@T: ALWAYS THE TWAIN

Yesterday I pointed out to readers the importance of getting the “positioning matrix” spot on, using the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s memo for the Papal visit this forthcoming September as an example of a poorly thought out and mistake laden one. There are a few key tenets in business and politics alike which affect their long-term success, or otherwise:

(1.)         Know your clients and service their needs;

(2.)         Know your competitors and provide products/services better than them; and

(3.)         Know your own company, where you want to get to (when, how and who with), and adapt to changing market conditions.

When I originally had the idea for 360-2020 it was because I was swamped with volumes of material (transaction documents, consultancy reports, analysts research, media commentary, emails etc.) in my professional life and there wasn’t any way of tagging and sorting that material into relevance and priority by color-coding it or designating it with adjectives, a timestamp and a quantitative mark that MADE SENSE TO ME.

So………in many ways 360-2020 is a tool borne from my need as a regular person/client who needs such a tool, it doesn’t exist so I have to code and develop it myself.

It’s valid to say that: 360-2020 may be one of the few truly original ideas in the world. This is because I did look beyond my own internal need and started to do some competitive analysis on whether the likes of Reuters / Bloomberg / Google Finance / Facebook and also niche analytical providers had the type of filtering and tagging tool I had in mind. What I realized was that they all filtered and tagged according to noun structures (name of company, person’s name, location etc.) and 5-star and/or -1/0/+1 systems which is………..

PRETTY MUCH THE SAME AS WHAT THE SEMANTIC WEB STACK AND SEARCH/RECOMMENDATION ENGINES DO.

Ergo, in real terms there hasn’t been that much of a step change forward as far as my experiences are concerned.

Now I’ve been aware of the 5 star system and colors since I was in nursery school because we had wall charts on which the teachers would stick different colored stars according to how well we performed and behaved in our tasks in class. This partially explains why I regard the 5-star system as suitable for babies but less smart to use for intelligent and articulate adults who have a much more extensive grasp of vocabulary, color recognition, quantification scales, intent, contexualization of connected relationships and time intertwining than babies do.

Moreover, anyone who’s been subjected to a professional performance review of any kind appreciates that assessing someone or something is a lot more complex than just giving them N stars out of five. Ditto for product reviews for a wide range of products (from iPads to sofas to clothing).

Anyway, the interest in the FCO’s positioning matrix is not a random and unrelated anomaly on my part. Actually I’ve been comparing the 360-2020 tools and their strategies to see how they stack up against where Facebook, Hunch, Google and Twitter are now and where they’re heading and I can say this:

360-2020’s competitors are still basing their sentiment analysis around -1/0/+1 (No/Yes) and 5 star rating principles whereas 360-2020 makes a leap of coherent imagination towards capturing information as “a consciousness of quantity and quality that enables differentiation and contextualization over time.”

Just look at Facebook’s sentiment approach and Hunch’s and it’s clear that 5-star and -1/0/+1  are still in play in designating positivity and negativity — just arranged differently visually on the page but functionally still the same. Sentiment and recommendations predicated along these lines are still open to flaws and lack of precision when it comes to capturing ambiguity, neutralities, underlying perceptions and values, intent and maybes.

The algorithm’s behind them are still……….not as smart or as person-specific or as granular or as holistic as what 360-2020 aims towards. Here’s what Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur, says about Hunch and the tech sector’s attempts to understand online intent:

Divining intent has always been the Holy Grail of academics, doctors, marketers, and snake-oil salesmen. At the beginning of the 20th century, Sigmund Freud founded the school of psychoanalysis, a science of intentionality based on interpretation of dreams. And today, 100 years later, a new generation of quacks has founded a school of crowd-sourced intentionality.

The problem with Hunch is that it treats me as a crass consumer rather than as a complex human being. Web 2.0 algorithms might succeed at building search engines that are, at best, 50 percent accurate. As such, Hunch represents the intellectual bankruptcy of the Silicon Valley revolution that has attempted to replace real human expertise and knowledge with bad algorithms and even worse user-generated content.

There are ways to make the algorithms smarter whilst simultaneously complementing human complexity (particularly in linguistic, emotional and psychometric capture terms).

It’s just that Facebook, Hunch et al haven’t thought of these ways yet……whilst 360-2020 already does.

Firstly, 360-2020′s patent claims cover over 30 unique and proprietary features. Secondly, I was recently involved with some friends’ scoping of a social network as well as at various IP conferences as part of my analysis about how to deal with one aspect of Project ART. There seem to be three schools of thought on IP:

(1.) There’s no point filing anything.

(2.) Let’s just build it with no project plan, no contractual responsibilities between the founder(s) and maybe look at filing something after the product launches.

