Carlos Buitelaar

BuzzMe Equals Game Changer

2008-05-16T19:02:00.000-07:00

I want to share a moment of revelation that I experienced recently. It occurred earlier this week when I watched Robert Scoble’s interview with Ajay Madhok, CEO of Equals. In the demo embedded below Ajay describes a new product they will introduce in a few months – BuzzMe. I think its going to be a game changer.

The basic idea of BuzzMe is to optimize the use of existing communication channels by making the selection of said channels context and relationship dependent. The premise is the following:

We have and use a vast array of communication tools/ channels: voice, email, SMS, IM, etc. There is a time and place for each of these tools, but unfortunately sometimes we find ourselves making use of a channel at the wrong time/place.

We all communicate with many different individuals, and our relationships with each one is unique. We communicate differently with each person depending on the relationship we establish with them. For example, you might communicate differently to a colleague than to a friend or your boss. Furthermore, communication is also influenced by our context. Where are we, what are we doing, how busy we are – these all make a difference as to how we communicate.

BuzzMe is basically a virtual agent that will keep track of your context (via Google calendar or your tweets, for instance), analyze incoming communication, and determine the optimal communication channel for you to use given your current situation and your relationship with whoever is trying to reach you.

So let’s say you are at a meeting or conference. You probably don’t want to get calls, at least not from everyone. So BuzzMe will send the average Joe to your voicemail, but will transfer through really important people whose call you cannot miss.

Say you are driving and shouldn’t really be reading emails. BuzzMe will transcribe the email to voice and read it to you while in the car. Alternatively, you may be in a situation where you can’t pick up the phone, but would like to get voicemails transcribed into text and sent to your email.

Say you are abroad. The BuzzMe agent will forward calls to a local phone.

In short, BuzzMe will know who your friends are, will know what you are doing, and will be able to provide you the optimal communication channel based on these two things.

What they didn’t cover in the video is blogging as a communication channel. I think it plays well into what they are doing. I may for instance, want to respond to a comment from a prominent fellow blogger more promptly than to a comment from Anonymous. BuzzMe could adequately push comments to my attention based on that information.

In my opinion, part of the genius of this whole idea is the safety benefit inherent in the service. Sharing your phone number, arguably sensitive information, with the public is no longer an issue because you have the BuzzMe virtual agent to buffer you from anyone trying to reach you.

Translate this to social networks as I think will inevitably happen. With an agent in the middle to determine how your profile is viewed it doesn’t matter what kind of information you dump into the virtual abyss.

It’s almost as if thinking about this whole social networking space as walled gardens is incorrect or insufficient. The visual is not enough. If my identity or profile is like a garden then I don’t really care to wall it off, but I want to present it differently to whoever chooses to look in. I want a transforming garden. An agent like BuzzMe could help me do that – a gardener to customize my garden for each and every one of my visitors.

What I find interesting is the thought that perhaps Google, with its FriendConnect initiative, is looking to become this middleman. Facebook seems to be thinking they own the data/ profiles/ gardens. Wrong, the users do. Google, on the other hand, seems content with being the gardener. I think this will make all the difference.

I’m now ranting and this is too long. Thoughts?

New domain name

2008-05-16T17:17:00.000-07:00

My blog just underwent a major overhaul. It loaded too slowly and I was not too happy with its domain name. www.mymemestream.blogspot.com was simply too much. Also, as unlikely as it would be, I did not want someone else to buy my name’s url www.carlosbuitelaar.com. So I bought it through Google and transferred over my blog to it. This was simple enough. The problem here was getting my disqus comments back in synch with the blog. Jason at disqus was gracious enough to help me there. Thanks Jason and thanks disqus!

The RSS feed remains the same; too much of a hassle (for me and you) to have to deal with that at this point.

So having said that, lets test this baby out and see if this post will flow through to my tumblr, facebook, etc.

I Live Barefoot

2008-05-11T13:38:00.000-07:00

Typically I would not write about shoes. It’s just not my style. That makes today an exceptional day.

