Off Course-On Target

Getting Small is Still a Very BIG Idea

Some of you will have heard me going on about how “getting small” is a really BIG deal for over 15 years now.  The context is that by making and breaking everything down into the smallest possible units (and not one bit smaller) we enable the creation of infinite numbers of infinitely customizable combinations so that each new assembly or mashup is a unique combination that fits a unique set of conditions just right.  And yes, I’ve been using the Lego ™ block analogy for as many years to illustrate this.

One of the latest examples comes in the recent announcement of Amazon “Kindle Singles” which they describe as;

“twice the length of a New Yorker feature or as much as a few chapters of a typical book.”

Obviously not a new concept in terms of format or size but what this does do is add a significant new publishing venue and dramatically scales up the number of people who can now have their ideas and writing published for a much larger audience.  For those who wish to do so this also adds some incentive and options to have their writing earn some money but I think the larger opportunity this presents is for more ideas to get out to more people.

You could argue that this is superfluous because anyone can already publish anything they want by posting it to the web via the blog and other means, and maybe these Kindle Singles won’t amount to much.  However as you know I am very big on how well the whole Kindle environment or experience has been put together (see links below) such that it is not so much about a piece of hardware as it is about content and ways to seamlessly have what you want, where you want and how you want, when it comes to text.

There are a LOT of examples out there where a seemingly small and simple idea has amounted to a very big deal in terms of how it just hits the right note at the right time and takes off with far reaching effects.  I’m not talking about fads that spike and then die off but small things which become very big and influential.  Take something like Email for instance, which on its surface is just electronic letter writing and how “big and new” did that sound when first proposed? More recently things like Facebooka and of course Twitter would seem to be top examples.  We often don’t factor in how much making something quick, easy and simple makes all the difference when it comes to adoption.

So it is with this line of thinking that I believe Amazon Singles could become a big deal.  Yes, it is a proprietary solution and comes with the usual limitations and detractors who will quickly point this out.  But again, so too have many such innovations and small new things started out this way and then caught on to become either defacto standards or otherwise broken out of the proprietary limitations.  Some of us will remember the days when Email was very proprietary and you could only communicate with others who were using the same Email program.

In any case I think this intoduction of Kindle Singles is worth keeping an eye on and even more so to trying out for some experiential learning so I hope more and more of us will give it a try and get those good ideas out there.

Related articles

• Amazon Introduces The Digital Pamphlet With 'Kindle Singles' (crunchgear.com)
• REFLECTIONS on TIME and EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING DENSITY (ELD) (waynehodgins.typepad.com)
• Top Three Big Little Reasons Why I Now Prefer eBooks to pBooks
• Kindle Singles Will Bring Novellas, Chapbooks and Pamphlets to E-Readers (wired.com)

Snowflake & SocialSize Your Burger?

I do love how serendipity continues to lead me to great and unexpected discoveries and here is but one of the latest examples which I think and hope has some value for you too.

 As you may know I’ve been out sailing in some remote spots (aren’t they all?) in the SW Pacific for the past year with mostly just my sat phone for connectivity so now that I’m stopped here in Majuro in the the Marshall Islands I’m enjoying my first decent WiFi connection to the web and a chance to do some serendipitous rich surfing.

It started when I was catching up to some of my Email backlog and my friend Marcia put me onto a new book called “I Live in the Future and Here’s How it Works” by Nick Bolton.  After downloading the Kindle version and giving it a quick read I think many of you will also enjoy Nick’s writing and insights and wanted to pass it along to you here.

 

In the book Nick writes about how he sees our shift as a "personal 'digital metamorphosis.'” which is fundamentally changing how we live, work, communicate, learn and think. He picks up on a key issue I’ve been focusing on more lately which is the fallicy, IMHO of what he calls being “"multiple multitasking multitaskers”.

I’ve also been talking and writing for many years about the transformation we’ve been making over the past fifty years or so to a society of “prosumers” as Alvin Toffler nicely put it, and Bolton talks here about a new type of consumer, the “consumnivore,” resulting from living in a world where immediacy trumps quality and quantity. 

I linked you (above) to the Amazon site for this book because their “Product Summary” provides a good summary of the key points to the book and you can also read some of the comments from others who have reviewed the book which I often find to be insightful.  I’ll wait while you jump over there to get the synopsis ……………………..

