« January 2008 | Main | March 2008 »

February 28, 2008

Semantic Web - What is the Core Problem?

In his latest blog post, Mathew Ingram writes about Paul Miller's interview with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web. Miller's interview writeup is very interesting - as Marshall Kirkpatrick notes on the ReadWriteWeb, Sir Tim feels that all the pieces for the Semantic Web are already in place to realize a large part of the dream and to allow us to create applications that leverage the power of structured data and the integration of that data.

[One big problem for the Semantic Web that I've written about recently is the lack of meaning-enabled authoring tools; however, in the interview, Sir Tim indicates that this need is less critical; the structured data we need can come from databases.]

Coming back to Ingram's post, he says that the biggest problem with the Semantic Web is that "it’s as boring as dry toast" - i.e. it's all about the technical side, with discussions about plumbing and widgets and standards, and there's nothing there that will make people sit up and take notice.

Continue reading "Semantic Web - What is the Core Problem?" »

February 27, 2008

Web Poll Results: Killer App for Semantic Web technology

Our recent web poll asked readers to vote on what they saw as the most likely "killer app" for Semantic Web technology, from a variety of choices. A total of 51 readers voted - thank you! The results of the poll are shown below.


    

What is the most likely *Killer App* for Semantic Web technology?



Within this results set, users felt that Web Search was the most promising application of Semantic Web. This seems reasonable - being able to extract the meaning of web pages should help search engines match results better with specific queries. On the other hand, this blog focuses extensively on web search, so the demographics of the audience may be skewed, thus affecting the results.

More interesting is that readers felt that Enterprise Applications are more likely to benefit from semantic analysis, over vertical applications. This is curious because semantic analysis is easier and more effective within a given vertical domain, where some level of background knowledge can be assumed by the parsing algorithms.

Also, Social Applications got only one vote - but as Facebook's Aditya Agarwal noted in a recent SDForum meet, the problem of finding relevant content of interest for a given user from within their social group is actually very similar to the basic problem of web search. So those two choices are not as different as one might think.

Finally, several users chose the "other" option, and listed their own interesting choices:

  • gnodal    [??]
  • contextual search
  • Actually, semantics is not about a particular application but a way of expressing
  • All: Integration of search with social networking and other apps
  • portal and service interoperability


February 24, 2008

Semantic Web: Where are the Meaning-Enabled Authoring Tools?

Jason Kolb sees it as a way to identify data objects using URIs. John Markoff, of the New York Times, calls it Web 3.0 . And Nova Spivack has a long post clarifying what it is Not.

What are all these authors talking about? The Semantic Web - much has been written recently about its concepts, approaches and applications. But there's something missing, a piece that hasn't generated much interest to date.

In terms of understanding, finding and displaying content, there is no doubt that the Semantic Web is slowly becoming real (e.g. there were some great demos at a recent SDForum meet ). However, a gap is emerging with Content Authoring tools, which have not yet made this paradigm shift.

On the one hand, most authors are comfortable with, and proficient in, desktop authoring tools, such as Microsoft Word, FrontPage, Adobe GoLive and others; this is especially true for professionals and other experts who create technical reference content for web applications, such as legal references, accounting manuals or engineering documents. The current crop of authoring tools produce visually high-quality articles and web pages, but their XML or RDF creation capabilities are severely limited.

On the other hand, parsing Word documents or HTML web pages to extract meaningful structure out of them, gives poor results; much of the semantic knowledge of the content is lost. There do not appear to be any popular tools that create Semantic content natively and yet are natural and easy for a content author to use.

Top-Down? Or Bottom-Up?

Of course, there are ways to get around this issue to some extent. Allowing authors or readers to add tags to articles or posts allows a measure of classification, but it does not capture the true semantic essence of the document. Automated Semantic Parsing (especially within a given domain) is on the way - a la Spock, twine and Powerset (see writeup ) - but it is currently limited in scope and needs a lot of computing power; in addition, if we could put the proper tools in the authors' hands in the first place, extracting the semantic meaning would be so much easier.

For example, imagine that you are building an online repository of content, using paid expert authors or community collaboration, to create a large number of similar records - say, a cookbook of recipes, a stack of electrical circuit designs, or something similar. Naturally, you would want to create domain-specific semantic knowledge of your stack at the same time, so that you can classify and search for content in a variety of ways, including by using intelligent queries.