A few weeks ago I read this post by Dylan Tweney on Wired – Are your shoes killing your feet. The take away was basically that shoes are “messing up the perfectly-balanced, coordinated bipedal gait that our species evolved over millions of years.” No good. So a company called Tierra Plana is selling shoes by the brand of Vivo Barefoot that are essentially the closest thing to being barefoot. A piece came out as well on the New York Magazine.

So I decided to go check out these mystery shoes. Tierra Plana currently only has stores in two locations worldwide. So I guess it’s lucky that New York is one of them. The first time I dropped by their locale in Elizabeth street I was frustrated to find that they had sold out of their entire season stock a mere three days after the New York Magazine coverage came out. A second (larger) season stock was ordered. I went back yesterday to find that they were almost sold out again. I think I might have gotten the last green aqua model on size 12. This was lucky because they will not be receiving any more Vivo’s until next season in September. Production of the existing season cannot be renewed, or production of the upcoming season will be delayed.

The shoes are actually incredible. They are by far the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn. They are super light, flexible and, of coarse, have no heel support to mess up that perfectly evolved gait.

Apparently the heel support on shoes forces a slight bending of the knees, hips and back to regain a vertical posture. Without the heel support a body is naturally straight. Needless to say, this is better on a number of levels. And after walking in them for five minutes you can notice the difference.

The lady at the Tierra Plana store, who I’m assuming is the manager, mentioned that the company had relatively recently been bought out by Galahad Clark – of Clark shoes. In my opinion this was probably a good investment, particularly given the fact that I may not ever purchase any other casual shoe. The Vivo’s were designed by a tennis player to avoid all forms of ankle injury. So you can actually do any type of sport activity in them. I may not even purchase sport shoes anymore.

If you can, I’d suggest checking these out – probably in September when the new season comes out.

Targeting disqus

2008-05-07T09:21:00.000-07:00

I think Google should (and possibly already is) looking at disqus as an acquisition target.

Why? Well for one, I would be.

So Google just came out with a new development for their beta product Google Reader. Users can now include messages on the items they share. I’ve been sharing items for a little while and I really enjoy reading the news that my friends deem “important” enough to share. But sometimes sharing itself is not enough. Sometimes you want to include why you are sharing this particular piece of information or any insights you might have on the subject. So a great step forward for Google Reader.

This development really was the next logical step for Reader, and it should have been developed a lot earlier. We need more than just notes, we need conversation. According to Duncan Riley “The ability to have a discussion around shared feeds is still missing, but/ is being developed by Google.”

The importance lays in the fact that comment systems are arguably becoming more important than the actual blog posts they are built on. I had a brief comment/reply exchange with another blogger (PH Bradley) about this. He suggested that comment platforms, specifically disqus, were akin to parasites living off of blogging platforms. Bottom line, if parasites become powerful enough they kill their host which is how he was arguing in favor of a vertical integration upwards from a comment platform.

I think the parasite analogy is right on target, and it should be the natural evolution of things. Here you have Google who with two platforms, an RSS reader and a blogging platform, is trying to weave a social web between them. If done properly a better solution might be to simply acquire discuss and integrate it fully into blogger and Google Reader.

This would be in line with Google’s general strategy of acquiring early stage startups, and it would provide a much more robust social web based on its existing products.

As a user I think I would benefit from this. I’m already using Firefox’s disqus add-on to comment on blogs directly from Google Reader, however, it would all be much simpler if the comment platform were directly integrated in the first place.

Any thoughts?

Another thing that should be integrated are email platforms and virtual rooms. Take Gmail and Google Groups. I use both but wish I could just have a space within Gmail that would do version tracking of documents I share with my groups. Browser add-ons like Xoopit have taken the first steps, but a fully integrated virtual room within Gmail would be so nice to have.

Penn's Self-Assembling Robots

2008-05-02T11:07:00.000-07:00

Even though I have nothing to do with this project (I'm not even an engineer), stuff like this makes me proud of being a Penn Alumnus.

