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Notes from Stanford US-Asia lecture with Prahalad and Barker

by eleanor on 1 Jun 2005 @ 10:40 am in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

Here are my Treo-tized notes from yesterday’s lecture in the US-Asia Tech Mgmt. Series at Stanford, which closed out the Spring series. Note that the presentations will be available online here - keep checking.

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Jonathan Barker spoke and focused on China:

• Huge demographic and economic changes: Private property growing, primarily as lease holding from government
  Changing middleclass consumption patterns will have tremendous impact. Adoption of credit and cashless payment systems is coming: there were 200 million bank cards in 2000, in 2004 there are 468 million.
• Chinese consumption is predicted to increase 18% annually for the next X years (versus a static 2% in the US)
• Consumer electronics consumption (not just manufacturing) was $49.6 billion in 2004 (#2 behind the US right now). IDC predicts that will double to $100 billion by 2008. Covers all areas – mobiles, tvs, audio devices.
• Need infrastructure for autos: (missed how many they have now) but in 2020 China’s expected to have 140 million cars on the road – huge impact for cities (urban planning, congestion, pollution), the countryside (highways, gas stations, etc etc) and the nation in general.
• Factors even extend into the non-glamorous: take milk consumption – he showed a chart where per capita consumption went from about 2 (liters?) to 40-50 (liters?) per year. (non-sequitur thought of mine: I had read that many Asians have difficulty tolerating lactose. Is that true? If so would milk consumption be a habit, a sort of acquired taste that would signal affluence?).
• Then he discussed a most interesting bit: China has a metric called the Gini coefficient, which is a ratio of inequality ranging from 0-1, indicating roughly the gulf between the richest and poorest (very interesting – something I recall neither from Political Economy or recent discussions of class in America like in the recent series from The NY Times). China’s is now .46, disturbing when it was just .33 in 1980 (for comparison’s sake it’s .41 now in US).

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Then we had C.K . Prahalad speak on India.

Central thesis: His work is now focused on the 10 countries in the developing world (see one of his slides for the full list, but it’s the usual guys). These countries represent $16 trillion in market potential. To get there we need to adopt the point of view of bottom of pyramid, abandon our own preconceptions and ways of doing business.

The question is what do with the 80% of humanity that’s stayed under the radar of the big global and local companies. hey’re simply unserved and that creates lots of opportunities for tremendous innovation and profit.

He wanted to give specific examples of why and how things work, because it’s very different. Everything about serving this market challenges conventional thinking and assumptions. The price-performance ratio needs to be completely rethought while maintaining world class quality. You need to plan for saleability, selling profitably at $1, not $100. Right now, the NGOs don’t pay attention to scale, everything is done on a regional/national project basis. Industry must step in and build this out.

So back to the question of how to convert 5 billion poor people to consumers. He uses a pyramid to show his 3 themes: global restructuring, conventional strategies and tactics, and the bottom of pyramid (this is probably made much more clear in his book).

This matters because in age of saturated markets, where we are chasing the same 1 billion people with endless product variations, the other 5 billion needs everything, making for essentially limitless opportunity. And it’s not a question of being “backwards”, it’s not about adopting best practices, it’s about finding next practices to leapfrog from being behind to adopting next generation tools. As just one example, India (or some region in India) held a fully electronic poll for their elections in 2004; of course the necessary equipment was transported by elephant, but their elections were successfully held using technology we can’t even get right (or trust, but that’s another story in famously corrupt India). Prof. Prahalad maintains it’s just a project management challenge, and encourages the Stanford Engineering students to bite in and take it up.

The theme of “Next practice, not best practice” would come up again and again in his presentation, that emerging markets are huge, demographics (youth) & growth rates appealing, especially versus the aging and stagnating demographics of the US and Europe.

So back to the question at hand, how to marry low cost, good quality, profitability, and sustainability (I might have missed one) at same time, fuse them into each product. He went through a couple examples (but had many more, I’m sure they’re all this fascinating).

• Hospitality in India. Indians love to travel – visiting relatives, religious pilgrimages, whatever – each day 10-20 million Indians use the national railway system. Where do they sleep? Sometimes even on the street (Gershenfeld’s Fab talked about the huge increase in prices of Bangalore hotels because of the influx of foreigners in to spend time at the tech haven – prices like $250+ a night). Prof. Prahalad wanted to do it for 10% of that kind of cost. So what do you do? You figure out what it will look like. They had a team of 6 people (students? At UMichigan or somewhere else? Is probably in the book.) They limited the scope, to redefine the market as being not luxury, not budget. They created a new market, but plotting the four most critical elements on the sides of a cube: space, modernity, price-performance, saleability. These were the self-imposed constraints (I think of them more as imperatives) that could not be relaxed. He didn’t say, but it has to be the case that everything else was up for grabs.

  So the example here is IndiOne, a venture backed by Tata Industries that’s the result of these efforts.

  

  They offer rooms for $20 US and it looks like a modern hostel meets a less expensive European chain hotel. The rooms are appealing, simple and modern. They have showers, LCD tvs, cable, and broadband connectivity. Hotel lobbies have stripped down restaurants. How did they do it? They rethought everything: new training practices, maintenance plans, human resources (hiring, staffing – they do this with far fewer people), and intelligent application of IT at the backend. Delivering more features, at a lower price. And they specifically thought about scale: they chose iconographic elements so they would be portable (and recognizable) globally. This is what 6 people did in 18 months. Ten more are due to be built next year. Their goal was to destroy the status quo price-performance curve, delivering a new kind of value unseen before. Watch out Marriott.

