal inequalities rather than resolve them.
(3.) The definition of “digital native” as being someone born after about 1990 who hasn’t known a world without technology and ‘digital migrants” as being someone born before 1990 is…….inaccurate since the PC was commercialized around 1974, so there’s an entire generation of people in their 50s and 60s who are digital natives! People like the fathers of the Internet (Tim Berners-Lee, Vint Cerf, Larry Brilliant, Tim O’Reily et al).
Moreover, by the USC’s definitions, Mark Zuckerberg would also be classified as a “digital migrant” since he was born in 1984 which is a full SIX years before 1990. See? So that’s an example of classifications having plenty of room for error, so we can imagine how it might propagate even with semantic stacks!
TWAIN’S WEB ECONOMY
In my model of how the Web should work, there would be legal requirements as a condition of platform providers being allowed to operate:
(1.) Allocate a % of their online gross revenues towards charitable causes and every company has to commit to a program of sending their employees to work for at least 4 weeks in an NGO/socially deprived area/public service.
(2.) Incentivize and reward content contributors via monthly micropayments — whether it’s a review / recommendation / any comment requiring skill they’ve made which is considered by other users to be of value;
(3.) Innovate new ways to include their communities in the design of products+services which result in companies having smarter inventory systems rather than over-producing and causing climate change issues, then doing hard sell/excessive advertising which doesn’t even result in bottom line sales at the end!
Now those measures, if implemented, would be TRULY DEMOCRATIZING AND WOULD ENGENDER GOOD CAPITALISM wherein each of the participants is conscious of their larger role in the ecosystem of the Web and of society as a whole.
THE WEB NURTURES OUR BRAINS + CONSCIOUSNESS
Personally (and I’m saying this from the experience of someone who’s used technology since pre-teen), I haven’t experienced any reduction in my ability to read, concentrate, contextualize or quote reams of reference sources to substantiate my position simply because I’ve been using the Web for more years than Google’s been around!
This is what I noted in one discussion on the issue of concentration:
“Wrt your comment: “This way of life doesn’t promote vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity,” I have to respectfully disagree. Leveraging tools like Facebook, Twitter, email and IM can facilitate all of those things. It’s a matter of the HOW, not the what.
It’s like this: those tools are a fishing rod. If we hook an old boot or a minnow instead of sweet, giant salmon it’s not the fault of the fishing rod. It’s the fisherperson’s lack of knowhow and skill. It’s their inability to read the terrain, factor in weather conditions and position themselves in a spot to concentrate and catch the salmon. It’s also their inability to seek the wisdom of others who may have fished before (and in that spot). The fishing rod can’t read their minds. They control it, not vice versa.
Now, I’ve worked directly with CEOs on strategies so let me also share this. Some of the CEOs of the 1950s to 1970s generation are technologically illiterate. They can’t (and so don’t) navigate their ways around email systems; they have their 20-something PAs print materials off for them. They delegate the management of their time and their attentions to those PAs. They read reports long-hand rather than as 140 character tweets. They’re also not on their own corporate networks or IM channels. They have few of the so-called “sources of distraction”.
Yet some of them are incapable of vision, planning, long-term strategizing, tenacity, those sorely needed skills you noted — as is evident in the global financial crisis or any Chapter 11 bankruptcy and corporate failures. They also suffer from information overload from those stockpiles of longhand printed out reports, books and even short 2-page executive summaries.
Likewise, the Anthony Edens, Joseph Stalins, Robert Mugabes and (some would say George W. Bushes) did not have the Web or technology to distract them and look what they achieved. Vision? Planning? Long-term strategizing? Inflation in Zimbabwe surged past 230 MILLION PERCENT by October 2008. Eden triggered the 1956 Suez Canal crisis. Stalin is said to be responsible for the deaths of upwards of 10 million, predominantly in Ukraine caused by the famine conditions his policies produced. In China, of course, we have Pu Yi the Last Emperor of China who had no technology distractions; however unlike his illustrious predecessors like Liu Bang (who in 206BC created the Han Dynasty, the first one to embrace Confucianism, strategy and educational and technological innovation), Pu Yi had no vision.
