KK Lifestream

What can you give away?

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:06:14 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

This is the most powerful question in this book. You can approach this question in two ways: What is the closest you can come to making something free, without actually pricing it at zero? Or, in a true gesture of enlightened generosity, you can figure out how to part with something very valuable for no monetary return at all. If either strategy is pursued with intelligence, the result will be the same. The network will magnify the value of the gift. But giving something away is not usually easy. It must be the right gift, given in the proper context. To figure out what to give away, consider these questions:

Is the freebie more than a silly premium, like the toy in a cereal box? There is no power in the gift unless it is crucial to your business.
What virtuous circle will this freebie circulate in? Is it the loop you most need to amplify?
In the long run, the unbounded support of a customer is more valuable than a fixed amount of their money. How will you eventually capture the support of customers if there is initially no flow of money?

Every organization harbors at least one creation--or potential creation--that can be liberated into "freedom." This is often an idea with problems, particularly with its price: Should it be $69.50 per minute or $6.50 per box? The answer sometimes is: It should be free. Even if the idea is never actualized, my experience is that the very act of contemplating the free will inevitably illuminate all kinds of beneficial attributes that were never visible before. "Free" has long been a taboo price point. Perhaps because it has been forbidden, many low-hanging fruit are waiting to be plucked by giving the free serious consideration.

Releasing incomplete "buggy" products is not...

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:22:30 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

cost-cutting desperation; it is the shrewdest way to complete a product when your customers are smarter than you are.

The protocommercial state and the triumph of the commons is in ascendance. It is no coincidence that increasing numbers of internet companies take themselves public before they are profitable. Investors are purchasing shares in a firm with protocommercial value. The old guard reads this as a signal of greed, speculation, and hype. But it also signals that many of the components of the gift economy--attention, community, standards, and shared intelligence--have to be in place before cold-cash commercialization can kick in. The gift economy is a rehearsal for the radical dynamics of the network economy.

Tens of thousands of software programs...

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 19:06:13 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

...written for almost every imaginable use are available on the net for free. Called shareware, the model is simple. Download whatever software you want for free, try it out, and if you like it, send some money to the author. Dozens of entrepreneurs have made their million dollars selling goods by this protocommercial method. More and more, the triumph of the commons overrides orthodox business models.

As Stewart Brand says, the main event of the emerging World Wide Web is its current absence of a business model in the midst of astounding abundance. The gift economy is one way players in the net rehearse for a life of following the free and anticipating the cheap. This is also a way for entirely new business models to shake out. Furthermore the protocommercial stage is a way for innovation to fast-forward into hyperdrive. Temporarily unhinged from the constraints of having to make a profit by next quarter, the greater network can explore a universe of never-before-tried ideas. Some ideas will even survive the transplantation to a working business.

It's a rare (and foolish) software outfit these days that does not introduce its wares into the free economy as a beta version in some fashion. Fifty years ago the notion of releasing a product unfinished--with the intention that the users would help complete it--would have been considered either cowardly, cheap, or inept. But in the new regime, this precommercial stage is brave, prudent, and vital.

Victorinox Chef's Knife

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Originally posted in Cool Tools

A really great chef knife will be insanely sharp, yet retain its edge easily, and be well balanced and welcoming to hold. These days a decent high-grade chef knife can cost between $100-$200. Several cooking publications (including Cook's Illustrated) recently identified a bargain $27 chef knife that in their tests rated just about as good as the $100 plus knives. This is the one we use.

The Forschner Victorinox is a hybrid of a thin Japanese blade with its 15 degree edge (western knives have a 20 degree edge) but with the longer, broader blade of European knives. It is lightweight, nicely balanced, and lethally sharp. It has a comfortable very grippy handle that won't slip even when wet. We have 5 cooks at our household and this is the knife they all grab first. It may not be as super great as the chef knives previously reviewed, but for the $27 price it can't be beat.

-- KK

Forschner Victorinox Chef's Knife, 8 inch
$27

Available from Amazon

Talk of generosity...

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 15:02:08 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

...of information that wants to be free, and of virtual communities is often dismissed by businesspeople as youthful new age idealism. It may be idealistic but it is also the only sane way to launch a commercial economy in the emerging space. "The web's lack of an obvious business model right now is actually its main event," says Stewart Brand, of the Global Business Network.

