For this he has moved to the City of London, its financial district and tries to speak with as many (mostly anonymous) insiders as he can find. And apparently quite a lot are willing to talk to him. His pitch to these people to appear on his blog is along the lines of “So you know bankers have a bad name, but you don’t see yourself as a bad person? Why don’t you explain why to me?”
This results in an interesting series of personal portraits of people who are active in the financial sector of London. One of the first things you notice, Luyendijk says in a Dutch television interview is that there is no such thing as the banker. These people all have very different jobs and personalities.
I personally find it very interesting to see what these people are doing (the insane working hours are the most baffling), but there are about 35 posts on the blog now and it’s not much more than a series of portraits yet. Luyendijk said one of the reasons he started this project is that he wants to start looking at the financial sector with a clean slate and wants to gather all kinds of information about it on the blog. This way any lay person can follow him in the journey of understanding the financial sector. This hasn’t happened that much yet, but he plans on continuing the blog for a long time (at least nine months) so I hope this will happen more in the future.
I think it’s a great initiative which will make us understand our own economy a but better and perhaps provide some insights in how the financial crisis came to be.
]]>
Click the image below for a larger version.
Click the image below for a larger version.
Finally. below, an animated short film, more on death than life but I think you can make up for yourself what it’s really about. Leave your thoughts in the comments.
I would advise to watch the film on Youtube, fullscreen and in hi-res.
]]>The Google +1 button was rolled out quite a long time before the launch of Google+. In March the +1 button appeared on the search engine results page. You could click it … and it would turn blue. Awesome.
After a couple of clicks you would feel a little bit like a laboratory rat who needs to press a button in its cage to receive food or any other reward, except there’s no reward.
So after some time, in June Google made it possible to embed this button on your website. So the button was now doing nothing on an ever increasing number of places on the web. Later Google optimized the button so it would do nothing three times faster. That’s some high quality engineering for you.
Now the next phase in the social experiment in which we are all part has apparently started, because the button now shares whichever page you click it on on Google+. You can select what circles you want to share it with and can write some explanatory remarks. You basically get the standard sharing window you also see on Google+. Try it out with the live example below (and thanks for sharing).
If you just click the button once it will be stored on your +1 tab on your profile. You can see mine here. You need to go to your own profile and click Edit profile and select “Show this tab on your profile” to make this available. If you also want to share it in your stream you also need to click “Share on Google+” in the pop-up below the button. 
If a website has not yet added the +1 button to its pages, you can add it yourself. By saving a piece of code in a bookmark you can have the +1 button appear over any website. This is called a bookmarklet, a bookmark that doesn’t go to a page but summons some other function. It’s not hard to create the +1 button bookmarklet. I have tested it in Google Chrome and Firefox, but it will probably also work in other browsers. Just click and hold the link below and drag it to your bookmarks or bookmarks bar. Google +1
The button on the bookmarks bar of Chrome
After you click on a page a pop-up will appear in the top right with the +1 button. 
Chances are that you have been introduced to their basic ideas if you have followed any business or knowledge management courses. The book describes how a company can organize itself in such a way that it best maintains and develops the organizational knowledge in it. Now the term organizational knowledge may be somewhat misleading since the authors say that knowledge only exists within people. So this is in contrast to scholars who view the whole of an organization as more than the sum of the parts (the individuals).
So the organizational knowledge consists of all of the knowledge inside these individuals. Just the basics on knowledge: it only exist in people (written down you would call it information but this always leaves stuff out) and you could see knowledge as information with a purpose. You know things with a purpose. It is action oriented. You know how to use powerpoint, fix a car or prepare a meal. In an organization knowledge is a very special thing. It is what make the people great an therefore what makes the organization great. So you want to know how to improve the level of knowledge and also the usage of knowledge. You want to have it, make more of it and you want to use it properly.
Nonaka and Takeuchi differentiate between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is hard to put in words, hard to write down and is most of the times created by experience. This is for instance the knowledge of how to ride a bicycle or how to swim, but also how to fix an engine or cook something. Explicit knowledge is easier to formulate and transform into written form. This would be for instance the recipe needed for the meal or the manual of the engine you want to fix. These difference then are important for the way you can transfer this knowledge to others or store it.
This model describes how knowledge is transferred and conversed into a different form. There are four different activities for the two types of knowledge (tacit and explicit).
The SECI model
Socialization is the the conversion from tacit to tacit knowledge. Here multiple people are sharing knowledge by doing, giving examples showing their work. For instance a master builder and his apprentice.
Externalization happens when tacit knowledge is changed into explicit knowledge. Writing things you know down is an example of this. You understand there always is a loss of knowledge in this process because some things are not easily put into words (riding bikes).
Combination happens when explicit is brought into contact with other explicit knowledge as you would get in computer systems or with a information dashboard of a company.