 

The next step in the cascading waterfalls of serendipity was when I happened to check out the author Nick Bilton. As many of you may already know but I obviously didn’t, Nick is the Lead Technology Writer for The New York Times Bits Blog and a reporter for the paper. With a background that spans design, user interface, journalism and hardware hacking and having previously worked as a researcher in The Times R&D Labs, looking at the media landscape 2-10 years, no wonder I was drawn to him.

Reading through Nick’s blog led me to this recent posting which was itself about his NYT article “Making A Social Media Burger”.  Both well worth reading as they are about his visit to a new “healthy fast food restaurant” that just opened in New York.  I’m not so sure about the healthy part nor am I a fan of putting fast and food together in any case but here’s the crux of Nick’s (and my) interest and why a techie is writing about food:

• with hamburgers shaped like doghnuts (read the article) Nick’s burger was as he put it “from the future:  my burger was created on the Internet and broadcast to Twitter, Foursquare and Facebook, part of a multiplayer online game, and my order was checked in by a receptionist with an iPad.”

 

• “Once you place your order, you can give it a name and off you go to pick it up. And this is where the game aspect comes in. 4Food has a leaderboard that shows the most-ordered burger. That turns it into a social networking food game.

 

• Here’s how it works: I create a burger, call it “The Bits Burger” and broadcast it to Twitter or Facebook. Each time someone orders my special creation, I get 25 cents credit in the restaurant and my burger rises up the leaderboard. The more customers order my burger, the higher it goes and the more credits I get, until I’m eating free.”

More rooted in the present, Nick also noted that:

“In addition to a connected burger, the space is as plugged-in as you will find: there are more power outlets in 4Food  than I’ve seen in the lighting and electronics aisle at Home Depot. And of course there will be free Wi-Fi too.”

I stumble over what I regard as Snowflake Effect examples like this every day, and I’m out here in the middle of the South Pacific!  I’ve got to believe it is happening even more dramatically for those of you who are living in much larger centers and so much more connected than I.  As with so many others, this Snowflaked burger example is both severely social and personalized and yet more proof IMHO of how the Snowflake Effect is becoming more and more pervasive.  Bon appétit mes amis!

 

Country or Community or Neither?

Maps are such a big part of my life as I experience the world via my sailboat so the TechCrunch posting XKCD Updates Its Map: We No Longer Live In Actual Countries But Digital Ones provided some serious fun for me this morning looking at this updated map for 2010 and this previous 2007 Map of Online Communities from XKCD.  These maps show online communities as countries with size based on the volume of daily social activity. 

It is both a fun perspective on the world we live in and very useful to support the trend I’ve been talking about for many years that the whole notion of national boundaries is fading fast relative to their importance and relevance in our daily life.  Let me be quick to point out that I am not in any way suggesting that national boundaries will be eliminated or forgotten nor that we will be any less proud of your national heritage.

But in terms of what matters in our daily lives as we go about living, learning and working together I think we are all seeing more and more examples where national boundaries matter less and less.  The country of origin of a person, product or service matters less and less to us compared to their fit and match to our unique needs and preferences.

Think about it, in your conversations and correspondence over the past week which have you mentioned more often; what country you are from or what online community you are from?

I’m certainly pleased and proud to be Canadian for example and just sent out a Happy Canadian Thanksgiving (Oct.11th) wish to one and all.  But guess where and how I sent it?  My blogs, Facebook, Twitter and all done from the cockpit of s/v Learnativity here in Majuro atoll in the Marshall Islands group. (07 06.274 N, 171 22.358 E)

I would also point out a related pattern that the importance of and the differences between the physical and the digital, between the real and the virtual, between the geographic location and the online location, are also becoming less and less relevant and distinct. We can and should start dropping them as qualifiers in our conversations. Just like we are less likely to feel the need to point out that we are calling someone from our car or an airplane and focus on the conversation at hand, we will have less need to add that some thing, or even some one, is digital or online or Canadian and focus more on having the right people and things connected together at the right time and way to meet the unique needs of the moment.

Perhaps more importantly it seems to me that communities matter more than countries.  I don’t see this as anything uniquely modern or new or digital.  Reflecting back on human history one could argue that communities have often been more important than nationalities.  What is new however is the reduced need to factor things like location or nationality or digital into our daily decisions.  They are not irrelevant, just less relevant. 

Taking an even longer view, which is my nature, I see all single point categorization such as nationality, gender, age group, digital, real, and so on, fading in importance and relevance as we instead use these as bits of metadata or characteristics which number in the hundreds, millions and centillions (10⁶⁰⁰) and which we combine into mashups and mine to help us make faster better decisions and help us avoid stereotyping and other forms of mass production thinking.

