Innovation for en pris

Det bliver stadig mere og mere almindeligt at uddele pengepremier for at tiltrække sig innovation udefra en virksomhed. Entrepreuer.com skriver.

it all started in 1927 when Charles Lindbergh made his famed solo nonstop flight across the Atlantic for a $25,000 prize.

Companies like Netflix and Google are catching on and following suit. Netflix is offering a $1 million reward to anyone who can improve their current movie-recommendation software by at least 10 percent. So far, it’s been a year–and still no winner. Netflix is trying to keep programmers motivated by offering $50,000 prizes to whoever comes closest to the 10 percent improvement. Google is also getting in on the prize wars. The company is offering $10 million in award money for people who build the best software to enhance the company’s upcoming cell phone operating system. Entries can be received from January 2 to March 3, 2008. Judges will select 50 winners who will each receive $25,000 and be eligible for ten awards of $100,000 and ten awards of $275,000. The big money comes into play in the second phase of the competition when another $5 million in prize money is at stake.

Dekonstruktion af the social web

På konferencen Defrag holdt David Weinberger et foredrag med titlen: “The Rise of the Implicit.” His thesis is that we have a natural tendency to focus on what’s explicit, but the explicit has certain characteristics that mislead us if that is the only focus. The old media sticks things together for unnatural reasons, he said. “New media is doing the work of defragging to break the pieces apart that were stuck to together for unnatural reasons. New media lets all of the stuff fall apart. I worry we don’t pay enough attention to the implicit,” Weinberger said.

He points to links as the way to reconnect the pieces more naturally. “The Web is different. It’s about links and in that sense links are the opposite of information. Links enrich and are decentralized, personal, messy and most of all fully social,” Weinberger said. This idea is linked to the unspoken, the implicit by virtue of the language between humans, from sentences, paragraphs and punctuation to links, which point beyond the self and point to the “lumpiness” of the unsaid.

“Making content public were founding events in our culture, once in writing and then printing. Now we can make relationships among ideas and content permanent and public through links,” Weinberger said. “It is the rejoining of the world, not just information. We are writing together our world. Links are gestures to what matters to us, what is between us.”

Current.tv

Joel Hyatt fortalte på Web 2.0 Summit, hvad den yngre generation af amerikanere mener om the 6 o’clock news:

“You ask our target demographic about watching a news anchor at 5:30 tell you what the news is. It is of no relevance to the younger generation. They want to participate and create,” he said.

Web 2.0 Boble

I diskussionen om, hvorvidt vi befinder os i en Web 2.0 boble, der snart vil briste, skriver Carlota Perez på NYTs blog:

The simplest ones have to separate stock market speculation from the wave of acquisitions. The first, I think, is an echo of the previous tech bubble. Those who missed out are playing a repeat of the game of “picking winners.” In that game, promise is better than reality. 

Digitale immigranter

Den amerikanske forsker i undervisning Marc Prensky lancerede allerede i 2001 begrebet: Digitale immigranter. Han skriver blandt andet:

There are hundreds of examples of the digital immigrant accent. They include printing
out your email (or having your secretary print it out for you – an even “thicker” accent);
needing to print out a document written on the computer in order to edit it (rather than
just editing on the screen); and bringing people physically into your office to see an
interesting web site (rather than just sending them the URL). I’m sure you can think of
one or two examples of your own without much effort. My own favorite example is the
“Did you get my email?” phone call. Those of us who are Digital Immigrants can, and
should, laugh at ourselves and our “accent.

Hot trends

ABC news er – i stil med Current tv – begyndt at anvende Googles “hot trends” til at lave indslag baseret på, hvilke emner, der er de mest søgte på hos Google. Skulle man lave tv-indslag nu, så er de to varmeste emner 1) Dorris Lessig og 2) Bly i læbestift…

Frem og tilbage

Jeg kan ikke sende tekstklip automatisk til WordPress (hjælp?) via clipit, hvorfor jeg skifter tilbage til Blogger, hvor jeg engang havde en  blog om samme emne (New Media).

Læs den her.

Lego som medie

Den nyeste dille på YouTube og andre video-delingssider er, ifl. Wall Street Journal, brickfilms. Det er stop-aktions film med LEGO figurer, der er optaget et billede af gangen og sat sammen til en film. Disse har i visse tilfælde fået et million publikum og enkelte brickfilm-instruktører har skabt sig et navn på den måde.

Media 3.0

Flere og flere er begyndt at tale om et kommende Web 3.0 – eller i de mindste Media 3.0.

Alan Mutter skriver på sin blog kaldet Reflections of a Newsosaur flg.: Media 3.0 will turn absolutely upside-down the classic one-to-many model of Media 1.0, replacing it with a many-to-one paradigm in which news, entertainment and advertising are delivered in a uniquely individualized fashion to all but the most technologically recalcitrant consumers.

The paradigm shift will be enabled by significant future technology developments in such areas as artificial-intelligence software, database systems, media-compression algorithms, network architecture, mobile platforms and nanotechnologies capable of delivering vast computing power to more diverse and tiny platforms than we can imagine today.

VC-investoren Jason Calacanis tilføjer: Web 3.0 is defined as the creation of high-quality content and services produced by gifted individuals using Web 2.0 technology as an enabling platform.

It-eksperten Nich Carr kommenterer på debatten mellem amatør og professionelles indflydelse på fremtidens mediebillede med et indledende citat fra Yeats:

Hurrah for revolution and more cannon-shot!
A beggar upon horseback lashes a beggar on foot.

Both beggars, though, labor under romantic misconceptions. For one, the web is freeing us from the shackles of the past, when our malignant media overlords stifled our creativity and force-fed us gruel. For the other, the web is returning us to a purified past, when our benign media overlords nurtured the most talented and delivered their fine works to us all. Both visions simplify the past and distort the future. The so-called new media is just old media with a different cost structure; the overlords will not be overthrown but neither will they be redeemed, and the same goes for the prosuming crowd.

Skype Out

eBays opkøb af Skype for flere mia. dollar ser i dag ud til at have et flop. Den økonomiske ekspert Henry Blodget skriver: Sell it to someone who could put it to use, like Yahoo, Microsoft or Google. “Skype is rapidly surrendering its early dominance of soft-phone VOIP to other more focused competitors, and if it stays within the eBay fold, we think further write-downs will be in the offing,” Blodget writes. “Skype was a $2-$4 billion eBay hail-Mary pass, and it just officially fell incomplete. EBay should just acknowledge that and move on.”

Med andre ord: Skype out