The danger of hidden variables

2008-04-22T16:37:00.000-07:00

So last week I traveled briefly to Johnson City, Kansas, population approximately 2,500. The place is the flattest I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been to the Netherlands so that is saying quite a lot. Unsurprisingly one thing they do very well over there is farming. I was given an in-depth tour of a small dairy farm (roughly 2500 cows) by the owner. The man has over 25 years of farming experience and owns vast parcels where he grows anything from wheat and corn to onions.

In any case, we were going around his dairy farm and the topic of biofuels came up. I’ve read in a number of places that the production of biofuel from corn and other animal feed is somewhat backwards given that calculations demonstrate that more energy is required to produce the fuel in the first place. Well this man, and I am of the opinion that he knows what he is talking about, explained that the production of biofuel from feed grains involves separating the starch from the oil and protein in the grain. The starch is used to produce the fuel, but he still uses the oil and protein to feed his cows. This last fact is quite important but according to him it is conveniently ignored in the aforementioned calculations. It’s important because the energy fed to the cows in the form of grain oil and protein is not included.

Granted, I can appreciate that this man may have a biased point of view, but then again he is the one in Kansas dealing with this on a day to day basis so he probably knows more about the subject than I do. The big lesson for me was that one must always take a step back and make sure all the variables are accounted for when dealing with these types of comparisons. Honestly, I thought I already knew this – astonishing those moments of rediscovery, no?

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Kudos to Rock Port...Rock Port?

2008-04-22T15:49:00.000-07:00

I’m feeling inspired now, and so I'm following up on my last few posts. Regardless of the skepticism of some of my friends I still think energy is headed towards free. According to Wired, it is the town of Rock Port, Missouri, “population 1,395 with a median income of $28,571, that are providing us with this glimpse into a piece of our renewable energy future.” Via wind turbines, they are producing more energy than what they consume. Again, the elimination of scarcity has to result in a virtual elimination of cost.

Another example is this team of volunteer engineers that created a low-cost wind turbine in Guatemala. Simply awesome.

Bottom line: I’d go long on wind energy; companies that produce turbines, parts for turbines, services for turbines, etc. And as soon as my year end bonus hits I may just do this.

Free for all

2008-04-10T11:27:00.000-07:00

A significant amount of discussion about the trend towards zero costs in the last few days.

Personal Data - Bryan Gardiner - Wired
Free Technology - Kevin Kelly - The Technium
Free Work - Justin Fox - Time
Free Software - Hugh MacLeod - Gaping Void
Free Software - Jeff Atwood - Coding Horror

One of my last blog posts was about energy’s trend towards zero.

The general response I got regarding that post was that I was flat out wrong. Maybe, but maybe not. I think that as renewable energy sources become ubiquitous energy costs may come close to zero [great renewable alternative here - via Inhabitat]. After all, at that point the marginal cost of production would be virtually zero (maintenance only). Maintenance costs may even reach zero if new self-fixing technologies [via Economist] pan out.

This all got me thinking about the socioeconomic implications of the hypothetical limit. I mean, the economy is an ecosystem of products and services – everything is intermingled. Drop the cost of one variable and the cost of many others are affected. This is particularly true if important inputs such as energy, but also (and progressively more so), if software costs approximate zero.

Think about it? What happens to the market as a whole? The market mechanism is based on prices; Prices are a proxy for scarcity and thus value. But what if prices drop to zero? Relative value still exists, but the market as it exists today cannot measure it.

Take that to the limit.
Company expenses drop to zero, revenues drop to zero, and wages drop to zero across the board… what do you have left? You have a gift economy? How does a gift economy work? How is relative value allocated? I think its an interesting mental exercise.

Where is Google going with Skype?

2008-04-02T08:55:00.000-07:00

There are rumors that Google is eyeing Skype. For Ebay, Skype did not work out. I think things might pan out differently for Google.

While it would certainly be very interesting if Google were planning to use Skype as its main voice application for Android-based phones, I don’t think the carriers would be happy about that. I frankly don’t know how that would work out.