• The second project he described was to increase adult literacy. They chose to focus not on the educational basics of the “3Rs” (reading, writing, arithmetic) but on the 1R of reading. Goal was to quickly get people to read, so they went with immersion type video, not alphabets and piecemeal word construction. [I can say that while using that Rosetta Stone sw to learn Japanese, the immersion was very effective, especially for the kanji; though I did memorize the kana]. Prof. Prahalad said that half of all Indian women are illiterate. Interestingly, from the video he showed, learning to read via computer was greeted with an enthusiasm that was missing from Gershenfeld’s discussion of tech adoption in India in Fab. It might be the difference between just plunking down hardware and in establishing a program and software to do something immediately useful for the population? This venture was put together by TCS, Tata Consultancy Services as a non-profit, non-commercial project. He said something about the software being open source.

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So that concluded the presentation part, the presentations will be online @ asia.stanford.edu/events/Spring05/ee402t/
Then followed some Q&A from the audience. I just captured snippets of the responses of the professors.

• ….Because our standard of living is so high, we miss out on serving everybody. We need to get back to the old ethos of Ford Motor Company, where the goal was to build products that everyone could afford. There needs to be a new industrial revolution.
• Discussing wage inequalities around the world: Information asymmetries lie at root of wage disparities; they will be brought in line once the information is available to all.
• Closing question - highlights of the best opportunities for the budding young entrepreneurs in the room:
  • Barker: In China, there are still lots of dirt roads, very basic opportunities are everywhere. To be successful, you need to learn to finesse the opportunity, to adapt to the local conditions and to not overlook huge potential even though many opportunities are not sexy by Western standards.
  • Prahalad: Invest time in languages and intercultural awareness. Focus on becoming part of global citizenry. In exchange for the opportunity to participate everywhere/anywhere in the world you have the obligation to do something productive, which will improve the world. Develop a personal mission, a desire to leave personal legacy.

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Prahalad at Stanford: “Changing Lifestyles in Asian Countries: Opportunities for Entrepreneurs”

by eleanor on 26 May 2005 @ 10:46 am in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

So much of our work here is about geekery targeted to “people like us”. Unashamedly alpha geek though I am, I’d be a fool to ignore the huge emerging markets of the “rest of the world”. I do though, often enough.

Fortunately around here you can get a dose of fresh opportunity. The equation global development -> rising standards of living -> profit works even for those uninterested in changing world.

Stanford’s US-ASIA Technology Management Center (home of lots of interesting free seminars) is having in esteemed strategist and professor CK Prahalad (U of Michigan & required bskool reading) and Jonathan Barker, Managing Principal, Longbridge Capital (behold, the zero info website!) in to talk about what we should be thinking about.

I primarily associate Prof Prahalad with things like “Resource Based View” and moving-pawns-around-the-board type Strategy, but his new book, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (not read) addresses these issues.

We should heed the call of the wider world.

Next Tuesday, 31 May from 4:15-5:30pm at Skilling Engineering Auditorium at Stanford.

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Gnomedex

by eleanor on 19 May 2005 @ 10:57 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Ah, so I’m calendaring because I haven’t lately. And people keep mentioning Gnomedex. Which I went to last year. But hadn’t checked out for this year, let alone even registered for.

It’s in Seattle (good I think, but I personally hunger to visit Portland as those things go), the weekend of 23-25 June. We went last year, when it was only $99 and in Tahoe (I like conferences in places I’m already looking for an excuse to adventure to). I think Mike and I will be going - that is we’ll try and hope to see you all there.

Even if you’re not a conference-goer and more like just a normal person, this is a good place to start. This conference grew up in the midwest and last time, there were midwest moms helping out. So it’s a very laid back, friendly sort of place. You’ll meet some people you’ve heard of or read, but others completely new. Sometimes it’s easy to focus on the high profile stuff and people, but that’s not where life really happens. I’d especially like to see more girls there this year, as there was a shocking dearth of them (but all the boys were very nice).

Register here.

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Webzine 2005 is back

by eleanor on @ 10:42 am in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Well, not that I was at the first ones, but I heard they rocked. Scott Beale of Laughing Squid and crew are putting on another Webzine. It’s a conf, party, subversive get together, geek-out and art thing all at once. In September. And we don’t even have to head out to the playa.

Yes, the rumours are true! After FOUR long years, Webzine will return later this year to San Francisco. We don’t know how we could have gone so long with a Webzine event either. What is Webzine you ask? Webzine is your momma’s cookies, a cup of warm tea, a masturbating monkey, Carl Sagan in the shower, orgasmic, educational, a party, a couple days at the beach, living chinchilla earmuffs, a Habitrail, a snort, 10 hours of sleep, a magical sword, a French kiss, a conference, an expo and celebration of independent publishing on the Internet. It’s an excuse to bring some of the most amazingly brilliant online content creators together under one roof, exposing their secrets so YOU, dear reader, are inspired to create your own. That’s what this is all about. Creativity, ideas and the tools to take you there. Listen, learn and leave inspired.

Webzine’s in SF the weekend of 23-24 September. And it’s going to be cheap as hell.