Ideally, the authors would create the content as meaningful XML text or RDF triples, so that parsing the semantics would be much easier. A side benefit is that this content can then be easily published in a variety of ways and there would be SEO benefits as well, if search engines could understand it more easily. But tools that create information in this way, and yet are natural and easy for authors to use, don't appear to be on their way; and the creation of a custom tool for each individual domain, seems a difficult and expensive proposition.

Car Review Example

As a more concrete example: imagine that you control a web site called New-Car-Reviews.com, a hypothetical site that reviews new cars; you pay expert authors to write reviews of new car models every year for this site. Unlike other automobile characteristics, reviews cannot be easily stored into a database and queried. Conceptually, your reviews are similar to this review for the 2008 Volvo S40 2.4i sedan on the automotive site Kelley Blue Book.

In the current paradigm, a typical element of the review is usually written something like this:

    <span id="ctl00">You'll Like This Car If...</span>
        ...description_positive...
    <span id="ctl00">You May Not Like This Car If...</span>
       ...desc
ription_negative...

For the future, imagine this: when your authors are originally composing this review, what if they could instead create it with semantic markup embedded:
(In this example, I use straight XML for simplicity; the actual format of the content could be RDF-triples, or some other improved format)

    <advantages>You'll Like This Car If...
        <text>...desc
ription_positive...<text>
    </advantages>
    <disadvantages>
You May Not Like This Car If...
        <text>...description_negative...<text>
    </disadvantages>

then you can get more value out out of the same content:

  (a) You can easily *re-purpose* the content in additional ways, such as for mobile devices, RSS feeds, web services APIs, mashups and so on
  (b) As search engines start to take advantage of semantic notation, you get SEO benefits
(c) You can provide users with ways to query the content *intelligently* ("show me cars which are family-friendly AND don't roll over easily vs those that work better off-road AND seat 7"), using tools such as the recently-released SPARQL .

As a content publisher, you want your content to be found and used as much as possible, and making it meaning-enabled is a big step in this direction. At the same time, you cannot ask authors to use a pure XML tool such as XMLSpy or an ontology editor like protégé; and MS Word creates unreadable XML that specifies formatting rather than semantics.

A solution for this specific example already exists: Microformats could be applied to handle the problem of annotating the advantages and disadvantages. While the Microformat solution works very well for specific types of information - such as for describing people and addresses - it is too limited to be applicable in a general way to add semantic information to web content at large.

It seems to me that the general problem must be solved if we are to see large-scale adoption of the Semantic Web. It would be a boon to expert authors everywhere, including those who create news articles for the newspaper publishing industry. But there do not seem to be any solutions on the horizon, in terms of technologies, tools or processes to promote the creation of more meaning-rich content.

Reactions: But is there a Business Case?

When I put this question to a group of prominent bloggers and industry thought-leaders in the Semantic Web space, the results were not encouraging. There does not seem to be much interest in building Semantic authoring tools. The main stumbling block is the lack of a clear business model for publishers to embrace this approach.

Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners, has recently penned a series of articles focused on Semantic Web: Meaning = Data + Structure , based on user-generated structure, domain knowledge and user behavior , which focus on the problem of inferring meaning from content.

He questions the business rationale for authors to take the effort to add XML markup to their content, and points to domain-specific extraction approaches as the more likely solution:

The challenge with getting most authors to markup in XML is not just one of tools, but also of motivation IMO. Unless and until a clear business case advantage justifies the additional effort required, and that advantage is greater than other projects offer, you won't see much semantic markup except from academics and others whose interests are more philosophically driven than business driven.

That is why I think the domain specific extraction approaches will likely be more prevalent - the business advantage of better search and structure accrues to the person doing the extraction, and because it is domain specific, the additional effort is lessened

He's right, of course; domain-specific extraction approaches are definitely going to be popular, and are beginning to take off already. It provides significant added value for the extractor. However, it's difficult and expensive to do it well, so the business case is somewhat dubious for the early adopters.

ReadWriteWeb's Alex Iskold is another thought leader in this space. He has a series of fantastic articles about the Semantic Web, including the problem of annotating data, the different approaches used, and a primer for the structured web.

His comments echoed those of Liew:

There seems to be little incentive for publishers to annotate information.

The problem is that if you go deep enough you hit RDF. The light version is Microformats. But the issue is not the format, its the incentive.