Another cool thing Google could do is integrate Skype to Gmail. Perhaps this is where they are going with this thing?

There are a number of companies transcribing voicemail so that users can receive it as text in their email. Spinvox, for instance, just raised a lot of money to do just that. That is certainly cool, but what about transcribing your entire phone conversations so that you can go back and search through them in your inbox? That would be move valuable I think. And for Google it would be great. Google is, after all, primarily a search engine and by transcribing phone calls Google would effectively be creating yet another space for search.

And if you have that technology all ironed out you should be able to transcribe videos as well. Google already has the YouTube platform for video. So they should also be able to tie that back to Gmail and let people search, not only through a video’s tags and descriptions, but through its actual audio content.

Haplogroup R1b1(P25)

2008-03-25T12:57:00.000-07:00

I got my Genographic Y-chromosome study back. Turns out I belong to Haplogroup R1b1(P25).

Very briefly:

M168 (Genetic Adam) > M89 > M9 > M45 > M207 > M173 > M343
In other words, I am Y-chromosome v. 7.0

Below you can see the general direction that my ancestors took over a period of a few dozen thousand years.

My haplogroup seems to be among the more common in western European men. According to the Genographic project it is probably not the base Viking line as I had supposed. That said, this haplogroup can, thus far, only describe history until 30,000 years ago. And given that Vikings roamed roughly 1,500 years ago I would say that it’s still pretty likely that I share ancestry with the people of Odin.

What the study does say is that this haplogroup traces directly to Cro-Magnon man, famous for their cave paintings.

As suspected, my paternal line is very different from my maternal line; effectively heading in the opposite direction. Check out my maternal line here.

This just goes to show that ultimately the world is round, and no matter the general direction of your gene ancestry, it all comes back together. Round and round we go…

... when energy costs zero

2008-03-24T08:23:00.000-07:00

I was reflecting on energy costs on my way to work this morning. It’s no news that there is a strong economical drive against carbon based fuel sources and hundreds of players are working diligently to achieve a comparable, non-polluting, substitute. Perhaps the majority of heads are turned towards sustainable alternatives – mainly wind and sunlight.

My bet is one or many such solutions will pan out. The economical consequences? Well, these would be technologies reliant on inputs that are quasi-infinite. Practically speaking, there really is no shortage of wind or sunlight. Given this lack of scarcity, economic theory would suggest that prices of energy would drop… to zero essentially.

What does the world look like when energy costs are zeroed out? When cars and buildings no longer consume energy, but produce it? Case in point: Solar Paint - Inhabitat. Clearly everything immediately becomes cheaper. The energy required to produce your food is zeroed out, as is the energy input to everything else. But now the problem you come across is how to use an overabundant resource. You need to make sure you don’t burn out your grids after all. You need to prune the grid, metaphorically speaking. At this point shall we need to produce more?

Update:

Add water to the mix: Desalination- WorldChanging.

Telepathy is here!

2008-03-13T07:17:00.000-07:00

... well sort of.
This video is amazing. More info on this technology here.

My next post is going to be about Memory Palaces, something else I think technology can facilitate.

Walking down 2020

2008-03-10T19:40:00.000-07:00

When I was younger (probably in middle school) I thought the coolest job in the world would be to get paid to sit around and think of cool new things. I was not aware that this job actually existed, but law and behold, Jamais Cascio has it. I may need to have a word with my high school college-advisor.

Doesn’t that sound like a cool job? Futurist. Do you include that on your business card? In any case, I know he does more than just sit and think – probably does extensive research and a bunch of other things as well.

I read two articles that just loved today. The first one was precisely about an interview with Cascio. My favorite snippet:

The internet in 2020 will be “indistinguishable from the physical world. Everything and everyone you see around you will have a simultaneous physical and digital instantiations. You can think of it in terms of augmented reality with glasses or contact lenses.”

“So, 2020: We have our augmented reality system saying, "Hi, this is Alexis and I know him through XYZ." How do I get somewhere? A path pops up like a Google map. At a glance, I can see environmental information. Oh, it's raining? How much has it rained? What's the pollen count? What's the forecast? All of these bits and pieces of how we appreciate the world around us will be given greater specificity and made graspable.”