While not without new problems and challenges I for one see all these changes as a VERY good thing and a major step forward by providing more ways and opportunities for all of us to help make this a better world to live, love and work within.

In any case, have fun wandering and pondering these maps.

Here’s a Good Idea:

Several in fact; check out the two videos below from Steven Johnson, consider reading his new book “Where Good Ideas Come From: the Natural History of Innovation” and see if these help you generate more good ideas of your own.

I also love these RSA video animations like the first one below which are intriguingly from the Royal Society for the encouragement of Art and are an extremely effective way of presenting ideas and concepts.  If you’ve not seen one before I think you’ll enjoy not only the topic but the presentation style itself and you’ll find lots of them available on YouTube and elsewhere if you start searching.

But my real purpose of this post was to bring your attention to this provocative pursuit of the challenging question “Where do good ideas come from?” and a book which Steven Johnson has recently released after his five years of his pursuit from an environmental (our surroundings) perspective.  The presentation and the book provide the patterns he has gleaned from his research and observations. 

I particularly liked his his notion of “creating spaces where ideas can mingle, swap and create new forms”.  And as a real serendipity and Lego block kind of guy I was particularly drawn to Steven’s thoughts on good how good ideas are formed by the collision of smaller hunches and the cognitive catalyst of serendipitously stumbling over some rich bit of new information.  He notes that what we’ve been seeing, over the past six to eight hundred years, is the historic rise in connectivity to reach out to other people and borrow their ideas and hunches and let them collide with ours and create something much bigger than the sum of these hunches themselves.

Check out these videos below and see if they don’t provide some great cognitive collisions with some of your hunches and ignite some great new ideas that you can share with the rest of us and keep this cycle ever growing and widening.

 

Getting to "just right" getting closer

A recent posting on TechCrunch "Check-Ins, Geo-Fences, And The Future Of Privacy" had a good summary of the balancing act between privacy and geo-location and worth a quick read.  The addition location related information is a key component to the critical addition of context required by the the Snowflake Effect principal of getting things "just right" as in just the right stuff to just the right person at just the right time on just the right device in just the right way.  However there is, and likely always will be, the need to keep this location based information in context itself so that your location information is being used when you want it, with whom you want it and where it will add value.  And it can't require too much explicit input or action on our part as we simply won't remember and won't take the time and trouble to do so all the time which severely reduced the value for us and others.  So we need all the help we can get to help us make smart decisions and do so as automatically as possible yet all the while maintaining the various levels of control each of us will want, which in itself is a context based "it depends" type decision that is constantly changing.

And we are getting more and more help with all these decisions from many sources and each of us have an growing army of support in the form of other people and all their input as well as devices that are finally beginning to gain some "smarts" and be able to do more than what we explicitly tell them to do.

It was therefore most interesting to me to read the comment:

As apps and mobile devices become more geo-aware, a balance will need to be struck between the over-sharing creepiness of constant location broadcasting in the background and the annoyance of the constant check-in chore. On Tuesday, at our Disrupt conference, Facebook’s VP of Product Chris Cox described a future where phones are “contextually aware” so that they can “check into flights, find deals at grocery stores,” and do other things for us at that right place, at the right time. “These things take a bunch of clicks now—it’s all wasting time,” he said. “The phone should know what we want.”

And in other location related news:

Latitude’s New Dashboard View Is Exactly What Passive Location Needs

Tweetdeck Adds Location Column, Integrates Foursquare

Friends Around Me IPhone/iPad App Lets You Interact With Friends Or Strangers, Just Like They Were Really There

Context and contextual awareness IS the next great frontier when it comes to technology advancements and the continued exponential rate the Snowflake Effect of mass personalization is increasing.

Wayne

via snowflakeeffect.wordpress.com

Pandora still out of the box?

My first and still favorite music recommender system, Pandora has been struggling to survive and has had several near death experiences over the past 10 years.  So I’ve been delighted to see a flurry of reports in the past few weeks about how things have recently changed for the better for Pandora. See the list at the end of this post for several of these recent reports.  Perhaps what I found even more valuable was the larger lessons which emerge from the Pandora story such as how to survive by being agile and adaptive and how perseverance, both on the part of both the founder and CEO Tim Wetergren and all the many employees who stayed with him through the troubled times and in many cases going years without paychecks, really does win out.