(3.) File everything NOW.

It really boils down to the founder(s) preferences and how much they’re prepared to spend to file IP and enforce it. It also varies according to whether the founder(s) believe their product is unique, the market opportunity is sizable, whether they want to use the IP as leverage to attract investors, the likelihood of the patent being enforceable and how much they could earn from licensing their product. For example, there is little point IP filing a typewriter in this day and age when people are migrating towards touch mobile devices where they don’t have to change the ink ribbons or to buy paper or swap the carriage. Equally, there are valid reasons to IP file any pharmaceutical which can cure cancer, aging or diabetes. The different applicability and the sizes of the markets means that the IP considerations are different.

There is no black+white, hard+fast, do-this-and-you-will-become-billionaires rule about IP or about Internet entrepreneurialism. As with Life itself everything is in shades of gray or rainbows and some things simply happen out of coincidence rather than deliberate planning.

Still, I read with interest that Facebook has had patents granted for its newsfeed and user affinity towards applications:

*  http://gigaom.com/2010/02/25/facebook-granted-news-feed-patent/

* http://www.allfacebook.com/2010/02/facebook-awarded-patent-for-measuring-use-affinity-toward-applications/

*  http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/facebook_granted_patent_on_the_news_feed_-_this_co.php

I know that some of my friends don’t believe in IP so the Facebook patent may give them some pause for thought, and maybe they’ll realize that when I say that it should be considered I do so in the interests of protecting them from themselves.

Serious investors are unlikely to be interested or to get involved if what to do about IP has not even been considered.

That’s what’s happening out there.

Search — we seek the digital gold here, we seek it there…….It’s right under our noses and we can’t see it.

This is a most cryptic Twainism which might even have Holmes saying, “Watson, I can make neither heads, tails nor tongue of it! The young woman is a most peculiar cat! Isn’t she supposed to be Alice rather than Cheshire?” Everything will become clear after my wee segment in the documentary, folks.

I am following the FB and FF tie-up with some interest. We have a situation where, only a few weeks ago, Microsoft inked its search deal with Yahoo! Microsoft owns a minority stake in FB (bought at peak price and, seriously, with my corporate strategy hat on? Google’s acquisition of YouTube was a much much more cost-efficient and smarter move.) Plus Microsoft is indirectly hiring former Googlers, the founders of friendfeed. In any case, the blogosphere consensus seems to be that it’s all about that magic word “search” again:

· http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-buys-friendfeed-for-war-with-twitter-2009-8

· http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/090810-154010

· http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/10/facebook-acquires-friendfeed/

The difference with this deal is that the emphasis is on this notion of “REAL-TIME” search and real-time updates from friends which implies implicit trust. Again, what “real-time” achieves is related to speed — a scalar value — rather than relevance, accuracy or reliability which relate to search orientation and direction which derives velocity, a vector value.

So I have this Devil’s Advocate question, okay?

If I run faster will I arrive at the right destination sooner? Superficially, we may think the answer is, “Yes, of course!” However, it’s a trick question which tests our lateral thinking.

The key part of the question is “right destination”. You can run as fast as Usain Bolt. However, you may be racing towards the Grand Canyon whilst everyone else is headed for Hawaii………….

LOL.

Ok, I just heard that my cousins from Germany are flying in later this week. What am I supposed to do with teenage girls?

Hmmn……..Well, all teenage girls love TopShop where Kate Moss has her own design line……..and Portobello Road for kooky treasures…….and eating foods that are banned by parents or unavailable at home (like chocolate, cream scones and fish+chips — separately and not together, of course)………

Hey and their surprise visit is cool. It means I’ll be able to speak Spanish, Italian, French and German all within the next month along with English and Chinese! There was I thinking I may have to watch another movie by Tom Twyker or Der Untergang (Downfall in English, btw) again to remind me of what German sounds like. Incidentally, it’s an Oscar-nominated film, a must-watch and is gripping with exceptional performances:

German and I have a strange relationship; it’s my least favorite of the European languages — lacks poetic lyricism — and yet it’s the language of some of the world’s best philosophers.

My German languages teacher was pretty upset I chose chemistry instead of German as an elective. Mostly because in the last German exams I ever took I got 99%, the first time anyone she’d taught had passed the 85% mark. Oh well, at least I opted to stay in her French class and she got to write in my report, “Twain has a natural flair for languages!” Ha ha. If she’d had her way instead of my mother, I’d have studied all the major languages, marched off to the LSE / Sorbonne, studied European Studies and become a UN interpreter or something.