The second was a post on “The future of social networks” by Charlene Li.

“I believe that in the future, social networks will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be. And also, without that social context in our connected lives, we won’t really feel like we are truly living and alive, just as without sufficient air, we won’t really be able to breathe deeply.”

The “augmented reality with glasses or contact lenses” description got me thinking about such a future. However, I think that, more relevant than directions or environmental information (after all, I can sort of tell if it’s raining if I am walking outside), will be the information that can be derived from social graphs and used in a practical way and in real time.

For instance, you are walking down the street wearing your futuristic glasses. You see a restaurant you have not yet been to and automatically the glasses provide you with information about the ratings your social network has given the establishment, the dishes your friends liked the most, the name of the waitress you should ask for, etc. With a blink of an eye you dismiss the message and proceed to walk in.

Take it further -- All of a sudden you are dumbstruck by this gorgeous girl walking down the street. Your shirt picks up the acceleration in your palpitations and relays the information to your glasses. The glasses themselves notice the dilution of your pupils. Immediately the glasses search for any connection you might have with her. They pull up the information: there are two degrees of separation between the two of you. Furthermore, the girl has set her status as single. Your glasses make a note this and suggest a few approaches. 1) send her a digital message, 2) call up your contact to see if he/she can fix a meeting, 3) walk up and say hi. If you choose to pick the third option, your glasses will naturally be able to generate a creative ice-breaker with the optimal probability of success given the information available about the girl and how you present yourself under stress situations.

Third and final example (and I know I’m rambling at this point). You witness an accident; a man has just been run over. You are the closest witness -- information which is promptly relayed to the police. At the same time your glasses automatically transfer you to an emergency line where an operator explains what you should do in order to help the injured person.

I agree with Cascio; the future of the internet is an intermeshing with the real world. Something he didn’t mention in the interview, however, is the role of genetics in this future. I think genetic information is going to play a huge role. What comes to mind is the investment Google made in 23andme.

The benefits that the internet has on education are well understood, but I think genetic information may take it to a whole new level. Now I’m no biologist, but I wonder if genes can suggest what forms of learning are optimal for an individual. Am I more of a visual learner? What kind of contextual information suits me best? If genes can tell us this, then they will revolutionize education.

What if our futuristic glasses had access to our genetic information? Well, they could tell us what to eat or not to eat given our genes, our current metabolic state, and the food intake we have had in the past 24 hours.

Networks in Education

2008-03-06T19:08:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I was thinking about ways in which social networks fit into education. At University (I obtained a Bachelor of Science from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania) I used two intra-school networks: Blackboard and the Wharton proprietary Webcafe. Both are quite good, you can upload files, manage folders and e-classrooms, etc. Both nevertheless are pretty encapsulated – when you have an online discussion its only 30-50 people that participate. What if we had an open e-classroom?

Today I read about uProdigy and was reminded of my musings. uProdigy basically serves as an intermediary between offshore tutors and students in need of tutoring. They filter MA and PHD tutoring candidates and mediate the interaction between tutor and pupil.

I think this concept is fine, but it is time and labor intensive given that uProdigy has to evaluate candidates, test them, and supervise them. The result is probably a superior tutor base but, like I said, it comes at a cost.

My experience from University was that much of the learning comes from interaction you have with your own peers. After all, you spend much more time with them than with professors. Peers are a great source of knowledge; if you get a good study group together much learning can be done.

Taking this thought a little further – what if you could have a website, where you could upload your homework, and then people (friends or strangers) could come over and read your work, make changes directly on the website and send you a tracked version? People would appreciate the help, no? What if you could then rate the proofs that different people provide? What if this could lead to the creation of dialogues between students studying the same subject but on different sides of the country?

I think this would be a fantastic resource to have, especially while at University but also in High School. It would not be the same thing as a one-on-one online tutor, but with sufficient users it would still be able to provide assistance 24-7.

