The World Changing

1871 is Changing the World for Chicago Startups

Dan Chuparkoff — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:10:56 +0000

Chicago Startups are about to get a blast of acceleration which will shower the technology scene like water from a firehose.

1871 is a new Digital Startup Center and it's coming in just a few months to the 12th floor of that juggernaut on the Chicago River we know as the Merchandise Mart. The not-for-profit innovation, collaboration, and mentoring space will offer its 50,000 sqft of space to more than 320 of our city's brightest new innovators at practically the cost of a gym membership. 1871 can do this because of the help of a plethora of influential partnerships and sponsors. But 1871 isn't just Changing the World by bringing money to the table. Those amazing partners will be offering mentoring and coaching with classes and even regular office hours!

In their own words from the 1871.com website:

: "Chicago’s brightest digital designers, engineers and entrepreneurs are shaping new technologies, disrupting old business models, and resetting the boundaries of what’s possible...Come to a place where you can share ideas, make mistakes, work hard, build your business and, with a little luck, change the world."

We couldn't have said it better ourselves.

So why's it called "1871" you might ask? The time immediately following the Chicago Fire in...yes...1871, was a tremendous moment of entrepreneurial rebuilding and innovation. Matt Moog, Founder of Built In Chicago, and Chair of the 1871 effort, says it best in his 1871 announcement.

The technology talent and capacity for innovation and creativity in Chicago is great. Chicago is a magnificent city. A serendipitous blend of the engineering influence which has spilled over from our sister to the east combined with the creative ingenuity of the masterful agencies which have called Chicago their home for decades.

On any given Saturday, in any given Starbucks, you will find at least a halfdozen iPad-wielding, aspiring entrepreneurs and potential founders. Individually, each of them harbor unique ideas and skills. Each of them, working alone in a coffee shop, has the potential to create something great. But together in the 1871 space, collaborating with each other and surrounded by coaches, mentors, and investors; the things these future founders create will Change the World.

1871 isn't just looking to help find the next Groupon. 1871 is looking to build the next Silicon Valley.

Do you have an idea growing inside of you? Are you a Startup with just a handful of teammembers? Are you on the cusp of something great? Could you be, if you spent some time building your ideas into a business in the 1871 space? The response has been overwhelming! But they're still taking applications. If you don't get in when they launch in the spring, don't worry. We couldn't help noticing there is an additional 70,000 sqft of additional space, adjacent and unoccupied, on floor 12 of the Merchandise Mart!

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Digital

Startups

WorldChanging

Web

We Changed the World of Democracy

Dan Chuparkoff — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 00:25:27 +0000

On Wednesday, January 18th, 2012, we Changed the World of Democracy. Heck the word Democracy changed that day. Or at least Democracy's previous definition became a little more accurate that day.

: "Democracy in its purest or most ideal form would be a society in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives." --Wikipedia

(Did you catch that? we could look it up on Wikipedia because it's not shut down.)

Let's get this right out into the open - Politics isn't usually the thing that gets us fired up. Just like going to the gym or eating more broccoli, it's one of those things that we know we ought to participate in more, but the cost of [genuine] participation is high. And we don't do anything half-assed. It's difficult sometimes and it doesn't matter how important it is or how much we know it's right. When it comes down to it, not many of us have convinced ourselves that a single instance of participation has any impact on the eventual outcome when it all comes down to it.

But this week all of that changed, because the Cost of Participation in Democracy has been significantly lowered.

Our democracy got a little bit closer to being truly democratized. A bill (#SOPA), with nobile intentions, to be fair, was about to make it's way through Congress. And, to be honest... all the evil, and the fail, and the suck hidden behind the hashtag #SOPA, is really not their fault. At least 80% of the Software Engineers, Digital Strategists, & Software Product Managers that we know would struggle to come up with a universally acceptable solution to the Online Piracy problem. So it's hard to be surprised or disappointed by the solutions proposed by a bunch of Millennials' grandpas in Washington. Seriously, what chance do they have?

But they gave it a shot. And, regretfully, they were influenced a lot more by RIAA and MPAA Lobbyists than by sane or brilliant people looking for a universally acceptible compromise. So it's really not that shocking that the whole entire Internet was disappointed in the proposal that came out of the Political System that was designed by a bunch of guys in a Town Hall in Virginia in the late 1700's.

