Making Stuff: 3D Printing on Campus

February 23, 2012 by Campus Technology

For example, company co-founder Bre Pettis appeared on a June 2011 episode of The Colbert Report, where host Stephen Colbert had his face scanned by a 3D scanner and a model of his head composed by the printer. That plan went into the Thingiverse …
See all stories on this topic »

Big data in the cloud

February 22, 2012 by Edd Dumbill

Sections

• IaaS and private clouds
• Platform solutions
• Big data cloud platforms compared
• Conclusion

Big data and cloud technology go hand-in-hand. Big data needs clusters of servers for processing, which clouds can readily provide. So goes the marketing message, but what does that look like in reality? Both “cloud” and “big data” have broad definitions, obscured by considerable hype. This article breaks down the landscape as simply as possible, highlighting what’s practical, and what’s to come.

IaaS and private clouds

What is often called “cloud” amounts to virtualized servers: computing
resource that presents itself as a regular server, rentable per
consumption. This is generally called infrastructure as a service
(IaaS), and is offered by platforms such as Rackspace Cloud or Amazon
EC2. You buy time on these services, and install and configure your
own software, such as a Hadoop cluster or NoSQL database. Most of the
solutions I described in my Big Data Market Survey can be deployed on
IaaS services.

Using IaaS clouds doesn’t mean you must handle all deployment
manually: good news for the clusters of machines big data
requires. You can use orchestration frameworks, which handle the
management of resources, and automated infrastructure tools, which
handle server installation and configuration. RightScale offers a
commercial multi-cloud management platform that mitigates some of the
problems of managing servers in the cloud.

Frameworks such as OpenStack and Eucalyptus aim to present a uniform
interface to both private data centers and the public
cloud. Attracting a strong flow of cross industry support, OpenStack
currently addresses computing resource (akin to Amazon’s EC2) and
storage (parallels Amazon S3).

The race is on to make private clouds and IaaS services more usable:
over the next two years using clouds should become much more
straightforward as vendors adopt the nascent standards. There’ll be a
uniform interface, whether you’re using public or private cloud
facilities, or a hybrid of the two.

Particular to big data, several configuration tools already target
Hadoop explicitly: among them Dell’s Crowbar, which aims to make
deploying and configuring clusters simple, and Apache Whirr, which is
specialized for running Hadoop services and other clustered data processing systems.

Today, using IaaS gives you a broad choice of cloud supplier, the
option of using a private cloud, and complete control: but you’ll be
responsible for deploying, managing and maintaining your clusters.

Microsoft SQL Server is a comprehensive information platform offering enterprise-ready technologies and tools that help businesses derive maximum value from information at the lowest TCO. SQL Server 2012 launches next year, offering a cloud-ready information platform delivering mission-critical confidence, breakthrough insight, and cloud on your terms; find out more at www.microsoft.com/sql.

Platform solutions

Using IaaS only brings you so far for with big data applications: they handle the creation of computing and storage resources, but don’t address anything at a higher level. The set up of Hadoop and Hive or a similar solution is down to you.

Beyond IaaS, several cloud services provide application layer support for big data work. Sometimes referred to as managed solutions, or platform as a service (PaaS), these services remove the need to configure or scale things such as databases or MapReduce, reducing your workload and maintenance burden. Additionally, PaaS providers can realize great efficiencies by hosting at the application level, and pass those savings on to the customer.

The general PaaS market is burgeoning, with major players including VMware (Cloud Foundry) and Salesforce (Heroku, force.com). As big data and machine learning requirements percolate through the industry, these players are likely to add their own big-data-specific services. For the purposes of this article, though, I will be sticking to the vendors who already have implemented big data solutions.

Today’s primary providers of such big data platform services are Amazon, Google and Microsoft. You can see their offerings summarized in the table toward the end of this article. Both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure blur the lines between infrastructure as a service and platform: you can mix and match. By contrast, Google’s philosophy is to skip the notion of a server altogether, and focus only on the concept of the application. Among these, only Amazon can lay claim to extensive experience with their product.

Amazon Web Services

Amazon has significant experience in hosting big data processing. Use of Amazon EC2 for Hadoop was a popular and natural move for many early adopters of big data, thanks to Amazon’s expandable supply of compute power. Building on this, Amazon launched Elastic Map Reduce in 2009, providing a hosted, scalable Hadoop service.

Applications on Amazon’s platform can pick from the best of both the IaaS and PaaS worlds. General purpose EC2 servers host applications that can then access the appropriate special purpose managed solutions provided by Amazon.

As well as Elastic Map Reduce, Amazon offers several other services relevant to big data, such as the Simple Queue Service for coordinating distributed computing, and a hosted relational database service. At the specialist end of big data, Amazon’s High Performance Computing solutions are tuned for low-latency cluster computing, of the sort required by scientific and engineering applications.

Elastic Map Reduce

Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) can be programmed in the usual Hadoop ways, through Pig, Hive or other programming language, and uses Amazon’s S3 storage service to get data in and out.

Access to Elastic Map Reduce is through Amazon’s SDKs and tools, or with GUI analytical and IDE products such as those offered by Karmasphere. In conjunction with these tools, EMR represents a strong option for experimental and analytical work. Amazon’s EMR pricing makes it a much more attractive option to use EMR, rather than configure EC2 instances yourself to run Hadoop.

When integrating Hadoop with applications generating structured data, using S3 as the main data source can be unwieldy. This is because, similar to Hadoop’s HDFS, S3 works at the level of storing blobs of opaque data. Hadoop’s answer to this is HBase, a NoSQL database that integrates with the rest of the Hadoop stack. Unfortunately, Amazon does not currently offer HBase with Elastic Map Reduce.

DynamoDB

Instead of HBase, Amazon provides DynamoDB, its own managed, scalable NoSQL database. As this a managed solution, it represents a better choice than running your own database on top of EC2, in terms of both performance and economy.

DynamoDB data can be exported to and imported from S3, providing interoperability with EMR.

Google

Google’s cloud platform stands out as distinct from its competitors. Rather than offering virtualization, it provides an application container with defined APIs and services. Developers do not need to concern themselves with the concept of machines: applications execute in the cloud, getting access to as much processing power as they need, within defined resource usage limits.

To use Google’s platform, you must work within the constraints of its APIs. However, if that fits, you can reap the benefits of the security, tuning and performance improvements inherent to the way Google develops all its services.

AppEngine, Google’s cloud application hosting service, offers a MapReduce facility for parallel computation over data, but this is more of a feature for use as part of complex applications rather than for analytical purposes. Instead, BigQuery and the Prediction API form the core of Google’s big data offering, respectively offering analysis and machine learning facilities. Both these services are available exclusively via REST APIs, consistent with Google’s vision for web-based computing.

BigQuery

BigQuery is an analytical database, suitable for interactive analysis over datasets of the order of 1TB. It works best on a small number of tables with a large number of rows. BigQuery offers a familiar SQL interface to its data. In that, it is comparable to Apache Hive, but the typical performance is faster, making BigQuery a good choice for exploratory data analysis.

Getting data into BigQuery is a matter of directly uploading it, or importing it from Google’s Cloud Storage system. This is the aspect of BigQuery with the biggest room for improvement. Whereas Amazon’s S3 lets you mail in disks for import, Google doesn’t currently have this facility. Streaming data into BigQuery isn’t viable either, so regular imports are required for constantly updating data. Finally, as BigQuery only accepts data formatted as comma-separated value (CSV) files, you will need to use external methods to clean up the data beforehand.

