Broadstuff Blog

We have already highlighted some worries about Google Streetmapping as a surveillance tool, but it would seem Google Earth is now being used to spy on citizens in their own backyards - TechCrunch:

“Under the table” pools may be the catalyst of the next technology revolution in government. During last February’s economic collapse in Greece, the normally technophobic Greek government used Google Maps and Google Earth to find people who had craftily evaded taxes by failing to declare a pool.

Now Google Earth-enabled law enforcement has come to the USA. The town ofRiverhead, Long Island, taking a lesson from the Greeks, is also using Google Earth to track down about 250 “unpermitted” pools. And using the satellite imaging service has proved profitable, Riverhead officials have collected over $75,000 in fines from pool owners who never filled out the required paperwork.

While Google Earth was originally intended to help people find their way around, Riverhead is one of the first incidences of what will inevitably be many more cases of the tool being used by local and national governments to catch people evading their duties as citizens, unless Google somehow intervenes. We’ve contacted Google for comment on this somewhat alarming unintended use.
Google of course is shocked - shocked - that people would stoop so low and reminds us that Google Earth should be used for A Higher Purpose:

Google Earth is built from information that is available from a broad range of both commercial and public sources. The same information is available to anyone who buys it from these widely-available public sources. Google’s freely available technology has been used for a variety of purposes ranging from travel planning to scientific research to emergency response, rescue, and relief in natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Haiti Earthquake
Of course, this opens up the possibilty an entire industry of fascinating new Surveillance Services. The Imagination runs riot with the mashups possible between Googlestuff and location based services, surveillance satellites and social networks.

In my more paranoid moments I start to think about what "cloaking" devices I need to put on my physical as well as digital footprints.

Update - the article has got quite a number of comments on TechCrunch - and here's the very scary thing: most commenters see nothing wrong about the surveillance and are sympathetic to catching "tax evaders" (those questioning whether pool tax is right are shouted down quickly).

From Walled Web to World Web and back again

Gawker reports on Wired thinking that "The (Open) Web is Dead" and a Walled world is emerging (see diagram above):

Word from inside Wired is the magazine is prepping a cover story in which editor Chris Anderson declares that "the Web is Dead." At a magazine founded by digital utopians, that would be something close to sacrilege.

Anderson is expected to argue that more tightly controlled corners of the internet, especially iPad and iPhone apps, are gradually supplanting the open Web as means of publishing and online networking. The digital prognosticator isn't alone in seeing such a trend; author Jeff Jarvis has publicly fretted over the rise apps.

The issue of course is The Money (or lack of it) in the World Wide Web World (as above Wired editor Chris Anderson, champion of FreeConomics, should know well) makes it hard to invest in improving the Open stuff quickly when new Closed stuff comes along. The problem in short is that as the new wave in the web emerges, it is more economical initially to build Walled Worlds - and worse, old standards start to come apart as they become redundant because:

(i) In any newly emerging technology where lots of things are not clear, it is easier to design your own end to end experience until standard "subcomponents" arrive. Early motor cars had a dizzying array of different clutch/brake/accelerator arrangements and mechanism for example. Ditto AOL, CompuServe et al had to develop a lot of peviously non existent technologies themselves before Mosaic appeared.

(ii) Funders - especially early day ones - like Walled Worlds as it looks more like Protected IPR, it makes business cases easier (my Ad sales to my customers on my platforms). Typically the "Open" gambit is used by a large player left out or wanting to enter a closed environment (Think IBM in PCs, Google in Smartphones) or the Random Generoisit of a lare Reserach Budget (DARPA, Mosaic) entering a small market. Apple has shown Walled really works well if the customer actually buys their own iBrick in the Wall, which is the New New strategy in Walled Worlds.

(iii) "Open" requires a plethora of agreed standards, subcomponents, working practices and other collaborative things that takes time to arise. You can force it via "Open Source" innovation but there is always a catch up phase before it takes off (Android is only now starting to seriously take on the iPhone for example). It does eventually arise, but only eventually.

In other words, by 2024 there will probably be another Open World again.....

We first explained how Free Consumer Web Services would be funded by datamining you data 2 years ago in our paper "FreeConomics II - Why your data is free but everywhere in chains" and readers of his blog will know we have been steadily warning people of privacy erosion over the last 2 years. But we are a small and specialist blog, talking manly to early users of these technologies. We have often wondered on these pages when the abuse of Privacy will "go mainstream" - in fact we thought it would be 2009 after the Beacon fiasco, but we were overoptimistic. Now however, a Wall Street Journal article yesterday laid it all out for the first time for a larger audience - to summarise:

The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

• The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to "cookie" files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.
Of course, the defenders of privacy abuse will come leaping to its defence - here is Jeff Jarvis:

I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us!

If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I’m not, because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be especially true of News Corp. when I worked there, at TV Guide) — I’d imagine that the Journal ginned up this alleged exposé as a way to attack everyone else’s advertising business just as its parent company skulks behind its pay wall and surrenders its own ad business. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. That’s why I’m confused.
The rest of the piece carries on in the same ad hominem vein ad nauseam. Great rational argument there, way to go Jeff! (But then this is the man who wrote the original Google Hagiography, so he would say that, wouldn't he ).

Pushing Out Choice to Consumers

The Intenet Advertising Board (IAB) is being a bit more subtle, as Adriana Lukas explains
Here are the important bits - the reservations about HR 5777, the Best
Practices Act proposal:

1. concept of first party data usage - "when consumers go to an online
website they understand there is going to be a certain amount of data
exchange by that first party site to serve them content and services
and yes, advertising. We think that clearly the first party (data)
usage should be exempted out of this. Choice mechanism not notice - we
should always do better around giving consumers notice to about thow
their data is collected and used

2. 3rd party data sharing - the internet is nothing but a series of
3rd party relationships. Virtually every website requires those 3rd
party data sharing whether is to customise content, to run your
analytics on the backside to make sure you know who's coming to your
site to get paid or whether it's for relevant advertising. have an opt
out ??? empowering consumers to exercise their choice when they have
legitimate concerns around privacy. You need to give them good notice,
you need to empower them and you need to educate them...

"I think, it's impossible to take information out of information age.
because if you do that you are going to get less relevant advertising
and less relevant advertising by definition is spam. And I don't think
anybody wants that - it is not good for consumers and not good for
business."

In fact its probably the HR5777 Best Practices bill draft that is starting all this kerfuffle as the lobbyists and apologists gird their loins.

Getting a Cluetrain

A reasoned riposte to all this comes from Doc Searls:

Here’s what’s delusional about all this: There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers.

For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

I’ve said it before: Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss.

