Solvation

Future of Money and Technology

I had a great time livetweeting the Future of Money and Technology conference on Monday.

Now I've had some time to reflect, and my overall impression is, as it often is, peripheral:

In a convenening of leading edge experts, there needs to be plenty of unconference time. Not "networking," which is also fun but not as crucial to the conference itself; but some mechanism of meeting people in situ and gauging their relevance. Unconference. Location-based game relevant to the topic. Table topics. Q&A of yet more entrepreneurs is a public service and it does allow people to ask questions, but it's just not as fruitful as full-on unconference dynamics.

After going through and counting the number of women on panels as well as black-looking people, Asian-looking people, and the Hispanically surnamed, diversity is still an issue. Representation wasn't horrible (it wasn't good but my expectations are very low); the issue is socioeconomic diversity - particularly in a forum about money. Convening the opinions of financially supported "global" college kids and their sophisticated parents do not make a diverse group regardless of skin color (and increasingly, country of origin). Avoiding groupthink of the innovators is crucial to the adoption of new ideas into new markets.

The second crucial issue of the conference is the difference between new people who have been reading for a year and have been forming opinions that are sometimes interesting but just as often a little bit sophomoric, vs. people who have been in the space for a decade. As always, the latter group pushes against the former's well-meaning obliviousness. And the former may become self-aware to the point they clam up, which is a bad thing because they bring new ideas and energy. It's up to the conference organizers to pull out the true experts, and when this is delegated to the panelists, they sometimes have extra-conference agendas to advance, relationship-wise. Another point for unconferences.

And last, Jim Benson and others have been urging me to find the time to write up the way I look at valuing ROI for intangible assets. The interest it garnered when I was teaching a class was surprising as well. I know it will be helpful. I need to find some reason to prioritize that as #1.

Other than that? The topical highlights

• Plenty of focus on community banks that are almost coops
• Tying virtual currency to actual currency
• Unbelievable amount of focus on mobile as exchange platform - and some things are actually nifty
• Microfinance has become a cult (well, ok, maybe not quite - but it's getting there!)
• Interesting comments about repurposing bank physical infrastructure
• Effort to create exchanges for credit card debt terms (etc.).

Oh yeah. One last thing. #futureofmoney has too many characters for a conference hashtag. If you organize conferences, remember to keep the limit is 5. Throw numbers in and special characters and keep it to 3 or less. How about #F$ ? That would've been perfect!

Technorati's Ironic Lack of Community Focus

I occasionally point out that there's a lack of representation in technology-based communities of a non-upper-middle-class-male life experience. I mention that this leads to many problems, including structures that instantiate a specific type of young-male worldview and style of interpersonal interaction.

Another example for the heap: the blog categories for Technorati.  I'm not exactly sure where a blog about volunteerism would go, since there actually is no category -- ironically -- for community activities.

Community

I belong to a few online groups; one was having a discussion thread called "To Give or To Get - That is the question!" I responded, as did many others, and a few people have said it was helpful for them to think about how I had phrased things, so here's what is essentially a repost:

Signal-to-Noise is too noisy

I was at Web2.0Expo last week, and noted a lot of talk about "Signal-to-Noise."

The whole concept of Signal-to-Noise is really becoming stretched beyond utility now. You know how it started: signal was the waveform that carried information, and noise was any other changes to the waveform - the ones that didn't carry information.  So if your noise had too high of an amplitude, you couldn't figure out what the signal was. It was like the ability to see in the dark... either you could see the sofa -- maybe even just barely -- or you couldn't because it was too dark.

But now, we have something more like gold prospecting, but for any given river, people are looking for different kinds of rocks.  Sure, some are looking for gold - and few would turn it away - but others are looking for zinc and still other want stones of any composition, so long as they're very flat.

So it's more like mining from a slurry with a constant sluice possibly carrying away something you want.

Not really signal to noise, more like "yield."  What's my yield on Twitter? On Facebook's "news feed"? 

And the other component: does Twitter need my undivided attention to get a good yield?

This depends on, first, how time-dependent the tool is: Twitter doesn't have great search so unless you find a 3rd party tool that works for you, you have to look at it all day.... and, second, how fast the decay rate of the information typically is.

For example if I don't look at it for 6 hours because I'm busy, is that ok, because I wasn't going to meet one friend at Peet's and answer another's time-sensitive question?  In that case, the time decay is fast but that's fine given the attention required. However if I am using Twitter to capture information that occurs suddenly but I need to reference for a while... well, then I still need to hover over it all the time if there's no available way to easily search or aggregate responses.

So I am thinking: most web2.0 tools, can they be better described using the metric "Yield-Per-Amount of Attention Spent," rather than "Signal-to-Noise"?

I propose: "yield per glance" and "optimal glance frequency" for passive monitoring; and "yield per interaction" and "optimal interaction frequency" for non-passive monitoring.

MIT/Stanford VLAB Summary

VLAB had a very interesting line-up on Tuesday in a packed house at Stanford's Business School.

Ron Gonen, the CEO of RecycleBank, might have the most interesting doppelgoogle ever.  He also has an interesting business model for recycling, one that allows consumers to acquire frequency points for recycling.  The concept hinges on RFID chips that allow operators to match recycling with recycler.

An engaging, dynamic speaker -- who knows how to flatter Californians -- Ron reports 90% penetration in the communities he's launched within. He gets quite a bit of interesting information based on the places the recycler-consumers choose to spend their frequency points. He notes that low-income neighborhoods use their points at the supermarket.

One of his points that I think bears repeating here: he strives to leave some money on the table with respect to charging municipalities so that the municipality can point to the success of the program and build positive community cohesion.

The second presenter was the CEO of Lucid Design. This company creates real-time energy use dashboards for commercial building owners.  He made mention of a reality TV show that is a competition for lowering the carbon footprint.  The winner?  50% Saved.