We... all of us... can finally influence our legal system in a way that was never before possible. There was a Social Revolution that Wednesday. It lasted just a day, but that doesn't really give us all a sense of its true scale. The World united quickly and passionately. Lobbying doesn't just come from guys in suits in Washington anymore. It comes from us. We invented massively multiplayer political lobbying and we applied it's force for the first time ever. And we can guarantee it won't be the last. The World is Changing.

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Massively Multiplayer

radugadesign is Changing the World with Digital Projection

Dan Chuparkoff — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 03:35:44 +0000

Ok, we're still in awe of the Ralph Lauren Digital Lightshow from last year. And now radugadesign, a Russian media design studio, has a new take on that innovative use of the digital projection called 3D Video Mapping (or sometimes just 4D Projection). Auto shows will never be the same. We need to head over to the North American International Auto Show in Detroit to see any other Auto teams are Changing the World of Automobile Marketing!

If you haven't yet been exposed to some of this cool Digital projection, it's called 3D Video Mapping and here's how it works.

: What is 3D Video Mapping or 4D Projection? An everyday object like a building is used as a canvas and projected upon with very high-quality, digital projectors. Just like a movie is sometimes projected on the side of a wall. But here's where it gets tricky. Instead of projecting just against a flat and plain section of the building, the entire object is scanned and a computer model of the building is created. With the precise knowledge of where every single window, door and brick is placed and exactly how the light will reflect off of cracks and crevasses of the building's geometry, a movie is created that makes it appear that the static object is actually coming to life.

In this video, as you'll see below, it wasn't a building. It was an Audi, which has been covered with a white canvas to ensure consistency of reflection. The use of that white canvas is sorta cheating, btw, but we'll cut them some slack since the outcome was so amazing. The movie created is that of another Audi, only the digital one being projected is racing across a moving background and repeatedly shedding it's color. You'll be amazed and a few times during the video you'll forget that the car isn't actually moving!

Nice job, radugadesign. It's stuff like this that's Changing the World.

From radugadesign on Vimeo.

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Sean Parker on Entrepreneurial Teams

Dan Chuparkoff — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:49:21 +0000

Before CES took over our newsfeeds this week, we found this video (at the bottom) from Forbes. In it, Sean Parker gives some WorldChanging advice to two young entrepreneurs. Three times, Parker reinforces that above all else the most important thing for an entrepreneurial startup to possess is a TEAM that can execute on a vision, whatever that vision might be.

The two young entrepreneurs, a nanotech hacker who has discovered a way of reclaiming the carbon from manufacturing exhaust and another who is using Facebook groups to facilitate the connecting of recipients and blood donors during times of crisis, got the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for a chat with the serial co-founder. For some unexplained reason, the discussion occurs while standing in a desert-like setting.

You may not be directly familiar with Parker, but you're definitely familiar with the product of his work. Parker has been the co-founder of Napster, Plaxo, and Causes. And as if that wasn't enough, he was also the founding President of Facebook - a contribution made infamous by Justin Timberlake in the movie, "The Social Network". "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars." Yeah, that guy.

In the video below, the two aspiring founders tapped Parker's wisdom and asked about the three most important things venture capitalists look for when evaluating young startups. Parker responds with:

"Team"
"Team"
"Team"

Parker goes on to elaborate that a team is most important because it gives VCs and the rest of the investment community confidence that the team can execute on the vision.

: "Build a complete team around what you are doing. You shouldn't be stingy about it. Your biggest challenge as an entrepreneur, is not concealing your idea from others or keeping it a secret - it's convincing people that you're not crazy and that you [have a team that] can pull this off."

When asked how Team could possibly be more important than the startup's particular approach to solving the problem, the serial-cofounder-turned-investor helped us to understand that often, with startups, the vision changes from the original proposition (see Groupon & Paypal). In these cases, startups need a team that's agile, nimble, and talented enough to create a compelling new vision and then execute the revised one. Young startups often need to change their vision as their implementation and monetization plans begin to materialize and as the market begins to respond to the early versions of the product. Only those with a solid team can survive getting sent back to the drawing board.