Internalization is the transformation of explicit knowledge into tacit knowledge. This usually happens by learning something, from a book or a speech. This also requires practice and reflection.
The level of knowledge in an organization can than be increased by this process of knowledge conversion. Knowledge conversion does not take place within one person but needs multiple people having contact. This process is shown by the arrow in the image and is called the knowledge creation spiral. In this process new knowledge will be created.
To understand how this knowledge creation process takes place you only need to think of a brainstorm session for a new product as an example. Different people with different knowledge sets start talking, drawing and combining ideas. Out of this some new insights might arise that weren’t present in the organization. This new knowledge can also be taken in the spiral and dispersed throughout the organization.
The role of social software might be clear already from this setup. You might have even been thinking about it throughout this text. But then please remember the above theory originated in 1995. Obviously information systems had been around, but not as prolific as they currently are.
Social software which helps organization members connect with each other, ask questions, capture experiences and get to know each other can really facilitate in this process. Especially in companies where the geographical distribution increases people will have less contact. This will create silos in the company where knowledge will not be combined and therefore less knowledge will be created.
Social software in the enterprise can reduce the threshold for people to get into contact with each other. If people are not sitting next to each other they might not be inclined to share everything they do with others. They might not even know who to contact with a question or experience. When using social software people can talk about any issue or experience freely and anyone who is interested in their work can join in. Silos of knowledge can be broken and knowledge can be captured. This makes social software a great tool for companies who are interested in maintaining and increasing their organizational knowledge.
]]>
According to W. Chan Kim and Reneé Mauborgne (Amazon Affiliate link), there are two kinds of space. On the one hand there are the contested battlegrounds, the existing cake that needs to be divided. These are called red oceans. Red from the blood of all the fierce competition, as they dramatically state. The other kind are blue oceans. New markets with no competition yet.
When diversifying or starting a new business a manager has the choice between getting back into the fight with existing or new competitors or creating a new space with no competition yet. Obviously the creation of new markets is no new idea. Any radically new idea in our history has created a new market. The terminology of blue versus red oceans is new however and it creates the possibility for manager to make a choice and think outside of their current box.
The creation of new markets has always existed. You may think of the iPhone or personal computer, but new markets have been created since the invention of the wheel. Kim and Mauborgne use the example of Cirque du Soleil. The CEO, Guy Laliberté, could’ve tried to create a regular circus, but with more animals, more impressive juggling acts and even funnier clowns. With higher costs he would’ve created a little higher value. But he didn’t.
By creating a new space he avoided the cost/value connection. With lower costs (no animals for instance) he created a lot more value. He combined parts of the circus, parts of theater and ballet and created something totally new. Something uncontested.
When competing in red oceans you are trying to beat or match the competitors who is currently performing best. This means that even when you match them you will only become just as good as someone else. This is the same flaw that exists with benchmarking. A firm that is lead by benchmarking of competitors will only try to achieve to be just as good in a couple of years as the competitors are now. Not only is there no incentive to surpass a competitor on a certain road, firms will also not follow a whole new road altogether.
There is no doubt that there are many potential gains from creating a new space, free of competition and free of a value/cost trade-off. Then why do most managers spend their time on improving what they where doing yesterday and today? Are you improving little by little what you did yesterday or are you looking to make the leap into the next blue ocean?
There’s a lot that can be said about Google and its efforts to set up social media services or features. From Orkut to Wave and Buzz the results have varied from mediocre to miserable failure. Now Google has presented Google+, a place where multiple social features come together. Some highlights:
You can find more details on the Google+ website: http://www.google.com/+/ Wired has an excellent piece by Steven Levy who has walked around the + project for the past year an has more about the motivation of the project. The next quote is from this piece.
Vic Gundotra, Social VP of Google:“We’re transforming Google itself into a social destination at a level and scale that we’ve never attempted — orders of magnitude more investment, in terms of people, than any previous project.”
As always it’s now about execution and getting users. I have signed up to get a beta account so I’m very curious how this will continue. It looks like a more serious and better executed effort than the previous attempts and I expect it will get the support an effort it deserves.
Then my harddrive crashed and I bought a new laptop. So I didn’t really feel like gathering that music collection again, it needed to be updated and cleaned badly anyway. It was a great occasion to start using a streaming service full-time. Just before that Last.fm had announced you could not stream music any more for free. I wrote an article (only Dutch, sorry) on when I would pay for a service like Last.fm. My main objection was and is to Last.fm that you can not choose any music yourself but can just listen to a tag or keyword and have it stream a radio channel around that word.
