Category: food for thought

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Random links from #Wired12

David Rowan and his team at Wired UK delivered a great event last week. The talks have all been documented here, I just want to add a few random links/ideas/things I gathered while in London:

Local projects
Here is a company reinventing the museum experience. They do truly amazing stuff. Latest projects (not yet on their site): a camera taking pictures of your face, and searching the artefacts that look like you (ex: make a weird smile, get directed to ancient masks). A giant image wall with everything the museum contains. Make a preselection using a touchscreen, send what you want to see to your tablet, let the tablet guide you through the museum to what you selected.

Homeless city guide
An old project I rediscovered (it was mentioned by a Lift speaker a few years ago): the Homeless City Guide. “To deliver vital information more effectively to the urban homeless— a decentralized population with little access to mobile technology—designers Emily Read and Chen Hsu revived the centuries-old language of the hobo code. The homeless can use this series of simple symbols to communicate with each other about safety, shelter, and free food by inscribing them with chalk on sidewalks, buildings, and other surfaces”. I wonder if this has been used.

Dérive ’urban exploration app’
An open source app to get lost in style in a city. As explained on Spontaneous Interventions: “Dérive is an application for getting lost. Designed by architect Eduardo Cachucho, Dérive deals users a task card detailing an action, such as ‘follow a couple,’ or ‘find a tree’. Users are dealt a new task card every three minutes, prompting an unplanned journey through the city”. Don’t search for the iTunes link, it’s a web app to be opened from your phone’s browser.

Kumaré
When an american-born Indian – Vikram Gandhi – turns himself into a fake guru. It’s not a borat like movie, he reveals his true identity at the end of the movie and doesn’t humiliate people who believed in him. Worth watching, coming out on iTunes on December 11.

MakeyMakey
An ingenious kit created by MIT Medialab students to turn anything into a keyboard.

Killing Mosquitoes With Laser Beams
Old news apparently (2010), I missed it. There is a TED talk about this technology. What’s also very interesting is Intellectual Ventures, the organization behind this idea. They are a bunch of hackers bringing ideas to the market, and inventing more stuff. This from their website:  “We work on the very beginning stages of nurturing an idea to prove that it can work and demonstrate its potential. Some of these originated here, others came from outside inventors we work with.”

Behance
A major site for creatives where they can show and share their portfolios. The vimeo of social networks, with lots of amazing stuff all around.

Hyperscore
A MIT app that turns anybody into a musician. Composing happens visually, using colors and shapes. I can’t test it as it’s on Windows, but apparently a nice tool.

Bullipedia
Ferran Adria – one of the best if not the best chef in the world – is releasing a database on food. Search for ingredients, see what goes with what, explore cooking techniques and flavors. Should be a great tool for cooks once it comes out, in a few days apparently.

Ginger.io
A platform to turn mobile data into health insights. It’s amazing what your phone knows, how much you move, how much time you are inactive, etc etc. “Healthcare providers and researchers can invite patients to install the Ginger.io mobile application on their phone. The mobile application runs in the background of the phone collecting passive (phone sensor) and active (patient-reported outcome) data. With patient consent, the data is securely displayed on a HIPAA-compliant web dashboard for healthcare providers and researchers.”

Better not make money to raise a round from VCs?

If you’re a startup looking to raise money, it’s better NOT to have revenues according to the Hipstamatic founders’ experience. This from an article telling the story of the Instagram competitor (well worth reading, it’s startup stories season these days after last week’s long article on diaspora):

“While startups with no revenue can often drum up seemingly arbitrarily high valuations, Hipstamatic was plagued by its own market success. Instagram had generated no revenue since it launched, yet sold at a market valuation of roughly $1 billion. Hipstamatic didn’t have the same ‘advantage’. [...] the self-funded startup pulled in $10 million last year, and was on track to more than double its revenue in 2012. “For us, raising money was always super awkward because we made money,” Buick says. “It fucked everything up and we’d get a different valuation. Like, ‘Oh you have numbers? Well, I’m going to put the X here and the Y here, and this is what you’re worth.’”

Link

The invisible rule of proportionate attention in online communication (and why social technologies are not magical)

4027006557_983abab28e_o.jpegI send a lot of emails. I post a lot of messages on my blog or on Facebook.

One thing I have noticed over the years: there is an invisible rule that seems to reign on the online world, regardless of the medium: the more care you put in a message, the more chance there is it generates an answer (email) or interaction (social networks).

Take email. When you send a newsletter, if you get 50% of people opening your message (as we do at Lift) you can be pretty satisfied. The industry standard is more around 20%. That is what you get for sending messages that have not been specifically written for the recipient. They feel that, and have no pressure to answer whatsoever as it has been sent to thousands of people.

In a typical one to one communication, answer rate is probably closer to 95% as long as you write to people you know, and who are at the same “level” than you.

Now for my editorial job at Lift, I get to invite pretty busy people as we try to convince them to join us for the conference. We don’t always succeed in having them, but at least I get around 80% of answers to my messages, positive or negative. I get this answering rate by carefully crafting my messages to make the recipient feel I value him or her, as I invest a lot of my time in reaching out. If I send a quick message, it is likely I will not get an answer. If I take time to research the person I am contacting, find out what their recent projects are, add a few personal sentences about the city they live in, the chances for a response get much higher.

My point here is that it seems that electronic communication is not totally deprived of context. When you talk to someone, your body language gives hints of how you feel, and influences the answers you get. In electronic form, these implicit messages can also be conveyed. I care about the discussion we’re having, I’m willing to invest time in reaching out to you. That matters.