I’m definitely going and volunteering to help out in any way I can. Check it out.

I like conference sites that are run on blog software. Anyone else noticing that blogs are just a cheap, quick and easy way to get stuff in a web-based database?

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Design is important, but remind me how important?

by eleanor on 18 May 2005 @ 1:25 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

Two design things in my bin, so I’ll post them (having only one would seem off-topic!).

Yesterday I ran across a mention (if I had my firefox tracker, I’d know where I found it, but alas) of a design conference that sounded somewhat interesting, the Design Research for Product and Brand Innovation held in SF in October. It sounds somewhat like what I do, but I can tell they’re talking to folks with a different general skillset. It’s like listening to Québequoise radio.

I’ll admit my ignorance and say I can’t tell if it’s info design, or user interface, or - most cynically - just up-market web development. I keep attending BayCHI events and other usability things because I’m trying to understand what this role adds. I still need an answer to the question: if I have a sw startup with limited dollars, at what point do I need to have a person with these skills? What do I look for and what value should I expect them to add? I may be skeptical, but at least I continue to be curious, sensing there’s value in there somewhere.

My intial impression from how hazy things are is that the practicioners themselves don’t yet know. Perhaps because of its newness, I have a feeling that this discipline is not monolithic at all, with high variation in level and mix of skills. Like worse than when you talk about Java programmers and try to figure out who’s good or not.

The second design thing is more traditional stuff, mentioned on the Future Salon Blog - a session tomorrow at PARC with David Kelley of IDEO. Now maybe it’s a product of my confusion that I think design-pretty should also be design-useful, but there you have it. Looking at the Stanford Design School’s website I have to wonder. Is this a thinktank? Maybe it’s new-new and all will be revealed later, but I tried to sign up for the “more info ” and got an error from Topica. If I get enough done early in the day tomorrow, I’ll wander by.

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Jeff Hawkins at ETL today

by eleanor on @ 11:07 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Niall and I have become Stanford groupies. He says it’s pseudo b-skool for him, and - even though I did that already - I might agree. In my case it’s revisiting the themes from the entrepreneurial side. I was a strategy and econ wonk in b-skool, and thought it’d be impossible to teach entrepreneurialism. While it may be, I now find that having designated times to discuss the issues, tradeoffs and best practices is very useful.

The speaker at today’s ETL session needs no geeky introduction, as it’s Jeff Hawkins of Palm fame. We’re gonna get our Treos signed! Niall’s got the pen and I’m getting the fixative. See you today at Terman at 4:30.

This is the second time I’ve fetishized my handheld - my old cute orange Clié has a little kitty hair (under the piece of tape) from my now-long dead familiar kitty.

I’m willing to guess that Jeff won’t burst into song, but it’s impossible to tell.

I’ll post pictures of our trophies and the process after our adventure.

UPDATE: Ah, ok so here we are, with the quintessential geek photo from Niall. Jeff was a good sport about signing, but he seemed keenest to sign on the inside. I have to apply fixative to mine today to make sure it doesn’t scratch off. (it’s reduced here the poor-man’s way, head up to flickr for the original in all Niall’s fooery). Nice composition!

Note also for the entrepreurial engineers out there, that 106miles is tonight. They say it’s full, but you might want to see if you qualify for the invites to the next one.

And dammit speaking of cats - why isn’t kittenwar back up yet???

Edit: .org, .com - tomato tomato - Thx to JeffC for the link correction.

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Being bookish: events tonight

by eleanor on 11 May 2005 @ 5:22 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Tonight there are two book events for more scholarly pursuits (not everything is food & drink):

• Steve Johnson has a book signing for Everything Bad is Good for You at Books Inc. in Mountain View at 7:30PM.
• Scott Berkun takes time out from talking to big corps with a chill meet up during his book tour of the Bay area. He’s out promoting his new project management book, The Art of Project Management. This one is, yes you knew it was coming, at Faultline Brewing Co., a bar in Sunnyvale starting around 7.

Niall and I (currently listening to Tim Draper of DFJ at Stanford) are headed to the 2nd event, though I am still eager to read Johnson’s book too.

Update: the ETL event yesterday at Stanford was not to be missed. Tim broke into song, which Niall captured here.

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Correction, Citizen Journalism gathering updated info

by eleanor on @ 4:36 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

Two quick things: the place for Fri’s party has changed and (maybe this isn’t correction so much as perspective) it’s also not all about JD - Mary Hodder’s got the scoop that it’s also to noodle around what Dan Gillmor is doing with his new project.

New location: Varnish Fine Art - 77 Natoma (alley running between 1st & 2nd), near Howard.

I still stand behind the Onion party as well.

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Advance notice this time: Onion/Craigslist party after JD’s media stuff

by eleanor on 5 May 2005 @ 6:38 pm in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I’m trying to get on top of happenings again, and will post this sooner rather than later. Especially since I’m gettin’ outta town for both wine country and and crashy coastline adventures in the next few days. What a lucky girl. We can’t all go to Finland, but this sure beats U.S. Customs!

As Mike and JD blogged, there’s going to be a Grassroots Media/Booklaunch for JD’s new book, Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation next Friday May 13 early on from 6-9 pm at CNet’s offices in SF.

Congrats to JD on getting another one out there!

Well, what could be more grassroots than caustic humor?