Naturally, in every startup, the balance of skillsets needed is slightly different, but in every company you need a complete team. In Parker's opinion, and we can't disagree, a complete team looks like this:

The Visionary: An agile & nimble leader who can come up with lots of ideas.
The Core Technologist: A hard core developer who can build the initial technology.
The Engineering Lead: Someone who is not the creator of the technology, but who can scale the technology team.
The Operator: Someone on the team who can watch over the business, do deals, manage Human Resources, operate the company, & deal with Legal.

Thanks, Sean Parker and thanks to Forbes as well for sharing this with us. Now, can your startup Change the World?

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reCaptcha is Changing the World of Digitizing Books

Dan Chuparkoff — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 19:55:37 +0000

All of us have, at one time or another, encountered a set of those funky, distorted characters of a CAPTCHA code when registering or filling out a form on a website. The World's websites use these CAPTCHA tests to help discern between actual people and programmatic bots attempting to create fake accounts or otherwise attempting to bypass security. CAPTCHA, by the way, stands for Completely Automated Public Test [to tell] Computers and Humans Apart.

But did you know that on the majority of sites, when you type the characters you see, you are participating in the reCaptcha massive-scale online collaboration project to digitize the world's books?

: "While you're typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing. Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do.", says Luis von Ahn (the inventor of CAPTCHA) in the video below from TEDxCMU at Carnegie Mellon University.

Digitizing the world's books is, of course, a noble cause. It will help us democratize knowledge by making it accessible to anyone, anywhere. But you've probably never stopped to think about the logistics of digitizing process. Scanning a book obviously involves taking a picture of every page. Then by using OCR (Optical Character Recognition), the scanning computer attempts to recognize all of the words on each page. The problem however, is that computers are not yet that good at that OCR translation of words in a picture into a word of actual text. Especially with older books, in which the pages have yellowed and the ink has faded, computers often fail to transfer 30% or more of the words. This flaw in OCR makes digitizing the World's books a problem computers can't solve by themselves.

Meanwhile, roughly 200 million reCAPTCHA codes are hand-typed into websites everyday by people around the world. That's 500,000 hours spent every single day entering reCAPTCHAs. reCAPTCHA harnesses this effort by feeding unrecognized OCR words out to reCAPTCHA users and this stroke of genius gets 100,000,000 words a day are being translated by CAPTCHA-encountering humans. That's the equivalent of translating 2.5 million books a year, one word at a time, by random people on the Internet. The reCaptcha team reports that 750 million people have participated in the reCAPTCHA digitizing project so far.

Luis von Ahn and reCaptcha are Changing the World. Stay tuned. Next, Luis and the reCAPTCHA team is going to tackle translating the World's information into multiple languages.

Tags:

Massively Multiplayer

The World of Email is Changing

Dan Chuparkoff — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 15:56:06 +0000

The World of Email is Changing. There is a long-overdue shift happening in which Email is being replaced by more effective & immediate ways of sharing information. And whenever we begin talking about the evaporation of email, someone in the room always asks, "So which Social Network is going to win?" The answer is none of them. But before I get into that, let's take a look at what's actually happening.

Imagine, for a second, that it's 1997 on a Friday afternoon and I'm at work. Outlook or maybe Gmail is the only communication tool that exists. Pretend for a second, that there is no Facebook. There is no Twitter. There is no Yammer. There is no Chatter. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for me to send out an email to all my friends:

From: Chuparkoff, Dan
To: PeopleIKnow
Subject: What Are You Up To?
Hey, Everyone. I'm bored at work. What's everyone up to this weekend?

Now, imagine that some of the people on my "PeopleIKnow" list will ReplyToAll and share with the group what they're up to.