When a sector of the new economy passes through the protocommercial phase, it is the opposite of the "tragedy of the commons." The tragedy of the commons was that nobody took responsibility for maintaining the communal pastures that were the livelihood for the entire community. In the follow-the-free economy that seems to precede commercial activity on the net, everyone keeps the commons up because nobody is able to make a living from it on their own. Sophisticated software, as good as anything you can purchase, is written, debugged, supported, and revised for free in this "triumph of the commons."

The most popular software used to run web sites is called Apache. It is not sold by Netscape, or Microsoft, or anyone. Apache, which has 47% of the server market (Microsoft has 22% and Netscape 10%), was written (and is maintained) by a network of volunteers. It is given away free. Apache, which is used by the developers of such commercial sites as McDonald's, keeps getting better because the triumph of the commons rewards a completely open product: Anyone has access to Apache's software source code and can improve it. "If you give everyone source code, everyone becomes your engineer," says John Gage, chief scientist at Sun Microsystems.

The most popular operating system for web server workstations is not sold by anyone. It is a product called Linux, a Unix-compatible program that was originally written by Linus Torvalds, and given away for free. In the manner of building medieval cathedrals, hundreds of software engineers volunteer their time and expertise to refine and improve Linux, and to keep it free. Beside Apache and Linux, there are many other free software suites, such as Perl and X-Windows, maintained by a network of programmers. The engineers don't get paid in money; rather they get better tools than they can buy, tools that can be easily tweaked by them for maximum performance, tools superior to what they can make alone, and tools that increase in network value, since they are given away.

The Geek Atlas

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Originally posted in Cool Tools

I am always looking for offbeat educational places to visit on my travels. The Geek Atlas has rounded up 128 great candidates from around the world. The Atlas calls them "places where science and technology come alive." I think of these destinations as places that make you think. The possibilities run the gamut from birthplaces of famous inventors and scientists (yawn) to really cool tours of working technological systems (a nuclear power plant, a dam turbine, a solar furnace) to a spectrum of interesting but little known museums, to just cool places like the prime meridian. A lot of these destinations are in the US and UK, but a fair number hail elsewhere. In addition to a description of a destination, author Graham-Cumming writes up a page explaining the key concept behind each spot. I've visited a dozen of these science hot spots and they are well worth a short detour, or in some cases a trip just for the purpose. You could probably fill another volume of brainy tourist traps missed by this book: I predict a sequel.

Solucar PS10 Power Station, Sanlucar la Mayor, Spain

The tower is at the center of a field of heliostats (mirrors that track the movement of the Sun) that focus the bright Spanish sunlight onto a receiver near the tower's top. The reflected sunlight is so intense that water vapor and dust in the air glow white. All that's needed to complete the scene is a maniacal James Bond villain atop the tower.

This tower is at the center of the Solucar PS10 power station. At the top of the tower is a solar receiver that is heated by sunlight to create saturated steam at 257°C. The steam is then used to drive a turbine that generates electricity. Make sure you're wearing sunglasses when you look up to the top; the tower's brilliant white glow is very intense.

Taipei 101, Taipei, Taiwan
The 660-Tonne Golden Ball

The Taipei 101 is the tallest occupied building in the world, with 101 floors overlooking Taipei's business district. But Taipei is prone to both typhoons and earthquakes, so the skyscraper contains a 660-tonne, gold-colored pendulum near the top to prevent the building from swaying and vibrating. It is the largest and heaviest such pendulum in the world.

Many skyscrapers contain such devices, called tuned mass dampers, for the same purpose, but the Taipei 101 pendulum is unusual because it is on public view. It hangs between the 87th and 91st floors, and there are public viewing areas on the 88th and 89th floors. It's even visible from the restaurant and bar. Two other tuned mass dampers, located in the building's pinnacle are not on display and are tiny by comparison: they weigh only 6 tonnes each.

The ball is made of forty-one 12.5-centimeter steel plates welded together for a total size of 5.5 meters. It is attached to the building by eight steel cables, each capable of supporting the ball's entire weight. In normal use the ball can move up to 35 centimeters in any direction and cuts building vibration by 40%. In a major typhoon, the ball is designed to move up to 1.5 meters; hydraulic bumpers below the ball absorb its energy and prevent it from moving too far.