Afterwards, we can keep on keepin’ on with the guys from the Onion who’ll be spinning and partying at 12 Galaxies (2565 Mission Street) from 10 til 2am. Craigslist and INFORUM (the hipster scion of Commonwealth Club) are playing host, and the event is free. I got this from a pr buddy, and will post a link to Craigslist when they have it up. Here’s a link from INFORUM.

Ah, the Onion. I recall after college when I went into office life that it struck me that Onion distribution had to be one of the web’s killer apps… While occassionally hit-or-miss for me now (I’ve grown so humorless), I found this particularly choice specimen. It’s nigh headache inducing, but is probably profound.

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Grassroots conferences: PodcasterCon doin’ it right

by eleanor on 4 May 2005 @ 2:45 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

The PodcasterCon people are taking a very interesting approach to their conference. I had to do a lot of looking around their site to see who was behind it because I was curious if it was Eric Rice because he mentioned a plan to do one back in the day. But it’s not. It’s a guy named Brian Russel of Audioactivism.org. Good job Brian.

I really like the community-based approach and openness - especially with the budget. Seems like a great way to appeal to newbies and bring more people into podcasting, and an excellent way to throw open a conference’s agenda.

I’m not a podcaster; I’m not even a consumer of podcasting. But this sort of event softens my view of the media, especially in the face of all the fluff in the last week, like this tragicomic piece from Frank Barnako on the Adam Curry/Sirius thing. You have to login to MarketWatch (free, at least) to read the whole thing, but it’s high melodrama and well worth it for gems like “Reaction to the strategy cast has been negative, beginning with comments from a computer programmer who originally worked with Curry to develop podcasting software.” It then moves to cover Paris Hilton, which is probably where the debate belongs.

In the hype and personal driven world of blogging, podcasting and video blogging, it was incredibly refreshing to need to dig thru the PodcasterCon site to find the honchos. Bravo!

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Events today and Palo Alto Geek dinner

by eleanor on @ 12:59 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

Today there is a bunch going on around my hood.

Today’s Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders session features Bill Campbell, former CEO and current Chairman at Intuit and Danny Shader, CEO/Pres of Good with an hour’s talk entitled “From Start-Up to Success: Lessons in Growing a Company”. It starts at 4:3o over at Terman Auditorium and is free. Niall says Campbell’s on the dock for his role in mentoring the Google gang as a been-there-done-that guy. Should be an interesting talk.

Then there’s a bake off:

• SDForum has Paul Graham at PARC speaking on How to Sell a Startup - but don’t let the generic title fool you. As Adam Rifkin points out on the 106Miles blog, this isn’t same-old-same-old: this is a new model of product development and market expansion. This has snacks starting at 6, goes until 9 or so and is $15 members/$25 nonmembers. I’m headed over to hear Paul’s pragmatic take in favor of what traditional startup theory rails against: tooling your startup for a flip. He’s one of my favorite not-bloggers - proving some things deserve a longer expositon. His essays are among the best out there - though strangely out of synch with the feed model. He should enable his site with feeds - I run into the same trouble keeping an eye out for new stuff that aggregators solved. Good thing others pick new pieces up pretty quick. You can get the feed here.
• Harvard Business School and the Economist are cosponsoring a tech event, “Business 2010″ right down the road at SAP. This one gets you dinner along with the punditry, but has a more fuzzy futurist bent (that’s actually what I’m moving away from, yay me!). It’s $25 with dinner from 6-8:30.

Then a bunch of us - split up by the quandary of too much interesting stuff to do - will meet back up for food (the SDF hors d’oeuvre-challenged folk) and libations at Il Fornaio. They serve till 11, and are equally happy to dish out pizzas, real food, espresso, vino, or desserts. This will happen about 9, with some of us filtering in later. Even if you’re staying in, feel free to come out for some snacks and chatter.

Update: I’ve got a reservation at Il Fornaio under Eleanor. See you there.
Update 2: Paul has a feed. Yay.

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BMA Prod Mgmt/Mktng Breakfast Roundtable on PMM in an Always-On World

by eleanor on 15 Apr 2005 @ 12:49 pm in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

Heh - I really should have done this earlier, but it’s been “get my elderly dad’s finances and taxes in order” week.

This month’s roundtable is — just that — a real roundtable. We’re going to come together to discuss the good-bad-ugly of product work in this age of constant connectivity. We’ll talk about marketing, customer support, requirements gathering, and pr - all issues that swirl together when you’re a company that’s fielding products today.

We’ll talk about blogs - not in a how to blog for your company sense, but in a how to mine all this chatter to capture what’s going on in your segment and in the minds of your customers. We’ll discuss a bit about how to tap into what’s being said via tools, but I’d like the emphasis to be on integrating the power of the blogosphere into how we do our work as product folks.

We’ll look past simply tracking what’s said about your company’s products to discuss how we can participate to shape the market and dig into the conversations themselves to gain product and marketing ideas. In many areas, we’re seeing collaborative product development, as users are proposing important enhancements directly or - more subtly - posting their thoughts on what they want to see from some enterprising provider. This is the true value of the blogosphere for product development - a low cost way to run betas, test out ideas, solicit/discover feedback, reach out to early adopters, and — lastly — create buzz.

Tumble out of bed and come wake up with us. The coffee is on the table, and the decaf is strangely tastier than the regular.

