The Software Abstractions Blog

Crowdsourcing Charity: Sustainable Innovations

Paul Buchheit (founder of Gmail and Friendfeed) wants to donate money to charity. He's trying an interesting experiment in collaborative charity, where he's planning to crowdsource the list of ideas he should consider funding. The ideas he gets are only recommendations, he says, and he will ultimately choose the best idea that appeals to him and that makes sense.

In that spirit, let me make a suggestion for Paul and others like him in Silicon Valley, one that takes a different perspective. If you're a successful tech founder or VC who likes philanthropy, consider this a free "business idea for giving back" that you can adopt as your own if it interests you. [Now I'm no VC, nor am I a rich, successful tech founder, so I have no idea if the approach below has any appeal to these folks; nevertheless it is an interesting thought exercise.]

Silicon Valley skills

In general, anyone with a bit of time or money and the inclination to help, can donate to charity, and many people do (bless 'em!). The most effective donations, however, leverage the unique skills and perspectives that one can bring as an individual, using one's own talents and gifts in addition to money, to help others.

So what could Silicon Valley entrepreneurs do? How about this: instead of donating money directly, why not use it as seed funding to build an organization that can keep on giving? After all that is what tech founders (and VCs) do best: they fund startups that take some initial amount of money and then leverage it massively to create a disproportionate impact on a target market - or die trying. Why not take the same approach to charity? Build an organization that leverages other people's time and money, and creates massive impact, much bigger than the pure monetary donation would create.

But what type of organization? There are already many, many charities, of many different types. How do you make a difference?

Third level of Abstraction

Give a man a fish, it is said, and you feed him for a day; teach him to catch fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Extending the metaphor, what if you could create a construct that continuously spawns ideas, technologies and approaches for teaching everyone to catch fish?

What the world needs more than direct charity, is locally-sustainable ideas that allow populations in underdeveloped areas to take care of their own core needs - clean water, sustainable food production, cheap education and economic development - by themselves. As a philanthropist, what if you were to establish an organization to crowdsource innovations and ideas to bring about these very changes? You could create a mechanism to encourage such attempts and to reward successes.

The idea: So the idea I'm proposing, in a nutshell, is this: instead of making a direct monetary donation to charity, set up a recurring contest or start an organization that encourages and rewards innovations in technology, design, reuse, financial models, human factors or ecology conservation, for the social good. Most important, these innovations must lead to local, self-sustainable solutions that do not depend on ongoing external help to keep going.

Real-Life Examples: Business Models and Innovations

There are many examples of business models for encouraging innovation through crowd-sourcing:

• Competitions, such as the Netflix prize for improving their recommendation algorithm (which seems to be beaten) or NYC's design competition for post-disaster provisional housing
• Paul Graham's Y-Combinator micro-funding model for seeding startups
• Social incubators like socialedge

I'm sure there are many others that are not listed here, feel free to list them in the comments if you know of any.

What kind of innovations should such an organization look for? Ideally, these would be locally-managed, self-sustainable or reuse-based product design ideas, original approaches or creative financial models.

Here are some examples of innovations of this type:

• Clean water powered by playgrounds: Playpumps International
• SHRIMP Refugee Housing, which folds up so small that four of these can fit into a standard shipping container, and each one provides shelter and fresh water for a family of 4. [A slide show from Wired Magazine has a whole list of innovative shelter designs for providing emergency housing to disaster areas and refugees.]
• Buy a pair of chickens for AUS $10 and help a family get started in sustainable chicken farming. [via Darren Rowse of Problogger]
• Lighting up remote villages in India, using technology and innovative financial models: SELCO [via Sramana Mitra]

The world needs many more innovations of this type. Why not explicitly encourage them?

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Why You Should Market Your Brand on twitter - NOW!

twitter has been an emerging phenomenon for a little while now. There were some very public performance problems and outages in the beginning, but the company seems to have moved past those now. twitter usage seems to be gaining critical mass, crossing over from the technology early-adopters to non-technology leaders, companies and celebrities (imagine Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart of Comedy Central bantering about twitter on Election night).