When the building sways in one direction, the ball opposes the movement by swinging the opposite way. The movement of the ball pushes (and pulls) on the hydraulic bumpers and causes them to heat up, absorbing the energy from the motion of the building. The pendulum is tuned by adjusting the length of the cables holding it. By changing the period of the pendulum (the time it takes to swing back and forth), it can be tuned to match the motion of the building.

Nevada Test Site, NV

At the Nevada Test Site, more than 1,000 nuclear explosions were set off between 1951 and 1992. The site contains over 3,600 square kilometers of dry lake beds and mountains, about 100 kilometers northwest of Las Vegas. Once a month, the U.S. Department of Energy provides a free, day-long tour of the Nevada Test Site's bomb craters, ground zeros, and test paraphernalia.

The tour covers around 400 kilometers of the nuclear explosion-pockmarked landscape: of the 1,021 nuclear explosions at the Nevada Test Site, only 126 occurred above ground; the rest were underground tests that left the site cratered. The largest crater of all, the Sedan Crater, is the highlight of the tour. It's almost 400 meters wide and 100 meters deep.

-- KK

The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive
John Graham-Cumming
2009, 542 pages
$20

Available from Amazon

But the migration from ad hoc use...

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 17:26:26 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

... to commercialization cannot be rushed. To reach ubiquity you need to pass through sharing.

Increasingly we see technologies pass through a protocommercial stage. Huge numbers of people, exerting millions of hours of collective effort, will jointly craft hundreds of thousands of creations, but without the exchange of money. An entire society following the free! Author Lewis Hyde long ago called this arrangement a gift economy. The central task in a gift economy is to keep the gifts moving. By social debt, barter, and pure charity, gifts circulate and generate happiness and wealth.

The early internet and the early web sported amazingly robust gift economies. Text and expertise (FAQs, for example) and services (page designs) were swapped, shared generously, or donated outright. Information was bartered, content was given away, code was exchanged. For a long while the gift economy was the only way to acquire things online. In the first 1,000 days of the web's life, several hundred thousand webmasters created over 450,000 web sites, thousands of virtual communities, and 150 million pages of intellectual property, primarily for free. And these protocommercial sites were visited by 30 million people around the world, with 50% of them visiting daily, staying for an average of 10 minutes per day. This is a raging success by almost any measure you'd want to use. No other emerging media in the past experienced such glory so early in its growth.

Another way to view this effect...

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:03:25 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

...is in terms of attention: The only factor becoming scarce in a world of abundance is human attention.

As Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon puts it: "What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention." Each human has an absolute limit of 24 hours per day to provide attention to the millions of innovations and opportunities thrown up by the economy. Giving stuff away captures human attention, or mind share, which then leads to market share.

Following the free also works in the other direction. If one way to increase product value is to make products free, then many things now free may contain potential value not yet perceived. We can anticipate the eruption of new wealth on the frontier by tracking down the free.

In the web's early days, the first indexes to this uncharted territory were written by students and given away. The indexes helped people focus their attention on a few sites out of the thousands available. Webmasters, hoping to draw attention to their sites, aided the indexers' efforts. Because they were free, indexes became ubiquitous. Their ubiquity quickly made them valuable (and their stockholders rich) and enabled many other web services to flourish.

What is free now that may later lead to extreme value? Where today is generosity preceding wealth? A short list of online candidates would be digesters, guides, catalogers, FAQs, remote live cameras, front page web splashes, and numerous bots. Free for now, each of these will someday have profitable companies built around them selling auxiliary services. Digesting, guiding and cataloging are not fringe functions, either. In the industrial age, a digest, Reader's Digest, was the world's most widely read magazine; a guide, TV Guide, was more profitable than the three major networks it guided viewers to; and a catalog of answers, the Encyclopaedia Britannica, began as a compendium of articles written by amateurs--something like online FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions).

Self-trackers' Show and Tell Number 9

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:52:03 -0800

Originally posted in The Quantified Self

We will have our 9th Quantified Self Bay Area Meet Up this week on Wednesday, October 14, 2009. It will be held in Stanford University at the Wallenberg Learning Center (below).

As in the past, this is a user-generated evening of presentations by folks who are self-tracking in one form or another. Each presenter gets about 12 minutes to tell everyone what they are learning and what tools they are inventing.