Tim O'Reilly wrote about this issue almost a year ago: Different Approaches to the Semantic Web , in which he echoes the same sentiment:

It seems easy enough, but why hasn't this approach taken off? Because there's no immediate benefit to the user. He or she has to be committed to the goal of building hidden structure into the data. It's an extra task, undertaken for the benefit of others. And as I've written before, one of the secrets of success in Web 2.0 is to harness self-interest, not volunteerism, in a natural "architecture of participation."

Conclusion

I guess I'm a minority of one. It seems to me that if content creators could add semantic meaning while constructing the content in the first place (which is, conceptually, only marginally more difficult for the authors), then the value of the content would increase exponentially at very low cost. That seems like a defensible business case for content publishers.

The business case for publishers to annotate existing web pages and content is certainly very weak. But for new content, if you're creating it for your site anyway, why wouldn't you add semantic markup to make it more findable and usable?

What do you think? Please leave a comment below or email the author (removing the ".aa" at the end) and let us know!



February 17, 2008

Social Data: Observations from "Search & The Social Graph" Event

Dave McClure moderated an event on Search & The Social Graph at the Yahoo! campus this week, organized by the Search SIG of the Software Development Forum. With the meteoric rise of Facebook and the heightened interest in leveraging the social graph - both Google and Yahoo! have launched new APIs and OpenSocial is gaining momentum - this discussion was timely and attendance was strong.

The panelists represented some of the most interesting players in this space:

  • Kevin Marks from Google
  • Aditya Agarwal from Facebook
  • Kent Brewster of Yahoo!
  • Eve Phillips, CEO of Chirp

It turned out to be an interesting event, with lots of good discussion about the implications of portability, privacy, utility and monetization of social data. No stranger to the social data space, moderator McClure did an outstanding job of keeping things focused and the discussion lively; he was clearly  knowledgeable and well-prepared, launching into a series of leading questions that moved the conversation forward.

Key Observations

By grouping together related comments, I've distilled the discussion at this event into the following topics:

1. Relevance of Search Results

- With the explosion of self-publishing and user-generated content on the web, the type of data getting created on the web is changing, and the classic search algorithms are becoming less effective.
- Users are increasingly interested in what their friends and peers are doing online.
- By using a social graph to filter out results during a specific search, you can boost the relevance of search results.

2. Monetization

- It is no longer uncommon for a person to become a media source, using tools such as twitter, blogs and RSS feeds; but this is hard to monetize. A referral model works better in this case than advertising.
- Brand advertising is still big, even for social search, but it works differently than for targeted search
- Online brand advertising will move into more interactive experiences in the future
- The key question is: Does membership in a social group signal an intention that can be targeted by advertisers? The panelists felt that, on balance, it did Not
- For a more concrete example: Google's directed search is very monetizable; Facebook has a lot of social data, but user behavior is not very monetizable

3. Privacy

- There is a clear difference between a publicly-proclaimed graph, such as the friends on Facebook, and a private list, such as Email contacts; application developers will ignore this distinction at their peril
- Yahoo!'s Brewster said it best: "There should never be a privacy surprise for the user!"
- Applications should make it clear to users if they are making data public or private; e.g. Flickr is three-valued in this regard

4. Interaction Levels

- From a monetization perspective, all "friends" are not created equal; some connections in the social graph are stronger than others
- The smallest inner set of friends is the most valuable; the first 25 people have 80% of the value
- The viral rate of promotion in Facebook is incredible
- If users can annotate connections, they can more fully express their network graph
- You can infer relationships from user behavior, such as sites visited and click-throughs
- The most important part of social data is the connections, followed by the profile; eventually, it gives you the ability to answer the question: "Who should you go to, to answer this question?"

5. OpenSocial

- OpenSocial allows application developers to write one application, and then take it to where the users are on diverse other social networks
- The vision: take some of the good parts of Facebook and bring those to a lot of people
- This allows any application to spread through the social graph

6. Social Email

- Email networks have a lot of connection data, which has social data buried in it
- These connections can either be one-way or two-way; the difference signals intent on the part of the user
- Google's Marks made an interesting point: a person's email address and personal URL are opposites - with the former, you can communicate with that that person; with the latter, the person communicates with you

Facebook

Facebook's Agarwal did a great job of articulating the company's approach to some of these issues. His contributions to the discussion were somewhat Facebook-centric; but given the strong community interest in Facebook lately, this only added to the value of the panel.

In discussing the value of social data for search, Agarwal compared the issues of selecting for relevance among a large number of results for a targeted search, with those of producing Facebook's news feed, which must also present a large amount of data to the user in a format that's easy to consume.