There has been much discussion and debate recently about whether it is appropriate and worthwhile for businesses to spend time marketing their brands on twitter. In this article, we take an in-depth look at the advantages of doing so.

Given the ongoing dramatic growth of twitter usage, and if twitter adoption has indeed crossed over to the mainstream, then it seems inevitable that brand marketing will eventually catch up with it on a large-scale; adding twitter marketing to company budgets will become an increasingly easier decision once "everyone is doing it". However there are compelling reasons why you should consider starting your twitter marketing efforts right now rather than wait until there is a herd.

So if you need to convince your boss to let you spend time on this activity - promoting your brand on twitter - here is a list of reasons to get into twitter-marketing now:

Early mover Advantage

Years ago Seth Godin's book, Permission Marketing, launched a revolution in brand-customer interaction. Imagine if you had gotten into Email Marketing at that time, when it was first getting started - it would have been so much easier to get and hold consumer attention, make your brand stand out, and establish a solid position. In contrast, getting the same level of attention today using email is almost impossible, since practically every company practices email marketing; consumers face email fatigue and get deluged by spam, and are reluctant to give out their real email addresses to companies.

For twitter marketing it's not too late, however - it is still in its early stages, and this time you do have a chance to jump on it before most of your competitors (as @Southwest Airlines, @Whole Foods, @Baskin Robbins and @Zappos have already done), gaining momentum as it becomes mainstream.

Influencing the Influencers

A common argument against the twitter marketing strategy is that many of the users of your non-technical product may not yet be twitter users, and you should always market where your users are. This seems like common sense. However, it overlooks a fundamental truth: users often tune out the direct messaging coming from a company anyway, and instead use indirect sources to help them make decisions.

In Malcolm Gladwell's influential book, The Tipping Point, he describes how word-of-mouth influences brand popularity, trends and buying decisions. If you can get some of the super-connectors and influencers to adopt and evangelize your product, then interest in your product spreads like wildfire and demand soars.

How do you reach these influencers? In today's world, it's a safe bet that the influencers are heavy users of new media methods like blogs, social networks and twitter, even if your field of interest is not particularly technical. twitter is especially effective in encouraging and responding to these highly-connected users; the medium gives you direct, instant access to even the most popular of these folks at all levels. (For example, here are the twitter accounts for publishing guru Tim O'Reilly: @timoreilly, VC Fred Wilson: @fredwilson, VoIP pioneer Jeff Pulver: @jeffpulver, and even celebrities like Shaquille O'Neal: @the_Real_Shaq and Lance Armstrong: @lancearmstrong ). By connecting with them and interacting directly, you have a much better chance of getting mentioned on blogs, in forums and discussions, and being highlighted in their media outreach.

Customer Engagement

More than any other medium, twitter allows you to connect directly with your users and engage them in a direct, immediate, two-way information exchange. You can get timely feedback: users with negative comments can be heard and their concerns addressed; users with positive comments can be encouraged to become evangelists. You can even learn of alternative ways your product is being used, or discover new markets that can be targeted.

This strategy of connecting with individual users and building a "long tail" following nicely complements the previous strategy of targeting "influencers". Some studies contradict Gladwell's conclusions, showing instead that users trust recommendations from peers and friends far more than those of a few super-connected individuals; the safest bet is to court both types.

Low Cost

In general, twitter marketing is very cheap and easy, and shouldn't have any significant impact on spending for your other Marketing programs; important, since cost is a major concern in the current challenging economic climate. Success in connecting via twitter takes time and authenticity, not a large budget!

And if your company still doesn't buy it? Create a personal account on twitter (hey, it's free) and start connecting! You can begin engaging others in your field and thought leaders in other fields - by engaging at a personal level, you can start to build your own network of followers.

Oh, and if you'd like to connect with me, you can find me as @nitink on twitter - I always follow everyone back!