• Date: Tuesday 19 April
• Time: 7:30-9 AM
• Place: Scott’s in Palo Alto
• RSVP: Not necessary, but email me if you’d like eleanor AT ellementK . com.
• Cost: Free for members of BMA, all others $10 + the cost of your breakfast.

Update - Well, hitting “publish” was touch premature, but no major changes, just added a link to Scott’s directions. Time to be done with this anyway!

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www.blogher.org goes live, conference ‘05 logistics announced

by eleanor on 13 Apr 2005 @ 10:43 am in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

So the blogher project is up with the detail on the conference announced…. not the full agenda, but the most critical details:

• Dates: Saturday 30 July - all day, with pre-dinner Friday night
• Location: Techmart, Santa Clara, CA. Note on Gmaps that the little J should be across the street. It’s a good venue (a tad sterile, but we’ll girl it up somehow) in the heart of Silicon Valley. To give folks the flavor I tried A9’s neighborhood maps, since it came off so well at last night’s great BayCHI search session. But there was no data here for this ‘hood. Too bad. (Incidentally do see Mike’s notes on last night’s session.)
• Cost: $99, with scholarships available for those who commit to live blog. Nearby hotels and a girl network for more communistic, sleep-over style accomodations.

Blogher.org will be the core community site, so keep an eye there for the group blogs and other community building resources as they roll out.

The final agenda for the conf should be out 1 May.

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Howard Rheingold at SDForum

by eleanor on 19 Mar 2005 @ 4:02 pm in Events & Happenings | Life-Culture-Play   ++

Howard Rheingold spoke on Thursday night at PARC as part of the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series. They’ll make the audio available on ITConversations, probably in a couple weeks. I was especially eager to hear this talk because I’ve been tracking Howard’s work at Stanford Humanities Lab, especially Towards a Literacy of Coorperation, the course he just completed. I wasn’t able to prioritize attending because it competed with the more work-relevant Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program (more online video!). But that’s why we document these things.

Howard’s course just concluded a couple weeks ago, so this was among the first public presentations of what they’ve been working on. They’re working on editing down video from the class, but for the time being there are some video and audio files on their site. I took notes primarily on things I wasn’t as familiar with, so if this is new to you I recommend tuning in directly (I recall the Peter Kollack session discussing more of the fundmentals of cooperation research).

Howard’s talk took us from the dawn of time til now, ending up at the question of whether our new tools can give us additional means to create even more robust cooperation. My background is in International Relations and Policial Economy, so I’ve spent a lot time on the theories underlying Howard’s work. He mentioned Robert Axelrod’s seminal quick-read, The Evolution of Cooperation which is great for anyone interested a more robust exploration the commonly cited maxim “tit for tat works”.

Howard discussed a new-to-me game called Ultimatum. It’s a single play game, where participant A is told they will be given $100 to divide between them and another player, who is faced with the choice of accepting the payout or ending the game with both players receiving $0. In developed countries, with higher standards of living, studies showed that there was a strong sense of fairness. Player A seemed to know that Player B would not accept a division that benefitted Player A too much more than Player B. Howard said the split happened below about 25%, and that by far most outcomes were between 50-50 and 75-25. Splits less fair than 75-25 were rejected as being unacceptable, despite the net-economic-gain that Player B would receive. Strikingly, this ratio did not extend to the devloping world: where subsistence was less certain, any gain was viewed as desirable, regardless of the equality of the division. (for my thinking, this is the mechanism at work in the bloghercon debates.)

This may sound of trivial interest, but for us econ fiends, this sort of outcome blows the central tenet of REMs (rational economomizing maximizers) out of the water - with tremendous implications in economic and social theory. See this paper by Pauline Vaillancourt Rosenau, for a thorough, though academic, overview. This line of research adds to findings of behavioral economists that there are strong social and personal motivations for actions beyond just the cash-value calculation, and is opening a new frontier of academic research which folks like Howard are mining. As a staunch libertarian, I see nothing but good coming from a more subtle understanding of what humans seek from economic activity.

Continuing this theme, Howard went on to discuss research on altruistic punishment (see here and here) , which is a tantalizing topic I read about several months ago, and then lost track of. The question of enforcement has long puzzled researchers: why do some people waste their time, money, personal capital etc in taking action to prevent negative behavior (free-riding, rules enforcement, cheating, inequality)? From a survival perspective, why aren’t they just concerned with their own welfare? Why are they going out on a limb, or patrolling the range at night when they could be in bed, or even wasting the breath to speak out? All of this begs the question of why we aren’t the savages that economic theory presumes.

This line of research looks at general human behavior to say why the general person seems to be biased toward cooperation, beyond the generally 20-30% who chronically pursue their own gain. Howard didn’t mention this research, but in the fall, I recall reading on PET-scan based research showing that, on an individual level, some people receive stimulation in an area of the brain associated with pleasure when they take actions enforcing actions “retribution”. This is satisfaction received from “doing the right thing” as they perceive it. And thus the mystery is solved: these people are getting a chemical benefit from their otherwise calorie- or capital-expending effort - even outside of just the “we need to keep this place from going insane” sense of collective action. I was keenly interested in this when I first ran across it (via the serendipity engine that is Google News), because I am unhesitatingly one of those people. Underdogs? Defended. Injustice? Pointed out. Hypocrisy? Mocked. Puffery? Deflated. Well-poisioning? Countered. It’s curious to see some basis for why I still like to defend the dork that gets beaten up in the schoolyard.