LOL. Of course, if I hadn’t studied chemistry SmithKlineBeecham wouldn’t have let me play with their Nuclear Magnetic Resonance machine when I was 17, compound my own paracetamol, glass blow my own test tubes and round-bottom flasks, and then two years later I wouldn’t have been in the development team (at what is now IFF) that created the world’s first alcopops, right? I wouldn’t have spent one summer synthesizing one cola as close to Coke as I could, right? And promptly lost all interest in soft drinks because if you spend 10 hours a day in a lab concocting and testing it, the last thing you want to do at the w/e is drink it!

Most importantly, I wouldn’t know an iota about chemical mechanisms to propose that THIS is a much smarter and more natural way to envisage and realize the Global Brain, when crossing it with linking open data:

See? There’s cause+effect and a natural connective order to each of our lives. I gained insights on this and it created neural paths to enable me to make successive leaps of know-how and cross pollinate it into another sector.

Hmmn, maybe it wouldn’t take much to translate that entire Google knol into Chinese, French, Spanish, Italian and German, and to ensure that colloquial Anglo-Saxon phrasing is suitably cross-checked to reduce “lost in translation” issues. Maybe then researchers from all over the world will have one source on the Global Brain which is written in all the major languages. At the moment, no single source exists.

[Note to self: must learn more Russian beyond "perestroika" --- LOL.]

See? All these to-do’s, to move Semantic Web concepts more spot-on along with Project ART commitments to disrupt online business models. Ergo, I’m a wee bit busy to join Facebook’s translation project group, particularly since (even in English) they can’t communicate it in a clear way that makes us understand what their request is!

* http://www.alwaysthetwain.com/blogs/2009/07/15/facebook-im-rotflol/

Also, I know from translating M+A deal documents (French => English, Italian => English, Spanish-Italian => English) that translators cost GBP15-20 an hour. Obviously, I decided to translate those documents myself instead.

Hmmmn……Now, please can anyone explain, “WHY SHOULD ANYONE TRANSLATE FACEBOOK WHICH HAS A VALUATION OF US$10+ BILLION, ACCORDING TO THE LATEST INVESTMENT OFFER BY DIGITAL SKY TECHNOLOGIES, AND CASH IN THE BANK TO PAY FOR TRANSLATION SERVICES AS PART OF GLOBAL ROLLOUT STRATEGY? FOR FREE?”

There too the question about the paid content model, users’ contributions and who owns what copyright arises.

Suppose we help Facebook translate itself. Suppose that some of us even create an algorithm that flags similes and non-translate-ables. Or even a methodology for someone in China to grasp the concept that that there are quantifier conjunctions in English which don’t exist in Chinese. Then suppose one day Facebook decides to charge us to upload our content in the same way that hosting providers charge us for storage space and our ISPs for connection. That means that instead of earning per hour for our translation abilities, we’re giving away our time and efforts for free. It also means that FB owns the algorithm and the methodology. It means the users will have added to the valuation of FB, yet they own no shares in the company, they’re not management or employed staff on a salary — not even temp / agency / consultancy staff — and they haven’t been paid for their contributions.

See? The Internet model which is appearing (and which Chris Anderson argues for) is NOT democratizing at all if the traditional barters of trade (aka MONEY) is not appropriately distributed and has differing equivalence. It is actually……..Communist if the online user bee is expected to build the hive, pollinate it and their reward is only that their content is allowed to exist in the hive — rather than for their content to LIVE, propagate collective sense-making and be nourished by honey (money).

This is why paying users for their content contributions and any special skills they bring to bear on a site should be a consideration that ALL sites which genuinely believe in online democracy need to commit to and implement.

THIS IS WHY MALCOLM GLADWELL WILL PROBABLY PROVE TO BE RIGHT AND CHRIS ANDERSON TO BE WRONG.

Returning specifically to my thoughts on German, what’s the other great reason to be able to speak and read the language apart from improving our technical competence and understanding “Vorsprung durch Technik” (advancement through technology)?

Answer:

* Wittgenstein

* Nietzsche

* Hegel

* Schopenhauer

* Kant

* von Clauswitz

What do these great minds teach us? I think, therefore I am. The World as Will and Idea. The power and utility of logic. We fight wars to win and there is no such concept as moderation in a war (to me, this is a sad but true insight). And, We are Human, All Too Human.

Sprechen Sie Deutsche? Ja, natürlich.

Why do we learn other languages if not to become informed with the wisdoms of and appreciation in as many cultures as possible?

Das ist Die Wahrheit. No, that doesn’t mean “the height of war”. It means………the truth.

Let me contextualize this mirth from several angles.