Reaching even further back, Rome and other ancient civilizations fell not because they were distracted by technologies. They fell either because of natural disasters or man-made causes stemming from arrogance, complacency, conceit, narcissism and hubris — the very same hubris that’s said to have infected the banking sector in recent years.
What it all boils down to are not the tools, the education or the experience alone, but the JUDGMENT. Judgment derived from rationale, ego and emotion.
There are technical whizz’s who can have 6 Bloomberg screens flashing constantly at them, a messy desk and they still make a spot-on stock call (every single time). Then there are others who have clean desks, get distracted and lose millions. Meanwhile, there’s another set who can sometimes tune in and out of their attention spans; sometimes tidy up their desks, sometimes call it right, sometimes are grossly wrong.
In a previous thread, I asked the question of whether it’s possible to isolate the Web and its tools (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) as the originating source of distraction or whether the inability to concentrate is also attributable to a priori Web changes in education systems, the proliferation of media (print billboards as much as online spam), the migration to magazines and snappy articles, television and fast-editing and also the advent of mobile technologies. Even the lack of conversation around a family dinner table can affect our abilities to concentrate. Fewer and fewer families sit down for an hour over dinner and simply converse and care.
How is that affecting our abilities to sit still, contemplate and concentrate?
Let’s also make this anecdotal observation and ask the scientists to source and analyze the empirical evidence. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Michael Bloomberg, the Google founders are all long-term technically “plugged in” to this “living in two dimensions,” and must get more emails, IMs and so-called “sources of distraction” than most. Yet they managed to remain focused and to increase the value of their companies and the knowledge repositories of their staff.
In my own case, I don’t treat tech tools as distractions. I take my fishing rod and aim for the sweet, giant Salmon of Wisdom (bradán feasa).
:*).
Hopefully, I’m not going to lose concentration or consciousness any time soon since there’s a lot I’d like to contribute.
Friends who read this blog will know that I learnt the story about the Salmon of Wisdom / Knowledge when cuil launched since that’s the story they regaled the tech sector with. Obviously, I applied it in a completely different way from the cuil team — LOL!
DOCUMENTARY WITH ME: QUOTES
The documentary in which I appear will be shown this coming week on a movie screen. Some of the quotes from the film used to market it are:
“Consciousness is a space we have been invited to participate in” says sculptor Antony Gormley, “But a subject neuroscience has “sidestepped”.”
“Consciousness is just a post-hoc narrative we tell ourselves” says perceptual neuroscientist Beau Lotto.
“We are bombarded by numbers, 16,000 numbers a day, 6 million in a lifetime. They get into our consciousness and affect it in ways that we don’t fully understand,” says cognitive neuroscientist Brian Butterworth.
“We are looking for consciousness with possibly the wrong tools. We have the quant-based tools but we need to develop the more qualitative tools,” says internet enterpreneur Twain Luu.
FILMING THIS WEEKEND
Well, I’ll be out+about later with my HD video camera to make my little video submission for a UN competition. It would be really good to attend the 64th plenary session in NYC and catch up with one of my best friends at the same time.
Today seems to have been something of a China day. My good friend GC called to say he’s back in Europe after a trip to China so I cannot wait for our catch-up later this week. Then I watched an interview on the FT’s ‘View From the Top’ with Michael Pettis, a Professor of Finance at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management:
Afterwards I went to check whether there was further analysis (particularly charts) on his views of China’s economy and I read that he seemed to be having issues with his blog technology, so — being a helpful person — I decided to send him an email to troubleshoot it.
Later still, I read an article in which negotiators involved in the climate change agreements say they’re expecting the Chinese Premier, Hu Jintao, to make some landmark policies on how China will control its CO2 emissions and actually be ahead of American counterparts (who are currently preoccupied with or diverted towards domestic healthcare issues):
LOTS of current affairs to discuss with GC then! Not to mention the slight pick-up in transaction activity (Kraft-Cadburys, Dell-Perot and the odd media buy). Activity like this always switches my brain on even more, particularly since Perot Systems was once in the tech portfolio I was co-responsible for!
