Facebook Crashes. My 5 Questions.

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

As Facebook settles to just over $20 and all kinds of problems emerge for the company as a result (chronicled here at length, including lock-up releases, tax issues, cash issues:�http://www.businessinsider.com/facebook-lockup-release-2012-8#ixzz22mj8cB6e) we keep coming back to the basics.

My 5 Questions, following up my earlier post Is #Facebook Doomed?

1. How do we value such an effort in terms that synch with Wall Street when all digital companies are fragile if wonderful things? (Answer: Dunno)

2. How do we project value into the future when (as I keep saying, over and over) interoperability looms in the social space, and with it the end of economic profit? (Answer: Modestly)

3. How can it be that our definitely “social” company shows less interest in social engagement (and diversity!) than almost any other on the planet, when it is probably the company most in need? (Answer: A Dreadful Mystery)

4. Why did Mark Zuckerberg and his buds, who claim serious social purposes for their enterprise (which I have no reason to doubt are genuinely held), not explore innovative financing and governance techniques instead of chanting IPO and setting up a governance structure that a C19th steel baron would admire? (Answer: A Curious Lack of Imagination?)

5. When will a major “social” effort decide to fund itself, in part at least, through subscriptions from its user base – with commensurate accountability – in place of the vortex of ads/analytics/privacy into which our premier social network is being sucked? (Answer: None too soon)

Facebook Crashes To End The Day – Business Insider.

Is #Facebook Doomed? (futureofbiz.org)
Facebook’s market meltdown is far from over (blogs.reuters.com)

Of Risk: Weather Threatens Infrastructure

Aside

Since success in biz and politics alike come from managing risk, it’s remarkable how bad we are at it.

This report in the NYT takes further the discussion we noted earlier (see below) on resiliency and risk in the context of the areas around Washington, DC, which were badly hit by recent storms.

More Risk: Resilience, Amazon’s Snafu, and the Cloud

Rise in Weather Extremes Threatens Infrastructure – NYTimes.com.

$1.3 Trillion from Social, Says McKinsey. BUT . . . .

Posted on July 26, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

English: McKinsey matrix as described in McKinsey Quarterly Español: Reproducción de la Matriz de McKinsey según se describe en McKinsey Quarterly (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This looks a very interesting projection. The value is mainly to be found from better productivity that will come from better collaboration using social tools.

All this may be true. But the wild card lies in what I term strategic social – not incremental tools for biz collaboration (which are important) but the much messier and so far little engaged possibility of public social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook. In general companies have seen presence in these media to be useful for advertising and customer relations efforts, and delegated that presence way down then line. The prospect of values alignment between customers, employees, and the corporation; and the ready flow of information via relationships across the organizational boundary; have been little tapped and not that much noticed. My sense is that the value lying there is in fact much greater, as it can, should, may, drive innovation and culture change within the company. Culture change/innovation is where, prospectively, all the value lies – in the context of rapid change.

Evidence of very low levels of hands-on engagement with social in the C-Suite suggests this value is a long way from being realized.

McKinsey Says Social Media Could Add $1.3 Trillion to the Economy – NYTimes.com.

McKinsey Says Social Media Could Add $1.3 Trillion to the Economy (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)

Death and Tech: Our failure to manage driving and devices

Posted on July 24, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

We really, really aren’t good with risk. Who recently pointed out that more Americans were killed last year by furniture in their homes than terrorism? And it was in the august British Medical Journal, of all places, that I read recently that there is no clear evidence that wearing a cycling helmet saves lives. And so to the roads, and technology . . . .

The number of fatalities on America’s roads has begun to rise, and it’s plain that thousands of deaths and many thousands of injuries are attributable to one cause: the cellphone. The weak generic category “distracted driving” is entirely unhelpful. Of course eating fries and drinking iced tea, like turning on the radio, can distract. Nothing, nothing distracts like a device, whether used for texting, tweeting, or speaking; handheld, or handsfree.

The intrusive commingling of us and our machines has found its most difficult entry into our everyday lives at this simple point. And while we have also proved highly ineffective at regulating cellphone social conduct, no-one dies because of cell-yell in a Starbucks or atrocious manners at table (though people do die all the time crossing railroad tracks with phones glued to their ears; a tragic end, but essentially death by moron).

Meanwhile, thousands of bodies are being mangled on our roads. Think of a massacre of 100 men, women, and children; then another the next week; then another every week; and you will get the idea. It is probably many more.

3 quick points:

1. We have failed as a community to address this issue, and for various reasons the checks and balances of the law have not solved our problem (multi-billion dollar settlements against providers, or manufacturers, along the lines of tobacco and asbestos would resolve the issue overnight; they may yet).

2. The evidence suggests that “handheld” bans that permit “handsfree” use – and are the legislation of choice at the moment – are a trick. Some studies suggest handsfree may actually be more dangerous, since we are less aware that our focus is in a conversation, not the car, than if we had to hold the item as a reminder. Certainly it seems to be no safer. It offers the specially dangerous thing, the illusion of safety, which in fact exacerbates the risk. People often have lengthy “legal” handsfree conversations for business and personal reasons and consider this normal daily activity.