From: Braun, Katie
To: PeopleIKnow
Subject: RE: What Are You Up To?
I'm off for the weekend. Minnesota, here I come!!
~~~~~
From: Burnside, Amy
To: PeopleIKnow
Subject: RE: What Are You Up To?
How about crashing your old, old company's holiday party!

Some of us don't have to imagine this - we just remember. We didn't do this quite as much on Tuesdays as we do today but we certainly did this every Friday. We emailed each other and some of us ReplyToAll'd with our Status. Somewhere along the line, Facebook started making this "RE: What are you up to?" email a little more efficient. And here we are - all 600 million of us. Facebook has essentially given us a really awesome email thread tool in which we don't get to choose the Subject of the humongously long email thread we are trapped within. It's always, "RE: What are you up to?" It's what we at TheWorldChanging call a Public Conversation Thread.

Now, the "RE: What are you up to?" question is a good one. And it's certainly a popular thread for drawing out ReplyToAll's. But there are also lots of other emails with lots of other subjects being shared every day. And the majority of those are still stuck in our Outlook/Gmail Threads.

I know what you're thinking.

Facebook isn't the only Social Network. I also share stuff on Twitter. How is that different?

It's not. Twitter is providing the exact same service for us. Twitter has just chosen a slightly different Subject for our humongous ReplyToAll thread. In the world of Twitter, our globally-unmodifiable Subject is slightly closer to: What would you like to share? Twitter has also tweaked the "PeopleIKnow" entry in the To: field of our message - by helping us to create an EveryoneThatsEverHeardOfMeAndCares distribution list.

From: Chuparkoff, Dan
To: EveryoneThatsEverHeardOfMeAndCares
Subject: What would you like to share?
This blog is awesome: http://bit.ly/tO4Qtx

So that's two (out of thousands of) email threads which have now been moved out of our Outlook/Gmail and onto the web. But we're just getting started. Here's what you can expect next.

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It is Almost Time for SXSW2012!

Dan Chuparkoff — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:09:04 +0000

It's almost time for South by Southwest!!

Every March, some of the most creative, innovative, and revolutionary ideas of the Changing World will be uncovered and shared at South by Southwest in Austin, TX. If you aren't one of the fortunate few... and by few, we mean 30,000... who get to join them every spring as the Music, Film, & Interactive worlds converge upon Austin, we'll be sharing what we find there. But before we get that rolling, first let's make sure everyone reading this knows what it is.

SXSW is actually the convergence of three simultaneous conferences:

SXSW Film
SXSW Music
SXSW Interactive

The products of these three separate industries have an incredible cultural impact on our lives. All three contain a mix of independent players competing for the same attention of consumers alongside of huge & established corporations. Bringing the professionals from both the big and small of all three of these industries together triggers sparks of innovation and creativity which easily jump across from the big to the small and from the small to the big... from music to interactive just as much as from interactive into film. It's the epitome of the convergence of creative energy. Imagine if you could take the ideas of Bono, Steven Spielberg, and Steve Jobs and put them in a blender to see what you could make as you mix them together. Now stop imagining. Just come to Austin and see what it's actually like.

This year marks the 26th edition of that event affectionately known as SXSW. This epic phenomenon of an event draws innovative professionals, by the tens of thousands, from around the world to Austin every March. It was born back in the time before the web, email, or smart phones even existed. SXSW history bridges the analog and digital eras and that fact gives the Interactive portion of this conference a very unique character. It stands out clearly from the tech-conference pack.

We'll be there in March and it's an understatement to say, "We can't wait!". Check back here often and we'll keep you posted on what we're anticipating and ultimately what we find at SXSW2012.

By the way, if you haven't registered yet, you're running out of time. Although you can get conference badges right up until the March 9th conference start-date, it's already near impossible to find an open hotel room within 30 miles of downtown Austin. SXSW veterans know to book their hotel more than six months in advance.

Check out the South by Southwest official website. And here's their latest South by Southwest promotion video. It's as kickass as we would expect:

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Sears Holiday Shopping with QR Codes

Dan Chuparkoff — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 00:55:20 +0000

Holiday shopping gets a tiny bit easier this year as retailers like Sears bring holiday shopping to you as they install the Sears QR Toy Shop Shopping Wall to airports and street advertising locations near you.

QR Codes are slowly inching their way toward ubiquity. Today we heard that 70% of consumers who have seen QR codes understand what QR codes are and what they do. And although this stat was posed as a negative by citing the inverse (30% of Consumers Lack QR Code Understanding), 70% is actually a hugely positive statistic!

Still, the Changing World is searching for the killer app that can bring QR codes into the mainstream. Normally the Internet counts on porn to help speed the adoption of new Technology. Heck the Internet itself might still be a cryptic tool for research scientists if it wasn't for porn. So far, however, we can't think of a reason QR codes and porn need each other... and trust me, we're trying. So until someone has a better idea, we think that the first killer app we've seen that has the power to bring QR codes into the mainstream might as well be shopping. Sears thinks so too.