In terms of privacy, Facebook wants to allow users to annotate the social graph, so that they can fully express their network. This will allow users to separate their strong connections from casual friends. The size of a user's graph is another dimension to be considered.

For data portability, Facebook currently doesn't have any plans to implement enabling features focusing on it. Agarwal clarified that although philosophically they support data portability initiatives, they have not determined it to be the best use of resources at this time.

Finally, although Agarwal did not acknowledge this directly, the panelists agreed that the Facebook-type social network data and searches are far less monetizable than directly targeted activities that display clear intent, such as a Google search.

Chirp

This was the first time I saw a demo of Chirp . Eve Phillips, Chirp's CEO, gave a demo of chirpscreen, an interactive screen saver that displays content from your social network, such as pictures from Flickr and status messages from Facebook. On the whole, the audience loved it - a series of photos of her friends kept popping up on the screen - but there were some concerns about being able to control what gets shown. According to Phillips, Chirp is planning to introduce new features soon that will allow users to set preferences of what content is displayed, from which sources, and so on.

Open Questions

McClure asked some incisive questions to the panelists, which deserve to be listed in their own right; I hope these lead to a wider discussion about social data and related topics:

  • Is Social Search - revolutionary, or evolutionary?
  • Which benefits more from social data: targeted search or discovery?
  • How well does social search monetize?
  • How should we use the social data that's automatically present in Email?
  • If Facebook and other networks encourage lightweight friendships, does it obscure the real social graph?


February 12, 2008

Enterprise 2.0: Top 5 Corporate Challenges for 2008 and beyond

The Few, the Proud

A few days ago, in its commentary section, the Wall Street Journal reported on an interview with General James T. Conway, Commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps.

In the interview, Gen. Conway muses on the way the tactics and equipment of the Marines are changing, in response to the unique nature of the responsibilities they have in Iraq and the evolving nature of their mission.

One way the Marines are clearly changing is in the vehicles troops use to patrol in Iraq. "If you look at the table of equipment that a Marine battalion is operating with right now in Iraq," Gen. Conway explains, "it is dramatically different than the table of equipment the battalion used when it went over the berm in Kuwait in '03, and it is remarkably heavier. Heavier, particularly in terms of vehicles.  ....these type of things, make us look more like a land army than it does a fast, hard-hitting expeditionary force."

...
In short, wars have a tendency to change the culture of the militaries that fight them. For the Marines, the cultural change they fear most is losing their connection to the sea while fighting in the desert.

In the midst of all this change, Gen. Conway is worried about preserving the essential character of the Marine Corps, even as the rest of the world changes around it. As an organization, the Corps faces one of the most daunting management challenges in the world: keeping individual Marines highly motivated and getting them to excel at a difficult, dirty and dangerous job, in the face of low pay and extreme working conditions. It is critical to preserve this esprit de corps, even while gearing up for new missions for the modern battlefield.

Corporate Trends

What does this have to do with modern corporate organizations? While the specific conditions are very different - no bullets or humvees are involved - companies have also been facing a set of discontinuous shocks in the last few years, and their pace is only increasing. In many ways, corporate leaders are facing major changes with challenges similar to the ones facing Gen. Conway, to which they must respond quickly and effectively, without losing their own organizational culture and common knowledge.

What do these discontinuities represent? Given below are five significant challenges facing corporate organizations in 2008 and beyond. None of these are new but their trends are rapidly accelerating. For a company to survive and compete effectively, it is imperative that its leaders have a strategy to handle each one.

1. Outsourcing Partnerships:
Corporate outsourcing has been growing rapidly over the last ten years. Initially it started simply as a way to find talented technical workers quickly and at low cost.

Recently, though, this trend has been evolving; outsourcing vendors are now seen as strategic partners who participate in the corporate vision of the Enterprise and share in its successes and failures. Bringing these outsourcing partners into the fold (especially if they are off-shore) is neither quick nor easy.

2. Hyper-Informed Consumers:
The average person in the United States and other developed countries already has unprecedented access to information, more so than at any other time in history; this access is now spreading across the rest of the world following the proliferation of mobile phones.

Coupled with a corresponding increase in the willingness and enthusiasm of users to consume that information - e.g. watching the quarterly interest rate changes by the Federal Reserve is now a national pastime in the U.S. - this means that consumers are now exceptionally well-informed.