So today I got news that Carlos has received my “Thank you” gifts by snail mail in Spain and is really happy with them which is great. For his unexpected kindness towards us on that first day, I sent him a few items for his home including:
* a bamboo steamer set — mostly because he only had a stainless set steamer and tried to impress me with it. That and the frozen dumplings (LOL, he was very sweet about it all). The thing is that I’m one of those lucky people whose mother is a dumplings expert, so I’ve eaten lots of them fresh — kneaded by her from rice flour, with the most delicious fillings imaginable and always steamed in bamboo cases.
Also, if he ever visits London then I’ll take him to a good dim sum restaurant since I discovered that the Chinese restaurants in Spain aren’t particularly good.
* Born to be Wild CD — it’s a compilation of rock music that’s ideal for roadtrips.
I sent him the CD mostly because he’d decided to give me his favorite CD, Y by the Spanish singer bebe (born María Nieves Rebolledo Vila), within about an hour of us meeting.
Here’s a YouTube video of bebe singing live:
So a complete stranger can pop up in your life out of the blue and that’s how an acquaintenceship and possible friendship begins……..
[Incidentally, no there’s no romance potential; we’re destined for other people. Still what it shows is that “We never know what might happen in our lives next!”
With the welcome return of Whitney Houston to the pop world — for me, she’s one of the best vocalists of her generation — here are some songs of hers which are inspiring / moving:
Also for good measure, here are some other songs I’m listening to over+over again:
LOST IN SPACE — THE LIGHTHOUSE FAMILY
VIVALDI (FOUR SEASONS — AUTUMN) — conducted by Herbert von Karajan
Sophie Ann-Mutter performs as lead solo violinist.
The remarkable photo of the Austofonna ice cap below is by Michael Nolan, a marine photographer and environmental lecturer, and was taken on Nordaustlandet in the Svalbard archipelago. Eerily, it seems to show what looks like the weeping face of Mother Nature (Gaia):
(2.) CONSCIOUSNESS — THE EDUCATION OF FUTURE GENERATIONS
A Bristol University study by Dr Paul Howard-Jones, being presented at the BERA (British Educational Research Association) conference, reports that one in nine trainee teachers thinks consciousness is possible without the brain and that almost one in five of them think their brains could shrink if they drank fewer than six glasses of water a day.
Hmmn…………..you know that urban legend about how humans only use 10 percent of our brains?
Well, if that urban myth is valid, it probably applies to this sample population of trainee teachers — which is fairly worrying because if I had a child of school age I’d definitely prefer them to be educated by more knowledgeable teachers!
[NOTE TO SELF: keep eagle eye on children’s education in future. Homeschool if needed.]
Also, I hope these aren’t the same people responsible for educating the next generation on climate change and the challenges which we all face and need to collectively resolve through global collaboration and smart solutions.
(3.) CHALLENGING THE STATUS QUO
A good friend says the global economic situation — tied in with US healthcare reforms — is in a precarious spot. He believes it’s almost impossible for any financial sector professional to make 5-year projections at the moment and for others to be confident in those projections. This isn’t good news because, historically, global finance has worked on investors putting in money based on those projections and now fewer of them want to take the risks.
More importantly, the feeling in the sector is that there seems to be an absence of real political leadership, globally, and that some of the senior appointees responsible for government policies are simply not that impressive or cut out for the overhaul of the systems and policy frameworks required.
There’s also an emerging feeling that social responsibility needs to be injected back into business models on a more wide-scale and systematic basis.
Hmmmn………………..here’s the thing: different interest groups communicate in language which isn’t immediately comprehensible or meaningful to other interest groups because they don’t readily get to the crux of it — SHARED COMMON VALUES + OBJECTIVES. They could all be speaking in English but it would sound like Russian or Sanskrit if the references are different. Think of something as simple as the nuances between English English, American English, Ozzie English, Afrikaans English, colonized English etc.