The frontier here is on the demand side, not the supply side. Advertising may pay for lots of great stuff (such as search) that we take for granted, but advertising even at its best is guesswork. It flourishes in the absence of more efficient and direct demand-supply interactions. The idea of making advertising perfectly personal has been a holy grail of the business since Day Alpha. Now that Day Omega is approaching, thanks to creepy shit like this, the advertsing business is going to crash up against a harsh fact: “consumers” are real people, and most real people are creeped out by this stuff. Rough impersonal guesswork is tolerable. Totally personalized guesswork is not.
Searls (one of the Cluetrain Manifesto authors) some time ago started to work on VRM, which could act as an alternative to this sort of "Sales By Privacy Abuse" approach by creating tools for the customer's desies to flow to providers without the need for datamining etc.

Granted a piece in the WSJ is not yet a mass market coverage, but that will now come, when organs such as the WSJ and FT pick things up, the Qualities and then the Mass media sart to echo them. Also, the emergence of HR5777 signals that the legislative wheels are starting to turn, and that too will raise the ante from now on. I would predict that this ball has now started to roll, and the by the end of 2010 we will start to see "Respect for Online Privacy" become a major issue.

About time.........

(Hmmm - article saying much the same as this one is over here - came out after us, I claim firsts )

We first explained how Free Consumer Web Services would be funded by datamining you data 2 years ago in our paper "FreeConomics II - Why your data is free but everywhere in chains" and readers of his blog will know we have been steadily warning people of privacy erosion over the last 2 years. But we are a small and specialist blog, talking manly to early users of these technologies. We have often wondered on these pages when the abuse of Privacy will "go mainstream" - in fact we thought it would be 2009 after the Beacon fiasco, but we were overoptimistic. Now however, a Wall Street Journal article yesterday laid it all out for the first time for a larger audience - to summarise:

The Journal conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

• The study found that the nation's 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred. The nonprofit Wikipedia installed none.

• Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to "cookie" files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them.

• These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

The new technologies are transforming the Internet economy. Advertisers once primarily bought ads on specific Web pages—a car ad on a car site. Now, advertisers are paying a premium to follow people around the Internet, wherever they go, with highly specific marketing messages.

In between the Internet user and the advertiser, the Journal identified more than 100 middlemen—tracking companies, data brokers and advertising networks—competing to meet the growing demand for data on individual behavior and interests.
Of course, the defenders of privacy abuse will come leaping to its defence - here is Jeff Jarvis:

I just don’t understand Julia Angwin’s scare story about cookies and ad targeting in the Wall Street Journal. That is, I don’t understand how the Journal could be so breathlessly naive, unsophisticated, and anachronistic about the basics of the modern media business. It is the Reefer Madness of the digital age: Oh my God, Mabel, they’re watching us!

If I were a conspiracy theorist — and I’m not, because I’ve found the world is rarely organized enough to conspire (and I found this to be especially true of News Corp. when I worked there, at TV Guide) — I’d imagine that the Journal ginned up this alleged exposé as a way to attack everyone else’s advertising business just as its parent company skulks behind its pay wall and surrenders its own ad business. But I’m not a conspiracy theorist. That’s why I’m confused.
The rest of the piece carries on in the same ad hominem vein ad nauseam. Great rational argument there, way to go Jeff! (But then this is the man who wrote the original Google Hagiography, so he would say that, wouldn't he ).

Pushing Out Choice to Consumers

The Intenet Advertising Board (IAB) is being a bit more subtle, as Adriana Lukas explains
Here are the important bits - the reservations about HR 5777, the Best
Practices Act proposal:

1. concept of first party data usage - "when consumers go to an online
website they understand there is going to be a certain amount of data
exchange by that first party site to serve them content and services
and yes, advertising. We think that clearly the first party (data)
usage should be exempted out of this. Choice mechanism not notice - we
should always do better around giving consumers notice to about thow
their data is collected and used

2. 3rd party data sharing - the internet is nothing but a series of
3rd party relationships. Virtually every website requires those 3rd
party data sharing whether is to customise content, to run your
analytics on the backside to make sure you know who's coming to your
site to get paid or whether it's for relevant advertising. have an opt
out ??? empowering consumers to exercise their choice when they have
legitimate concerns around privacy. You need to give them good notice,
you need to empower them and you need to educate them...

"I think, it's impossible to take information out of information age.
because if you do that you are going to get less relevant advertising
and less relevant advertising by definition is spam. And I don't think
anybody wants that - it is not good for consumers and not good for
business."

In fact its probably the HR5777 Best Practices bill draft that is starting all this kerfuffle as the lobbyists and apologists gird their loins.

Getting a Cluetrain

A reasoned riposte to all this comes from Doc Searls:

Here’s what’s delusional about all this: There is no demand for tracking by individual customers. All the demand comes from advertisers — or from companies selling to advertisers.

For now.

Here is the difference between an advertiser and an ordinary company just trying to sell stuff to customers: nothing. If a better way to sell stuff comes along — especially if customers like it better than this crap the Journal is reporting on — advertising is in trouble.

Here is the difference between an active customer who wants to buy stuff and a consumer targeted by secretive tracking bullshit: everything.

Two things are going to happen here. One is that we’ll stop putting up with it. The other is that we’ll find better ways for demand and supply to meet — ways that don’t involve tracking or the guesswork called advertising.

I’ve said it before: Improving a pain in the ass doesn’t make it a kiss.

The frontier here is on the demand side, not the supply side. Advertising may pay for lots of great stuff (such as search) that we take for granted, but advertising even at its best is guesswork. It flourishes in the absence of more efficient and direct demand-supply interactions. The idea of making advertising perfectly personal has been a holy grail of the business since Day Alpha. Now that Day Omega is approaching, thanks to creepy shit like this, the advertsing business is going to crash up against a harsh fact: “consumers” are real people, and most real people are creeped out by this stuff. Rough impersonal guesswork is tolerable. Totally personalized guesswork is not.
Searls (one of the Cluetrain Manifesto authors) some time ago started to work on VRM, which could act as an alternative to this sort of "Sales By Privacy Abuse" approach by creating tools for the customer's desies to flow to providers without the need for datamining etc.

Granted a piece in the WSJ is not yet a mass market coverage, but that will now come, when organs such as the WSJ and FT pick things up, the Qualities and then the Mass media sart to echo them. Also, the emergence of HR5777 signals that the legislative wheels are starting to turn, and that too will raise the ante from now on. I would predict that this ball has now started to roll, and the by the end of 2010 we will start to see "Respect for Online Privacy" become a major issue.

About time.........

(Hmmm - article saying much the same as this one is over here - came out after us, I claim firsts )

Large research house punctures Location Based Services hype shocker - AdAge:

Marketers, hold off on Foursquare -- for now. That's the verdict of Forrester Research on location-based start-ups, which, despite their reputation as the hot new media, are still too small for major marketers. The research firm finds that these heavily-hyped apps currently make sense mainly for brands seeking male influencers.

