Google has announced it is ending development on Wave, the cross-platform communication tool it launched with much fanfare at its I/O developer conference in May 2009.

Google said in a post last night that “Wave has not seen the adoption we would have liked” and that elements of Wave’s technology, including drag-and-drop and character-by-character live typing, are now as open source so users can “liberate their content from Wave”.

There will be plenty of coverage today reeling off lists of Google’s failures; Google Squared, Google Answers, Google Radio, Google Lively, Google Health, Google Notebook and Dodgeball among them. Those will be reliably dwarfed by Google’s successes. Our European perspective might make us more critical of failure than in the US, where it is more rightly regarded as an inevitable and positive sign of productivity and innovation.

Chief executive Eric Schmidt himself said of the Wave failure that it is just a symptom of trying things out. “Remember, we celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely OK to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that,” he told journalists late yesterday.

I tried Wave and never really figured it out but there is a need for something that brings all the various SM threads together for those of us tracking lots of social media profiles and sites, and something that offers email/ chat/ photos all in one tool for those of us who aren’t.

More importantly is the failure thing – launching these things and giving them the opportunity to fail must lie at the heart of Google’s success.

iPad users ‘are the selfish elite’, claims survey

By Daniel Bates

Are you wealthy, sophisticated and smart but don’t care about anybody else?

The chances are you own an iPad.

A survey has revealed the typical person who has bought Apple’s latest gadget is unkind and has little empathy for others.

They have been branded the ‘selfish elite’ by a poll of 20,000 consumers carried out by an American research company.

The £429 device has become the most desired gadget in Britain since its launch in May and 600,000 are expected to be sold before the end of the year.

But the next time you see someone sitting on a train smugly using theirs, take comfort from the fact they are probably not a nice person.

According to Tim Koelkebeck of MyType, which carried out the survey, iPad owners are are six times more likely to be ‘wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50-year-olds’.

They are self-centered workaholics with an overwhelming interest in business and finance who cherish ‘power and achievement’ and will not cross the street to help others, he added.

Mr Koelkebeck said that the high price was one reason why the iPad attracted such a specific clientele.

More…

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• Consumer help: My iPad buyer is a thief! (thisismoney.co.uk)

It also appeals to people who spend all day working in front of a computer screen and enjoy interacting with new technology.

In their free time they are so used to computers they want another screen to ensure continuity in their lives.

Apple’s iPad can be used to browse the internet, read books and watch TV shows

Apple founder Steve Jobs says it will revolutionise everything about our lives, from the way we travel to how we read books.

It sold out within hours of its launch in the UK and initial problems with the Wi-Fi connection have not diminished the relentless demand for the device, which costs up to £699 for better models.

Whilst those that own an iPad are uncaring and selfish go-getters, those who criticise the device are branded by the survey as ‘independent geeks’.

Attacking the device gives them an ‘identity statement’, said Mr Koelkebeck, that helps them cope with their own failings.

‘As a mainstream, closed-platform device whose major claim to fame is ease of use and sex appeal, the iPad is everything that they are not.’

Last week, it was ‘iDosing’ where our vulnerable youth were tripping out to repetitive beats on youtube (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1296282/I-dosing-How-teenagers… and this week it is slander of all iPad owners.

Just as irritating as the absurdity of their fear-mongering agenda is the use of research to support their claims.

OK, first off – a poll of 20,000 consumers? This is 20,000 users of MyType’s facebook community and that number is there to give us the impression of rigour. Despite MyType’s claims that the data has been normalised, it’s daft to suggest that this is a representative sample – it’s a sample of facebook users who completed a personality test, aged 13-59, 200 of which own an iPad.

Despite the author’s valiant attempts to defend the findings in the comments to his post, we need to take this with a massive pinch of salt.

We’re going to be doing something more rigorous.

(thanks @victoriajane)

Sleep is important for assimilating new information

A nap during the day improves the brain’s ability to absorb new information, US scientists claim.

Volunteers who slept for 90 minutes during the day did better at cognitive tests than those who were kept awake.

Results of the University of California at Berkeley study involving 39 healthy adults were presented at a conference.

A UK-based sleep expert said it was hard to separate the pure “memory boosting” effects of sleep from those of simply being less tired.

Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap Dr Matthew Walker, UC Berkeley

The wealth of study into the science of sleep in recent years has so far failed to come up with conclusive evidence as to the value of a quick “siesta” during the day.

The latest study suggests that the brain may need sleep to process short-term memories, creating “space” for new facts to be learned.

In their experiment, 39 healthy adults were given a hard learning task in the morning – with broadly similar results, before half of them were sent for their siesta.

When the tests were repeated, the nappers outperformed those who had carried on without sleep.

