My travels

China and Hong Kong photos

Omnium China

Omnium China

China - a few more

blurb.com

I just have to share. I love this service for making photo books.

http://www.blurb.com/

And yes, they do ship to Germany/Switzerland/Hong Kong (and Canada, bien oui.)

One big, mashed-up, virtualized, deconstructed mundo

Mash ups

At Prive last night they played a unexpectedly fabulous mash-up of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" and Michael Jackson's "Beat It." Up until yesterday "mash-up" conjured for me images of Go Home Productions and Frank's on-line CBC Kids' project The Outlet which let's kids add to CBC video. I highly exposing children to the wonderful work the CBC kids group is doing with on-line content.

We learned that mash ups, like a Kinder surprise, add value by combining multiple web sites in one location (or by combining mixed media). Mash ups, lead by the Web Services revolution, do your heavy lifting - rather than creating your own breadcrumb trail of sites (wikipedia to google to zillow.com to zoominfo.com), mash ups consolidate related information into a single location. In the case of mash ups for personal information, contentious privacy issues are raised (I refer you to Sheerin's point of view and provide a link to the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic.)

Amazon.com presents a case to watch on a company "opening up the store" - deconstructing and outsourcing their technology to individuals to set up mini, specialized storefronts to sell Amazon inventory on commission. Why? It allows for broader coverage (take the Finnish Bookstore example), lends micro credibility, and is giving them the chance to take a run at eBay. Risks are mitigated by agreements and the ability of Amazon to pull the plug on someone's business.

Will you dare to carve up and farm out pieces of your business? It's a blue ocean few have entered. Keep an eye out for it.

Virtual Worlds

Who ever would have guessed that a World of Warcraft Widow would have seen her nemesis appear in an MBA class? In fairness, Frank's WoW ambitions distracted him from pestering his hard-working MBA roommate (so WoW has its benefits), and he made level 60 in seemingly good time.

So virtual worlds, eh? An alternate universe to explore marketing, ecommerce, customer research with little overhead. An opportunity for Four Seasons within Second Life? Maybe to recruit, design room mockups, showcase new properties? Unlikely. Where's the policing, where's the brand management - are our target audience really lurking in Second Life? Probably not yet. Would you find the right type of employee - social, tactile "people-people" - in a virtual world? Hard to imagine. There's also the consideration of fulfillment of customer demand and preferences - just because buy the bling bling in Second Life will that translate to the real world? It may just be enough to fulfill desires in the alternate universe.

That said, one thing the class has taught - be careful when you naysay...

And finally, a note about process

You think the product is cool? Reconsider the impact the product (e.g. digital cameras) has on the process (photography).

The river flows both ways - how does the disruptive technology impact the larger process? Look at the larger process - how much value is added/detracted from current iterations? By modifying the process, how can you create value for customers and yourself?

This one's for you, Jens

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Did it help?

Posts that contain Machine Tools per day for the last 30 days.

An inkling about prediction markets

Inkling provides prediction market solutions.

Thank you, Steffen, for posting the YouTube explanations about prediction markets.

5 Disruptive Technologies to Watch

• Radio frequency identification
• Web services
• Server virtualization
• Graphics processing
• Mobile security
  

http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=196800208

Disruption leads to "Aha"

If there's one thing we are hearing repeatedly, overtly and interlaced, it is that resting on your achievements, no matter how impressive and lucrative, will cost you in the long run. Oftentimes innovation is borne of simplifying or going downmarket with your existing practices, but doing so can go well beyond the comfort zone of many companies. Unfortunately, cultivating these radical departures -- these disruptive technologies -- is difficult for companies to do in house while simultaneously investing in the status quo, largely because the two efforts are fundamentally at odds and consequently provoke internal conflict. This can be resolved by moving the disruptive efforts out of house and researching the collective intelligence of larger world.

Speaking of collective intelligence.....

Google trends can help you get a sense of the "buzz", especially when you search strategic word combinations, like "iphone" and "3G". iPhone users were searching for information on a good 6 months before Apple officially announced it.

To facilitate these strategic searches, O'Reilly Radar has a good track record of anticipating disruptive technologies. While somewhat long, I think their own words describe what they are about well:

At O'Reilly, a big part of our business is paying attention to what's new and interesting in the world of technology. We have a pretty good record at having anticipated some of the big technology developments in recent history. For instance, we launched the first commercial Web site, GNN, in 1993; we organized the meeting at which the term "open source" was first adopted; we were early investors in Blogger, which helped launch the blogging revolution; and more recently, our Web 2.0 conference launched a world-wide meme. We call this predictive sense the "O'Reilly Radar." And while we're certainly not always right, we are, at least, good at making interesting guesses.