In a study out today, Forrester finds that only 4% of U.S. online adults have ever used location-based mobile apps such as Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt. Only 1% update these services more than once per week. What's more, 84% of respondents said they are not familiar with such apps, leaving the vast majority of Americans online still in the dark about location-based apps, which have had the marketing world obsessing over them in recent months.

The report could also be a wake-up call for social media on mobile phones, especially when comparing the location services to the last social-media darling, Twitter. The micro-blogging service reports 35% of its 125 million registered users are in the U.S. and only a fraction of that number accesses Twitter via mobile. In April, Twitter said 37% of its usage comes via mobile clients. Apply that percentage to U.S. tweeters -- we must extrapolate because the company does not break out U.S. users via mobile specifically -- and the 16 million Americans using Twitter via mobile is about comparable to the location-apps audience in total.
Kudos to Forrester for being realistic. As one of the commentators on the piece says:

Wow - for once, Forrester isn't riding the social media bandwagon and it gets taken to the woodshed by the commenters.

Step back for a sec, take a breath, and look at it thru the lens of "I'm in a marketing organization with big sales goals but very very limited resources so where should i be prioritizing my investments?" and you might see that Forrester's recos on LBS are helpful.
This is quite interesting, because the usual pattern for the big research houses is to hype up the new new thing, so one wonders why Forresters (among all of them) have decided to puncture the Location Based Service bubble rather than run with it

(This is not to say that it won't one day be an order of maginitude larger, just not now - its too early)

Interesting article in New Scientist about digital anthropology providing the sort of data that will allow it to become a science:

Social scientists have long had to rely on crude questionnaires or interviews to gather data to test their theories; methods marred by reporting bias and small survey sizes. For decades, the field has been looked down upon by some as a poor cousin to the hard sciences. The digital age is changing all that - practically overnight, the study of human behaviour and social interactions has switched, from having virtually no hard data to drowning in the stuff. As a result, an entirely different approach to social science has emerged, and studies based on it are appearing with increasing frequency. The impact has been remarkable.

"The data revolution is here for social science," says Albert-László Barabási of Northeastern University in Boston. "For the first time, scientists have a chance to study what humans do in real time and in an objective way. It's going to fundamentally change all fields of science that deal with humans."
Barabasi, old hands may recall, was one of the early thinkers on Social Networking as a predictive science. what Malcolm Gladwell called the Tipping Point. Curiously, one of the experimeters looking at how this worked was a Gladwell critic, Duncan Watts:

To examine what made some songs more successful than others, Watts and Salganik created a project called Music Lab. It featured a website where more than 14,000 people listened to any of 48 songs by relatively unknown bands, rated them, and downloaded them if they wanted. These options provided a measure of quality (the average rating given) and popularity (the number or downloads). Crucially, the duo were also able to control whether listeners could see how many times other people had downloaded any particular song, or instead had to rely solely on their own judgement. In this way, they could effectively compare outcomes with the power of social influence turned on or off. They also grouped the socially influenced participants into eight independent "worlds" so that they could explore how the outcomes - the popularity rankings of the various tunes, based on downloads - might change if the tape of history could be rewound and run again.

The results strongly support the idea that human influence has a huge effect in making some songs more popular than others. This factor also makes it much harder to predict what will happen, and which songs will do well. The worlds in which social influence was operating had much higher inequality - with popular songs going up and unpopular songs going down to an even greater extent than in the worlds lacking social influence. With social influence turned on, song popularities fluctuated wildly between one world to the next. So, like it or not, it seems like many of us follow the herd.
As we pointed out at the time, Watt's attack on Gladwell was more about positioning that point of order. The article goes on to talk about an experiment that shows we have two natures - an investgative and a sheep like following nature, and the one tips over into the other in much the same way as other systems change state -

Onnela and Reed-Tsochas realised that analogous changes take place in Facebook, on which people share their profiles with their online friends. Facebook users can also choose to install applications - software components that personalise their Facebook page. If one person adopts an app, their friends are automatically notified, and they can also see the apps their friends are using. Facebook users also have access to a list of popular applications, akin to a best-sellers list.

.......

The data stored on Facebook makes it possible to analyse the growth in popularity of individual applications in unprecedented detail. Onnela and Reed-Tsochas analysed the popularity of several thousand applications in 2007, shortly after those apps were introduced, and then studied how other users adopted them over time. They looked to see if the sequence of adoptions for each app followed an essentially random pattern - indicating that each "adoption event" was independent of other previous adoptions - or whether previous adoptions by a participant's friends influenced the likelihood of their subsequent adoption of an app.

The results showed that both independent thinking and copying behaviour play a role, reinforcing conclusions reached by conventional survey methods. However, the study also indicated there are two very different processes in action. On the one hand, their analysis shows, at first, when a new app appears it is adopted by users independently of their friends' opinion. But if the popularity of an app crosses a threshold, its very popularity then seems to draw many people to adopt it, and its growth can become explosive. Just as Watts and Salganik found in their Music Lab experiment.

"We found very distinct regimes in which individual or collective behaviour dominates. The change from one to the other is a sharp on/off process," says Reed-Tsochas. They don't yet know whether tipping points of this kind might influence real-world processes beyond the web, such as shifts in political opinions or the popularity of books. "It's certainly possible," says Reed-Tsochas, "but we'll need to wait for equally good data in those areas to find out."
Others are looking at Twitter's ability to predict movie popularity

Huberman and his colleague Sitarum Asur wondered if it might be possible to do even better by exploiting the enormous volume of opinion expressed through social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Opinions voiced in these media, they reasoned, should have strong predictive power because they actually play a role in determining which films do well. "What gets discussed through these media often ends up setting trends," says Huberman.

In an attempt to mine these opinions, they studied the chatter on the microblogging site Twitter. They started from the supposition that movies that get talked about a lot - that generate a lot of buzz - should end up being more popular. To measure the buzz for each film, they looked at the rate at which it generated tweets immediately following its release. They used this as a predictor of the ultimate film sales.

The results show that the rate at which movie tweets were generated can provide accurate predictions of box-office revenue, more accurate even than the Hollywood Stock Exchange. In the end, predicting successful movies may only be of interest to film companies and investors. But Asur and Huberman reckon this is just the beginning, and that their technique should be able to predict social outcomes of many kinds. "When properly tapped, social media express a collective wisdom which can yield an extremely powerful and accurate indicator of future outcomes," says Asur.