Rather than provide end-user interfaces itself, Google wants an ecosystem to grow around BigQuery, with vendors incorporating it into their products, in the same way Elastic Map Reduce has acquired tool integration. Currently in beta test, to which anybody can apply, BigQuery is expected to be publicly available during 2012.

Prediction API

Many uses of machine learning are well defined, such as classification, sentiment analysis, or recommendation generation. To meet these needs, Google offers its Prediction API product.

Applications using the Prediction API work by creating and training a model hosted within Google’s system. Once trained, this model can be used to make predictions, such as spam detection. Google is working on allowing these models to be shared, optionally with a fee. This will let you take advantage of previously trained models, which in many cases will save you time and expertise with training.

Though promising, Google’s offerings are in their early days. Further integration between its services is required, as well as time for ecosystem development to make their tools more approachable.

Microsoft

I have written in some detail about Microsoft’s big data strategy in Microsoft’s plan for Hadoop and big data. By offering its data platforms on Windows Azure in addition to Windows Server, Microsoft’s aim is to make either on-premise or cloud-based deployments equally viable with its technology. Azure parallels Amazon’s web service offerings in many ways, offering a mix of IaaS services with managed applications such as SQL Server.

Hadoop is the central pillar of Microsoft’s big data approach, surrounded by the ecosystem of its own database and business intelligence tools. For organizations already invested in the Microsoft platform, Azure will represent the smoothest route for integrating big data into the operation. Azure itself is pragmatic about language choice, supporting technologies such as Java, PHP and Node.js in addition to Microsoft’s own.

As with Google’s BigQuery, Microsoft’s Hadoop solution is currently in closed beta test, and is expected to be generally available sometime in the middle of 2012.

Big data cloud platforms compared

The following table summarizes the data storage and analysis capabilities of Amazon, Google and Microsoft’s cloud platforms. Intentionally excluded are IaaS solutions without dedicated big data offerings.

	Amazon	Google	Microsoft
Product(s)		Amazon Web Services		Google Cloud Services		Windows Azure
Big data storage		S3		Cloud Storage		HDFS on Azure
Working storage		Elastic Block Store		AppEngine (Datastore, Blobstore)		Blob, table, queues
NoSQL database		DynamoDB1		AppEngine Datastore		Table storage
Relational database		Relational Database Service (MySQL or Oracle)		Cloud SQL (MySQL compatible)		SQL Azure
Application hosting		EC2		AppEngine		Azure Compute
Map/Reduce service		Elastic MapReduce (Hadoop)		AppEngine (limited capacity)		Hadoop on Azure2
Big data analytics		Elastic MapReduce (Hadoop interface3)		BigQuery2 (TB-scale, SQL interface)		Hadoop on Azure (Hadoop interface3)
Machine learning		Via Hadoop + Mahout on EMR or EC2		Prediction API		Mahout with Hadoop
Streaming processing		Nothing prepackaged: use custom solution on EC2		Prospective Search API 4		StreamInsight2 (“Project Austin”)
Data import		Network, physically ship drives		Network		Network
Data sources		Public Data Sets		A few sample datasets		Windows Azure Marketplace
Availability		Public production		Some services in private beta		Some services in private beta

Conclusion

Cloud-based big data services offer considerable advantages in removing the overhead of configuring and tuning your own clusters, and in ensuring you pay only for what you use. The biggest issue is always going to be data locality, as it is slow and expensive to ship data. The most effective big data cloud solutions will be the ones where the data is also collected in the cloud. This is an incentive to investigate EC2, Azure or AppEngine as a primary application platform, and an indicator that PaaS competitors such as Cloud Foundry and Heroku will have to address big data as a priority.

It is early days yet for big data in the cloud, with only Amazon offering battle-tested solutions at this point. Cloud services themselves are at an early stage, and we will see both increasing standardization and innovation over the next two years.

However, the twin advantages of not having to worry about infrastructure and economies of scale mean it is well worth investigating cloud services for your big data needs, especially for an experimental or green-field project. Looking to the future, there’s no doubt that big data analytical capability will form an essential component of utility computing solutions.

Notes:

¹ In public beta.

² In controlled beta test.

³ Hive and Pig compatible.

⁴ Experimental status.

Strata 2012 — The 2012 Strata Conference, being held Feb. 28-March 1 in Santa Clara, Calif., will offer three full days of hands-on data training and information-rich sessions. Strata brings together the people, tools, and technologies you need to make data work.

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Related:

• Big data market survey: Hadoop solutions
• Microsoft’s plan for Hadoop and big data
• Get started with Hadoop: From evaluation to your first production cluster
• On the performance of clouds

Website from Sherwin-Williams Analyzes Images to Create Color Palette

February 10, 2012 by (author unknown)

Here’s a truly useful idea for Sherwin Williams from McKinney. Chip It! analyzes every pixel in an image to match it to one of the paint manufacturer’s 1,500 paint colors, and composites the top 10 into ChipCards.

How social technologies are extending the organization

November 21, 2011 by (author unknown)

Our fifth annual survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance. Read more on the McKinsey Quarterly >

Topics: High Tech Business Technology Surveys

Update your Quarterly feed preferences

How To: Crowdsource Your Next Vacation

August 11, 2011 by Maya Swedowsky

Social media has dramatically changed the way we book travel and plan vacations.

According to a Destinations Analyst survey – “The State of the American Traveler” – nearly 35.8% of travelers listen to the opinions of friends, colleagues or relatives when making travel plans. And with the average person having 130 Facebook friends, social media is a natural place for gathering recommendations from our peers.

This change has been accompanied by the growth in use of social and web tools for planning vacations; social media has become a necessary partner in experiencing the best vacation possible. So what are the most useful tools for planning in advance and while on vacation?

Planning in Advance: TripAdvisor

An informal survey of my team illustrated that trip planning website behemoths like TripAdvisor are still the go-to resource, followed by recommendations from our social network (online and offline). In fact, almost 90% of those surveyed said that they relied on travel websites like TripAdvisor when choosing a hotel.

Founded just over 10 years ago, TripAdvisor was an early adopter of consumer-generated reviews and has amassed quite the archive of feedback from travelers. While the site has added functionalities and features over the years (e.g. connecting to Facebook to read reviews from your network, a mobile application), it is its massive amount of data that has marked TripAdvisor as a credible resource. While it’s nice to be able to get recommendations from those we know and trust versus strangers, having a lot of reviews from strangers is a close second.

The interface may not be as slick or social as emerging travel sites like Gogobot or gtrot, but TripAdvisor gets the job done. And that’s usually what we’re looking for when we book a hotel or flight – the more confident we can feel about our choice and the quicker we can make it, the better.

Last Minute Planning: Mobile

Geo-location and mobile tools become increasingly important once a trip is underway. After we arrive at our destination, we can use tools like Foursquare or the Time Out mobile app to help us navigate unfamiliar territory. Whether reading tips left by other travelers or city guides created by brands or the local travel board, geo-location tools provide us with simple filter we can apply to our foreign surroundings.

Sites to Watch

Hipmunk is a simple service that enables travelers to book hotels and flights. The most compelling functionality of Hipmunk can be found within the flight search – results for flights are plotted out on a Gantt chart that can be sorted by price, duration, arrival and departure times, non-stop, and “agony.” Yes, “agony” really is one of the options – it is defined as “a combination of price, duration and number of stops.” This sorting option not only appeals to the emotions that go hand-in-hand with traveling, but also helps us rationalize a more expensive flight by quantifying the unpleasantness that we’re eager to avoid. Although Hipmunk is lacking in the consumer reviews department for hotels, its flight booking functionality is definitely worth checking out.

