Category: Food for Thought

attention, Food for Thought

Attention: Move to a more cooperative model and increased situational awareness

I have been thinking about the Attention economy and what it means for businesses. I find the idea of a more cooperative value model eludes most traditional businesses. I have had to explain multiple times that the value of an interaction includes more than just the product and the cash payment. There exists around all interactions meta data that in some cases exceeds the value of the obvious portion of a traditional transaction. I think that many companies take meta data for granted. There tends to be an assumption that only one party is capturing meta data. In non-online interactions that assumption maybe correct, but in the online world what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Businesses will wake up real quick when customers realize that they can monetize their book purchasing or reviewing habits on amazon by sharing their meta data with Borders.

No longer is the customers meta data a private source of insight or value. As new companies move to free customer meta data and its stored value, traditional businesses will have to move to a more cooperative model. I expect some companies will fight this effort by trying to institute draconian terms of use and invoking copyright protections. Those companies will be fighting a hopeless battle, and if they are successful it will only create a black economy of customer meta data and that is never good. A transparent and open meta data trade is best for all parties involved.

The cooperative model will force companies to work to provide more value for the meta data in the form of better financial terms, increased services, and a broader continuity of experience. Cooperative companies will enable customer creation of a rich situational awareness. That situational awareness will drive productivity and create additional business opportunities.

Thomas W. Malone gave a presentation on the Future of Work at the Accelerating Change 2005 Conference, which focused on the impact of the declining cost of communication. This declining cost of communication is enabling both customers and companies alike to utilize a broader spectrum of the information in our everyday lives. In the future we will all need and have personal situation awareness systems. This will make the information management tools of today look like a Motorola Bravo pager in the age of smart phones.

Food for Thought, Lists

My Interface Design Principles

I did some work on putting together a new interface design for an application. So, I thought I would provide my guiding principles.

  1. “Information becomes the interface”, Edward Tufte in Visual Explanations p.142.
  2. “OODA Loop” (Observation, Orientation, Decision, Action) By Col John Boyd, USAF (Ret).
  3. Information displays should strive to be no wider than 16 choices and 2 levels deep.
  4. Base change on real observed behavior. The qualitative can not eliminate the quantitative
  5. To some degree the interface has to be stupid simple. The antithesis to this principle is demonstrated by some large ERP software vendors.
  6. Do as much work beyond view of the customer as possible.
  7. Icons are Iconic or they are not valuable.
  8. Visual oriented communication occurs a faster rate and results in increased short term retention
  9. Make help always available and obvious
  10. Continuity Continuity Continuity
  11. Empathy
attention, Food for Thought

Attention and the illicit meta-data trade

It’s a funny world, serendipity strikes. I was listening to the Gillmor Gang SearchSIG Gang podcast which could have been named the AttentionSIG Gang. The conversation about Gesture Bank and the value of meta-data was very interesting. The idea of Gesture bank as a counterweight to the walled meta-data gardens made me think about all the meta-data I have seen traded. I have seen traditional demand data being traded for improved supply chain performance and purchasing behavior being traded for cash. I guess enterprising people have always been able to find a way to monetize an ever increasing percentage of the information generated everyday.

Serendipity strikes, I had recently listened to a speech by Kim Popovits Founder & President of Genomic Health as part of the Stanford DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. Genomic basically was able to monetize the value of wax block biopsy samples that are stored after a cancer surgery. I know Genomic is doing great things for people with cancer but I wonder if those patients whose wax block samples allowed Genomic to prove their product, ever imagined they would be helping Genomic achieve a market cap of $270 million. There was (and most likely still remains) no way for cancer patients to monetize their wax block samples and now Genomic has created a walled garden around the data gathered from those wax block samples. Brilliant.

As industries (Financial, Medical, Mobile Communications ect…) create information the players eventually figure out how to use the whole cow even the moo. For some period of time many information assets sit undervalued and untapped. Eventually, an enterprising and innovative individual finds the long neglected assets and creates a way to make money with them. In most cases the resulting monetization occurs, at best, in a walled garden, most commonly thought, it occurs behind the ramparts of a castle where no one speaks of the trading of those long overlooked information assets.