Morph Concept

2008-03-03T11:14:00.000-08:00

The future looks amazing!
Find more about this concept here.

ClaimID

2008-03-03T05:43:00.000-08:00

A friend just sent me this great email:

“I had the same idea you've had regarding VaultCo. I was researching it a few weeks ago and came across this site called ClaimID.”

ClaimID seems to have made some good first steps. It stores and manages login names and passwords to a number of sites. These are important aspects of one’s online identity, but there is much more to it. When I was dreaming up VaultCo. I was thinking about a site that would mirror and store, for instance, one’s Amazon recommendations and “Want List” and then have the capacity to hand down parts, or all of, this information to a third site depending on the permission level that the user wishes to provide this third site. Basically, it would be a site that would allow you to carry all your information with you – settings, preferences, want lists, recommendations, ratings, reviews, etc – and then let you use it when you come across a new website or when you want to grant a website you already use additional permission to your information.

If this already exists, please let me know.

VaultCo.

2008-03-02T14:41:00.000-08:00

Before Paypal was launched a lot of people stored a significant amount of financial information on a number of sites. This was risky and the great thing about Paypal was that it effectively eliminated much of this risk by vaulting personal financial information into one site/place. Then, when payments needed to be made, users simply provided sites with the necessary permission to access part of the information available in this vault -- Paypal.

I wonder if there is value in providing such a service for non-financial information. Enter fictional company “VaultCo.” A lot of information – passwords, usernames, preferences, settings, and other personal data – is currently scattered over many sites. I’m thinking about something like Explorer’s “Autocomplete” setting. I personally don’t use Autocomplete because I don’t think it’s safe. But what if, when signing up to a new website or web service, you could instead provide this new site with varying levels of permission to pull the necessary personal data from VaultCo – a website dedicated to managing the information permissions you grant to other websites. Not only would it be safer, it would also be much more convenient.

User content aggregators like FriendFeed have the potential to do just this. Right now they allow people to follow the online activity of friends. A very complimentary service would be to serve as a vault for personal information. In this way you could centralize all your info and track it. This would allow you to determine how and where the information is going by setting permission preferences as you see fit.

PC's vs. OS'?

2008-02-28T08:01:00.000-08:00

I just read this article on CNET.

Apparently, in an email (Page 153) from Brad Goldberg, General Manager of Microsoft's Windows Client Product Management Group, he states that “[Customers] are in the store buying a PC, not an OS.”

Matt Asay then goes on to comment the following:

I wonder if Mr. Goldberg appreciates both the truth and the difficulty inherent in his comment that consumers are looking for a PC, not an OS. To me, he could not more clearly state, "Windows is a commodity. The end of (our) world is near."

I have somewhat divergent opinions about this. On the one hand I do agree that Windows is progressively becoming commoditized. One of the main reasons, in my opinion, is competition. Compatibility has become much less of an issue. Furthermore, as applications get pulled out of personal hard drives and get hosted on the net, the capability differences between OS’ are diminished.

Generally speaking, competition leads to commoditization.

Nonetheless, I think that hardware will inevitably follow software in becoming hosted. We see this with hard drives and processors thus far. At some point, I imagine, most of a computer’s parts will actually reside in some central location. At that point the only thing people will have in their homes are user interface devices (a screen or something) and a connection to the net.

When this happens the choice consumers will face when at the store will be much simpler: “how big of a monitor do I want?” The rest of the hardware upgrading, I think, will be done automatically by the companies that provide users will all the online services used.

At this point the more important decision is: “what OS do I want to run?” Since everything will be hosted, switching between OS’ will be smooth and simple: simply cancel your subscription with one online OS and subscribe to another online OS.

Conclusion: OS’ are becoming commoditized true, but hardware is more of a commodity and as I argued above it could even become a utility. As such, I disagree with the “The end of (our) world is near" statement. In fact, I think the decision on what OS to run will actually become more important, not less. This should be seen as an opportunity.