I was unable to attend the last show and tell because it came during the final weeks of my overdue book deadline (which is now past me!). But Gary Wolf and I will be co-hosting this one, and filming the talks. If you are around the Bay Area go over to the QS Meetup page to get directions and let us know you are coming. I heard the last meeting was swamped, so we'd like to be more prepared this time. (We WILL post the talks from last meeting.)

The Sibley Guide to Trees

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Originally posted in Cool Tools

Naturalist David Sibley, like Tory Peterson before him, made his reputation painting and annotating birds before expanding to other biological realms. Sibley's guides to birds and bird behavior (recommended on Cool Tools) are the best all-around guides to the birds of North America. Sibley's beats out Peterson's, and the dozens of others published today. Sibley's newest book, also written and illustrated by him, is the best all-around guide to the trees of North America, again displacing the many other field guides to trees in print.

Sibley's illustrations are clear, crisp, and accurate. He manages to maintain distinctions in tree types where species get fuzzy, like in the oaks, or firs. His maps are specific. He includes more parts of the tree than most guides -- buds, bark, branches, seeds, silhouettes, flowers, cones, etc. -- which really help in identification. And he includes not only native trees but many feral varieties, and even widely planted ornamentals. One detail I appreciate: he lists alternative common names to trees, since trees seem to have local names.

With Sibley's guide I've been able to identify more trees than with other guides. However the book is big, not at all pocketable, or the kind of thing you are likely to take with you into the field on a hike. Perhaps future editions might remedy this. I use this quality softcover edition (a delight to browse) by taking samples and photos outside and returning home to identify.

-- KK

The Sibley Guide to Trees
David Allen Sibley
2009, 426 pages
$24

Available from Amazon

Evolution of the Space Station

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:03:49 -0800

Originally posted in The Technium

This will be how all space stations are built: Not as one piece, but accumulated in bits and pieces. Smaller stations will be symbiotically combined into larger stations. View this mesmerizing animation by USA Today for a timelapse account of the ten year growth of the first International Space Station. I realized from watching this wonderful summary that space stations will be like cities: ever changing, ever accumulating, ever growing. Some may grow to be a century old, full of new layers but and contain ancient parts they cannot shed.

The natural question is how companies...

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:00:00 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

... are to survive in a world of such generosity? Three points will help.

First, think of "free" as a design goal for pricing. There is a drive toward the free--the asymptotic free--that, even if not reached, makes the system behave as if it has been reached. A very cheap rate can have an effect equivalent to being outright free.

Second, pricing a core product as free positions other services to be expensive. Thus, Sun gives Java away to help sell servers, and Netscape hands out consumer browsers to help sell commercial server software.

Third, and most important, following the free is a way to rehearse a service's or a good's eventual fall to free. You structure your business as if the thing that you are creating is free in anticipation of where its price is going. Thus, while Sega game consoles are not free to consumers, they are sold as loss leaders to accelerate their journey toward their eventual destiny--to be given away in a network economy.

If goods and services become more valuable...

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:37:07 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

...as they become more plentiful, and if they become cheaper as they become valuable, then the natural extension of this logic says that the most valuable things of all should be those that are ubiquitous and free.

Ubiquity drives increasing returns in the network economy. The question becomes, What is the most cost-effective way to achieve ubiquity? And the answer is: give things away. Make them free.

Indeed, we see many innovative companies in the new economy following the free. Microsoft gives away its Internet Explorer web browser. Netscape also gives away its browser, as well as its valuable source code. Qualcomm, which produces Eudora, the popular email program, is given away as freeware in order to sell upgraded versions. Thomson, the $8 billion-a-year publisher, is giving away its precious high-priced financial data to investors on the web. Some one million copies of McAfee's antivirus software are distributed free each month. And, of course, Sun passed Java out gratis, sending its stock up and launching a mini-industry of Java application developers.

Can you imagine a young executive in the 1940s telling the board that his latest idea is to give away the first 40 million copies of his only product? (Fifty years later that's what Netscape did.) He would not have lasted a New York minute.