Huberman says such analyses could soon help predict many other events, such as election outcomes, or quickly gauge public reactions to major events, just as long as we have evidence reflecting peoples' views on the relevant issue. "Twitter and texting in general were influential in the election of Barack Obama and some businesses are already analysing these kinds of data to assess the likely success of their products," says Huberman.
(Cass Business School's Dr Caroline Wiertz presented corollary findings at TEDxTUttle II, by the way). Anyway, what is emerging is something akin to Isaac Asimov's science of Psychohistory - we are all different, but en masse we are remarkably predictable:

It's the discovery of underlying patterns of this kind that has excited so many scientists. Given the undeniable complexity of individual human beings, it's not as if social science is going to become like physics, grounded in eternal and general laws, but access to data on human events makes it possible to identify the patterns that do exist and these can be useful for demystifying the social world.

Interesting times...........................

Fascinating - 3 Old Media Newspapers are the medium of choice for Afghanistan war wikileaks:

The huge cache of classified papers - described as one of the biggest leaks in US military history - was given to the New York Times, the Guardian and the German news magazine, Der Spiegel.
What is most interesting is why Wikileaks - a Web 2.0 User Generated Content site if there ever was one - chose Mainstream media as its organ of publication and dissemination rather than just getting it out there on the Web. If there is one thing this proves, it is that the role of the Olde Media is far from redundant. The deep throating may now be very 2.0, but the reporting is an interesting combination of Old Hacks drinking from New bottles.

(Update - there is a rather good debate going on in The Atlantic on what this all implies for Journalism)

As to the actual incidents themselves, there will no doubt be a lot of hand wringing from the self-declared sensitive types, but the more prosaic truth about these facts is that this sort of thing was ever thus (Allied exploits in WW2 do not make them out as angels at all, and just ask the average British tankie about US "friendly fire" in the Gulf Wars), its just its all come out in the open this time (A process that started in the Crimea, by the way).

And, no doubt Western generals everywhere will be worrying that they have to fight with one hand tied behind their backs while the enemy have no such limitations. But the more prosaic truth about the leaks is that this sort of leaking will become more common, and that governments and corporates everyhere will now redouble efforts to stop it.

That the best way to prevent corruption is to shine a light into the dark areas is very true, but it is also true that some areas ned to stay dark for the safety of those fighting on "our side". What will be interesting is to see how a "new contract" is formed between States and their people over the next 10 years or so - States will know the stuff wll come out, most of its citizens will realise a State sometimes has to do what it needs to. Ditto with Corporate malfeasance (where the "have to do what we have to do" carries less weight, methinks).

If I were to make a guess, its that most citizens already knew that War is a gory business, that Afghanistan was going far less well than the Governments claimed and the media reported it as going (The mediarati are going into overdrive today, but where were the investigative media before this, one wonders....) and that much of this is news, but not New news. It merely adds detail to already provable hypotheses.

Anyways, the Grauniad's page explaining the data is over here, and here is the Excel spreadsheet (They couldn't put it on Google Docs as it can't handle files that size)

PS - I loved this comment on Slashdot - pretty much sums up my view of the whole sorry episode:

According to the CIA World Fact Book: [cia.gov]

Population: 29,121,286
GDP (Per capita:) $800 (2009 est.)

So now, expenditure over six years (Jan 2004 - Dec 2009) is $300,000,000,000.00 divided by six is around $50,000,000,000.00 per year

Per capita is $1,716.96 or more than double the GDP per capita of the country!

I would think that the US would get better resultsif the money was simply given to each inhabitant, the $800 they already make plus $1,700 from the US, would triple the GDP per capita, no small feat.

Just smile for the camera and show that you have not handled explosives or fired guns in the last week (paraffin test) and you get your weekly expenditure; you don't show up for a week then you lose the privilege, i.e. you knew you couldn't pàss the test.

Who said "You Can Rent an Afghan But Never Buy One"? It would rent the whole lot of them for a long time!

News that Nokia is looking to replace it's CEO - WSJ:

The world's largest handset making is calling for a new CEO, sources told the Wall Street Journal on Monday. WSJ Corporate Bureau Chief Andrew Dowell and Dow Jones Newswires' Rob Armstrong join the Digits show to discuss possible successors to Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, and how heavily Nokia should focus on a new mobile software strategy.

............

While Nokia continues to sell more cellphones than any other manufacturer, it has failed to keep up with advances by such rivals as Apple Inc. and makers of smartphones running Google Inc. operating software.

The Espoo, Finland, company's failure to get back in the race has taken a toll. Its stock rose eight cents to $8.82 in 4 p.m. New York Stock Exchange trading Monday but is off nearly 42% since April 19.
This is a story that starts pre-iPhone - before this blog even started in 2007 we had done analysis showing Nokia was losing ground on usability of its handsets, and the tardiness of their response to the iPhone has been an indication that the corporate culture is unable to come to grips with the new smartphone market. There has been a few chairs shifted at the top, but we suspect more root and branch change to company culture is required* - a totally independent unit in another country perhaps?

Still, its not just Nokia that is struggling - news out today that 70% of iPhone users would buy a new iPhone, but only 20% of Android users will buy a new Android - the reason is also one of Nokia's main problems:

Google has to work with .... handset manufacturers who have their own agenda. Unfortunately that agenda very often conflicts with customer needs. Old habits die hard for this manufacturers who still insist on adding more crap to the phone and complicating them. The lesson that everyone should learn from Jobs is less is more. Less is more.
For "Handset manufacturers", replace with "Nokia".

*Removing a CEO is seldom enough to change the culture of a company, which is usually promulgated by senior middle managers proecting their own positions.

Yet another early Facebook stakeholder has crawled out the woodpile, this time claiming 50% of The Face Book - SAI:

The first transaction, which appears undisputed at this point, covers web-development work Mark was to perform for a Paul Ceglia company called StreetFax. No issue there.

The SECOND transaction (and this is the key part) calls for Paul to PURCHASE (yes, it says "purchase") a 50% interest in a project that Mark is already working on--an online yearbook for Harvard students known as "The Face Book". There are also penalties for late completion that increase this ownership percentage over time.

The reference to "The Face Book" transaction is repeated many times, in separate sections of the contract.

As SAI is quick to point out, there are a few things that need sorting first:

Where is the original contract (and has a judge seen it)?

The document we have all now seen appears to be an electronic copy of paper-based contract. Electronic documents are vastly easier to forge or doctor than paper-based documents. The first order of business, therefore, is for both parties to examine the original contract to assess whether it is genuine. This analysis will eventually likely include ink testing and other forensic analysis.

Why did Paul Ceglia wait 7 years to make this claim?

Facebook's vast value has hardly been a secret for the past few years. In 2007, Microsoft invested in the company at a valuation of $15 billion. It seems beyond bizarre that, if Paul Ceglia remembered this contract existed, he would wait until now to file this lawsuit. The most plausible explanation might be that he forgot about the contract and then stumbled upon it. But "why now?" would seem a simple and reasonable question for him to answer, especially in light of the fact that he and his wife were arrested for grand larceny last year for allegedly defrauding customers of his wood-pellet company. (That doesn't mean he's guilty of defrauding customers or that he's now trying to defraud Facebook, but it certainly makes this a reasonable question.)