Wanderfly is geared toward adventurous travelers – those who have interests like “eco” or “watersports,” but aren’t quite sure where they want to go. After entering a price range, general date range (e.g. mid-January) and selecting your interests, Wanderfly will serve up suggested destinations, accompanied by recommendations on where to stay, what to do, how much it will cost and what your Facebook friends have to say about the destination. Wanderfly is monetizing the site by giving brands the opportunity to curate recommendations for relevant destinations (e.g. Havaianas, the flip flop brand, recommends beach destination that will “soothe your sole”). While Wanderfly’’s unique, exploratory interface and brand sponsorship opportunities are well-executed, the site may not provide enough structure for the average (adult) traveler.

What’s your go-to website, application or resource when planning a vacation?

Social Networks Will Change Product Innovation

March 18, 2011 by Andrei Hagiu

Much is being written about the impact that new communication technologies and channels (blogs, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) have on traditional marketing. The deeper question is: Will these new communication channels actually force material changes not just in the way companies market their products but in the strategies and operations they use to develop and build those products as well? In my view, the answer is an emphatic yes. It’s another instance of the proverbial medium that changes the content.

The effects on large established companies and start-ups are different.

Let’s consider large companies first. In theory, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogs should make it possible to engage their customers in new and diverse ways. The choice set is larger and the audience is expanded. So this should be good, right? Not necessarily, as illustrated by the mighty challenges encountered even by media companies in transitioning from the off-line print world to the online one.

As it turns out, managing corporate communication and brand diffusion across these new communication channels is quite different from what they were used to. It is very difficult and costly to maintain a unified voice across all channels and to control information flows to the outside world (particularly for technology companies, whose employees are likely to be Twitter or tech blog stars). The company needs to adjust to a 24/7 dialogue with consumers, investors, and other stakeholders.

And this will require changes in product strategy. Companies are under increasing pressure to significantly shorten their product cycles and rely much less on well-choreographed and fully-controlled product releases. In a world of constant information flows and leaks to the outside world, they need to accept that they will have to work with smaller changes at shorter intervals — and that they will be subjected to much more visibility and scrutiny from the outside world.

The good news is that for some companies, this makes it possible to leverage much more useful input from customers. The dark side is increased exposure to negative shocks due to founded or unfounded rumors. Sure, one could argue that these changes in business models are partly driven by other factors (e.g., the advent of truly ubiquitous bandwidth which made cloud-computing models for numerous software applications possible). Nevertheless, it seems undeniable that communication technologies are playing a major role in prompting these changes.

For small companies and start-ups, the considerations are a bit different. On the positive side, new communication technologies and channels have made it easier to get on the map quickly and to create buzz and word-of-mouth. The problem is that start-ups are now subjected to new and not necessarily desirable pressures, which are exclusively related to communication channels. In short, it is the “fear of being left out” syndrome.

The public’s perception of the relative competitive positions of several start-ups in the same field is increasingly determined by a popularity contest in tech blogs and Twitter posts. Sure, some of these new channels contain very well-informed analyses. But as soon as their effect on the public’s and ultimately investors’ perceptions is taken into account, we end up with self-fulfilling prophecies and exacerbated “superstar” effects: a few companies attract all the attention and, therefore, investor financing, while the rest labor in obscurity and, as a result, have fewer chances of success.

This cannot be a good thing, especially with new, difficult, and unproven technologies. Entering a popularity competition too early can be very detrimental to orderly progress. It also makes it hard if not impossible to stay under the radar, which is crucial for start-ups creating disruptive technologies.

To some extent, this is similar to Facebook creating social pressure on people (fortunately, this seems to vary widely by generation!) to participate and share details of their daily activities. Just like one might worry that teenagers spend too much time writing posts about doing and learning and too little time actually doing and learning, investors may be legitimately concerned that companies are spending too much time posturing on social media as opposed to producing useful things.

But fighting against this trend will most likely be a losing upstream battle. One needs to recognize that the new communication channels will become an integral part of the business world — just like Facebook is becoming an integral part of society — and adapt. Recognize that the new channels require not just new marketing campaigns but also reorganizations and rethinking of entire strategies.

Andrei Hagiu is an associate professor in the strategy group at Harvard Business School.

Quora for Business Not Allowed, But You Should Still Monitor and Respond

January 21, 2011 by jeremiah_owyang

Yesterday, on a client call, I was asked if Quora was going to be relevant, and what businesses should do about it.  I’m sure I’m going to get asked this more often, so I’ll put my answers down for all to see.  If you’re not familiar with Quora, it’s a Q&A website where people can ask questions and others can answer and respond.  If you’ve seen LinkedIn or Yahoo Answers or similar features from Community Platforms, and even Get Satisfaction to an extend, you’ll find a theme.  Quora officially launched 6 months ago in a limited beta, and is founded by Facebook’s former CTO with backing by Benchmark capital, all positive signs for company vitality.

What makes Quora Notable:

1. A Social Network for Questions and Responses. Like a social network, individual are often putting their real identities and offer extensive features for surfacing the ideal responses up, these features are more advanced that the typical ‘vote up or down’ responses.  The service is interesting, as it seeks to surface the most valuable and relevant answers, but I found that many of my questions didn’t get enough responses to warrant usefulness over every interaction.  There’s a unique blend of checks and balances that allow for the question, summaries, and votes for answers to be surfaced, much like a wiki for Q&A.
2. An Advanced Set of Features That May Confuse New Users. The user interface offers as lot of features, but some which are complicated.  As I started to probe around and ask questions, it wasn’t clear how to create a question (you actually have to put it in the ‘search field’, an action not native to most users).  Secondly it wasn’t clear what the difference was between a question and a post (which is like a blog post).  A few times, I found the service slow to load pages, likely due to the next point.
3. Technology Influencers are Currently Present, Spurring Growth. A certain type of technology and web influencer is present (see this frequently updated list), giving fuel to their early but rapid growth.   I’ve seen this before.  First with Twitter, Friendfeed and now Quora.  While this group may not be an influencer group of CPG, Retail, and other industries, they are an early indicator of technology adoption.   For example, in his natural penchant to find and evangelize new services, Robert Scoble, has become a poster boy for this product, much how he did for Friendfeed, further bolstering the growth.   To really see if this is the service that will explode, we’ll need to watch how it shapes the SXSW experience, a conference I use as a bell weather for next-generation technologies
4. Like All Social Sites, It’s at Risk to be Gamed. Quality responses are likely to surface the highest, yet like all voting websites, search engines, and social networks that allow for followers and friends, those with more connections to the network will be able to assert more influence over content, visibility, and ability to ultimately sway others.  The Quora service seeks to balance this out by trying to surface the most relevant content at the top.  Yet, I assert that those with more popularity will always be able to influence their responses to the top, as you can read in this discussion here, here, and of course on Quora itself.  (Update: Later, Robert proved my point as he was lashed out for gaming Quora)

How Businesses Should Respond to Quora:

• Businesses Accounts Not Allowed…Yet. Now, If you’re involved in supporting your customers in the social web, either you’re a brand manager, or a community manager, your job is to go where customers are online and respond to them.  While Quora doesn’t currently allow business profiles on the site (see how the Mashable account has been suspended) you should expect in the future that this would be a potential revenue stream for Quora to offer ‘buy outs’ for Q&A just as LinkedIn has done in the past.
• At A Minimum, Monitor The Discussions. While corporate accounts are not currently allowed, personal accounts are, and most people who are in Quora work at a company and you see them answering questions about their company.  Send your Community Managers (you have them, right?) into this emerging Q&A sites as they would other sites, to monitor and respond if questions go awry.  Glean intelligence by creating an excel sheet and creating a list of the top asked questions related to your brand and use to fuel internal discussions around why these questions are asked, and cascade to the appropriate product and service teams to fix. Likely if one customer is asking questions in Quora, it’s an indicator others are too.  The savvy will use this information to identify leads, such as those following the keywords related to your brand.
• Advanced? Engage by Providing Helpful Responses. The advanced community managers should be responding to questions related to the lifestyle or workstyle of their brand to demonstrate thought leadership and ability to engage in discussions, adding value to the community.  If questions about your product are answered on other websites, leave a summary respond and point to the original repository of correct information.  Tip: I provided just a link to one of my blog posts where the answer was, and some users asked me instead answer in text, then link.  As always,  be sure to indicate where you work and that you are an employee of the company, as transparency gleans trust.  The goal?  To give the most helpful answers so they rise to the top of the question thread.

You can find my Quora account here, where I will ask and answer questions that I’m passionate or need help with.

Update Jan 22: I met the Quora founders last night at the Techcrunch’s award show, Crunchies and asked him point blank “When will there be services for companies” and he told me that isn’t a direct focus right now (as they’ve indicated).  Although he didn’t say it directly, we should assume ‘Corporate’ accounts won’t be available sometime until they have massive consumer adoption, and also because they have considerable funding to tie them over to build a great service.  This further reinforces my recommendations to you above to monitor and respond now.

Gawker Gives Up on Blogging (And That’s a Good Thing!)

December 1, 2010 by Dylan F. Tweney

Gawker founder Nick Denton is one of the most aggressive and successful blog publishers around.

Which is exactly why online news sites should be paying close attention to his new, and public, strategy intended to re-focus his snarky snack-bite empire on hard, original news, video, some aggregation and TV-like timing.

Denton started with a good gut understanding of what works online, and built a federation of blogs that exploit a similar model (low overhead, smart and fast writers, efficient tech and ad sales) to great effect. Gizmodo, Gawker, IO9, Lifehacker are all category-leading blogs, or close to it; some of them (like Gizmodo) are starting to compete with traditional media as well.

But what is more significant, his operation is devoted to objective, metric analysis in a way that no one else is. Every Gawker story publicly displays how many pageviews and how many new visitors to the site it has delivered. In addition, Gawker Media’s Manhattan headquarters has a large screen that prominently displays each writer’s traffic totals — numbers that figure into writers’ bonuses. Those numbers are at the core of the organization.

And carefully watching the data has shaped his strategy more than anything. It’s also led him to be way ahead of the curve in many cases (I’m thinking of the way he started planning, in 2008, for a 40% decline in ad spending, long before the rest of the media were willing to face up to what was coming).

It’s somewhat amazing, then, that he’s willing to share the results of his insights. Lifehacker today hosted his thoughts on where Gawker Media is going in 2011.

Now, this could be a classic head-fake, and perhaps Denton is only publishing this plan to throw the rest of us off. But I don’t think so. I think the advice in here is solid, and he’s publishing it because the odds of his slow-moving competitors actually being able to capitalize on this information are slim to none. Meanwhile, Denton raises his cred among smaller publishers, editors and writers, some of whom may be eager to work for him at some point.

Be that as it may, there are some good pointers in Denton’s roadmap.

Here’s the Cliff’s Notes version:

1. The news drives traffic — and more importantly, brings in new readers/viewers who later become return readers. Or, as Denton puts it, “aggressive news-mongering trumps satirical blogging.” Deadspin grew from a cult blog to a household name with its reporting on Brett Favre’s indiscretions. Gizmodo hired Wired magazine editor Joe Brown to shepherd features and long investigative pieces, including those from former Wired.com and Wired magazine writer Brian Gardner.

2. Aggregation is important for filling in the gaps between a few breakout stories each day. The solution? First, have two types of editorial staff: editors/curators, and reporters/producers/scoopmongers. Second, relegate the reverse-chronological “blog flow” to a sidebar, and make the big stories, not the filler, the center of attention.

3. Having a variety of content is important — even more so as your audience grows and becomes more diverse.

4. Photos, videos, and strong visual presentations work resonate with audiences now, and they don’t have to be full-blown videos to work.

5. You can sell video ads in banner ad spaces.

6. Gawker is being programmed more like a TV network, with time slots for stories and ad campaigns, and less like a newspaper or magazine.

7. Gawker is going after high-end brand advertising, the traditional stronghold of magazine companies like Hearst and Wired.com’s own Condé Nast — and the TV networks. To do that, they’re going to be moving up-market this year, trying to class up the joint while still being Gawker Media. Sponsorships and time-slot campaigns are the key to moving out of the doldrums of low-value, high-inventory web advertising.

Big media better watch out. Denton’s done with blogging; his next target is finding an even more profitable form of new media that blends aspects of blogging, magazine journalism, and TV.

And while that might be scary, Denton’s also showing off things that we are learning here at Wired.com as well. Reporting matters. Breaking news and getting scoops resonates with readers. And once you have that, you don’t have to be first with everything, and if you are late to a story, you can take the time to fill it out with smart commentary or additional, or contrarian, perspectives.

Threat Level and Danger Room are two great examples. Danger Room is a great mixture of original reporting, aggregation and smart commentary. Threat Level excels at original, smart and authoritative reporting on tough subjects, like cyber-crime, security and copyright — holding its own traffic-wise despite not having the velocity of a typical blog.

Denton’s new format will be very interesting to watch, and doubtless we’ll see many sites start to adopt pieces of it — probably right as Denton figures out his next step.

But rejoice, readers, writers and publishers: news is back, even if it doesn’t look like what used to land on your doorstep every morning!

Additional reporting by Ryan Singel

An earlier version of this essay appeared on Dylan Tweney’s website. For more real-time tech news, follow Dylan Tweney and Epicenter on Twitter!

See Also:

• 15th Anniversary: Gawker’s Nick Denton on the State of Blogdom
• Wired 12.06: How Can I Sex Up This Blog Business?
• Geekipedia: Nick Denton
• Media Death Watch: Ad Revenues Plunge $3B

Altimeter Report: Social Commerce, How Brands Are Generating Revenue in Social Media, by @lcecere

November 2, 2010 by jeremiah_owyang

I’m frequently asked “What’s the top challenge the corporate social strategist is struggling” and over and over, ROI comes up very high. To tackle this challenge head on, Altimeter has conducted a research project to find out how companies are connecting social technologies to the overall buying process as well as analyzing how they increase revenues for brands.

In conjunction with our recent conference on Social Commerce, we’ve now published the findings from interviewing top social commerce vendors and brands that are connecting commerce with social media. Our lead researcher analyst on this project is Lora Cecere who stems from Gartner and AMR and stems from Supply Chain Management, her and I will be doing a no-cost webinar to discuss these findings, I hope you join us.

This report is intended for you to use, share, and spread, under creative commons, feel free to embed it on your own blog, comment on it, and discuss. I look forward to hearing your feedback.