For further reading, here are some great articles on twitter Marketing:

Great Examples of Corporate twitter use - Jennifer Laycock
Using Twitter for Brands or Corporate Identities - Dawn Foster
How to use Twitter as a Twool - Guy Kawasaki
Looking for Mr. Goodtweet - How to pick up followers on twitter - Guy Kawasaki
Free (but welcome) advice on the corporate use of twitter - Elliot Ng
A User's Guide to Twittering - Wall Street Journal
Professional Branding Comes to Twitter - Svetlana Gladkova
Why I Love Twitter - Tim O'Reilly

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Should you invest in New Media Marketing in a down economy?

Over the past couple of years, companies and brands have been increasingly engaging with New Media, which can be broadly defined as blogs, feeds, wikis, micro-blogging (twitter), social networks (such as LinkedIn and Facebook) and social bookmarks.

As the economy goes sour and budgets decrease, however, does it make sense to continue to invest Marketing dollars into these word-of-mouth, engagement programs?

Here are some of my initial thoughts.

As with everything else, it comes down to a cost-benefit analysis, comparing these types of programs with alternatives such as direct marketing, trade shows, magazine advertisements and so on.

Benefits

On the benefits side, some of the core value propositions of New Media Marketing are pretty strong:

Increased Brand Awareness
Research has shown that consumers most often buy brands that they are already familiar with; generating brand awareness and familiarity is thus as important as pure direct conversion rates.

Engaging with Customers and others in the Ecosystem
The first simple step to irrelevance for any brand is when a company stops listening to those who are most affected by its products. By engaging with customers, users, suppliers and others, a business can get direct, rapid feedback and potentially head off problems before they turn into major crises.

Getting Product Ideas
Discussions about your product and its use in social media are a fertile environment to get new product ideas, especially involving novel settings or uses of your existing products or discovering gaps that can be filled.

Lead Generation
In the same way, social media can be mined to harvest meaningful, highly-qualified leads, significantly reducing the cost of customer acquisition.

Find, Encourage, Enable and Reward Advocates
Who are the users who really like your products and are most vocal about it? How can you provide encouragement and rewards and remove barriers? By engaging directly with users, you can find the answers to these questions.

Participate in the Conversation
If your product is at all popular, you can be certain that customers and users are already talking about it somewhere, somehow - whether you know it or not. If you can participate directly in this conversation, you can at least react to what they are saying, even if you cannot and should not directly steer the conversation.

Monitor => Engage => Influence => Monitor
This is the virtuous cycle New Media enables. By its very nature, social media is interactive; it is a dialogue, rather than the outward-bound one-way Marketing messages of the past.

Costs

By its very nature, social media marketing is low-cost compared with traditional approaches. What it takes to be effective in this field is time (which, of course, also translates to cost) and authenticity.

The Marketing Mix

So is it worth investing in this type of user engagement? Obviously, the decision depends on your particular products and your environment, but increasingly in the future, the answer to that question is going to be another question:
Can you afford not to be a part of the conversation, especially if your competitors already are?

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Terrorist Attacks in Mumbai, India

As I write this, the terror situation continues in Mumbai, India. The Times of India first reported the initial news sometime around 10 am this morning, which means it has already been going on for over twelve hours. Although Mumbai has suffered from other significant terrorist actions in the past few years, this is the most violent and long-running attack that I can remember. According to the latest reports, at least 101 people have been killed and hundreds more have been injured. The beautiful Taj hotel building has flames shooting through its top floors and terrorists are still holed up in the Oberoi Trident hotel.

One tragic outcome is that the Mumbai police have been hard hit by this attack, having lost three of their top people: ATS Chief Hemant Karkare, Encounter Specialist Vijay Salaskar and ACP Ashok Kamte, have been killed. Our thoughts and prayers are with their families.

Atypically for terrorist activities in this region, this particular attack seems to have specifically targeted foreigners. That, and a high level of coordination across multiple targets, points to a new level of sophistication for the local terrorists.

The best way to monitor the situation from afar, I've found, is via twitter. The catchall twitter tag #mumbai (thanks to @fredwilson for pointing this out) is currently getting multiple updates every minute. Although CNN is much more visual and includes more analysis, it's hard to beat twitter for real-time updates of breaking news. Gaurav Mishra provides some great commentary on the role of real time citizen journalism in covering these attacks (as does TechCrunch).