Howard cited further studies (that I haven’t yet found) show people will take action to punish those who fail to punish; that there is an additional layer of enforcement around regimes of cooperation. A system of nudging, rib-poking and hazing so we all hew to same behavior.

Back to the talk, Howard wrapped it up by stating his belief (hope?) that these “new forms of communication will create new forms of wealth”. This was an echo to how he started the talk, when he discussed how eons ago banding together to hunt large game created a new form of protein-wealth that both expanded communities (the weaker could be more easily supported from the excess as it was not an economic loss to share the new abundance) and stregthened their bonds (the best place to store food is in your neighbor’s stomach — not cannibalism — but the foundation of a system of reciprocity!!). A new form of wealth changes the game, and can hopefully take us another step up from savagery.

My final note from the evening might have come from Howard’s response to a question, but contains perhaps the most profound statement on the logic of the “corporate altruism” that I know had the folks at NEC baffled (and me lacking a coherent explanation). Howard said something along the lines of “corporate support of Linux is seeking to turn Prisoner’s Dilemma into Assurance/Stag Hunt” . Which means it’s moving the zero-sum game of platform-committted devlopment to a more open application environment. And it is a very elegant way of saying “Growing the Pie”.

Perhaps anticipating Howard’s talk, Christopher Allen blogged about altrusitic punishment on Thursday morning, connecting these otherwise-game-theoretic concerns to the blogosphere, with his continued focus on the fundmental characteristics of group interaction. From my view Dunbar’s number is an observation that’s tied to the current-state of cooperation - both our collective skill at cooperating and the state of our tools, rather than a core observation on human nature itself.

For another take on this, check out Elisa’s view on Howard’s talk…. her overview is different than mine (funny how she slacked on writing this until today as well).
There’s certainly a fertile discussion gaining mometum around these important concepts.

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Surprisingly neat stuff going on in education… ETech2005

by eleanor on 16 Mar 2005 @ 11:53 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

I’m in the session on From the Classroom: Remixing Wikis with Rendezvous, Web Services and SchoolTool, and it’s been far more relevant that I expected. I learned about a new tool that is totally pertinent for both my own projects and the wiki-hunt we’re doing for the bloghercon: Instiki is a personal, client-based wiki written in Ruby. *Have* to try this one (this is more for my projects that the bloghercon thing). Personal note: Ruby is cute.

For the bloghercon wiki, I thought of rolling our own via my Dreamhost account, but then (der, just after talking to Abe of JotSpot) thought that Socialtext or JotSpot would work perfectly for this. Our list of organizing and advising chicks (and it is all chicks, dudes - and I’ll declare that I’m not at all sure how I feel about that) is growing big fast and email got unweildy for me yesterday (the day it encompassed me). I’ve got a request in to Socialtext and will try to find Abe again to see we can get a trial there. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at this space, so I’m not sure which of the tools will work best for us. Best to explore both.

Wow, and this school stuff keeps getting interesting. That’s a lesson to all of us to dismiss agenda topics outside of our normal high tech poweruser base.

There’s a new tool called SchoolBell 1.0 with a calendaring application (calendar servers/syndication is also something that I’ve been thinking and writing about).

Very good to see education is such a hotbed of useful development. The needs and resouces and tech-skills/familiarity index of most educators is an excellent model to generate applications that real users can pick up and use.

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Networked objects at ITP as art… Etech2005

by eleanor on @ 11:37 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

A few weeks ago, Mike and I bailed on the WordPress 1.5 release party and attended the Digital art thing at Future Salon where Steve Dietz spoke on the thinking going into San Jose’s hosting of Zero1 2006 big art/media fest next year. I apparently didn’t blog it as I thought, but Mike’s stuff is here. This presentation that Tom Igoe from ITP (Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU) gave is a fascinating parallel to the works discussed that night. Hopefully the presentations will be available so you can check out the …. projects (I almost said pieces).

I hope to find the presentation for this and link to it.

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Wed morning at ETech2005

by eleanor on @ 10:34 am in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

So we’re down here at ETEch - I paid for the day pass, since a few people asked. I was planning on SXSWi, and an Etech day pass was essentially the same price. It’s an expensive conference and since I’m untethered to corp entities, my evalutation is that of a private citizen. It’s interesting how a pragmatic and flexible approach can change the context: a quick flight down this am got us here in good order and we fly back tonight.

Cory’s talk was good but his is readable online (and was indeed read aloud). I like Cory better in print anyway - writing for speaking always has a different rhythm.

The swarming presentation is online now from SwarmStream - it’s funny to hear how this actually connects to work the US folks at NEC (with whom I sat rather than worked directly) are doing with their fault tolerant servers and approach to redundancy. I’m glad to see that some of my work on more boring enterprise software stacks, with areas like Content Delivery Networks, is still relevant to stuff going on here (of course it is, but it it’s different than what you see looking out the IDC libray window).

Now we have Wikipedia and the Future of Social Computing with Jimmy Wales, President, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. They’ve got 499, 388 English language articles, German is third at 209K, and Japanese is third at 106,682 articles and just tied the NYT in page views (~500M pageviews monthly). Lots of other stuff.