But now, giving away a product is a tested, level-headed strategy that banks on the network's new rules. Because compounding network knowledge inverts prices, the marginal cost of an additional copy (intangible or tangible) is near zero. It cost Netscape $30 million to ship the first copy of Navigator out the door, but it cost them only $1 to ship the second one. Yet because each additional copy of Navigator sold increases the value of all the previous copies, and because the more value the copies accrue, the more desirable they become, it makes a weird kind of economic sense to give them away at first. Once the product's worth and indispensability is established, the company sells auxiliary services or upgrades, continuing its generosity to involve more customers in a virtuous circle.

One might argue that this frightening dynamic works only with software, since the marginal cost of an additional copy is already near zero (now that software can be distributed online). But "following the free" is a universal law. Hardware, when networked, also follows this mandate. Cellular phones are given away in order to sell cell phone services. We can expect DirecTV dishes to be given away for the same reasons. This principle applies to any object whose diminishing cost of replication is exceeded by the advantages of being plugged in.

As crackpot as it sounds, in the distant future nearly everything we make will (at least for a short while) be given away free--refrigerators, skis, laser projectors, clothes, you name it. This will only make sense when these items are pumped full of chips and network nodes, and thus capable of delivering network value.

Remix of Out of Control

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 12:25:16 -0800

Originally posted in ct2

The other day I got a note from a Danish guy who is a fan of my book OUT OF CONTROL. He found my ideas great but my presentation "frustrating." But unlike my other "frustrated" readers, Andreas Lloyd decided to do something about it: he remixed my book!

I think the result is quite amazing. Remixing is perhaps too strong a word because he mostly simply dropped entire chapters, with a little re-arranging here and there. It is a very sharp but intelligent edit. But the effect is striking. Instead of a rambling book about one dozen things, Lloyd's remix of my book focuses it on the cybernetic and feedback aspects of the systems I was reporting on in the early 1990s. I suggested this focus needed a better title than OUT OF CONTROL, which I never was happy with anyhow, so Lloyd came up with a new one for this version of the book. He calls it BOOTSTRAPPING COMPLEXITY.

So if you never read OUT OF CONTROL because you were put off my its length, here is a user-generated remix that shortens and focuses the book. You can read it on Lloyd's website or even download the PDF. (I will post the PDF here on kk.org as well.)

Lloyd's notes read thus:

Kevin Kelly's book "Out of Control" is a fascinating book full of fascinating ideas reaching across the board from artificial intelligence, evolution, biology, ecology, robotics and more to explore complexity, cybernetics and self-organising systems in an accessible and engaging way.

But in reading Out of Control, I found it suffering from a number of frustrating flaws: Not only is it way too long-winded, it is also almost completely void of meta-text to help the reader understand what Kelly is trying to do with his book (having read the book, I'm still wondering).

Indeed, reading the book I got the feeling that Kelly was trying to combine several different books into one: There is a fascinating study of self-sustaining systems. But there is also a sort of business-book take on network economy. And an extended meditation on evolution and postdarwinism.

I'm sure that to Kelly, all of these things are tightly interconnected. But he doesn't explain these interrelations very well to the reader. His central argument is that as technology becomes ever more complex, it becomes more akin to biological systems (eco-systems, vivisystems, interdependent and co-evolving organisms). But because the individual chapters are set up as essays on their own, there is often little to tie these wildly different ideas together.

I would have preferred a much shorter book, more narrowly focused on the idea of self-organising systems. The whole text of the original book is easily available online at Kelly's own website, so I thought: Why not remix the online text to make such a book?

So I did.

However, if you liked BOOTSTRAPPING COMPLEXITY, you may also want to try my "long-winded" original version with lots more stuff. It is available as web text and a free PDF as well.

I think Lloyd is a fantastic editor, and his fan-based work is exactly the kind of liquidity of text that I believe will propel books in the next century. His remix is the kind of literary fluidity I was talking about in my Scan This Book article for the New York Times.

The task, then, is to create new things...

Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:15:54 -0800

Originally posted in New Rules

to send down the slide--in short, to invent items and services faster than they are commoditized.

This is easier to do in a network-based economy because the crisscrossing of ideas, the hyperlinking of relationships, the agility of alliances, and the nimble quickness with which new nodes are created all support the constant generation of new goods and services.

We will create artifacts and services rapidly, as if they were short-lived bubbles. Since we can't hold back a bubble's drift toward popping, we can only learn to make more bubbles, faster.