"The purpose of terrorism," Vladimir Lenin once said, "is to terrorize." Perhaps, but I think that these terrorists have underestimated the resilience of spirit of the people of Mumbai. In the same vein as New Yorkers, the Mumbaikars will survive this brutal act of terrorism and eventually emerge the stronger for it. Terrorism has become a scourge worldwide, but in the end, it cannot succeed; by simply going on with their daily lives, the regular folks - unsung heroes all - will eventually prevail.

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"Doctor, I read it on Google"

As I observed earlier when writing about Emerging Trends in Healthcare, the relative knowledge levels are changing rapidly in the physician-patient relationship. In the past, the physician was clearly the expert and the patient simply accepted the doctor's judgement and counsel without question.
 
Today's web-savvy Healthcare consumers, however, are adept at finding comprehensive and detailed information about their own condition and disease. In many ways, in fact, they have an advantage over the doctor - a patient only has to learn about one particular condition (or a few); whereas a physician, even a specialist, must necessarily cover a far wider range of medical knowledge.

By and large, most doctors are uncomfortable with this sudden shift in patient knowledge level and the potential for second-guessing the doctor's opinion, that goes with it. New research from Microsoft suggests that the doctors may be right!

Microsoft Research has just published an article on this topic: Cyberchondria: Studies of the Escalation of Medical Concerns in Web Search. The study authors found that patients who perform Web Searches about their symptoms, tend to have an exaggerated sense of their illness. Says the article:

However, the Web has the potential to increase the anxieties of people who have little or no medical training, especially when Web search is employed as a diagnostic procedure.
...
We show that escalation is influenced by the amount and distribution of medical content viewed by users,

Overall, though, this finding is hardly surprising. As any layperson who has ever perused a medical encyclopedia knows, just reading about the specific symptoms for any random disease makes one start to start imagine those very same symptoms - it is part of the human condition! Obviously the same thing happens when patients read medical information online.

At the same time, there is a distinct upside for patient health in having all of this medical information easily available and accessible to all. Informed patients are in a better position to understand what is happening to them; they can handle it better and can take better care of themselves in addressing their own health problems.

In any case, this is a one-way street. The genie is out of the bottle now and patients will be increasingly better-informed in the future. Whether this is preferable or not, physicians had better gear up to deal with this change.

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Shared Searching from Microsoft - a new form of Social Search

The New York Times reports that Microsoft is developing a tool to enable users to collaborate in real-time on web search. This free IE7 plug-in allows users at different computers to divide up a search task among themselves, and then pool their results and recommendations in a shared space displayed on their browser.

 

Meredith Ringel Morris, a computer scientist at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Wash., has created one of these collaborative tools, SearchTogether, now available in a test version as a free download at http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether. The program is designed to work within the Internet Explorer 7 browser.

 

“Web search is usually considered a solitary activity,” Dr. Morris said. “But many tasks can benefit from joint searching.”
...
The system also has a “peek and follow” feature that lets a group member watch another member search.

This is a fascinating idea that hasn't been tried before. Although search is commonly an individual activity, there are many scenarios when being able to directly share the search activity and discuss the results is invaluable; e.g. in a business context, geographically distributed team members could collaborate on project tasks that include internet search activities; similarly, in a family context, you could remotely assist less-computer-savvy adults or children in completing tasks that include web search.

Coincidentally, earlier this week Google also launched their own take on social search. The Google SearchWiki enables you to customize search by re-ranking, deleting, adding, and commenting on search results. These results only affect your own searches, but you can share your annotations and changes with others; although as Marshall Kirkpatrick notes on the ReadWriteWeb, viewing these annotations leads to a poor user experience. No doubt that will change soon; the area of social search is very important to Google, as Marissa Mayer noted in a VentureBeat interview in January of this year.

Of course, there are many other social search engines - Delver, OneRiot, Scour, Tusavvy, Yoono, et al (I still remember Lijit, but it seems to have turned into a publisher application); Mashable has a has a list .