Rise of social_commerce_final

View more documents from lora cecere.

Related Links:

• Read more of Lora’s take on the official Altimeter Blog
• Read Lora’s blog Supply Chain Shaman
• Social Commerce: The path forward by Gigya

Crowdsourcing Your Brand? Read These 5 Best Practices

October 20, 2010 by Kelly Ferraro

In the wake of Gap’s recent misstep in crowdsourcing its logo, brands should be advised to tread lightly when crowdsourcing. Truth be told, there are some things that a brand should never crowdsource – like its name, culture, or point of view. But brands can incorporate the fresh perspective of the public without sacrificing its brand quality.

Here are five ways brands can effectively crowdsource:

1) Poll the crowd first to identify brand affinity. If you are considering a major brand overhaul, it would be fatal to do so without first gauging your audience. But try and do so early on, and determine if you need a total brand overhaul, or just some minor improvements. The age-old adage, “If it ain’t broken…” is totally applicable here.

When Time Warner Cable split from parent company Time Warner Inc., it embarked on a journey to find a distinct identity. [Full disclosure: Time Warner Cable is a client]. But after 18 months of research, the company decided against a total identity overhaul, opting instead for an update.

“We are giving ourselves a brand identity refresh… so you’ll see a new logo, new colors, new photography, new graphics, and a new ad campaign,” said Marissa Freeman, Time Warner SVP of MarketingCommunications in a video posted on the company’s blog, twcableuntangled.com.

“Most importantly, we are keeping and celebrating our eye and ear symbol,” said Freeman.

Why did the company shy away from the overhaul? Through the extensive research, Time Warner Cable learned that there was a strong brand affinity among its consumers.

2) Involve actual designers. Crowdsourcing DIY-style to anyone with access to a font kit and Photoshop undermines the work of designers – and frankly, it’s not a smart way to approach your business. Ogilvy 360 Art Director Aaron Thornburgh, says:

“Crowdsourcing the effort to create a new logo devalues the design process. If you’re a multi-billion dollar, publicly traded company with stores all over the globe, why on earth would you trust your new identity to DIY designers who don’t understand your brand, business strategy or core values? The reason companies spend so much time and effort to create a unique brand is because it’s vital to the longevity of business.”

Even if you do not have the resources to hire a design firm or freelancer, you can still enlist real designers to preserve your brand’s integrity. Try using a resource like Crowdspring.com, which tends to attract professional-scale designers and artists.

3) Give your audience a voice without giving up design. DC-based blog and creative collective, ReadysetDC found a way to both highlight real designers and effectively crowdsource. Founder Justin Young and Editor Brandon Bloch recently ran a contest to re-design the tourist t-shirt, mostly because Bloch felt the current “I Love DC” design is just a hack of the “I Love NY” t-shirt.

Rather than crowdsource directly to the public,  the Readyset DC editors asked a group of local designers to reinterpret the DC tourist t-shirt, featured the designs on ReadysetDC.com, and finally “crowdsourced” the selection of the winning design through an online vote. The blog posted a follow-up feature of the winning designer, Alex Slater, which soon after helped Slater get “discovered” by the design firm where he is currently employed. Win-Win.

If your target audience is involved in the process, they are more likely to be invested in the result. After realizing its mistake in leaving its target audience out of the decision, Gap very smartly hosted a new call for design submissions on its Facebook page, which landed them a post on Mashable.

4) Proactively seek design feedback. Instead of crowdsourcing your brand identity, consider incorporating product design suggestions from your target audience.  Lululemon Athletica does a fantastic job of incorporating feedback from their customers, or “guests”as the athletic retailer refers to them.

Since the company was founded in 1998, it has posted in-store design feedback walls that invite its guests to share what they love or hate about the products. Store employees then email the responses to the corporate design team, who incorporates it into the design process. When the company refreshed its website in 2009, it announced an online feedback option:

“[F]eedback is so important to lululemon that we decided to add the option for our guests to add their thoughts on every product on lululemon.com.”

Just like voting on a design, inviting feedack helps your target audience feel more invested in your product, and ultimately, loyalty towards your business.

5) Allow your target audience to personalize products. Finally, there is no need to crowdsource your entire brand identity when you can give consumers an outlet for their creativity – and a stronger feeling of connectedness to  your product- by having them personalize a product design. Nike ID is a great example of a brand that empowers its target audience to create by customizing their own shoe design online, which users can vote on, and even order.

Can you think of other examples of effective crowdsourcing? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

Image/Photo Credits: 1. makeyourowngaplogo.com 2. Time Warner Cable 3. ReadysetDC.com 4. lululemon.com 5. nikeid.com

Article: Corporate Blogging Goes Mainstream

October 20, 2010 by (author unknown)

Becoming fully incorporated into media and marketing

The Gap Logo Debacle: A Half-Brained Mistake

October 8, 2010 by Umair Haque

Here’s a thought: 21st century organizations need not just half a brain — but a whole, full, complete brain, where both halves work in unison and harmony. Let me explain, by way of an example.

It hurts your eyes to look at it. It’s making designers world-wide recoil in amazement and horror. The latest installment of Aliens vs Predator? Nope — it’s the Gap’s new logo.

Now, I’m not here to pass aesthetic judgment. That’s already been swift and severe (and frankly, the logo looks like something my pet hamster could cook up in PowerPoint). And now, recognizing the error of its ways, the Gap has decided to get radically open: to let anyone compete to design their logo, via (you guessed it) markets, networks, and communities — which is the way that 90% of design, business, and downright everything should be done in the first place.

But the deeper question is: why and how did this train wreck happen? Here’s my guess. Like most companies, the Gap just doesn’t understand the game-changing power of design. The new logo reeks of something designed not just by committee — but by a committee of beancounters who don’t have a creative bone in their body, a suite full of suits who just might be missing the empathic, intuitive right hemisphere of the brain entirely.

The real problem, then, I’d guess is this. Most companies see design as a superficial afterthought on which a few pennies are spent if there are a few bucks left in the budget — as, to use the beancounter’s macho argot, “tactical.”

All of which is why, when you think about it, Steve Jobs is having the last, delicious laugh. Apple’s book value is about $32 billion (you can adjust that up or down by a few percent depending on how you define book value). But Apple’s market cap is over $262 billion. That difference of more than $200 billion? Maybe not every penny of it’s the result of a few ground-breaking designs, but I’d be willing to bet that a sizable chunk of it is the result of the capability to be able to break new ground in design — which they do by taking it seriously. Taking design as seriously as most companies take (yawn) “strategy” creates more value for Apple in a year than most companies create…ever.

So why did design create so much value for Apple? Consider: having suffered decades of relative underinvestment, it’s one of today’s rarest capabilities. When you think about it, Apple chose an industry that was bereft of design altogether. Walk into Best Buy today and you walk into design desolation, aesthetic aridity, a dystopia of designlessness. There’s not a drop of joy, delight, amazement, or just plain well-though-out usability in sight; it’s a little bit like the emotional equivalent of taking a holiday in Sparta. And unless you’re a masochist, you’re probably not going to pay much of a premium for that.