Checks on brain electrical activity suggested that this process might be happening in a sleep phase between deep sleep, and dreaming sleep, called stage 2 non-rapid eye movement sleep, when fact-based memories are moved from “temporary storage” in the brain’s hippocampus to another area called the pre-frontal cortex.

Brain ‘inbox’

Dr Matthew Walker, who led the study, reported at the AAAS conference in San Diego, said: “Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap.

“It’s as though the e-mail inbox in your hippocampus is full, and, until you sleep and clear out all those fact e-mails, you’re not going to receive any more mail.

“It’s just going to bounce until you sleep and move it into another folder.”

However, Professor Derk-Jan Dijk, the director of the Surrey Sleep Research Centre, said that there was no clear evidence that daytime napping offered a distinct advantage over sleeping just once over 24 hours.

“The sleep-wake cycle is not as rigid as we might think – we have the capability to sleep in different ways.”

He said that while the brain effect reported in the study might be spotted in a laboratory setting, the picture became more clouded in the “real world”.

“The size of these effects are much more difficult to assess – if I have to learn something, for example, it’s easier to do this when I’m feeling awake and alert than when I’m sleepy.”

We have a daft workplace culture that frown upon daytime napping. Among the many, many advantages of self employment is the opportunity, whenever I choose, to lay back, put my feet on my desk, shut my eyes and doze off. 10 minutes after waking up I’m ready to go again.

The perception that good management is closely linked to good measurement runs deep. How often do you hear these old saws repeated: “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count”; “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it”; “If you can’t measure it, it won’t happen”? We like these sayings because they’re comforting. The act of measurement provides security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost certainly have some control over it.

But however comforting it can be to stick with what we can measure, we run the risk of expunging something really important. What’s more, we won’t see what we’re missing because we don’t know what it is that we don’t know. By sticking simply to what we can measure, we come to imagine a small and constrained world in which we are prisoners of a “reality” that is in fact an edifice we’ve unknowingly constructed around ourselves.

The late 19th and early 20th century American pragmatist philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce was the first to point out that no new idea in the world was ever produced by inductive or deductive logic. Analyzing the past, crunching the existing numbers to produce the future can do nothing more than extrapolate the future from the past. So if you stick to measuring what you can already measure, you cannot create a future that is different than the past.

For that to work out at all well for any institution making its decisions on that extrapolation, the future needs to be remarkably similar to the past — or bad things start to happen. If an institution is all geared up for a future that is like the past and the future changes radically, then the institution becomes an anachronism, like a Motorola or GM.

Managers in this situation tend to blame forces beyond their control: “How could we have ever predicted such a change?” In some sense, they are absolutely right. They had no way at all of predicting change. Their core conception — “If you can’t measure it, it doesn’t count” — precludes them from demonstrating to themselves that the future will be anything but an extrapolation of the past. Note however, that it is a prison that they have built for themselves. They build it, lock themselves in a cell, throw away the key; and then complain about being unfairly locked in a prison cell.

We need to get away from all those old sayings about measurement and management, and in that spirit I’d like to propose a new wisdom: “If you can’t imagine it, you will never create it.” The future is about imagination, not measurement. To imagine a future, one has to look beyond the measurable variables, beyond what can be proven with past data. While Motorola was projecting future sales volumes of “feature phones,” Mike Lazaridis, founder of Research in Motion, was imagining what executive life would be like if you could receive your emails on a handheld device. How compelling would an ordinary phone be if you could have a BlackBerry attached to your belt? He couldn’t “prove” that this would be a good idea. There was no data on the demand patterns for smartphones, because smartphones existed only in his imagination. But a mere 11 years after the launch of the product of his imagination, RIM leads Motorola by an ever-accelerating margin in sales, market share and profitability.

Long ago, Peirce coined a term for the thinking that Lazaridis used to create the BlackBerry: abductive logic. He referred to it as “inference to the best explanation” and “a logical leap of the mind.” Lazaridis couldn’t prove that executives would become so addicted to his invention that it would acquire the nickname CrackBerry. But as he watched executives behave in their day-to-day work, he inferred that there was a good chance that they would highly value immediate access to their email regardless of whether they were at their desk or on the road. There was nothing to measure. What counted were inferences; inferences made on lots of qualitative insights and “a logical leap of the mind.”

The difference in the world of a Mike Lazaridis vs. the “if you can’t measure it…” executives is like day and night. For the abduction logician, the world is expansive and the possibilities are endless. For the measurement types, the world is a brutal place, full of nasty surprises that are impossible to predict. That is why any expression that starts with “if you can’t measure it” is dangerous for your managerial health.

Roger Martin is the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto in Canada and the author of The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Press, 2009). His website is: www.rogerlmartin.com

It can sometimes be difficult to explain why qualitative insights, based on fewer interviews without lots of percentages are the right approach. It takes a leap of faith. The data is open to interpretation. Some people love numbers.