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"Connecting With Your Intimate Bot" - by Sramana Mitra

I've just started reading Sramana Mitra's new book, Entrepreneur Journeys. More thoughts on this to follow, but in the meantime, here is an excerpt.

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Connecting With Your Intimate Bot

We've all had this thought: When will technology slow down enough for me to catch up? Just managed to get a grip on Web 2.0 (or did I?), and already there are rumblings about Web 3.0.

But the Web's evolution slows for no one. Here's how to get ahead of the next wave.

There are numerous definitions of Web 3.0 floating around. Tim Berners-Lee, a father of the World Wide Web, talks about the "Semantic Web," a way that computers employ the meaning of words – not just pattern matching – along with logical rules to connect independent nuggets of data and so create more context for information. The formula that makes the most sense to me is this: Web 3.0 results from combining content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search. Or, to put it in a handy phrase: Web 3.0 = (4C + P + VS).

Here's what it means.

Web 1.0 was all about driving online commerce and trying to find "anything" in the tangled jungle of the Web. It produced companies like Yahoo!, Amazon.com, eBay, Netflix and Blue Nile. The rush for dollars also resulted in the dot-com meltdown. Even so, people's habits of searching, buying and selling genuinely changed.

Web 2.0 has been a relatively niche phenomenon, with hundreds and thousands of tiny companies primarily focused on social networking through online communities. MySpace, Facebook and Digg, have been the most notable companies to emerge. But there are a plethora of others where you can "meet," "connect" and "make friends" online these days – habits no longer considered weird.

At the same time, we've seen a great deal of investment in vertical search companies. If you are looking for a job, you can go to a site like Indeed.com and search across various job portals and career sites. Or go to Kayak if you've got travel questions, or TheFind if you're seeking shopping advice. In each case, the sites have carefully customized search parameters (job seekers, for instance, can search on salary ranges, locations, job levels and so on). Therein lies the big difference with Google, a generic horizontal search engine.

Finally, Web 2.0 has brought an onslaught of user-generated content in the form of blogs, podcasts, appending comments at the bottom of articles, posting reviews of restaurants, movies, stores, and hotels. Media has become truly interactive, as opposed to the one-way world we were used to. Many more voices are being raised, and heard. The media industry, as we have known it, has been shaken to its roots.

The next wave – Web 3.0 – will organize itself around two different elements: context and the user.

By "context," I mean the intent that brings you to the Web, your reason for surfing. Looking for a job is "context," as is planning a trip or shopping for clothes. Fundamental to context is the user. And when you fuse a specific user with genuine context, you wind up with truly personalized service.

Imagine this: You are planning a trip to Rome. You are looking for a hotel around Piazza di Spagna, but not something large and impersonal – which rules out the Hassler Villa Medici. You like smaller bed-and-breakfasts, with charm, warmth, character. You want an online travel agent who can understand your needs and preferences, and find you not only the right hotel but really interesting restaurants, boutiques and shows all aligned with your taste. Normally, you use Guide du Routard as your travel guide, but today there is still a gulf between travel guides and online travel-booking sites – in other words, content and commerce are fragmented. In Web 3.0, you will see content and commerce finally come together in a big way, no longer forcing you to hop from site to site to get one job done.

On this same trip, you would love to meet local people who share your interests – say, cooking, jazz, opera. In Web 3.0, you will see the community elements of Web 2.0 pulled into context, making it as easy to find new friends with common interests, even in a distant city, as it is to book a hotel room.

Some user-generated content is already evolving into an integral part of travel planning today. At TripAdvisor, for instance, travelers report back on their experiences at hotels around the world. The missing element, however, is the notion of the individual user and his or her personal needs. You don't want to read reviews from anyone. You want to read reviews by people whose taste and judgment you trust.

In a Web 3.0 world, then, a personalized travel agent will help you find and book a highly customized itinerary, leveraging all the power of previous generations of Web technology –searching (both generic and vertical), community building, content and commerce. That's how I get Web 3.0 = (4C+P+VS) – the sum of content, commerce, community and context, with personalization and vertical search.