The Sears QR Toy Shop might be just the sort of thing the QR code world needs.

The QR codes we stumbled into here at Chicago's O'Hare airport allowed us to purchase an array of great holiday toys right from our phone. The shopping experience was just as great as the Tesco Subway shopping experience we brought you a few months ago. The selection of toys was presented right on the wall of our airport terminal and the full selection was available with another QR scan which took us to the following link for the full mobile shopping experience

If you're part of the 30% that still isn't sure what QR codes can do for you, check out our World Changing article on QR Codes.

If you don't yet have a QR code scanner, our favorite is still the I-nigma reader. Just search i-nigma in your mobile phone's app store or navigate directly to the I-nigma App mobile download in the browser on your mobile phone.

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Klout Changes the World Marketing to Influencers

Dan Chuparkoff — Tue, 25 Oct 2011 15:39:12 +0000

Klout is Changing the World of Marketing with Klout Perks by allowing their advertisers a never-before-found opportunity to market directly at the Influencers of their industry. Klout is the standard for online and internet influence.

As we all learned in Malcolm Gladwell's Tipping Point and Geoffrey Moore's Crossing the Chasm, the mainstream customers of the world are influenced by "early adopters" and "mavens". Historically, however, the Marketers of the world have had to send their messages at the masses. This was the only way to make sure that their message would be picked up by mavens and trendsetters and carried forward to the mainstream population. Even in the millennium-straddling years of targeting, these targeted blasts, were still blasts and had no way of singling out or directing messages at the true influencers.

But the World is Changing! These days, the influencers are easy to spot over here on the social networks of our lives. And Klout, more than any other company, is in the position to identify our influencers, reach them with specific messaging, and reward their behavior. Klout tackles this challenge brilliantly with Klout Perks. Klout Perks creates offers which become unlocked for Klout users which have achieved an Influence score of a specific level and are associated with a topic appropriate to the advertiser.

Are you an Influencer in the Food and Beverage Industry? Get Free wine from Lot 18. Are you an Influencer in the Retail sector? Get a credit toward the purchase of a merchandise from handbags.com. Klout Perks can even be location specific. For a limited time, for example, Klout users with a score over 55 (on a scale of 1 to 100), who engage their audience in Technology and also Live in New York can get a free Windows Phone!

This is an incredibly exciting time for both Marketers and Influencers. Finally, there is a way for Marketers to get their messages out to the people that have the greatest influence. Thanks to Klout, the World is Changing! Not sure whether or not this actually works? Watch Klout Perks in Action. Chicago Influencer, @phampants, got a Chevy Volt for the weekend. Here he is, influencing his network:

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Spotify is Changing the World of Music

Dan Chuparkoff — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 03:42:42 +0000

So it's been two weeks now since Facebook's F8 conference. If you watched it, you undoubtedly caught the mention of Spotify's integration with Facebook. If you didn't watch it, then you've probably seen more than a few Newsfeed Posts mentioning the music that your friends have been listening to on Spotify.

: btw...If you haven't noticed F8 or the Spotify posts, then you better step it up a little! You're reading an article on a site called "The World Changing", so you're clearly the Early Adoptor in your circle. It's your responsibility to help the World learn about new things! So after you finish reading this article, get back to trying new things and telling your friends about them.

But back to Spotify...
We saw this happen once before. A little more than a decade ago, Napster changed the World of Music with it's peer-sharing music download service. Until two weeks ago, it appeared that the key to Napster's popularity was Free Music. It's clear now, that it wasn't that at all. Free music was an amplifier to their success, there's no denying that. But at the core of Napster's success, was the fact that Sean Fanning offered us the ability to look in a folder containing all of the songs a person liked. For the first time ever, we got exposed to new music through individual music listeners' opinions instead of because of the opinions of Radio Executives.

Back then 'Friend' wasn't [yet] an Internet thing... we called them 'Peers'. In 1999, I vividly remember searching for peers that had particular songs that I wanted. When I found them, I would check out the other songs that peer had in their library. When someone had a large number of songs that I recognized (and liked), I would look for other music that I hadn't yet heard. In the short amount of time that Napster service existed as a free service, my musical taste broadened wider than it would've after ten thousand years of radio listening.

Spotify is finally bringing that back to the web. This is the best thing to have come to Music Listening since 1999. Check out the latest Spotify promo video below.

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