Pandora was one of the first tangible examples Erik Duval and I seized upon and used when showing others what The Snowflake Effect looked like and proof that it was possible.  Pandora truly lived up to its mythical name and let the Snowflake Effect genie out of the box for good for Erik and I. 

While I continue to watch and experiment with many other music recommender systems such as Last.fm, Slacker, and Spotify, I’ve always found that Pandora does the best job of helping me find just the right songs at just the right time, which is at the heart of the premise and the promise of the mass customization and personalization of The Snowflake Effect.  Others prefer to find music based on the tastes of others by adding and mining data from social networks to their tools, but for me I’m looking for music that matches my tastes, moods and context and Pandora, with its Music Genome Project database containing intricate details of each song, seems to do do this best.
*  See “The Song Decoders” NYT article for an interesting insight into the people doing this work.

Music is but one of the almost infinite areas where we are seeing the transformation from a culture of mass production to one of mass customization and personalization.  Experiencing the difference between finding songs and artists via a service such as Pandora compared to something like Top 40 radio is one of the most compelling ways of seeing this transformation which will help you see just how powerful and how real this transformation is and will be.  We are already seeing similar examples of how we can have similar “decision support” in finding the best books to read, sites to visit, people to talk to.

If music recommender systems are new to you or it has been a while since you have tried them, I’d encourage you to check them out and see if they don’t help you find just the right songs, just for you, and in doing so give you a glimpse of the Snowflake Effect future before us.

 

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• Pandora: In the Middle of the Music (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
• Pandora Could Hit $100 Million in Revenue for 2010 (mashable.com)
• Of Course On-Demand Music Replaces Sales - It's Supposed To (wired.com)
• As Online Music Falters, Pandora Doubled To 40 Million Users This Year. (techcrunch.com)
• Pandora open-source handheld is go (crunchgear.com)
• Pandora Sees a Big Future: Heir to FM (nytimes.com)
• Why I love Pandora Radio (timesunion.com)

Minority Report-ing for Duty Soon?

Image by gunthert via Flickr

Seems like today is filled with examples of science fiction becoming reality and adding to my WITII? list of “What if the Impossible Isn’t?”  Below is the latest example of some significant advances in gesture based computing, Minority Report style.  Be sure to follow the link to the full article for some great videos to show you how this works.

For me gesture based computing is but one of the many exciting ways we are finally closing the gap between ourselves and the “machines” we interact with.  These kinds of far more natural based interfaces which also include things like touch based interfaces, voice controlled and direct mind/brain controlled interfaces. 

The iPad Is Step 1 In The Future Of Computing. This Is Step 2 (Or 3).

by MG Siegler on Feb 16, 2010

In 2008, I attended a meeting in Madrid, Spain that featured the coolest demonstration I had ever seen. The problem was that I wasn’t allowed to talk about what I had seen because the company was still in stealth-mode. More importantly, several governments, including the U.S. government were still exploring various parts of the technology for next-generation computing systems, so parts of this were very confidential. By the end of that year, Oblong Industries had revealed itself, but still little was said about its project. Finally, people are starting to talk about it.

While we may not have been at this year’s TED conference, apparently, Oblong was. And apparently, it wowed the crowd. And it should have. If you’ve seen the movie Minority Report, you’ve seen the system they’re building.

No, really. The co-founder of Oblong, John Underkoffler, is the man who came up with the gesture-based interface used in the Steven Spielberg movie. And now he’s building it in real life.

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• Oblong Dazzles More Than Just Me (feld.com)
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Remember when we thought it was impossible to get all the metadata we needed?

In a former lifetime when I was championing metadata and standards around the world one of the most common questions and reasons for doubting this was the future, was that it would be impossible to ever have enough metadata.  Where was it all going to come from and who was going to create it all?  With most people still thinking that metadata was the same as library cards in the catalogue and that all metadata had to be entered by us humans, it was a reasonable concern.  I remember my dear friend Erik Duval and I, and others, suggesting that this was not impossible at all and that much of the metadata would come from automated metadata generation.  At the time we could only point to a limited number of very early examples.  Clocks and GPS sensor in cameras for example could automatically add time and location to the information of each photo which also includes all the details of the camera used, exposure settings and more.  But this was barely the beginning and now it seems like I’m finding more examples everday and ones which are creating metadata at a truly breathtaking rates and scale.  And not just simple metadata but very rich and deeply detailed sets of metadat are being created.