This is complex technology, requiring sophisticated artificial-intelligence algorithms. After all, your Web 3.0 travel agent will not be a "person" but a "bot", or intelligent agent.

But I suspect you will like your travel bot. And your career bot. And your shopping bot.

So be patient with the technology entrepreneurs around the world, who are working through these generations of the evolving Web, trying to bring about a dramatically better user experience. After all, they - and their bots - are working for you.
 :)

                      Entrepreneur Journeys
                           

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Windows on OLPC: Is it a Deal-breaker?

The latest issue of the Boston Review has an interesting essay by Richard Stallman, the father of GNU and the Free Software movement. Stallman takes great issue with OLPC's recent switch to allow the machine to become a platform for running Windows. [OLPC - the "One Laptop per Child" project, is working on developing a low-cost, connected laptop for educating the world's children.]

Stallman was initially a proponent of OLPC. Now that OLPC has enabled it to run with Windows, he argues:

... the main effect of the OLPC project—if it succeeds—will be to turn millions of children into Microsoft users. That is a negative effect, so the world would be better off if the OLPC project had never existed.

In the article, he lists the four essential freedoms of free software: freedom to run the program, to study the source code, to distribute exact copies of the program and to distribute modified copies of the program. With these freedoms, he says, users become more powerful; they get access to software that does not include malicious features and does not encourage user dependency.

Windows programs, on the other hand, do not give the user any such powers. As Stallman says,

Windows Vista has features to spy on the user, restrict use of data in the machine, and even attack the user (Microsoft can forcibly install changes in the system at any time). Windows Media Player restricts copying, format conversion, and even viewing of files.

While I have the greatest respect for Professor Stallman and the achievements of the Free Software Foundation - open source has truly changed the world - I wonder if his call for withdrawing support from the OLPC is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

There's little doubt that distributing free software, rather than Windows, on OLPC machines is a worthy goal - it will give a boost to alternatives and help propagate them to different corners of the world. Having said that, the OLPC initiative itself is a far-reaching, historic effort to get real computers, however simplified, into the hands of schoolchildren everywhere at a price that's far more affordable than ever before. 

In the long run, the ranks of open source programmers are likely to swell due to this wide exposure to computers at an early age, whether or not it is Windows. And in the meantime, OLPC will provide those children in developing countries who would otherwise not have any possibility of computer access, with the benefits of learning and connecting using computers. As such, I believe OLPC still deserves our support.

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Prediction Markets and the US Presidential Race

Last night, we saw history in the making as Barack Obama won the race for the White House and became the first African-American person to become President of the United States, after a long and arduous campaign that the NYT calls "near-flawless".

Although consistent hard work, strong organizational skills and an uncanny ability to stay cool under pressure, all played a big part in his win, I suspect that one of the core qualities that brought him so far so fast is his ability to bridge differences and to bring people together, even over heavily-divisive issues. [e.g. check out these articles from Slate magazine, about his work at the Harvard Law Review  and his position on abortion. ]

Enough politics! Let's get to technology - well, the technology of politics, at any rate. Specifically, about applying the Wisdom of Crowds, with all the attendant risks, to predict the outcome of the Presidential race.

Professor Sam Wang of Princeton has been tracking WoC data to do just that. Although I don't understand the mathematics of it, his final predictions were very good - check it out!

Other prediction markets also correctly forecast Obama as the eventual winner.

Oh, and good news for Twitter fans - the service stayed up, even as it got backlogged, during record-breaking activity on its site on election night.

Let me end with this elegant quote from President-elect Obama's acceptance speech: "America is a place where all things are possible".

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AltSearchEngines goes independent

My friend Charles' blog, AltSearchEngines, is now independent! ASE started life as part of the ReadWriteWeb network.

Since the inception of ASE, Charles has established a reputation for high-quality reporting, focusing relentlessly on covering all happenings in the search engine space. Although the Alts form his main subject, he also devotes some space to the mainstream search engines, providing a fairly complete picture. He's now seen as an authority in this space even by the MSM, as recent mentions in Newsweek and Wired indicate.

Congratulations, Charles! And Best of Luck!

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