Where is the payment-trail evidence?

If Paul Ceglia gave Mark Zuckerberg $1,000 to fund "The Face Book" in exchange for 50% ownership in the entity, there is presumably a simple payment trail we can follow that proves this. This would take the form of a canceled check, perhaps, or a wire transfer. It is presumably possible that Ceglia made the payment in cash, but this would be highly unusual, even for a payment this small (normally, when you make an investment in a company, you WANT a payment trail).

In other words it is pretty clear cut that we don't know enough yet to know if the document is genuine, never mind whether there is a case or not. Of course this hasn't stopped every TV and Blog lawyer (and non lawyers) jumping on the bandwagon.

However, two things that do make this curiously more credible:

(i) This is not the first time Mark Zuckerberg has paid other people who claimed similar, (in a strictly no-fault way you understand)

(ii) So far the strongest denial from Camp Zuckerberg has been that "I think we were quite sure that we did not sign a contract that says that they have any right to ownership over Facebook,"
Being non-lawyers and not on TV, as yet we refuse to prognosticate on the validity of the document. But on past form, we're offering 3/2 odds on a payoff

The Faebook Story - its somethin you just couldn't make up - no one would believe it!

Why Tech Equity analysts exaggerate more than anyone else

It has been clear for many years that the big New Tech analysis houses exaggerate the future impact of (sales, penetration, benefits etc) of new technologies (the Gartner Hype Curve was invented for the sector after all). The reason is also fairly well known - no one buys research from people who tell it like it is most likely to be, because then few business cases would fly, few VCs would invest and then where would we be.

We routinely divide Mobile industry projections by 2, as we know most will be reduced to this level 2 years later.

What I had never really understood though is why Tech Analysts from the Investment Banks were the most overoptimisitc in the dotcom boom (Henry Blodgett and Mary Meeker are the most infamous). An explanation from McKinsey shows why:

McKinsey research shows that equity analysts have been overoptimistic for the past quarter century: on average, their earnings-growth estimates—ranging from 10 to 12 percent annually, compared with actual growth of 6 percent—were almost 100 percent too high. Only in years of strong growth, such as 2003 to 2006, when actual earnings caught up with earlier predictions, do these forecasts hit the mark.

The capital markets, by contrast, have been more realistic: except during the 1999–2001 market bubble, actual price-to-earnings ratios were 25 percent lower than those implied by the forecasts of analysts.

So there you have it - Tech Analysts over hype, Equity Analysts are Overoptimistic, so Tech Equity Analysts...well, the 2x2 above explains it all

Researchers at the Northeastern University College of Computer and Information Sciences, along with researchers from Harvard Medical School, set out to determine how happy or sad Americans are at different times of the day and week by looking at happiness indices implied in Twts - NYT

Some of the results are more obvious than others. For example, during the workweek people are happier in the early morning and late evening, before and after the daily grind.

Researchers also observed interesting geographic results. People sending Twitter messages on the West Coast seem happier “in a pattern that is consistently three hours behind the East Coast.” Over all, judging from a video the researchers created, when Twitter users are upset, the most negative areas appear to be the middle of the country and the East Coast.

The research also found that people are much happier on weekends; the peak of happiness on Twitter is reached on Sunday mornings. The unhappiest moments are on Thursday evenings, before the last day of the workweek begins.

To visualize the data the research team created maps called cartograms, in which the sizes of states are based on the number of Twitter messages originating from them.
They looked at 300 million twts over a 3 year period. Overall report is over here

As the NYT notes, Twitter is becoming the Digital Anthropological equivalent of Rwanda and Uganda'a Gorillas and Chimpanzees.

Fred Wilson on RWW talking about premium privacy:

Wilson suggests that while large companies like Twitter, Facebook, Google and Yahoo could set a precedence for privacy, from an infrastructural outlook it is harder for them to roll back and scale permissions to their huge social graphs.

He says, "The challenge for large social networks is to undo permissions that they've already given. Meanwhile, a startup is at an advantage as they can build something from scratch that allows the user to predefine the data terms for sharing."

Our own Marshall Kirkpatrick has criticized a number of Facebook's privacy policy decisions, and Wilson echos this need for user education and control.

"When you reveal your specific location, it's very important that you have control over that... There are business opportunities in privacy-related services," Wilson says. "The challenge is to get someone [whether business or consumer] to pay $2-$10 dollars per month to ensure that sort of premium privacy."
Three very interesting implications which come out of this:

(i) There is an increasing opportunity to use privacy as a differentiator vs the existing SocNets - my own view is stronger than Fred's in that I think there will be a large backlash against the current privacy scrapers. You won't see it in massive user turnoff, more just the slow reduction in activity and people who still "live" on that site until it becomes an online Ghost Town.

(ii) Privacy potentially has a business model of its own, called pay-conomics - but how to get most people to pay $24 - $120 per annum is not easy. I thus suspect these services will have to offer more than simple social connectivity. Clearly location based gaming is one extra suit, but (in my view anyway) its possibly a fad, or (more likely) a feature that will be integrated into more comprehensve services.

(iii) Who will use Premium Privacy? In my view it will be the same outcome as Free to Air (Ad supported) TV - ie the people with money will opt for a No Ads / No Scrape service (thus removing the most valuable people the Ads / Scrapers want to target) while the remaining 80% get left to the mercy of crappy "Free to Scrape" SocNet services.

I await with interest to see which Private SocNet Fred winds up funding

A bit of holiday reading - John Brockman on the demise of the old literary intellectual and their replacement with...well, that's an interesting question and I'm not sure he has it right. I first read his book "The Third Culture" (in which he argued that there needs to be an intellectual culture that blends new thinking encompassing both science and liberal arts) some 15 years ago. In his view the traditional 20th Century "Intellectual" is intellectually redundant:

"Traditional American intellectuals are, in a sense, increasingly reactionary, and quite often proudly (and perversely) ignorant of many of the truly significant intellectual accomplishments of our time."
He is talking about the (often proud) ignorance of science and technology (and I wouldn't limit it to Americans either - in fact in his Third Culture he had a good go at European intellectual tradition as well). Observing the chattering class British disdain of science (still largely prevalent today), I was somewhat sceptical that a 3rd Cuture would come tofruition anytime soon. And waching the rise of pseudo-scientific hokum movements from creationism to ..... since then has made me even less convinced.

So who does he believe the New Intellectuals are? Well, if his own books are anything to go by, he has assempled all the "writers of books" that have a scientific bent (rather than scientists per se). Well, being a publisher, he would, wouldn't he?

Now don't get me wrong, I enjoy these sorts of writers hugely (Jared Diamond, Richard Dawkins, Jaron Lanier et al), but I do wonder if this is a bit akin to looking for lost keys under existing lamplights? Does being an Old Skool publisher lead to missing the point as much as an Olde Intellectuals does?