Our methodology is simple: we draw from the wisdom of the alpha geeks in our midst, paying attention to what's interesting to them, amplifying these weak signals, and seeing where they fit into the innovation ecology. Add to that the original research conducted by our Research team, and you start to get a good picture of what the technology world is thinking about. What books are people just now starting to buy, and which are falling off in interest? Which tech-related Google AdWords are rising or falling in price? What can we learn from predictive markets tracking tech trends? What do help-wanted ads tell us about technology adoption?

Even more invasive than google trends (which may be a good or bad thing, depending on how you see it) is technorati which searches blogs for key words. With Four Seasons hotels' focus on spa, I checked out the activity on "spa". English posts that contain Spa per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!
Unfortunately I was unable to pull 180 days.

I leave you with this final thought - if the following were disruptive technologies, which would you invest in?
The battle of the starlets

Punch holes in the box (and I'm not talking FedEx....)

Always be on the lookout for disruptive technologies, both from internally and from your customers.

Customers are a significant source of creativity, and aggregating their inputs (collective intelligence) can translate to the bottom line. They are powerful because they aren't paid to love your product (or paid to hate it - another potential source of valuable information), and because they probably know it better than you. These users tend to come in 2 flavours: "creative", who use new and old versions of your products, often for uses unforeseen by the company (think of the Fedex box furniture maker);
and "lead" users who are reaching far ahead -- they push your product forward. They know your feature suite and want more.

Getting customers on board can be done by having consistent standards, freely (but controlled) sharing of information, and through (I love this) "Wabi Sabi", the beauty of imperfection which inspires the incentive to improve. But user involvement carries inherent risk. I think about Four Seasons, where we take such excrutiating care with every word, photograph and action that is expressed publicly on behalf of the brand. While we know our customers are loyal and do enjoy singing our praises, how do we control the brand messaging if we let customers have free and public reign of discussion groups, for example? It could be as innocuous as "When I stayed at Four Seasons Maui, I had the most amazing spa amenity in my room." What expectation does that set for other customers if this isn't standard practice?

As an extension of evaluating customer input, our groups had to evaluate a different scenario of customers adopting particular businesses. The tricky part is that group members, distributed throughout the room, could only communicate via Google docs. The learning from the process was far more fascinating than the business decisions:

1. Collaborative, real-time discussions must be moderated, structured, and when time is limited, divided and assigned.
2. Instant messaging for discussion should be kept separately from document creation.
3. It is challenging to control groupmates' actions and comments within the document.
4. We ran into a cross-cultural situation where the Europeans didn't appreciate a North American's irreverency with the assignment.
   

Investing tip
Companies in information assets - newspapers, radio, TV, etc. - will lose out to user groups unless they can figure out how to harness the public's energy profitably.

Bullets in Jerusalem straight through my heart

http://www.cbc.ca/world/story/2008/03/07/israel-shootings-cda.html

How to circumvent Chinese government's strangling of the Internet

Thanks to Steffen for posting the link to Tor, a free service that provides surfing anonynimity and would have allowed me to access highly contentious sites like, oh, wikipedia, while in China.

FYI, the Onto domain is still available....

Herding Cats

The never-ending quest to manage knowledge collectively. An effort as effortless as trying to herd cats.

Our class learned the challenges of knowledge management (the knowledge cycle has too much breakage) and the beauty of Google docs and viral marketing. I was pleased to see the promotion of on-line, real-time document sharing touted as the current best solution for thought sharing as I have been actively promoting it at Four Seasons for sharing between us and ourselves.

• Google docs is the newer version of Google groups. No need to go backwards. There is also a corporate version of Google docs that may be worth investigating.
  
• Risks:
  
• Google's hardware might crash (make sure we back up once per week)
• Privacy considerations (not the same as using internal tools). However, remember that most IT fraud is done internally.
  
• Data is crawled for key words - for future advertising use
  

• Companies like viral marketing because
• To connect relationships between individuals
• Invitations from known sources are more effective
• Puts the burden on customers to market

• What Google has to gain from freeware:
• Weakens competition (pulls users away from traditional software)
• Advertising revenue
• Data mining from profiles, email keywords - Google is invasive!
• Selling of web 2.0 services ($200m US stream... currently)

• Suggestions for Wikis as used by the big players:
• Twiki
• Confluence
• Mediawiki
  

If you don't want Google to know your every move, use IE to log into gmail and google docs, but do your surfing on FF. This creates a firewall that prevents Google knowing what HongKongLexy does on line. (Heaven forbid they discover I'm an impatient closet Corrie fan who nibbles on spoilers. Come to the dark side...)