Now folksonomies are on, with hey - the del.ico.us guy, Josh Schacter (who we were just chatting with out in the hall, but I didn’t connect him!). He’s apparently just a stockbroker type who scratched his own itch and created a great tool. He’s supposed to be very nonchalant about the fuss, and happy in his own vocation (and therefore del.ico.us tends to languish and go up and down). That’s just what people who know have told me. But here the man himself speaks: He said del.ico.us started just from a text file, just collecting to post on a website, 20k odd links. Somewhere there he started putting hashmarks and text to grep them out later, his wireless links etc. The web version came later, but still single user, for him. It was less cateogorization, but just grouping (which for me is the key issue - let the structure emerge). Then he made it massively multiplayer. What he found interesting was about the behavior around the tags with the users, as they triangulaed around both the quality of the url/doc and the context of the user combined. He said that people use tags for all sorts of things. Tags for groups working together, tags for workflow and rss to feed stuff around. Ah, most interestingly, Josh notes that wiki’s people fight for space, there is a limited namespace and taxononmy is much more rigorous (my edits), and that del.ico.us is much more individual - there’s no agreement necessary. That’s a good distinction to make.

Marc Canter asked if we could connect tags together, the tags we’ve left lying around in the various services. I’ve been looking at this as part of my side projects, drawing on the whiteboard and talking to folks like Michael Eakes of Rojo. Something like an exportable opml that I can own as my microcontent and bring into these different system. Stewart B says that Technorati has most of this now (they have it, but it’s my microcontent, and in Technorati it’s not well linked to me). Josh says we’re already starting to see this, different axes of what tagging, why tagging, and what happens. Flickr is mostly my stuff for my purposes. Technorati is tagging my stuff for other people’s purposes. Del.ico.us is tagging other people’s stuff for my use. Clay said that the api’s are there and that the answer (totally agree) is that it should be a local activity with an upload to servers. He also brought in the idea of the remix culture, which is a good connection. But for me this is all about my microcontent working for me along all the axes of use and the variable functionalities and supported use cases of the various tools.

Josh was talking and I was goofing off and now he’s talking about a sort of dashboard interface of my tags, commonly associated (popular?) tags (perhaps associated with the items (what other people would tag them) and then a third component. I’ll have to find Josh again, because I violently agree with all that he’s saying.

Anthony Eden (who wrote TagSurf just asked how we would tie in together all the tags. Technorati is searching thru 3 services, Flickr, Furl and blogging. Josh said are you tagging for your own purposes or for others? There’s nothing to keep people from misbehaving if not - the whole meta tag padding issue. (Defefinitely look online for other notes on this session - it is VERY interesting). I’ll post this, and add update links and possibly that third thing from Josh if I remember to ask him.

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ETech or bust

by eleanor on 15 Mar 2005 @ 7:36 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

So SXSWi didn’t work, so I’m heading down with some buddies to ETech for the day tomorrow. Ah, the Southwest commuter plan!

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BMA Product Mktng/Mgmt Roundtable - Chuck Henderson on Launch

by eleanor on @ 2:22 pm in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

This morning we had our monthly BMA Product Marketing/Mgmt roundtable, with Chuck Henderson of Breakthrough Product Marketing discussing “The Product Doesn’t Matter in New Product Introductions”.

I invited Chuck to speak based on insightful comments he made in response to a launch query on another weblist. The advice he shared some months ago (which he revealed as originating with Cathy Kitcho’s High Tech Product Launch) was that launch must do two things:

1. Create demand for your product or service (create pull)
2. Set up the company to be able to fulfill the demand (make money)

True, beautiful, succinct, and something - as I reflected - I realized that startups and new product teams often deprioritize in a world of limited funds and time. Too often the operational side of the house is neglected, as a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy where companies fail to plan for success. As an example I ran across yesterday gives a nice snapshot of the problem. It comes from Joel Spolsky at FogDog software, now selling a project management book to support FogBugz, one of his software products, who wrote two weeks ago an account of how difficult it is to fulfill physical product vs. downloadable code. In a world where we just can’t do everything we want when we can see it in our strategic path, how do we account for the unexpected opportunities that emerge as we build our businesses out. Joel optimized for code, but now needs to kludge in shipping. How many examples can you think of where back-end processes are made deliberately unnecessary in the early stages of the business - workarounds adopted so this overhead can be eliminated - only to become critical later when you’re selling a more fully-developed product?

Another discussion surrounded the sales side of the house, where we thought through just why the internal aspect of launch (the sales rep training, the lining up of manufacturing, fulfillment, billing, customer service, etc.) are so often deprioritized. It’s incredibly ironic because, as the wiser sales guys in attendance reminded us, it’s far easier, cheaper and margin-pumping to sell to your current sales base. For that, you need to keep them happy. Customer happiness, once they’ve been sold by the flashy sales stuff, is determined primarily by the “boring” post-sales activities of fulfillment, service and support. I can think of a dozen startups that totally deemphasize their support functions. It’s just not seen as mission critical, as product development obviously is - because it is, well, both obvious and interesting. Support is the stealthy make-or-break function in customer retention, but it’s hard-to-quantify and unobvious ROI make it difficult for otherwise responsible folks to spend their limited dollars and time here. Another factor which occurs to me now is that building strong support infrastructure results in a lot of confusing, conflicting, and contradictory customer data. What startup, bravely going about executing their business plan, can afford to be distracted by this feedback? You know there’s value there, but it’s gotta be like comments on A-list bloggers: how can you tell what’s good and real?? Personally, I’m not sure what the answer is - I have a bias against it as well, one I need sessions like this to talk me out of.