The one thing that has interested me is the last 5 years and the rise of the Blogosphere, where there has been a massive rise in people who, because they are not constrained by conventional limits, do cross these intelectual lines quite unconsciously and happily. The difficulty with the Blogosphere of course is that it is huge, chaotic mass and (as it gets easier and easier to use) increasingly polluted with pure cr*p so it is hard to find the good stuff at first.

But what has happened - big picture - is a rise of a very large volume of people putting new ideas together in new ways, so you ar awash with new thoughts. Let me give you an example - this week for the first time I heard of (and read a bit of the works of) Vaclav Smil (who also writes on the development of technology and energy over the last 100 years or so). Now here is the interesting thing (to me, anyway) - there was very little he has written that I didn't already know about by reading the blogs I do read in this space, and yet I had never heard of him - yet Bill Gates apparently hangs on his words.

The point I am making is that new ideas are now arising and disseminating in multiple channels, and the Blogosphere - distilled - is its own intellectual - as well as its own Hello! and Pseud's Corner and sheer Crap-o-Sphere (500 million people on Facebook and nothing on.....)

The problem going forward, in the arising tide of sheer noise that is the New Social Media, is finding them. The Web will need its John Brockman style publishers as much a Olde Media did.

Ooops - she's at it again! Every so often Danah Boyd does an analysis that brings un-PC differences to light in Social networks. This time its race (last time it was class...see here).

And, one suspects, this time (just as the last time) - she has exaggerrated it a tad for publicity (surely not because - you would no doubt be surprised to hear - there is a book to flog?) - GigaOM:

The book chapter is entitled “White Flight in Networked Publics? How Race and Class Shaped American Teen Engagement with MySpace and Facebook,” and is part of a book called Digital Race Anthology, which is being published later this year by Routledge Press. In it, Boyd describes how during her research in 2007, one teenaged interview subject named Kat said that she didn’t like MySpace any more because it was what she called “ghetto”:

It’s not really racist, but I guess you could say that. I’m not really into racism, but I think that MySpace is now more like ghetto or whatever.

Boyd says that this kind of comment in a number of interviews drove home the point that “Facebook went beyond simple consumer choice; it reflected a reproduction of social categories that exist in schools throughout the United States. Because race, ethnicity and socio-economic status shape social categories, the choice between MySpace and Facebook became racialized.” Later on, Boyd uses the metaphor referred to in her chapter’s title when she says that one way to understand the shift that teenagers appeared to make in 2007 from using MySpace to using Facebook is to see it “through the lens of white flight” — that is, the departure of white and middle-class residents from inner-city neighborhoods.

Digital White Flight, Ghettoisation, incipient racism, class and income inequality - marvellous stuff. Its a pity battered women and asylum seekers can't be shoehorned in too (wait for the 2nd Edition - Ed)

As GigaOm imples, (and this would be our hypothesis too), MySpace is a last-generation SocNet, and it was overtaken by a nerwer and better executed design, and also had a "last generation" user base - music fans etc - rather than Chatterati.

Facebook has also arguably done a far better job of monetizing and expanding its social network and its features, while MySpace has not had much success, despite repeated attempts to monetize its user base through the use of widgets and other features. Could it not be that one network prospered because it was just better, easier to use, offered better features and was better managed? And that the other has declined because it is ugly, the user interface is terrible, and all you can do is listen to small snippets of largely irritating music? Does it necessarily have to be driven by some kind of “white flight” from an online ghetto?

It was also bought by a large corporate just as the Next Generation hit the scene, so the ability to innovate was removed at a critical time.

Overall I like her stuff on privacy, but I think her stuff on web demographics is skewed because it looks too narrowly - I think two of the comments on the GigaOm page explained the bigger picture well - this one:

Can PhD’s (or microsoft employees) really be this dumb? Have they ever heard of something called the ‘network effect’? Or how about studying the reasons behind why Microsoft’s OS became even more dominant in PCs than Facebook is now in social media.

Or, acknowledge that Fox utterly mismanaged MySpace. Or…and maybe she was too busy to learn this, but there are ZERO BARRIERS to join Facebook.

This is embarrassing in its complete dumbness. (Not you, Matthew, but Doctor Boyd.)

Ignore the ad hominems, but the points about causes other than race or class are well made - and also this:

Facebook started as a university only social network, which yes may mean demographically more white people but I don’t think race is really a factor.

MySpace offered more customisation, music on member pages – but all in all a more chaotic experience. And it looked to school kids that as you went to university you grew up and onto Facebook. Kids always want to be more like adults, so when Facebook opened up – those that previously had to wait until they were 18 to join, could now do so at 15 or 16, and then younger.

Facebook was also the independent alternative to MySpace which has been owned by Murdoch’s Fox Interactive for quite a while. The individualism is what made MySpace different to Facebook – but that “individualism” was under massive corporate control. This meant removing copyrighted music from people’s profiles and more policing in general.

Even without the ability to share copyrighted music on MySpace profiles, it remained the place for musicians and bands to have their homepages. But since then MySpace has regressed as a music platform. They started having ads with audio (very annoying when you want to listen to the music by the band whose MySpace page you’re on) and more intrusive ads in general. It remained very difficult until quite recently to make a MySpace page look good with the customisation tools they offered. They didn’t offer good user tracking to bands. They didn’t introduce a DRM-free music store and allow the bands to sell their music quickly and easily. Basically they completely dropped the ball.

The fall of MySpace has little to do with race, and even little to do with Facebook except that they had a critical mass of users so were waiting in the wings to pick up the slack. MySpace just threw it all away and I would be surprised if it still existed in 5 years at all.

Incidentally, I read this week that Twitter has a more valuable/professional/dynamic/upmarket demographic than Facebook now....and (shock) its more MALE!

We eagerly await the cries that Twitter is a White Male bastion....

Have been tres busy this week, hence no posts - but the non-admission of a design error on the iPhone 4 by Apple this week has been very amusing, on a number of fronts:

Form f*cked Function

The Beautiful Device got in the way of efficient Antenna design, essentially allowing Antenna attenuation to be added to by a 100 - 220 lb soft bag of salt water. Not good (If, as may even be the case, it was because they had no wireless engineers, then this is even scarier.

Pride Goeth before a #FAIL

What us nore intereting is that they must - MUST (surely) - have seen this result in testing before launch, so it is interesting to speculate why the launched regardless - after all the evental sticking plaster (that would work too...) was hardly rocket science or costly, and yet the impact of such an error is surely huge compared to whatever benefits were gained by launching at the time

How to win friends and influence people the Apple Way

The attempt to recover essentialy by blaming the users for the way they held it, or for whining, or for being hundred pound saltbags was an..."interesting" strategy. It plays well to the fanbois, but outside of that sanctum less well methinks.