I joined FB over 3 years ago and at the w/e read an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Accidental Billionaires: Sex, Money, Betrayal and the Founding of Facebook, by Ben Mezrich (to be published by William Heinemann on July 30) on the Times website:

* http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/book_extracts/article6688863.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1

Here’s the cover of the book itself with a hint of why FB was born (btw, there’s a Kindle DX version of it too so if readers click on the image they’ll be directed to Amazon):

The book essentially suggests that FB was built so that frat boys at Harvard could meet pretty girls from the various sororities. It could become like their “little black book” online with ratings of the girls’ pictures — the LBB they don’t want their wives to find out about later (A-HA! NOW are we understanding the needs for privacy settings yet? Beyond identity theft and poke harassment concerns?)

Also, can we twain the ultimate truth?

Billionaires are created because men always want to impress us women — and why not? After all, the female gender does have the X factor in our chromosomes, right? RIGHT. And, in return, men produce in us women not billions but the question, “Y?!”

Fine, I’m being tic-lol again [tic-lol = tongue in cheek, laugh out loud] but it’s still true.

Yes, I did register on FB but not because of any Harvard connection or desire to be part of any giant match-making site. And, no, not under my real name. My friend sent me a poke, I joined for the sake of strategic analysis, we swapped e-gifts of some chocolates and champagne, we posted some travel photos (hers from LA and mine from Florence and Beijing) onto each other’s Walls and I thought, “Ok, that’s enough of that!” The time I gave FB the first time round was all of 5 minutes and I abandoned it — despite frequent pleas from my friend to return and engage because it was the only place she was posting her travel photos.

This early departure was before they overhauled their privacy settings, real-time updates, frequency of notifications and filtered through their apps to keep the better ones and bin the marketing spam ones.

Anyway, so now I have 2 FB accounts and finally today I went to take a 60 second look-see-delve at the site and what do I come across in those 60 secs?

Incongruities which make me ROTFLOL is what!

(1.) I could change my name to Attila the Hun and the system would accept it instantaneously.

Ok, so I didn’t do that. I only changed it to [insert]  to see how quickly changes take effect. There’s some notification that it will take 24 hours and a message saying that the name change has been notified which implies they’re going to verify it independently somehow. More importantly, there was a warning that the name change had to be legitimate so “no pet names, assumed celeb names etc.” are allowed.

No problem so I went with the chiral of my first name instead and thought, “Let’s see what it says in 24 hours.”

Only….in reality it happened immediately. Here it is:

(2.) Facebook wants me to become an English (UK) translator and obviously needs people like me

Now, it should be noted that English was the 3rd language I learnt as a child. Yes, I am aware I play fast+loose with the language on my blog but anyone who’s ever read an official strategy paper or an equity analysis research note from me knows my professional standard of English is of the top level.

There’s simply no need for grammatical pedantry on my own blog. Its style is conversational, educational and occasionally tic-lol with mash-ups of concepts and characterizations.

In any case, FB clearly needs English (UK) translators. Please read the notice carefully.

“…ALL OVER THE WORLD, IN ALL LANGUAGES.”

Errrrrrr………if people are translating it into English (UK) that’s not all languages. They’ll only be able to read it in the UK version of English which uses terms like these, including street slang and colloquialisms, that are distinctive from their American cousins:

* parents — folks

* trousers — pants

* sidewalk — pavement

* soccer — football

* sneakers — trainers

* store — shop

* candy — sweets

* highway — motorway

* apartments — flats

* dope — blinding

* cool — wicked

* drunk — skank

Actually. it may be a wee bit worrying that an American-founded site feels the need to translate itself for the English (UK) audience — has the #You say “potato,” I say “patattah”# affectionate differences of Cole Porter’s days become such a chasm in the Internet era? Or is the implication that most of the world understands English (UK) better and with more clarity than English (US)? Ergo, they included the “used by people all over the world” snippet.

See what I mean about this translation notice? It’s become unclear and ambiguous because of grammatical inaccuracy.

If this is how FB is inviting English (UK) native speakers to participate in the translation, I wonder what’s lost in translation in the notices to Chinese, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, etc. native speakers to contribute to the project……..

They’re smart folk at FB; they’ll figure it all out.

The Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital conference is taking place this week and there are some quite interesting interviews, including with the founders of Twitter about their potential revenue model plans:

http://d7.allthingsd.com/20090526/d7-video-twitters-biz-stone-and-evan-williams/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/05/27/twitter-founders-revenue-_n_208046.html

There’s also an interview with Facebook’s new Russian investor who’s committed US$200 million to acquire preferred stock at a US$10 billion valuation for the company.

http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090526/the-first-video-interview-with-facebooks-new-russian-investor-plus-coo-sheryl-sandberg/?mod=ATD_skybox