So for any intergovernmental body or NGO or charity / good cause concern to GET BUY-IN BY CORPORATES to fundamentally change business models and practices for the better, they need to know what information to present and how to pitch it.
SOLUTIONS MORE THAN SIMPLY OPTIMISM
Solutions exist and I’m aware they exist. However, it is true that no single person / government / corporate entity has managed to synch them in an effective and implementable way……………..yet. It requires focussed, coordinated and nuanced global collaboration of many with an open and democratic approach that’s not yet been seen. And just because it hasn’t been seen or realized yet doesn’t mean that it’s not do-able or doesn’t exist. We just need a wee bit of collective will, imagination and reorientation about common global values, that’s all!
Personally, I believe that what I’ve proposed in 5 key solutions lays down good foundations and challenges our current and previous practices which are proving to be — alas — not particularly smart. They’re also undemocratic, complacent, unimaginative and misinformed.
Instead of any status quo that isn’t working, what we could have in the future is:
(i.) 360-2020 perspective and values solutions to grasp with greater granularity what consumers mean and want from brands, products + services. In this way, those brands/products/services not genuinely offering consumer choice or with which they can identify cease to exist and produce unwanted excess => reduce unnecessary production.
(ii.) GREENspot — a social network (online and mobile) whereby consumers are proactively encouraged to BUY+BE GREEN and support / validate corporate green policies.
(iii.) I-ON-INVENTORY —- a much more intelligent and holistic inventory system that reduces overstock and its associated wastage of electricity to house unsold products in warehouses. For a while now, it’s become increasingly clear to me that we need to realign the product value chains and to move consumers further up the production stream (closer to participation in product origination and development) as a means of producing goods we actually want and NEED rather than ones we purchase because of marketing impetus.
(iv.) COS (contribution optimizing society) — a variable percentage allocation of net profits and/or community engagement program from every corporate entity towards good community causes as a legal requirement of operation. At the moment, charitable donations are on a voluntary basis and sometimes companies do so on the basis of brand considerations rather than genuine commitment towards local communities and services.
What we need to get to is an appreciation of the CONSEQUENTIAL CONNECTIONS OF CORPORATE ACTIONS.
(v.)Brain cross-train — systems to enable our brains to synch information from diverse sources (different cultures, languages, cultures, academic disciplines, professional spheres etc.) in more sense-making ways and which promote cross-cultural and multi-disciplinary appreciation.
For those interested in climate change issues, this is quite a useful source of news and updates:
WARNING: there’s lots of LOLs in these videos so if you’re of a delicate (aka humor bypass or just don’t “get” Twain) disposition, it’s probably better if you give them a pass, :*).
I know I’m a lucky young woman. My friends are all brilliant and take good care of me, and the oddest — funniest — things happen when we get together!
In the first video, we meet……….Carlos a complete stranger who turned out to be quite a gem of a guy. He gave me his favorite CD, took us out for dinner+drinks, lent us his inflatable bed so we didn’t have to go to Marta’s brother to borrow his, offered to take me to see Formula 1 in Valencia AND tried to give me GBP150 worth of multi-vitamins (stamped + approved by the Spanish FDA and retailing in licensed pharmacies).
His apartment views are…………..A-M-A-Z-I-N-G!!!
With the videos and the trip, my aim was not to do the “touristy” thing but instead provide glimpses into how locals and my friends live. I did the “touristy” thing (del Prado, Plaza Major, Parco del Retiro, Gran Via etc.) many years ago when I was there on business so it was a great experience this time to be with friends.
Naturally, we ate some good food like gazpacho, jamon salads, black squid and Spanish ox — it’s just as well my vegetarian trial was over! Yes and normally I like my beef medium to well done, but this beef was recommended to be eaten rare because of its high quality. Marta really really spoilt me, food-wise!
[If readers click on the images below they'll be directed to good Spanish recipe sites, written in English.]
Marta may be over in London for the London Film Festival in October. If so we can have proper Chinese dim sum and I can make her real spring rolls! Yippee!