3. One notable Australian study suggests that cellphone use while driving is exactly as dangerous as alcohol use; that is, that DUI is the same whether the influence is wine or a legal handsfree conversation. Yet we demonize “drunk drivers” with draconian penalties; handsfree chitchat is almost a required activity of moms in suburban minivans. (This is perhaps the single most ridiculous example of the illusions of “science-driven” policy, as I recently pointed out in discussion with a relevant expert at the NIH; he had read the Aussie document and had no defense to my argument.)

We all know what needs to be done. Cut the handsfree/handheld illusory distinction. Up the penalties. Or just make driving under the influence legal. Your choice.

No Evidence That Cell Phone Bans Are Effective, Report Shows – ABC News.

via Death and Tech: Our failure to manage driving and devices.

5 stories that make me worry about whether the future has jobs

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

The seal of the United States Department of Labor (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Kurzweil, Krulwich and Ptolemy (Photo credit: Daniel Williams)

English: PR2 Robot at Willow Garage in Menlo Park (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Five quick stories

1. I sat down for lunch a few months back on a sunny Silicon Valley day in Menlo Park with two partners from a global law firm who work with clients in the Valley. There were various things on my mind – Washington/Valley issues, potential collaborators for my nonprofit, the weather and the wine. But that was not the conversation. What they wanted to talk about was, as one put it, When are we going to come up with innovations that create jobs rather than destroy them? You could have knocked me down with a chip.

2. Fast rewind to one of those excellent Singularity Institute conferences that the Kurzweil-inspired network hosts. They are usually on the west coast; I think the one I am recalling was in San Jose. Early on the program was Marshall Brain, founder of famed website How Stuff Works. He threw up on the screen that Department of Labor job classification form we all know, and went down the list. In his view, around 50% of the jobs in the U.S. economy could be destroyed by robots. He was heckled.

3. Fast sideways to a visit a year or so later to the OECD in Paris, where I sat down with one of their top S and T officials and discovered he had just returned from a visit to Japan. Japan, where the plan is for retirees to get a pension – and a humanoid robot, as nursing aid and companion.

4. Then, in this journey through space and time, to Washington, DC, which as some of you will know is the U.S. federal capital where allegedly responsibility is taken for key dimensions of our future well-being. A top official of the Dept of Labor assured me there was no-one on the team focused on the AI/human robotics/employment issue.

5. Some time later I was on the phone to AFL/CIO. Same there. In the case of the labor unions, I suggested everyone consider stopping whatever else they were doing and work on this issue instead . . ..

Five stories. They do not amount to an argument, and if anyone has just loaded with “Luddite” please sit down.

I know that disruptions have happened before, though the nature of our Moore’s Law experience is that they are now getting very fast and disruptive at increasingly fundamental levels (reflect on the rapidity with which such smart enterprises as RIM and Nokia have come close to collapse). I do not know how fast our economy can innovate its way into the development of huge slews of jobs which have been taken out, class by class, through the advance of digital into the higher echelons of AI and robotics.

What I do know are three things: This issue is huge. Almost entirely unexamined. And urgent.

Here’s a neat piece from Vivek @wadhwa, one of our most provocative and smart thought-leaders, arguing that in China robotics is set to destroy manufacturing and enable us to repatriate what we have outsourced. Yet to the extent that this is true, what follows for this nation? Just asking . . ..

My convo with Vivek about innovation: http://c-pet.org/?q=node/93

My Napa panel with Vivek and others on U.S. competitiveness: http://www.techpolicysummit.com/2012/06/looking-ahead-investing-in-americas-competitiveness.html

The End of Chinese Manufacturing and Rebirth of U.S. Industry – Forbes.

Stunning Progress in Technology Brings The Death of Unskilled Labor (singularityhub.com)
The Future of Manufacturing Is in America, Not China – By Vivek Wadhwa (foreignpolicy.com)
Technology, the Future, and the Great Divide – #TPS2012 in Napa (futureofbiz.org)
#Innovate #Education, for real? #edu #Thiel #Wadhwa (futureofbiz.org)

The C-Suite: Social-free Zone – but IBM’s report says things are cool

Posted on July 23, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

IBM’s Watson (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

IBM‘s latest report on global CEOs – Leading Through Connections – makes fascinating reading and I commend it to you in extenso. It is packed with data and based on interviews with many hundreds of the top corporate (and some other) leaders.

But I have a problem. I just don’t find it very convincing. The answers are too good, too positive, too forward-looking. And on�the core issue of “leading through connections,” social, while the nostrums are as expected the evidence (as we know separately; see various earlier blogs here and much elsewhere) is that hardly any top CEOs (or CIOs! hard though that is to believe) are engaged with social at all. In fact, the evidence suggests that the Fortune 500 C-Suite is largely a social-free zone.�

My problem is that knowing this distracting fact undermines my confidence in the generally smooth prose of the report at large.

Read it, and read the social-usage evidence, and try to make sense of a situation that looks so good from the outside (or, should I say, from the inside; it’s the CEOs themselves who shaped the data in this document).