The last commercial presenter was the founder of GreenPlug, a company that makes chips and gives firmware to companies: Pip Coburn, are you here?  (Pip had a very memorable picture in his book "The Change Function" that rails upon the excessive amount of computer hardware that must be lugged.) The hardware automatically recognizes what the specific device needs, and turns off after it's fully charged.  Further, it's created for easy disassembly, minimizing e-waste.

Hey. There's actually a reason to behave like a civil person?

I realize that in the United States there's a fantasy of the Lone Ranger, the isolated person outside the law who is somehow better or more pure of a human being than the corrupt people who have to conform to social norms.

But can we get over the idea that social structure actually has value? This is really old news. You know? Really, really, really, really old news. In fact, I'm going to wildly speculate that almost every woman who has ever gone into labor, or anyone who has ever taken care of an elderly relative or an ill person is pretty convinced that being isolated would be a stupid, possibly even self-destructive way to run one's life.

Collaboration? Cooperation? Of course! 

To do it well, to minimize the inherent risks, to get over the idea that 9000 superficial relationships "wins" over a few deep ones and understand in a sophisticated way the nature of boundaries and transparency, when bridge capital is helpful vs when it's distracting, the FALSE senses of risk mitigation inherent in hiring from within your network, the issues surrounding building and rebuilding (and rebuilding) interpersonal trust... that's where the edge is.

O'Reilly Analysis of Facebook Apps

It's not easy being green. A recent analysis shows the shortcomings of what we early Gen X Old Farts know: if you work for free, it's very unlikely you're going to get paid.

This doesn't mean that Facebook won't become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism.

The post goes on to suggest a hackathon during the social graph conference. 

You know, when you have too MANY aspiring developers/actors/musicians, it turns into a situation where people just hope to be discovered. So if, as a society, we could be quiet already about the alleged "shortage of developers" and realize that it's a lack of companies that good developers want to be with we might actually make some progress.

Facebook is providing a venue for talented, creative developers to communicate to the world what talented and creative developers could possibly do.  It's also got a lot of drek.

The Experience of Prediction Markets

(Cross-post to IFTF's FutureNow blog.)

I had been co-administering the prediction market for the Open Ex program at IFTF and pulled together a summary for people interested in Prediction Markets.  The IFTF market used InklingMarkets.com as a platform.

These ideas are pulled predominantly from the experience of running the market, rather than participating in the market.

Assassination Markets

I've been doing some work in Prediction Markets for IFTF, and have been particularly interested in the concept of assassination markets:  I predict this person will die can be transformed into a price on their head.

The thing that's fascinating is that markets have positivity and negativity built into them all the time.  However, with prediction markets, it becomes explicit.  A new betting site, BetUs.com, allows people to bet on specific outcomes for global warming.

Will new types of regulation spring up to eliminate the possibility of creating markets in destruction? 

Traffic magic

Figure out how long a commute should take at a given time and day, or what it would be like if you left at that moment.  This is a new feature. 511.org - Traffic: Predict-a-Trip

Who DOESN'T like the Internet - and why

This is a fabulous article from from First Monday.  Why shouldn't we assume that all consumers (if you're a business) or parents and children (if you're interested in education and other community-based communication) at least *want* to have internet access?

Pew Internet Life statistics (Fox, 2005) show that the percent of “truly disconnected” Americans has remained stable since 2002 at just over 20 percent.

Unpacking "I Don't Want It" -- why novices and non-users don't use the Internet, by R. Michelle Green.  http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/green/

The entry level price is right

Some software research nuggets that turned up:

Holy Cow! nuvvo.com Online course creation and community forum
Not yet launched but sign up now!  wildapricot.com.  Online website with db functionality.

Brought to me by the highly helpful Scott at shopify.com, a very reasonable rate for online shopping.

net-squared

at some point in the afternoon.

Are Software Patents Evil?

An excellent essay on the value of software patents in specifics, and IP in general: Paul Graham's Are Software Patents Evil?

Sophisticated and Anticipatory Demand? Or two nations, under God?

Let's have a little reality check.

Nielsen published broadband penetration data (thanks to SmartMobs, btw).

So, as usual in these things, you can't really quite manage to reconcile the terms they use since they're never clearly defined. 

The original press release of the report says, "95.5 million users from home of active broadband," 68% of people who have internet have broadband, and "internet penetration in the US" is 74%.  Now, first note that it's very ambiguous whether they mean households, users, or home+office; but let's assume they mean users at home, since the data that they specify indicates this.  Let's also assume that they say the word "active" meaningfully, which is to say that there's also a non-active segment.

So, given this, that means there are 220.5 million internet users, of which 150 million are broadband internet users.  Of those 150 million, 95.5 million are "active" broadband internet users.  Keep in mind there are 298 million people in the US.

Now what does that mean?

That means that 54.4 million users have internet but not broadband and 29.5 have broadband but are not active!  And that's in addition to the 77.5 million who don't have internet connectivity at home at all.

If you know that the top 10 states in the US have over half the population (55% - California alone has 12%), and you think that "almost everyone I know in online a lot -- and pretty much everyone has broadband" you should realize that you're way on one end of the "active user" continuum!

The other thing they mention in their report is that the average "active" user is now at 30.5 hours per month (an hour a day) of home use online.  This means for every 4 hour per day, and 8 hours on the weekend news junkie (or porno surfer or everquest fiend) there are a lot of people who are counted as "active" users who occasionally go online to check email or whatever but who certainly don't live there.

Most tellingly, they point out that internet penetration has stabilized at around 74%.

How different people view information

I was excited to see a new blog aggregator: Memeorandum.

But was distracted by:  Colleges Protest Call to Upgrade Online Systems - New York Times.