Enter Spotify. It’s a great service with quite a large collection. You can search for an artist, album, genre or more specific things like labels or era and play that music. I just find the interface a little confusing here and there. There are quite some features I found out after a couple of weeks of usage such as how share stuff with your friends and how to save albums. You can only save playlists, not albums artists or anything else. So the closest thing you can get to an actual music collection in Spotify is saving some albums as a playlist. It would be nice to be able to add an album to your favorites or something and then have a nice overview of those albums a la iTunes.
All the features that made Last.fm great are a little bit lacking in Spotify. The ability to find music, share what you have listened to and just open a radio channel of a certain music genre or style are more or less there but really well executed. My profile shows what I have listened to for instance, but it seems to only list songs from the last week or month of play. You can still scrobble plays to Last.fm however (one of those things I only found out after a Google search). View my Last.fm profile here where my Spotify plays are listed.
After a couple of weeks of using Spotify I also discovered that you can select the “radio” of a certain artist. This shows you some related artists nicely but within 10 songs you’re listening to a whole other genre. One other thing is those playlists that everyone makes. They are real nice, but can not be found within Spotify. You need to go to a special website like Sharemyplaylists.com or Spotylist.com.
On the left you see my saved playlist, mainly for albums.
The deal used to be that you can use Spotify for free, for 20 hours per month. You receive some quite frequent and annoying audio commercial in between songs and ads in the player but I can just live with that. The 20 hour limit does not apply for Free subscription, but an invite is needed for that. Then for €5,- /m you get Spotify Unlimted which removes the time limit and commercials. For €10,- /m you get Spotify Premium which gives you unlimited songs in better audio quality, the use of a mobile app and the ability to download songs for offline use (can only be played with Spotify, so actually some kind of DRM play).
Now Spotify has announced that it will change the Open/Free plan. For the first 6 months it stays the same. After this you can listen for 10 hours/m and only listen to any song for 5 times /m. So in theory this seems like a lot less than what’s currently allowed.Especially for users with a Free account which have no time limit.
Will this nudge the large group of freeriding user into the paying category? It will cost only €5 /m to lift the time limit and get rid of the ads. While that’s not a lot there are many good alternatives available for free. On Twitter and in the comments below Spotify’s announcement there have been many reactions like “It’s been nice knowing you Spotify”. Spotify offers users a month of Premium subscription for free so that might be a good way to try that out. I know I will and then I will see what to do. No reason for to drop the service yet. How about you?
]]>Christopher Breen of Macworld.com has written a clear piece about this.
The most important point in it is that mobile phones don’t really need to be as good as the Flip to be able to push it out of the market, because convenience is also a factor. From a geek’s perspective the Flip is a cool device that falls in between a better digital videocamera and a mobile phone. But from a user’s point of view, why would you take a Flip if you already have a iPhone for all the ad hoc stuff while you bring a better camera when you know something worth filming is going to happen.
So as far as I’m concerned the fact that Cisco is stopping the Flip is not the remarkable thing, but the fact that they paid $590 million for Flip only two years ago is.
(The Flip isn’t selling that bad currently by the way. Some more interesting insight on why it’s not the fault of the iPhone and other smartphones the Flip died by David Pogue at NYTimes.com)
Some experts believe that looking at these screens is not just kind of boring, but also bad for our sleeping rhythm. You’re essentially looking into a lamp all day. We humans are used to only seeing light when the sun is up. When it gets darker melatonin is released in our body, telling our brain that it becomes time to sleep. When it never really gets dark our bodies never really prepare for sleep. That’s why it’s a good idea to give your eyes a rest before going to bed. Another common tip is to actually see some sunlight during the day, so go out during your break and get some daylight.
F.lux tries to help in this process. You install it on your computer and it adapts the color of the screen a little bit to match the time of day. So in the night it’s little darker and has a orange tint. Your eyes become used to it pretty soon.
I’m not sure if it actually works but your eyes feel more relaxed right away. Try it out. There are many satisfied users of this free software and it’s regularly recommended to me.
Check it out on http://stereopsis.com/flux/
]]>After a short comparison I went with Goodreads. Honestly only based on the number of people using it. I could not really compare on functionality because all the aforementioned apps claim similar features: track what you have read, want to read and what your friends are reading. So I guess the most important criterion for a Facebook app is how many friends and other people are using it.
I have to be honest and tell you that I actually don’t have a clue how Goodread or the other apps are doing what they claim. As always I am totally confused by Facebook and its structure. This leaves me with many questions after “installing” (allowing the app to access all your personal data) Goodreads. Can only people who are also using Goodreads see my books? Will a message be posted when I have read a book? Will it show on my profile that I am reading a book? I was even confused when trying to find out more information about these apps, because sometimes you’re on the “Page” of a service and sometimes you’re on the “app page” (which even more confusing has a “go to app” button)
Perhaps I need a Facebook app that can explain how Facebook works?
]]>