Again, we drew in the thinking of Steve Blank from Haas/e.Piphany, who covers some great stuff in his Four Steps to the Epiphany. You should own and read this book. It’s samizdat-style, but getting a fancier cover (our copy has a map of the Tokyo subway which is amusing for its own reasons). $24.95 will unlock the secrets of the startup universe.

Chuck’s notes from the session are here (FYI - he’s going through a rebranding and Innovation Acceleration will be the new name as of 1-Apr-2005) .

This roundtable (which I ususally post about as FYI) occurs on the 3rd Tuesday of each month at Scott’s in Palo Alto from 7:30-9am. It’s always a great group of people, where experienced folks share their knowledge and we noodle through ideas to help improve the practice of the ambiguous world of product mtkng/mgmt.

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Bloghercon pre-meeting thoughts

by eleanor on 13 Mar 2005 @ 12:28 pm in Geek | Events & Happenings   ++

So I’ve been talking with Elisa for a few weeks about Bloghercon, an idea she and Surfette (Lisa Stone) came up with (back in Novemeber). It was sort of hush-hush until I prompted Elisa to share her new idea with Sylvia at the SF Blogger first Tuesdays dinner a couple weeks ago. From there Sylvia took it viral and it’s out in the blogosphere.

I haven’t blogged on it, because most of my thought has gone into it during IM conversations with Elisa. We’re having a meeting today to discuss, and I thought I’d get my ideas down first.

Let me say first that my take is that it’s not an issue of why boys aren’t linking to girls. The absence of women from the Technorati100 is absolutely not, in my view, a problem that we can address by drawing attention to sexuality overtly. The issue isn’t causing boy bloggers to say “Have I linked to a chick in my post?”, but rather how women need to tool up to play better in the blogosphere. How we need to adapt our participation to penetrate the media, and once we have our foothold, we can start to impact its evolution more directly.

I’ll probably be one of the more “conservative” voices on the team, believing that our issue is skills-based rather than a matter of social justice. Above all I want to keep it positive and practically based, so that we all can come out of this more unified, not just as a band of blogger girls, but to unify the blogosphere itself.

All-girl or co-ed??

So in building out this thing, my favorite bug-bear is the “do we invite the boys?” issue. On that one I’m solidly convinced that we need the larger chunk of the conference as chick only. Why? It’s the classic girls–school argument. If this is going to be a chick blogging conference, it’d be great to have only women in the rooms. I’d like to focus on meeting and hearing from the women, and not just hobnob with the blogger boys I know. Personal failing, but it’s a fragmentation of attention and purpose. I have tremendous dread of panels where questions come up and the moderators face the choice, in the limited time available, of giving voice to the (inevitiably) outnumbered boys in the room or giving preference to the women. And those boys in the room, as chick-empowerment-minded as they might be, will still be interested in their own issues.

As an example, when I told MikeR of this question (sea also his take on Bloghercon), he said “I want to come, I want to learn better how I can source female speakers for MobileMonday. Right now that’s too hard, I want to make it easier.” Now, noble as that is, that’s still addressing a boy problem, from a boy perspective. The chick perspective is “How can I get empowered so that I’m comfortable speaking, comfortable putting myself forward, so that others end up wanting me to speak.?”

Surely we can see the differences in focus there, and how much the focus would drive what happens at the conference.

Let’s let the boys in around cocktail hour

But both sides of the coin are important, so the idea that I’m going to push for is a split session. The bulk of the day content should be by women and for women. And then later, maybe after 4 pm, we could bring in the guys for a joint session, to workshop issues after our ladies are all empowered. That would be my ideal, with a group dinner afterwards.

What would we talk about with just girls?

We can discuss topics that might be deemed irrelevant by guys (”Whuffie Whoring for Women” would be a great one) and do so with careful attention to how we need to change out tactics. I’m totally with Elisa in that we need to keep away from the conventional smarmy chick conference topic of work-life-balance, but I would like to see a session on tools that will increase efficiency and effectiveness of blogging: how can you effectively follow a thread and participate in a conversation. How do you determine what voices you need to listen to. How do you build a tight linked blog roll, so that you get references. I know those are all “core values” of the blogosphere that I tend to dismiss, but am currently exploring a tools-based approach to match my attention span better to what’s going on out in the wild.

Someone should also have a session on succinct posts, for meanderers like me. Yesterday Russ Beattie commented that the articles in O’Reilly’s Make were “blog length”, to which I laughed and said “Oh really?’ (thinking of my own) and he said, “Yeah, all 4-5 paragraphs.” Pretty funny, and there’s a lesson to be learned: short is good. I’d love a discussion there.

What’s the point again?

Chicks are different than guys. We tend to think differently, and bring our own group norms and sense of proper interaction. Some of that is, from my view, hampering to success in the very public, competitive and continuous grind that is the blogosphere. As chicks, we have things to teach each other. I, for one, would love to meet many of these chicks. Bay area events and conferences are so predominantly boy, that I’d be thrilled to see the opposite.

And we do need to get the guys to help out in building a more inclusive community. But that’s something I don’t think they can be guilted or harrassed into doing. The responsibility remains for women to get into the game. Now let’s think about how to make a playbook, start swapping techniques, and build connections among ourselves.

Oh, and here’s the tag: bloghercon

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