Outbrain and Google Chatback

2008-02-26T16:24:00.000-08:00

Two new widgets have been added to the blog.
The first is the “Google Talk chatback badge” which sits under my pixilated picture and lets readers and random wanderers chat with me if I happen to be online.

The second is just awesome. It’s the Outbrain widget, which I discovered today, and allows readers to rate each of my posts -- Netflix style.

I love this second widget for a number of reasons. Sometimes it’s just cumbersome to write a full comment. Rating something from one to five simplifies the whole process so much. One click and you are done with it. Furthermore, rating is fun! No? I can also see this being helpful to me as I can gauge what users are more interested in, etc. I’m not necessarily saying I would change what I write about; after all, this is a blog about me. Still, its constructive criticism and I’m interested in getting it.

The next step – and we are probably not far from it – is for the data that Outbrain generates to be streamed into one of those “user content aggregators,” like Friendfeed, to begin parsing individual posts instead of whole blogs. Like Google Reader’s Shared Items taken to the next level.

Virtual Walls

2008-02-25T17:53:00.000-08:00

“Google Docs is Chock Full of Fail" is a comment that came out a few days ago in response to a blog post about the potential of Google apps. What’s most disagreeable to me is the fact that the commentator appears to be making much more of a personal attack instead of an argumentative response to the blogger.

I am of the opinion that Google Apps is the winning solution. As Vicente Fox stated in his autobiography: “If there is one thing that history teaches us, it is that walls do not work.” The Berlin wall, the Great Wall of China, and the Wailing Wall are all good examples. Microsoft Office is a walled garden, Google Apps is not.

True, Microsoft Office is more developed; it is more convenient for power users; it has functional shortcut key commands; etc. Google lacks much of this, but all of it can simply be copied from Microsoft – sans walls.

To me it seems that Microsoft will be the one hard pressed to replicate Google's collaboration advantages.

Ohh, also, Google Apps is free.

Free, open and online vs. expensive, closed and offline. It's only a matter of time.

Web Users - Customers and Owners

2008-02-25T17:52:00.000-08:00

Today I was reminded again of that quote from last week’s economist: “Citizens are not only the state’s customers; they are also its owners.” In a way, it seems to me that the government and many web services share this dichotomy in parallel. The value of many web services is generated, in one way or another, by the users themselves. As such, like the citizens and their government, web users are both customers and owners.

Yesterday I wrote about how, in the case of governments, taxation is circular as money is technically taken and given to and from the same group. Furthermore, I suggested that value is only generated by reducing expenses – by improving efficiencies. I think we can see the very same tendencies in web services; they manifest themselves in downward cost pressures. Many arguments can be made for why internet services are often free. A compelling one, I think, is that it is simply because it is users themselves that generate the value of these services; they are the owners; and it makes no sense to charge the owners.

I’m sure this is not a new idea. What I began wondering though, was whether the cost pressures that manifest themselves in online services would manifest themselves in the government. In other words, is the eventual inclination towards zero taxation? After all, the public sector generally lags behind the private one.

I can actually almost see this theoretical limit as a realistic possibility. The web is, after all, a tool to facilitate communication. Take the web’s capacity closer to its potential and it should have the ability to communicate and mobilize a collective for itself and by itself – a real democracy, no?

Label Cloud

2008-02-25T16:14:00.000-08:00

I meant to write this brief thank you yesterday but didn’t get around to it.
Blogger’s labeling system works so long as you don’t use too many different labels. I found that my list of labels was quickly becoming unmanageable.

Phydeaux3 provides the necessary code to customize a cloud labeling system into the Blogger HTML. You can find the code here. Thanks Phydeaux3.

My cloud now sits beneath my blog archive. I like the solution because it’s not only visually attractive, but also very functional – a quick snapshot about the general themes of the things I’ve written about.

e-government

2008-02-24T11:58:00.000-08:00

Been doing a little bit of catch-up reading today and I just finished last weeks special report on the Economist about e-government. The report covered and explained how the public sector lags behind the private one in the implementation and efficient use of technology and the internet. Same recurring themes – government has no competition, therefore has no incentives to do things properly and within budget.