The promise of Gesture bank (As I think of it) is it’s potential to become a market maker for attention meta-data, a creator of attention meta-data liquidity (think Fannie Mae). As Steve Gillmor said, (I paraphrase) during the podcast, most pools of meta-data are not open and available for purchase. What goes unspoken is the meta-data is used to serve the purposes of the collector and those purposes may not benefit the contributing parties. It is rare that a source of information as rich as the web/internet would have at it’s infancy an opportunity for the unwashed masses to realize the value of their participation beyond simply viewing web pages and receiving email.

At least that’s how I think about it.

Food for Thought

Continuity of Experience

The Continuity of Experience is:
About making the experience more ubiquitous.
About making the experience more consistent.
About making the experience more understandable.
About making the experience more actionable.
About making the collection of our experiences more contiguous.

This web 2.0 thing is just one of the more visible increases in our computing Continuity of Experience. Its all about increased simplicity, integrated metaphors, greater collaboration, transparency and increased information composition. The goal is to make it easier for people to interact with the universe of computing platforms, applications, services and information. Increasing the Continuity of Experience for one user or 10,000 or 10 million (think companies) increases the capacity to transfer value during the experience. We need to think about the continuities we enjoy today and really focus on what opportunities we have to bring isolated experiences into a larger continuity of experience.

Food for Thought

Opening Yahoo, Ahh the possibility.

Over on David Weinberger’s blog is a post about opening Yahoo. I have been using Yahoo for a long time and would love a complete Yahoo API. I have long wondered why Yahoo hasn’t integrated Calendar and contacts with a cell phone provider. I would love to have my contacts in my mobile category on Yahoo sync to my phone. I would also love to have the changes I make in my phone contacts to be synced with Yahoo contacts. Yahoo must know how powerful this integration is, so what’s taking so long. So I hope the Opening of Yahoo will make my dream of a single source for contact information come true.

Food for Thought

A favorite Parable

The Lion and the Gazelle

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.
It knows that it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed.

Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up.
It knows that it must out run the slowest gazelle or it will starve.

It does not matter whether you are a lion or gazelle.
When the sun comes up you had better be running.

Food for Thought

Support the troops

As I am driving around I keep seeing many forms of the Support The Troops magnet on all different kinds of vehicles. I find this a bit ironic. I guess these people are saying “Support our Troops” so they can maintain stability in the Middle East? The rate at which the United States consumes foreign oil requires that the US maintain sufficient military assets to protect our oil supplies. So those people driving around in their Suburbans with their little yellow magnets are indirectly contributing to the need for an ever-stronger military. They are also making it more likely that the Troops will be deployed to protect our oil supplies. Just a wild thought that entered my mind as I saw a big ass SUV with a yellow magnet. I doubt many people think about it.

Full tanks and open roads.

Food for Thought, Technology

Buzz Game: Markets

I was reading a Post on Mark Bakers’ blog Web Things and he linked to here. It appears that Yahoo and O’reilly have teamed up to create a market for measuring direction of technology at Buzz Game: Markets. James Surowiecki would be proud, as he describes the use of markets to properly value things in his book “The Wisdom of Crowds”. This a great idea and if popularized could help clarify where some technologies are going. Very Cool Check out Buzz Game.

Food for Thought, General

Wacky Neighbor: Flaunt it Baby!: Oblique Strategies

I really like the oblique Strategies cards created by Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt. So when I found the link to Wacky Neighbor: Flaunt it Baby!: Oblique Strategies on 43Folders I was impressed. The flash interfaced is cool. It appears that the deck being used if from volume 4. If your interested you can see the text listing of all four decks at here.
I enjoy using the cards to add a unique perspective when I am trying to consider alternate views of architectures. Sometimes the cards work really well sometimes they are not as helpful. I find them more helpful than not so check’em out.