Companies must act accordingly; they must either join the online conversation as equal partners (as Cluetrain suggests ), or be left out.

3. True Globalization:
Increasingly, corporations find their talent, their suppliers, and most importantly, their customers, at an international level and compete for them with other multi-national conglomerates, both domestically and abroad. As Thomas L. Friedman's popular book says, the World has become Flat again.

This change brings a whole new set of challenges with it; only organizations with a truly international mindset can survive and thrive.

4. Communication and Collaboration across Distributed Teams: 
With this new diversity of cultures, geographies and perspectives within the Enterprise, it is even more critical to get teams to communicate openly and to embrace a shared vision.

The recent uptrend in the use of Enterprise 2.0 strategies and tools is a positive development in addressing this need. These tools help to bridge the gaps; they promote collaborative design and development, and enable rapid dissemination of information among international teams spread across geographical boundaries and many different time zones.

The speed and flexibility with which these distributed organizations can respond to changes in market conditions, is now a major competitive differentiator.

5. The Dominance of Search:
As commerce shifts increasingly online, the use of the Internet for research, analysis and selection of vendors, and for making purchases, is increasing rapidly. In the future, it is expected to become the primary way users find information.

This means that if a company does not show up near the top of search results for the major search engines, then essentially it doesn't exist for new prospects and even for previous clients. Addressing this challenge requires a significant change in Marketing philosophy. Companies can no longer coast on the strength of their brands; they must continually invest time and energy in refining their Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies.

Conclusion

These five trends go together and strengthen one another; so do the challenges associated with them. This positive feedback means that the changes are only going to accelerate in the future.

How is your company addressing these challenges? Add a comment below and  let us know!

(Note: This post previously appeared on Profy.com )



February 07, 2008

WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference: Designing Search Engine Friendly Sites

SEO is one of the hottest topics currently in the world of web sites and web applications, since a high ranking in search engine results can have a tremendous impact on the amount of traffic a site receives. So it was no surprise that the session on Designing Search Engine Friendly Sites was so popular, at the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference and Expo last week.

As a co-founder of Search Engine Marketing firm Bloofusion, moderator Andreas Mueller is no stranger to the topic of SEO; in addition to asking incisive questions, he was able to add to the discussion with the other panel members.


     


The other members of the panel were:

Near the start of the session, Paul O'Brien outlined the most basic three items required for Findability - changes you should complete before even attempting any explicit SEO tactics:

  1. Access: Crawlers from the major search engines have to be able to access your site and get at the content
  2. Structure: You must organize the content on your site so that Google (or other search engine) can understand it
  3. Content: The content must follow the basic requirements of SEO, such as optimizing keywords, using adwords and so on

SEO Tips

Based on the discussion at this session, I've compiled the following list of SEO tips provided by this panel of expert Marketers.

  • Optimize the content that people are searching on, not search terms that you would like to rank for even if no one is searching for those terms
  • Try to articulate explicitly what the expected outcome is - which terms would you like to rank highly for? Which specific page should rank high for which term?
  • Think about SEO early in the web design process and throughout the life-cycle of the product or site; adding it in as an after-thought is less effective and takes a lot more resources

     


  • Within a company, it is better for the SEO function to live within the Marketing department, rather than within Engineering. At the same time, you need outside validation that the company is going in the right direction.
  • Create a hierarchy of web pages, optimized for both human users and search engine crawlers.
  • One word: Linkbait! Create content that's unique, valuable, and most important, consistent with your brand. Optimize it for keywords that are important within your domain.
  • For SEO purposes, avoid dynamic web sites that rely too heavily on Ajax or Flash; if it can't be crawled, it won't rank highly with the Search engines.
  • Creating a static site that can be crawled, separate from the main dynamic web site, has the effect of diluting PageRank for those web pages.

At one point, Mueller asked a really interesting question: given that resources are finite and constrained, should you focus resources more strongly on inbound links, or on optimizing the content?

The panelists agreed that since link popularity is weighted much more strongly, focusing on getting inbound links is a top priority; optimizing the content by adding keywords in links, using meta tags, etc. remains a distant second.



February 03, 2008

WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference: Issues and Challenges for Crowdsourcing

I attended a really interesting session at the WebGuild Web 2.0 Conference and Expo last week: The Power of Crowdsourcing - moderated by Jeremiah Owyang of Forrester Research.