Nevertheless, the adoption of technology, and particularly the internet, within governmental organizations is great news on many fronts. As the report mentions, the state using the internet comes hand in hand with the opening of governmental information to the masses. This is particularly important to developing countries plagued with corruption. Openness is perhaps the biggest deterrent to corruption and therefore a great incitement for development.

It was a welcome surprise to read about the progress that the municipal administration of DC has made. Apparently under Adrian Fenty, the new mayor, DC now benefits from a portal that provides citizens a wealth of access to state services. More importantly, in my opinion, the administration seems to understand the importance of efficiency. They are not trying to reinvent technology, as is often attempted by governmental offices, but instead use private solutions to accomplish their goals. Information is hosted remotely and word and data processing is done via Google’s free online applications. All these savings can now be used to invest in what really matters – equal opportunity – education, healthcare and public infrastructure.

It seems that the administration is now handing police iPhones, which apparently turn out to be a cheaper alternative to police radios. I would love to see the police beginning to use communication services like twitter to report incidents.

I think this is all a great message. Arguably the purpose of government is to maintain a standard of living. This requires resources, and resources can be extracted in two ways: more taxation or more efficiency. In business terms: increase revenues or decrease expenses. For a number of reasons, I suppose, greater emphasis is placed on the top line. The private sector needs to focus on both revenues and expenses, but I think the public sector should place a much greater emphasis on expenses. The reason for this is that any increase in governmental revenue (taxes) has a direct and inverse effect on public disposable income and therefore national investments. This relationship does not really exist in the private sector and therefore growing revenues indefinitely is generally seen as a virtuous goal.

In other words, as the economist puts it, “Citizens are not only the state’s customers; they are also its owners.” From a philosophical point of view, since cash taken from tax payers is ultimately spent on tax payers, an emphasis on top line is circular and thus much less important than one on expenses. Only by increasing efficiency (reducing expenses) do governments add value.

Once you begin to account for socio-economic differences within a population, however, people may argue that the above logic is faulty, or at least is incomplete in today’s reality.

In any case, it is my belief that all other things equal, in the long run the nations that grow the fastest are those that invest the most. To achieve greater levels of investment you require greater levels of disposable income. Consequently, it is the smaller more efficient governmental solutions that should triumph in the end.

Tumblr Songs on My Blog

2008-02-23T18:56:00.000-08:00

Easylistener stopped working for some reason. Fortunately, for the few of you that read this, I have found a great alternative. I will now be posting songs on my Tumblr site and they will be accessible on this blog via a little widget beneath the avatars.

Special thanks go to Fred Wilson and Daryn. A simple “tumblr songs on blog” query on Google ported me to a particular post of Fred’s, where Daryn pasted the code for this widget.

Thanks!

Cai Guo-Qiang Exhibit

2008-02-23T15:30:00.000-08:00

Earlier today I went to the Guggenheim to check out the “I want to believe” exhibit by Cai Guo-Qiang. A combination of montages and two dimensional paintings make up the exhibit, and it’s all quite unique. The pieces that stood out to me were:

- A recreation of life sized clay statues portraying the misery of Chinese peasants under the rule of a harsh warlord. What made this piece interesting was the fact that it wasn’t all about the final product. It couldn’t be, given that the work was a copy. Instead, the montage was about the process of creating these pieces – all of the statues were unfinished. The clay remained wet in some places, in others it was flaking. Other statues were nothing but a wood and metal skeleton waiting for clay to be put on top. In this way, it was as if this montage was celebrating the previous, original work of art.

- An egg shaped lamp made out of snakeskin with mirrors on top. What made this piece unique was that one could look up into the mirrors to observe live slithering snakes sitting at the bottom of the lamp.

- A collection of gunpowder based paintings. Qiang basically uses controlled explosions in conjunction with oil paint to create his pieces. The result is a set of amazing paintings that are unique not only in their “controlled violence,” but also in their very color and texture. Some paintings almost seemed scarred and blistered.