So argue with me if you like, bring the full arsenal of overquantified pseudomathetical Wall Street analyses to the table if you want — but I’d gently suggest: most companies don’t take design seriously, but they damn well should. What standing in their way? Yesterday’s tired, increasingly stale assumptions that what really matters in hard-nosed, tough-as-nails business is the left-brained stuff: negotiation, calculation, and, to it bluntly, intimidation. Hence, cutting-edge design as a nice-to-have, not a can’t-live-without. Hence, design as something that’s relegated to ghettos inside organizations, instead of a competence that’s lived and breathed in all corners. And hence, designers being lower in the corporate pecking order than the assistant to the middle manager of the middle manager.

That’s a big mistake in a hypercompetitive world where 47 billion low-cost factories from Madagascar to Fujian can churn pretty much, well, anything in the blink of an eye and for a few pennies. More than ever, it’s beauty, delight, and amazement that separates rapidly commoditizing “product” from stuff that’s treasured, adored, loved, and envied.

For most boardrooms, design’s never counted less — but the truth, I’d venture to guess, is that design’s never counted more. So here are five questions to gauge whether you’re taking design seriously enough.

• Do designers have a seat in the boardroom — or just in the basement? How often does your CEO ever talk to a designer?
• Are designers empowered to overrule beancounters — or vice versa?
• Is the input of designers considered to be peripheral to “real” business decisions — or does it play a vital role in shaping them? Is design treated as a function or a competence?
• Are designers seen just as mechanics of mere stuff — or as vital contributors to the art of igniting new industries, markets, and catgeories, sparking more enduring demand, building trust, providing empathy, and seeding tomorrow’s big ideas?
• How much weight does senior management give to right-brained ideas, like delight, amazement, intuition, and joy? Just a little, a lot — or, as for most companies, almost none?

Here’s the point of my little scorecard: to demonstrate that management by lobotomy just won’t cut it anymore. In the 21st century, creating enduring advantage is going to require organizations that have a whole brain — not just half of one. And if you’re flunking, prepare, dear left-brained beancounter, for the discount rack.

Business Ideas from the Crowd

September 23, 2010 by Ndubuisi Ekekwe

The women had gathered where the market’s largest sugar distributor was giving generous bulk discounts. It was a typical African open market, where people bring their goods for sale and afterwards take the remainders home. Late in the evening, the distributor observed that one of his trucks had broken down. He couldn’t bring everything home. He quickly started a promotion with even deeper discounts on bulk purchases.

The women formed themselves into a crowd and pooled their meager individual resources. They bought a large quantity and shared the inexpensive goods among themselves. It was a magical experience: a crowd of like-minded people, congregating to get a bargain, on the spot.

Such energy of the crowd is not new. Companies have always looked at ways to tap the imaginations of the masses and profit from them. However, the astonishing advances in social networking and communication technologies have provided a high level of interactivity and connectivity, making it possible for people to connect more easily. And brands are finding that the crowd offers great opportunities for business innovation.

Last year, Netflix awarded $1 million to a team that improved its prediction accuracy to link people to the movies they want. General Electric, in partnership with four venture capital firms, is awarding $200 million to the best clean-technology ideas entered in its GE Ecomagination Challenge.

The Netflix and GE contests are examples of programs sponsored by companies casting wider net for new business ideas. These programs involve outsourcing activities traditionally done by staff or contractors to a large group of people through open contests. The contests bring fresh ideas and help firms improve their business processes and tools.

As the global economy recovers from recession, the concept of tapping into the crowd for insights will become even more attractive. Netflix and GE are not alone: L’Oreal turned to Current TV, a cable outlet that dedicates much of its airtime to user-generated content. By tapping the crowd, L’Oreal paid $1,000 for a 30-second ad that would have cost $150,000 if produced in-house.

To become a vital business innovation tool, providing quality ideas, a crowdsourcing campaign should follow the following guidelines:

• Be specific: In clear, simple terms, define what the problem is. Netflix wanted an algorithm that beat its current one by 10%. If the problem definition is vague, the answers will be, too.
  
• Target the right crowd: To get the best out of crowdsourcing, firms must know where the right crowd is. A campaign on nanotechnology will better seek technical universities, not the masses across Facebook.
  
• Define the IP rights: To avoid legal problems on solutions provided by the crowd, unambiguously state ownership of all ideas submitted to the contest. This will save you intellectual property-related lawsuits in the future.
  
• Nurture the network: Besides the cash, think about other ways to motivate the crowd. The L’Oreal campaign was structured in a way that got most participants interested due to their passion for the brand. Brand loyalists contributed so they could shape the products they already use. Point redemption for products, invitations to corporate events, among others, could appeal to many people in the crowd.
  
• Promote the campaign: Posting the problem on the web is only a step in the campaign. To make it successful, promote the campaign to alert scientists, hobbyists, universities, and even the unemployed.
  
• Engage the solution providers: Many solution providers exist to help firms get the best out of crowdsourcing. Companies like InnoCentive and IdeaConnection provide services that help firms reach top talents in the crowd. They do this by entering into partnerships with universities and trade associations, through which expand access to the right crowd.
  
• Have an in-house plan: The crowd will not save your business every time.
  

Garnering business ideas from the crowd is not simple. It carries risks. Companies can unknowingly provide leads to their competitors on product development strategy. There is also the challenge of intellectual property leakage as data is shared with the crowd. (Netflix provided data for the campaign it sponsored.) Despite the intellectual property risks, for many, tapping into the wisdom of the masses could provide invaluable insights on a brand.

Ndubuisi Ekekwe is the founder of non-profit African Institution of Technology. He recently edited Nanotechnology and Microelectronics: Global Diffusion, Economics and Policy.

Media Isn't Social

August 4, 2010 by David Armano

Several weeks ago I delivered a 16 minute TEDx talk titled “reinventing social media”. Typically I like to frame topics outside of the social media bubble, but in this instance the topic itself and the purpose of the talk was designed to get us all thinking about things a bit differently. You see, businesses, brands and organizations are truly struggling with the disruptive nature of social technologies. In fact, the term “social technologies” is part of the problem—we are all fixated on the technologies and meanwhile the real action lies in harnessing the change brought about by human behavior enabled by technology. I used the simple story of how a colleague shared a book with me. The book itself (media) is not social—the interactions, communications, stories and conversations that involve the book are.



But to say “it’s about people” is too simplistic. Toward the end of the talk, I made my case that in a couple of years it would be unlikely that I would even be talking about “social media”. This thesis based on the belief that “social” translates into the conversion of an organization which requires shifts in culture, technology, process and ultimately behavior. If an organization does not empower its people to behave in a productive and beneficial social manner than can we actually use the word “social” to describe it? If the organization has not begun integrating these changes across several functional groups as opposed to leverging just one (such as marketing) then is it really taking advantage of some of the changes I discuss in my talk?



I believe that the answer is no. It means that one part of the business is behaving a certain way while the others behave differently. This would be like your head looking at the person’s face who you are having a conversation with while your body is walking away from them in mid conversation. So in order for “social media” to become reinvented, to go with the theme of the TEDx discussion, it has to change (or we need to). And change as we all know always begins with people—so our focus needs to turn here. Hope you like the talk and as always feel free to share your own thoughts.

Google Promises To Let Anyone Build Mobile Apps

July 12, 2010 by Eliot Van Buskirk

Users can combine building blocks representing code in a variety of, allowing them to make apps without writing code (screenshot from below video, courtesy of Google).

Google, not satisfied to let any coder into its Android app store, has invited non-coders alike to invent mobile apps of their own with a simple building-block system that, it claims, anyone can use. The promise, unrealized as yet, is to let every person who bores their friends talking about what a great idea they have for an app to build the thing and be done with it.