Thats 3 strikes in rapid succession - what does this say about what is going on within Apple, one wonders?

Anyway, policy in Broadstuff Towers is to be a laggardly Early Adopter - always wait 6 months while The Market (aka the suckers who buy early) irons out the bugs (and beside, the price usually drops too).

The poor form of "Wisdom of Crowds" Prediction markets and Performace Statistics

We have been reflecting on the poor performance of "Wisdom of Crowds" prediction markets and on historical Statistics to predict future occurrences, as shown in the chart above (see the original article here)

News reached Broadstuff Towers yesterday that a new, and better, prediction method has been found - an octopus:

The creature, known as Paul, has correctly chosen all of his German homeland's results so far. This time hie is predicting Spain vs Holland

With food in both boxes to attract Paul, it is then a matter of waiting until he opens one of them to determine his predicted winner. The eight-legged mystic has a perfect record at this tournament - and is said to have had an 80% success rate during Euro 2008.

Here he is on YouTube



I recall a test done many years ago - the Monkey Market Fund - where stocks were picked based on where monkeys were looking, and it outperformed the stock market average. Maybe ancient soothsayers had it right after all - who needs algorithms when you have entrails.

This being South Africa's World Cup, I am surprised that there have been no stories of the local sangomas divining the Footballl results.....

Update - And, of course, Spain won...........

Pew study of social media users' views on social media (full report here):

....a significant majority of technology experts and stakeholders participating in the fourth Future of the Internet survey say it improves social relations and will continue to do so through 2020.

Some 85% agreed with the statement:

"In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a positive force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future."

Some 14% agreed with the opposite statement, which posited:

"In 2020, when I look at the big picture and consider my personal friendships, marriage and other relationships, I see that the internet has mostly been a negative force on my social world. And this will only grow more true in the future."

Most of people who participated in the survey were effusive in their praise of the social connectivity already being leveraged globally online. They said humans' use of the internet's capabilities for communication -- for creating, cultivating, and continuing social relationships -- is undeniable. Many enthusiastically cited their personal experiences as examples, and several noted that they had met their spouse through internet-born interaction.
The underlying drivers are seen to be the lowering of the "friction" of communicating - cost, geographical barriers and time required to keep in contact with people.

The drawbacks perceived were....

Among the negatives noted by both groups of respondents: time spent online robs time from important face-to-face relationships; the internet fosters mostly shallow relationships; the act of leveraging the internet to engage in social connection exposes private information; the internet allows people to silo themselves, limiting their exposure to new ideas; and the internet is being used to engender intolerance.
So what's not to like?

One of the issues with all this is that the survey was done of "experts" and "stakeholders". Pew says that:

The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged Internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes

And if you read that detailed survey methodology (I do this sort of stuff for a living, these things interest me) and the list of famous Soc Med fans questioned, the worry is that the recipients are not neutrals. "By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample" says Pew. I'll say - read the respondents opinions over here.

Which begs the question of the whole point - never mind the veracity of - the study. It is clearly not useful as research, so what is the aim here? I have no objections to a "Delphi" technique (questioning experts to get their views), but ths isn't one, as the questions are pre-structured to derive a result, and the approach is not made very clear in the press release.

The worry I have with this sort of "research" is that tech journalists and bloggers will pick up on the press release without looking at how it was done, and if enough of them do that you get a distorted view of the market. Perish the thought that this may, in fact, be the aim (I see that GigaOm wasn't taken in....)

Been catching up this afternoon with what Eric Schmidt said at Actvate 2010 yesterday, its been reported in the Torygraph, Grauniad and El Reg (I am ignoring the twitterstream from now on - here's why). If you are interested in what will happen in the next 2 - 3 years then its worth catching up n as there are Googlefingers in so many pies, and the guy is no fool - maybe Evil, but no fool.

Schmidt said there were 3 big trends - the growth of mobile internet connectivity, the growth of cloud computing, and networking. To me those are two big trends - mobile and cloud - the other is an underlying architecture. I also think he is trying a 3 pot shuffle - to me, the three things that look like the 3 Big Trends in the Googleverse are Mobile, Cloud - and slipping past the Privacy/Trust issue in datamining. So, in reverse order:


Trusssst in Meeee

(From the Torygraph)

Schmidt says this enables them to deliver better-targeted ads - more lucrative for Google, more relevant and less annoying for you. However, it raises privacy issues, something for which Google has been criticised.

"I think the criticism is fine. I think criticism informs us, it makes us better. It doesn't bother me at all,” Schmidt says. However, he acknowledges the problem but says it’s a broader issue. "Those concerns are real - I'm not trying to move away from them. The fact of the matter is that if you're online all the time, computers are generating a lot of information about you. This is not a Google decision, this is a societal decision. In Britain, you all allow yourselves to be photographed on every street corner. Where are the riots?”

Google, Schmidt says, is kept in check by its customers and by the competition: “All of our testing indicates that the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with our policy. And this message is the message that nobody wants to hear so let me say it again: the reality is we make decisions based on what the average user tells us and we do check. And the reason that you should trust us is that if we were to violate that trust people would move immediately to someone else. We're very non-sticky so we have a very high interest in maintaining the trust of those users."

In other words trust the Wisdom Of The Crowds to know what is good for them. In that way you can fool most of the dumb b*star....er, People most of the time...... Sadly for Google, that does not apear to be the ay it is working - too many people who can't be fooled are taking too close an interest.


Mobile Internet

(From the Grauniad)

"Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology," Schmidt said. "The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them."

Asked what he thought of the future of newspapers, Schmidt said: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it's delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it's not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We'll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."

They will beat Apple by suing the Microsoft Gambit

"We don't have a plan to beat Apple, that's not how we operate," Schmidt says. "We're trying to do something different than Apple and the good news is that Apple is making that very easy."

"The difference between the Apple model and the Google model is easy to understand - they're completely different. The Google model is completely open. You can basically take the software - it's free - you can modify whatever you want, you can add any kind of app, you can build any kind of business model on top of it and you can add any kind of hardware. The Apple model is the inverse."


Except that when Microsoft played Apple they had all the App developers, and a good hardware distribution network - two things Google/Android is struggling with - as El Reg notes:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has convinced himself that the company killed its sold-direct-to-netizen Nexus One phone after less than six months because it was "so successful."

"The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did," Schmidt told The Telegraph, demonstrating just how far removed from reality his mind has become.
Microsoft never did direct sales. A lesson for Google there methinks. It is possible for them to win the "Microsoft" position in the mobile smart device market, but to do so - if Microsoft's lesson is anything to go buy - you have to have a large scale 3rd party distribution system (IBM, anyone?) and the lions share of the developers on your platform.