Participants on the panel were:

This was one of the best panel sessions I attended at the conference, part of the reason being the bang-up job Owyang did as moderator. He took a very active role, bringing up provocative questions, directing those at specific members of the panel and not being shy about treading into the concerns and difficulties of using crowdsourcing and social media - this prevented the session from degenerating into a "Rah, Rah, Crowdsourcing is all good!" type of discussion.

The other reason was that the panel members were all knowledgeable, articulate and open in their remarks; the conversation never flagged, as it did with some of the other sessions I attended.

To kick off the session, Owyang put up a few slides entitled Social Technographics that were intriguing, but more on that in a future post.



One of the panelists, Michael Sikorsky of Cambrian House, listed the three legs of crowdsourcing as follows:

  • Wisdom, which can be explicit (e.g. voting in American Idol) or implicit (e.g. links used for calculating PageRank)
  • Participation, such as item submissions or code check-ins
  • Funding, such as a prize or project funding

The Challenges

Based on the discussion at this session, I've compiled the following list of challenges in implementing crowdsourcing solutions and ways of addressing them.

Wisdom of Crowds: How do you keep the input quality high?

For any crowdsourcing activity, the first step is to pick the right crowd! Equally important, you must ask the right question.

The next step is to use statistical methods to prioritize high-quality input. Finally, a self-policing community (possibly, with some moderation) can help weed out low-quality input and spam.

Is there an inverse relationship between those who have the time to contribute, and the quality of the ideas presented?

One caveat to keep in mind is that the vocal minority may not be representative of the majority of users. But this type of forum may act as a funnel for identifying talented people who have not yet been discovered.

By providing rewards or incentives consistent with the value of the ideas being submitted, you can get greater participation from qualified users and a higher level of confidence in the quality of the ideas being submitted. Another alternative is to use some type of game mechanism; games have built-in rewards that encourage participation.

What if some people don't want to be outsourced?

Tara Hunt, of Citizen Agency, recently wrote a blog post titled: Please Stop Crowdsourcing Me , questioning whether crowdsourcing is a good idea. She has a point - some users may not want to contribute or be involved in a crowdsourcing exercise, especially to benefit a large corporation.

The panelists agreed, and pointed out that you should carefully consider which tasks should be outsourced in this way - for example, product users love to help each other out with solving problems and difficulties, but if participants get the feeling that the company is simply using them to reduce customer service costs, then they will stop being helpful.

Any crowdsourcing program has to be thought through and managed carefully; you don't want to risk users having a bad experience.

How do you manage and lead a crowd, to create a positive experience?

For the community to be truly engaged, it is extremely important for the company to be very transparent.

One key point to think about, especially for large companies, is that you have to be careful about what you share with the crowd. On the one hand, the more you share, the better the ideas you will get; on the other hand, you risk letting out corporate proprietary secrets.

Finally, some activities simply may not be amenable to crowdsourcing.

How much control do you want to retain? Do you need a Product Manager as an expert?

A community of users can generate a lot of great ideas, but those don't all necessarily fit together; having an expert in place as a product manager can provide guard rails to keep things on track. The product manager can bring a single, unified vision and - this is critical - can communicate back to the community why a particular idea is not being used.

It's important to find a balance: the community generates the ideas, but the company or organization picks the ones to be used, refines them and implements them. Even the nuggets of ideas can be leveraged to create lots of value.


 


Successful Examples

The panelists also offered examples of actual crowdsourcing implementations:

  • The Longitude Prize - one of the earliest examples, was a reward offered by the British government through an Act of Parliament in 1714 for a simple and practical method for the precise determination of a ship's longitude.
  • Procter & Gamble has raised the level of outside design and significantly increased the success of product-related improvements.
  • Intelpedia from Intel, is an example of crowdsourcing in the Enterprise space. The idea is to look internally for ideas, share best practices and preserve common knowledge. According to reports, Intelpedia has up to 20K pages already.
  • Ace Hardware created a community for 300 dealers, whose ROI was measured at 500%; as a result, the community was rolled out to all 5000 of its dealers.
  • The Hopelab Foundation created a global competition for kids of all ages and received submissions from 429 teams.
  • American Idol has produced highly successful artists, some of whom have sold over 10M CDs; even the worst idol winner has sold 500K CDs.
  • Innocentive is a well-known example where companies post complex problems and offer rewards for their solutions.

[Update :  An alert reader pointed out that the P&G name should be spelled with an "&" - this is now fixed. Thanks, John!]


  • Search This Blog


    Web This Blog