Google App Inventor for Android demonstrates how markedly Google’s philosophy differs from Apple’s, whose app model it copied to a great extent. Apple wants a velvet rope to keep subpar developers out, but Google just sent them an engraved invitation, potentially opening the floodgates for exactly the type of deluge of unsophisticated apps that Apple seems so eager to avoid.

“App Inventor requires no programming knowledge,” reads the Google’s description of the program, currently in a closed beta. “This is because instead of writing code, you visually design the way the app looks and use blocks to specify the app’s behavior.”

In the video demonstration to the below right, a woman with a cat creates an app that meows when the user taps a picture of the cat, showing how simple it is to create buttons with the app and tie them to actions, such as the playback of an audio file. Sound familiar? That, my friend, is how fart apps are made (and one of those apparently earned its creator nearly $10,000 in a day).

That said, Google hasn’t opened development to everybody as of today. Would-be app developers must register with a Gmail e-mail address if they wish to be considered for inclusion in the program. Google is prioritizing educational applicants if the questions on the form are any indication, but a note on the page promises, “Complete this form and we’ll have you building apps soon.”

So far, apps created in grade school and university classrooms tests have demonstrated useful applications, from texting one’s location to friends every 15 minutes to responding to incoming texts with a message telling people you’re driving.

In addition to accessing calling, texting, and other phone features, these apps can talk to outside databases, meaning that users should be able to build apps that tap directly into Amazon, Twitter or any other API. In addition, the apps can link up to any web apps the person or their programmer friends may have written. That location-texting app  accesses a database consisting of the user’s friends that lives on the web, for instance.

This is the work of computer scientist Harold Abelson, who is spending his sabbatical from MIT working at Google (what does this guy do on his days off?). He based Google Inventor on the OpenBlocks Java library, from the thesis work of Ricarose Roque (with others contributing).

Abelson pointed out that such a thing would not have been possible on Apple’s iPhone, which only allows apps to be created using Apple’s tools.

“We could have only done this because Android’s architecture is so open,” he told the New York Times, adding, “These aren’t the slickest applications in the world, but they are ones ordinary people can make, often in a matter of minutes.”

Google hasn’t truly opened this program up to everyone yet, so it’s still being slightly “Apple” about the whole thing, despite this promise to democratize app creation. But even at this stage, Google Inventor shows a lot of promise for giving the regular users the chance to be creative in ways they couldn’t with a computer.

If this program really can let anyone build anything, it will be interesting to see whether Google’s openness will extend to adding all of these amateur-created apps to its official store.

See Also:

• Indie Coder Proves Android Apps Can Make Money, Too
• Spotify’s Android App Should Frighten Apple
• Google Flips Remote Kill-Switch on Android Apps
• Independent App Stores Take On Google’s Android Market
• 10 Android Apps For The Tech-Savvy Student
• MSpot Unveils Cloud-Based Music System for Android
• SXSW: MOG’s Mobile Music Apps Go Beyond the Playlist
• Rhapsody’s iPhone App Beats Spotify, MOG to the Punch

Nike's Open (Green) Innovation

June 23, 2010 by Andrew Winston

One of the hottest concepts in strategy and management today is the idea of “open innovation.” Gone are the highly secluded R&D departments funded by a single company, carefully guarding secrets from the outside and even from other divisions. In its place, in theory, are hubs of collaboration capturing ideas from customers, academia, or some guys in a garage somewhere.

Given the simultaneous growth of the sustainability movement, it’s no surprise that companies are starting to combine the concepts and try to create open green innovation.

The general idea of this new collaborative approach to innovation has been kicking around since the 2003 publication of Open Innovation by professor Henry Chesbrough at UC Berkeley (see a recent article he wrote with some key examples here). But it’s been gaining real currency in recent years as (a) large companies such as Procter & Gamble and IBM have embraced the concept, (b) the platforms for accessing many brains through social media have evolved, and (c) companies have looked for low-cost innovation pathways during tight times.

The green shade of open innovation has appeared more recently. Earlier this year, Nike, Best Buy, Yahoo!, and a few others launched the GreenXChange, an organization dedicated to sharing patents and ideas that can help companies reduce their environmental impacts. The core non-corporate partner is Creative Commons, the godfather of modern idea sharing and an organization “dedicated to making it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others.”

I met some of the key players in the GreenXChange consortium — and saw Professor Chesbrough speak — at the recent Sustainable Brands Conference. Nike managers described how this fascinating agreement to share patents works in practice. Earlier in the 2000s, Nike had developed a “green rubber” that lowered production costs and slashed toxic emissions by 96 percent. The company offered up this technology and the Canadian outdoor equipment company, Mountain Equipment Co-op, licensed it (for what I sense is a nominal fee) to apply to its products.

Members of the GreenXChange contribute patents for new methods of production that reduce energy, water, toxicity, and so on. Each company can learn from and build on what has come before. As the Nike managers put it, companies have latent ideas and technologies sitting on shelves, not being used. Why not let others in?

Is open innovation a great thing for sustainability? A couple of major points in its favor: First, it certainly represents heretical innovation of the innovation process itself, and I’m big proponent of asking heretical questions. Second, the energy, toxicity, waste, and water challenges the world faces are so great and pressing, we don’t have time to wait for every organization to discover cleaner ways of operating on its own —- we need to share information and speed up adoption of new methods and technologies. We need cooperation across traditional boundaries and open innovation to solve the biggest problems, and that means companies sharing much more than they’re used to.

But I’ll admit to having one major reservation about this innovation strategy. One of the core arguments for going green is that it creates competitive advantage, a logic that makes sustainability palatable to many corporate leaders. A skeptical executive would be completely right to ask, “Won’t sharing our ideas level the playing field and give away the keys to the candy store?” Imagine getting your patent attorney on board. Well, Nike execs brought theirs to the conference and he talked about his personal journey to seeing the value — to society and to Nike — in exchanging patents.

I asked the manager leading the GreenXChange project my core question about giving up competitive advantage. Her logic was interesting. When the company discovers something like green rubber, “people” (meaning, I think, their employees and other key stakeholders) expect the company to do the right thing and spread the word — and so Nike does just that.

But there are certain kinds of innovations the company wouldn’t share. The ideal shoe, this manager imagines, would likely be made from one material (which would greatly reduce its material use and lifecycle footprint and make recycling very easy). If Nike could accomplish this feat, the new geometry and design would be all Nike’s, and thus a source of real advantage.

In the end, I come down firmly on the side of supporting open green innovation, especially given the scale and nature of the challenges we face. But for each company, the supporting logic for open green innovation will need to be balanced by a good understanding of where and when to share ideas, and which ideas are unique to the company’s core competencies — such as design and branding, in Nike’s case. Those latter ideas will drive profit and advantage.

For now, it seems that Nike has this delicate balancing act down.

Follow Andrew on Twitter at @GreenAdvantage.

Pandora Mixes the Best of Taxonomy with the Wisdom of the Crowds

June 11, 2010 by Patty Seybold

Smart Customization is hot! Mass-customized products and services, personalized experiences, smart recommendations that are tailored to your specific interests and needs—all of these efforts have a lot in common. 