The Cloud

(From the ToryGraph)

This is about more than just selling people a new product, it’s about shaping a social change. Within three-to-five years, Schmidt says, we’ll be consuming almost all of our information online. We’ll do it, he adds, “on devices that are live not static. The characteristics of these devices are that they know who you are, they know where you are, they can play video and they carry memory."

To get a sense of the likely rate of change of the next three-to-five years, think back over the same period. Google has bought YouTube, launched Google Docs, taken leaps forward in mapping and expanded into mobile operating systems with Android and desktop operating systems with Chrome OS.

The Cloud is upon us! And yet, and yet...... every 10 years or so some company pops up with the (rather self serving) nostrum that The Cloud will rule. And all the Kings horses and all the Kings men spend PR money like water, but it dies down again as reality intrudes. Mr Schmidts says that:

"The internet is the most disruptive technology in history, even more than something like electricity, because it replaces scarcity with abundance, so that any business built on scarcity is completely upturned as it arrives there," Schmidt said. "You have to plan your corporate strategy around what the internet does."
Leaving aside whether or not the Internet is " the most disruptive technology in history", a lot of people think IP will be like electricity and other commodities, but consider the differences:

- There are no similar "economies of scale" for production infrastructure to justify massive centralised plants vs local production. This is seen in the (reluctant) admission by Cloudists that its benefit is not cost saving.

- The variabiity required in the end product is far higher (for now anyway), so the benefits of end product commoditisation are not as high and the complexity costs of its mass delivery are worse.

- Those who win from mass centralisation (Cloucd Co's) are not those who own the Transport infrastructure - objectives are not aligned. Witness the 'Net Neutrality bunfight.

- "There is no Plan B" if a Cloud based infrastructure goes down, at least in the forseeable future. Nobody with any form of risk will thus put all their eggs in its basket.

- There is not as much fungibility in the supply chain. Apple locks you in one way, Facebook another, etc etc. Imagine if your dishwasher would only work off one companies' electricity and your TV off anothers.
In other words, The Cloud ain't going to take over anytime soon. But then, Google knows that, which is why its not putting a lot of its resources into it - the main Googlegame is to try and wreck Microsoft's economics by giving it away for free. Which is, of course, why Microsoft has gone into Search with Bing.....

Rather interesting observation yesterday - I was busy with client work so couldn't attend the Grauniad Activate 2010 conference, so I dipped in (as is my wont) to the User Generated Twitterstream (#activate2010). At the same time there was a Guardian liveblog and a moderated Twitterstream from its Journalists was going on.

What was interesting to me was the massive degradation in the User Generated Twitterstream. Last year, and early this year, you could tune in to such Twitterstreams and get a fairly decent "user generated media" view of what was going on. The "User Generated" Activate Twitterstream yesterday was....well, "unhelpful" would put it mildly.

Key issues I spotted were that retweeting of content was far more focussed than before, but not in a good way - the main focus was on:

(i) Uncritical mass retweeting of "soundbite sayings" - "Kool aid" homilies etc

(ii) Similar mass retweeting of very dubious statistics, again totally uncritically.

(iii) In fact my impression overall is that the Twitterstream was becoming an "empty vessels making the most noise" mode of communication. The Retweeting seemed more about marking cyberterritory by pissing on the digital lamp-posts than actually communicating anything.

The disparity between the Twitterstream and the Grauniad "Journalist Generated" Liveblog and Twitterstream became more and more marked as the day wore on, leading me to ormulate two hypotheses for "User Generated Media" going forward:

(i) The "Citizen Reporter" on the twitterstream, who was a pretty reliable eyewitness 2007-9. is increasingly being drowned out by flacks, fanbois and noisy numpties. "Proper" mainstream media journalism again is becoming a far more trusted source. The age of "You Media" is over.

(ii) I eventually stopped watching the Twitterstream, setting up a temporary stream from a group of people whose views I trust that were there. In other words, the Twitter Signal to Noise ratio is gettng to the point where filtering the folksonomy by trusted source will be essential.

The obvious lesson for presenters from yesterday is that using mental bubblegum soundbites that send the twitternumpties into RT frenzy is a far more effective way of getting your message across than any reasoned argument. That was ever thus, true - but the only danger with this, I would argue from my reasoning above, is that over time it degrades to lowest common denominators sans moderation - a tragedy of the commoners, as it were. It will work like online advertising - you do it to get to the most influential people, but they are the first to avoid it - so you wind up banging your gong to the digital peasantry.

And on the way, the countless retweeting empty vessels toll the death bell for Citizen Journalism on Social Media platforms.

No what surprises me a lot about this post is that I wrote it! I'm no friend of the MSM, and a fan of the whole "2.0" thingy in general, but what this showed me is that, left to its own unfiltered devices, "User Generated" content is a lot like a the h3nry Sewer of Life - what you get out of it depends on what you put into it. And like that sewer, if what is being put in is a lot of crap.....

As an aside, it may also mean that the Good Stuff in future will be found behind Times style paywalls and what you get for free is increasingly Ad-peddled and raddled sh*t (as the Economist implies today - but the article is, newly, behind a paywall.....).

Prediction market Inkling's view on world Cup predictions

All the angst about England going out in the last 16 of the World Cup has me befuddled, as its exactly what was predicted statistically by its rankings over the last 18 months (Germany has been Top 4 on average, England nudging Top 8 ). Its the same old litany of English football - the British media overhypes the team above what the odds say is plausible, then there is the predictable and inevitable disappointment, the ritual sacrifice of the Manager, the FA Inquest, the Reports, the Burying Under The Carpet, the New Favourite Manager appointed to the hysterical plaudits of the Football press, and the same sad cycle again 2 years later.

(You may be able to lie with statistics, but its a lot easier without them ;-0 )

Anyway, it may be interesting to see what the Prediction Markets are saying about the Last 8. I looked at the Inklings market, mainly because its data is publically visible unlike Yahoo's much heralded Predictor (Note to Yahoo - putting stuff people pay for behind a wall is sensible, but free stuff????)

As you can see in the diagram above, the prediction market is fairly clear about Brazil's probability of winning, and about Spain's. The probabilities for Argentina v Germany and Uruguay v Ghana are far closer. Incidentally, FIFA results largely agree except they place Germany (6th ranked) above Argentina (7th ranked), and Spain (2nd ranked) way above them).

(erratum - I have Spain beating Argentina (FIFA prediction) whereas the Prediction Market has it the other way)

So, thats the prediction market view as of close of play today.....lets see how it turns out.

Update 1 - Holland beats Brazil, totally against the predictions

Update 2 - Uruguay beat Ghana in a very close game by a cynical handball stopping a certain goal. In Rugby that would be a penalty try, game to Ghana. Football is not a "sport", and its laws are an ass.

Update 3 - Germany hammers Argentina 4-0 against prediction

Update 4 - Spain narrowly beat Paraguay 1-0