I noticed the same happens on my blog and on Facebook. On the blog, articles where I simply pass a link (as I often do to set them aside for my personal archive) receive little feedback, while longer and more personal articles generate more comments. On Facebook, I have an even more tangible proof. For a long time, the Lift page was managed manually. I would replicate each article carefully, adding a custom message different from the title of the news I was pushing to the community. As soon as we installed an automatic app (RSS graffiti) to republish articles automatically, the number of interactions almost halved. It was the same content, but our followers felt we were not putting as much energy in the process of pushing the information to them. They felt less engaged, maybe less cared for, and the number of interactions dropped.

That’s why social technologies will never be magical. They promise us more personalized interactions with followers, as we know who they are. Truth is, mass updates will always have a different feeling from a message written specifically for a recipient. Nobody can escape the time consuming task of writing personal messages. And if you have 10’000 fans, that will take a while.

Generation Y vs Baby boomers

The tradition of western societies is that older generations always deny younger generation the right to their own culture and behaviors, in the name of things like “we worked harder than you ever will, our times were much harder”. Now what happens if things go the other way around, if the older generation leaves the younger folks with a world close to bankrupcy? Which way will the blame go?

Check this op-ed by David Brooks in the NYT, he nails it, and reflects on the challenges facing those graduating this year:

But, especially this year, one is conscious of the many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders. They enter a bad job market, the hangover from decades of excessive borrowing. They inherit a ruinous federal debt.

More important, their lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured.

Link

Evolution of empathy over a medical career

I recently watched Bridget Duffy’s talk at the GEL conference, where she presents her work as “Chief Empathy Officer”. She mentions at one point the evolution of doctor’s empathy over a career, and I find it pretty fascinating to see this key skill evolve with time. Doctors start by being idealistic, then lose empathy after their study, probably confronted with the reality of a job that can be tough, and where it is easy to treat people as numbers when you face the constraints of a modern health system. Then life kicks in and teaches a few lessons, bringing empathy back to the picture. Pretty much summarizes the evolution we all go through isn’t it?

The evolution of empathy over a medical career, and Bridget Duffy at GEL 2008.

Online, quality beats quantity

Online used to be a world of “the more the better”. Search engines would brag about indexing X zillion of pages, the race for LinkedIn contacts was raging between users, and even professional sites like Alibaba would base their communication on the fact they allowed to reach thousands of suppliers in one click.

For early adopters, every single piece of information published on the network was a small victory. Each page indexed by Altavista was one more step towards the society of information that we were trying to build.

This was the old world of megabytes. Not the world of 2011, measured in exabytes. Tons of information have now created noise when we increasingly need relevance. From a world whose problem was to add information, we now enter a world where the problem is to find which one can be ignored, hidden, or deleted. Let’s take the three examples again:

  • Do you really care if Google indexes one or two more billion pages? No, you care about the top 10 results. The challenge is not to index 90 million pages containing the word “bank”, it is to hide the 89.99M that are not relevant to the current context.
  • Users are coming back from the “more friends is more fun” mantra. I see people remove or hide friends, some now cap the number of contacts to a “few” hundred. But the key is advertising: once social advertising happens (whatever it’s form), more friends will likely mean more ads. “De-Friendization” will then accelerate. And what is the point anyway, when we all lost the followers race to Lady Gaga anyway ;)
  • If you have to find a supplier, would you rather have a lot of offers, or the right ones? Sites like needeo work with selected suppliers, not “all the world’s suppliers”, and in that case quality and trust will always beat quantity.

Another sign this trend is here to stay can be found in services like Path which, in their DNA, embed the fact that you can not keep in touch with more than 50 people. Also Beluga (acquired by Facebook), Brizzly, the trend is now to launch closed group apps, to capitalize on the fact that it will be easier to monetize systems based on quality relationships than on a lof of relationships. The data mining will be easier (less data to make sense of), the social ads will be more effective (users are more likely to click on a recommendation coming from a close friend than from an acquaintance), and it will be possible to create real trust between the users and the system, with no fear of privacy boundaries being crossed.

From a world of quantity, we now live in a world of quality. The key is not to have a lot of signals, but to have the right ones. Social networks make it possible as long as they don’t encourage us to have lots of friends, just the right ones. Do you now better understand the 75b$ valuations of Facebook?

Recreating serendipity in social networks

Social networks started on the past (classmates), moved to the present (Facebook), then the future (dopplr). Social networks used to be on people you knew (classmates), people you know more or less (Facebook), people you do not know (dating websites), they will soon also be about people you do not necessarily want to know.

At Lift Asia 09 we welcomed Jin-Ho Hur, CEO of Neowiz, a social network/gaming platform whose fundamental concept is that everybody can hide behind an avatar. Why? Because not knowing who the other users are is a feature! If you spend hours playing online games from the office, do you really want to share that with your network? And what about meeting people randomly like what happens at bars? This is not really covered by existing networks, hence the success of something like chatroulette that “generates one-on-one Webcam connections between you and another randomly chosen user” (NYT link).

I believe this is a trend, not only because it corresponds to a need, but because it is the only place where social networks can innovate under the current framework, where each positions itself along the past/present/future and friends/acquaintances/strangers dimensions.

Framework small

The red bubble is where we have the less players at the moment. I expect to see many new services in the coming months, reproducing a phenomena that is omnipresent in our lives but mostly absent of online life: serendipity.

The fact these services are used & created by teenagers is also not very surprising. After all this generation seems to have lost many of the opportunities we had to connect randomly: the arcades have been replaced by Playstations, the rave parties have been forbidden, dating happens online rather than in bars, etc etc.