On May 20th and 21st, I had the good fortune to attend the 2010 Smart Customization Seminar at the MIT Design Lab. One of the speakers I really enjoyed was Tom Conrad, the CTO of Pandora Internet Radio. Tom told the story of the history of Pandora, from its early days as Savage Beast, when the company provided music recommendation services to music retailers, through its reincarnation as Pandora Internet Radio in the summer of 2005. For over 10 years, the musicians and technologists at Pandora have been building and evolving a Music Genome by codifying over 800,000 pieces of music based on 400 musicological attributes. Their goal: make it easy to understand what sounds you like and find more music you’ll like based on those attributes. His story is fascinating for anyone who wants to understand the trade-offs between the distinctions that subject matter experts make and the distinctions that average fans make. As is the case with many electronic publishing efforts, Pandora has merged the best of both worlds: a professional taxonomy with the wisdom of the crowds.

There are lessons in Tom’s story for all of us. If you want to provide personalized recommendations, custom-tailored products or services, or smart solutions that infer what you might like based on what you’ve found valuable in the past and how you and others have interacted with those solutions, then you’ll want to understand what Pandora has learned to-date in its 10 year history and to subscribe to and follow the evolution of this Internet Radio service.

It’s been two years since I attended the last of Frank Pillar’s Smart Customization Seminars at MIT. (See “Frameworks for Smart Customization“.) The field of smart customization is maturing fast. I look forward to bringing you more examples of smart customization in the next few weeks.

Pandora: Delivering Personalized Internet Radio
How Pandora Internet Radio Combines Taxonomy, Crowdsourcing, and Personalization to Improve Music Playlists
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, June 10, 2010

Apple Invites Authors to Self-Publish on iPad Bookstore

May 28, 2010 by Brian X. Chen

Getting a book deal isn’t easy (I can personally vouch for that), and Apple is now an alternative to the traditional publisher. The company this week opened a new portal for independent authors to self-publish their books for the iBooks Store open to iPad (and soon iPhone) customers.

Apple’s iTunes Connect program has a section where authors can self-publish their work under certain formatting requirements, MacLife first reported. Basically, the books must be made in the ePub format like the rest of the offerings in the iBooks Store.

Apple’s iPad launched simultaneously with the iBooks Store, and several major publishers such as Penguin, Harper Collins and Hachette Book Group, have signed up to publish their books on the iPad. Apple later announced in March that the iBooks Store would be available for iPhone users as soon as iPhone OS 4 launches in summer. With iBooks and the iPad, Apple’s biggest target is Amazon, who hosts its popular Amazon e-book store and sells the dedicated Kindle e-reader. Amazon, too, allows authors to self-publish books through their market.

See Also:

• Kobo Beats iBooks with International iPad Bookstore, App
• Apple Starts Stocking Shelves of International iBooks Stores …
• iBooks Store Loaded with Project Gutenberg Titles at Launch …
• How to Transfer Your Stanza E-Book Library to iBooks for iPad …
• Apple’s iPad Will Read Books Out Loud, Support Free E-Books …

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Social CRM Webinar Part 1: The 5Ms and Marketing Use Cases (Slides and Recording)

April 9, 2010 by jeremiah_owyang

The Market Took to the Social CRM Use Cases
The Social CRM report by the Altimeter Group is a hit.  Within 30 days it has received over 30,000 views, been touted as the “Most Viral BtoB Report,” and brands and SCRM vendors are aligning their roadmaps with the use cases. There were over 800 registrants for the webinar, and we had nearly 300 attendees, over 135 of the registrants said they wanted to be contacted by a SCRM vendor. All of these numbers indicate that there’s interest in this new market, and we’re glad to help illuminate the pathway. (Update: If you want to give a primer to your CMO, send them my latest Forbes column on the topic)

Watch the Recording and Use The Slides
Our belief in Open Research means we try to collaborate with the market on conducting research, then sharing a great deal of it so the market can build on top of it, improve it, and we can continue to learn. Yesterday, we hosted part 1 of the SCRM webinar series, and have made the slides and the recording available.

SCRM Part 1 Slides: A Discussion on the 5Ms and Marketing Use Cases

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

Above: Download the slides from slideshare and reuse under creative commons

Social CRM Use Cases: 5Ms and Marketing, by Altimeter Group from Altimeter Group on Vimeo.

Above: The webinar recording. My voice was a bit soft due to technical reasons, however at 14 minutes in I switch headsets and it clears up.

We also polled the attendees about their readiness to deploy:
When are you planning to invest in a Social CRM Solution? (41% of attendees responded, but this was at the end of webinar, so we don’t know how many were still online.)

• A) Not at this time (25%)
• B) In the next 30 days (14%)
• C) In the next quarter (14%)
• D) In the next year (9%)
• E) Not sure (35%)

This means that 28% of the attendees were interested in investing on Social CRM solutions.

Related Resources
This is just the starting point, harness these other resources to become successful.

• Sign up for future SCRM webinars and other Altimeter content
• Read the report that started this all
• Join the Social CRM Pioneers Group
• See a list of vendors that offer SCRM

Four Steps When Working with Social CRM Vendors
After you’ve digested the report, and are starting to prepare for the 5Ms, approach social crm vendors with these four tips.

1. Forward them the report.
2. Ask them to define which use cases they currently specialize in.
3. Ask to see a roadmap of which use cases they’ll be launching in coming quarters.
4. Ask how they’ll work with other SCRM vendors that offer use cases that they can’t deliver.

iPad falls short on cloud integration

April 5, 2010 by Edd Dumbill

Apple urgently needs to improve its strategy on the cloud. The iPad and the iPhone are perfect smart terminals for cloud computing. At some level Apple knows this, as it was pushing a MobileMe discount with iPads this weekend. But when you get your hands on an iPad, you realize that Apple missed a real opportunity for deep integration with its cloud offerings.

I’ve been a MobileMe user for a little while, since the transition from .Mac, and I like how it is integrated with OS X setup. On the iPhone, I love the over-the-air syncing of my bookmarks, contacts and calendar. I had expectations that the iPad would take this a step further.

However, the iPad is no more advanced than the iPhone in its cloud integration. I would have loved to have switched on the iPad, keyed in my MobileMe login, and automatically had my email, browser bookmarks, calendar and contacts set up for me, as well as the ability to load in ebooks through my iDisk, and have my photo galleries available.

Instead I was forced through the painfully overloaded iTunes application, and had to tether my device via USB to get all of my content on it. Setting things up was a crazy dance involving configuration in both iTunes and in the iPad’s settings panel. To make matters worse, the iPad doesn’t want to charge over USB. This means I need to plug it in twice: once to the charger, and then somewhere else to sync. Decent cloud access would have mitigated this a little.

I was genuinely surprised that the iWork and Photo applications for the iPad don’t have built-in support for MobileMe. Email appears the be the only generally universal way of getting things out of the iPad.

Both OS X and Ubuntu offer me a much more pleasant out-of-box setup experience for connecting and synchronizing with cloud services. I suspect that because the iPad is divided up into little silos for each application, and iPhone OS doesn’t offer any general notion of cloud services, it can only be this way for now.

I am hoping for a future where all I need to supply a device with is my identity, and everything else falls into place. This doesn’t even have to be me trusting in a third-party cloud: there’s no reason similar mechanisms couldn’t be used privately in a home network setting.

I think the iPad is an amazing piece of hardware, and the most pleasant web browsing experience available. It is still very much a 1.0 device though, and its best days certainly lie ahead of it. I hope part of that improvement is a simple story for synchronization and cloud access.

Somewhat to my surprise, I’m equally as excited about the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 (Lucid) release for netbooks as I am by the iPad. The iPad is not yet a netbook-killer.