The message about old-school knowledge management is that it requires to much downstream decision-making. Effective knowledge management requires the distribution of decision making.


TechnoTips

• •You can download videos from YouTube – you need FF; download “download helper” www.downloadhelper.net – you also need to download the flv player 1.33

• •Why Wikipedia works: Purists will argue that the data in wikipedia is unreliable; however, the reality is that most of the knowledge we rely on to operate in the world doesn’t have to be 100% accurate – we can operate highly effective if we have reasonably reliable but not 100% reliable data – Wikipedia is a great starting point

• •Wikipedia is used 200X more on-line than Britannica

• •Wiki tread carefully. Sharing with customers has risks
• Customers can change your web pages – they may post things that do not reflect the corporation
• •Employees could post something that contradicts the company position
• What you shouldn’t post on a company blog/wiki (for the wiki guidelines):

  •No financials

  •No product road map

  •No negative comments about customers (or company)

Who needs economists anyway?

Technology Innovation - loving it!

One of our first lessons: you don't need an infinite number of buyers and sellers to predict the market price. Simply research a few vendors for a given product and you will get a sense quickly of good value (i.e. a reasonable price). Educated consumers do this instinctively. Oh yeah - and don't rely on free batteries that come with cheap electronics.

We were introduced to our first Asus eee pc, a scrappy little anti-establishment mascot providing computing essentials in a durable package at < $300 CAD. It has no hard disk, is customer-centric (boots up quickly, strips out unnecessary "noise" but can be extended), and uses open source software (Linux) while also being Windows-friendly. And I have a soft spot for Asus because they use GF AgieCharmilles machine tools.


Takeaways:

• Disruptive technologies, like Asus, can change the market place, but it's not enough just to create a new technology and ride it out. You have to consider the reactions from competitors, partners and customers, and how to leverage these players.
  

• Good management can be the antithesis of innovation because:

• It relies on "knowledgeable experts" who perhaps can't see beyond their boundaries. Makes you think - what are we saying today about the future? Can we challenge these assumptions?
• Groupthink - we like to agree with each other; opposing views get internalized.
• Market research - believing is seeing?
  

Fun and folly of Prediction Markets

© NewsFutures

Yikes.

Still wrapping my head around this prediction market thing, but I think I'm getting it.

What are predictor markets?

A predictor market, such as newsfutures, allows individuals the opportunity to trade shares on the probability of certain outcomes - everything from NHL games, to election results, to financial markets.

How does it work?
You purchase and sell shares in an event based on your prediction of its likelihood. For example, if you are willing to buy a share for $85 that will return $100 if you're right and $0 if you're wrong, you are saying you are 85% certain of its probability.

This may explain what I have been doing wrong. I really screwed up the Red Wings/Blues prediction because I was betting in the opposite market (against the Blues winning rather than for the Red Wings) and bought high and sold low. What a dork.

Why would you do this?

The dollar value people put on an outcome gives you an idea of the probability of an event, and it has proven more accurate than polls or really any other measure. HP used this internally for predicting sales on printers, with success.

A market represents the free exchange of information. People make independent predictions without undue influence.

Min # of people to make a prediction market work?

About 12. Any fewer, resolve in a conference call.

How do you get it to work in a company?

Hire newsfutures (that's how they make money).
Incent with public recognition to the person who predicts most accurately.

How can this work at Four Seasons?

Viability of advertising campaigns, web site functionality, market predictions....

•

The sublimity of togetherness

Here's one for the NCCPP - turns out the collective outperforms the individual. In terms of knowledge, at least.

One jar of jellybeans of unknown quantity, 24 intelligent EMBAers taking their best guess. Guesses ranged from 153 to 260, with an average of 191.5. The correct answer? 196 (bah, I underguessed by 2). The lesson? That a collective effort towards the solving of a problem synthesizes different ways of looking at the same issue - that is, everyone brings their own theory to the the table. This aggregation of knowledge tends to produce results that are more accurate than those done by individual "experts".

So I asked the question: could we have been influenced by the prior guesses of our classmates? After all, each guess was public and sequential. Sure enough, it's a risk that your data will be skewed if knowledge is NOT independent.

How to take advantage?

• Leverage web searching and the power of Google's ability to draw relationships through search engine optimization - this is harnessed not just through effective meta tags within your site, but also by having other sites link to yours.
  

• Use Google trends to measure the popularity and likelihood of outcomes through search activity. Or you could use the clearly much better named Alexa.com for the same purpose.

• Analysis of email flows can identify which individuals are communications gatekeepers.

Geez. There is so much we can do.

Note to self re: minute taking - we should have done the note taking from the Entropy meeting using Google docs and collaborated on the fly.