A recent example (below) prompting this post was how SimpleGeo, (a relatively small starttup that hasn’t even launched!), is already indexing over one million locations PER HOUR.  Listen to to SimpleGeofounder Joe Stump describe some of the metadata this is generating and just one example of how this could be used in this quote from

"Location-based devices only provide a latitude and a longitude, sometimes an altitude," he said. "What they don't provide is a ZIP Code, city, state, county, weather data, messages and photos posted near the site. They don't provide business listings, Wikipedia entries, census data (for demographics), articles written or posted near the location," all of which SimpleGeo does. For example, a location-based game set in San Francisco could accurately display its players gleaming in the California sun, or obscured by Golden Gate fog, based on the real-time weather data from around town.”

Check out “SimpleGeo Now Indexing 1m+ Locations Per Hour” post by Marshall Kirkpatrick for more details and the fuller story.

Even this is but the beginnings of the gathering of metadata snowflakes as they pick up speed rolling down the hill turning into an exponentially growing snowball and avalanche of metadata.  Watch more so for the kinds of previously unimaginable benefits and capabilities which all this metadata will enable.

The Promise of a Personal Assistant is growing

I’ve long lamented the fact that for all the computing power we have at our avail, and in spite of it growing exponentially, it still seems that it is all quite “dumb” in terms of not knowing much about me, my situation, my habits, etc.  I wrote about this back in the 90’s that it was like having an assistant with no memory and no learning ability.  You had to teach them, each time, how to do everything you wanted them to do,  But it seemed inevitable that in the future we would see this change as computers and applications got smarter.  We’ve seen some progress in the years since but it has been mostly on that initial low and flat feeling part of exponential change and I think we are just about to hit the inflection or tipping point in this area. 

One indicator is the recent announcement below from Siri of their voice based assistant app.  It shows much promise and will help you see the distinction between mere voice recognition and voice based assistance. The assistance part comes when the app is able to not just recognize what you said but to interpret it and take actions as a result.  For example it hear you say “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio tomorrow night at 7.” and it will do everything from finding the closest Il Fornaio restaurant, display driving directions on a map and book the reservation for two.  There is still much work to be done to make this more ubiquitous and find ways of hooking into many other services, but it is a significant step towards true smart assistance that we all need and I’m optimistic that the exponential curve of the Snowflake Effect of mass customization and personalization continues to shoot every upward.

Siri Launches Voice-Powered iPhone ‘Assistant’

• By Dylan F. Tweney February 5, 2010

A new app invites you to command your iPhone in the same way that Captain Kirk addressed the Enterprise’s computer.

Siri's visual interface displays a transcription of what you say, then hands the data off to an appropriate web service or search engine.

Siri, an artificial intelligence-based voice-recognition startup, launched an iPhone app incorporating its technology on Friday. With the app running, you can address requests to your phone verbally, asking it things like, “Will it rain today?” or “Where is a good place for pizza nearby?” and “I’d like a table for two at Il Fornaio tomorrow night at 7.” The Siri app parses the sound, interprets the request, and hands it off to an appropriate web service, such as OpenTable, Yelp, CitySearch, and so on. It displays the results onscreen as it goes, giving you a chance to correct or adjust your request via onscreen taps.

It’s the most sophisticated voice recognition to appear on a smartphone yet. While Google’s Nexus One offers voice transcription capabilities — so you can speak to enter text into a web form, for instance — the Nexus One doesn’t actually interpret what you’re saying.

Read More http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/02/siri-voice-recognition-iphone/##ixzz0f5YzoxB8

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The Snowflake Effect on motivation

The word and concept of motivation is a very popular one these days, largely fueled by Dan Pink's new book "Drive" (well worth the read) 

So this short article caught my attention and matches my sentiments that the preface to the question "What motivates people?" is "it depends".  Depends on the context and the situation I or anyone else is in at the time.  This is the Snowflake Effect on motivation.  As Paul puts it:

“But here's the point: What motivates you, may not motivate me. Also, what motivates you today, may not work tomorrow.”

The #1 Motivator

Published: Thursday, 4 Feb 2010 By: Paul Hellman

Paul Hellman
Founder
Express Potential

What's the best way to motivate people, based on recent research? We'll get to that in a moment. But first—is this even a smart question?

Not really. The question assumes a one-size-fits-all, best solution. That's a common trap when problem-solving.