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The cloud, explained

IP — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:57:30 +0000

Let us begin with an “unrelated” comment: There’s a sentence about Tim O’Reilly that seems applicable to Seth Godin and other people who are masters of networking in the “adding value to the network” sense: “It looks like Tim is just telling disconnected alpha-geek anecdotes, in his customary, avuncular, visionary fashion. What Tim‘s really doing is throwing lit matches into his network. And boy is he the guru when it comes to doing that.” – an underrated skill.

Back to the video itself, embedded inside: thought-provoking presentation on (buzzword alert!) “information shadows”, “the sensor web”, cloud computing, data collection, processing and presentation/ visualization, local marketing + micropayments, P2P credit-card payments, social network risk evaluation… and how all this is coming together to create new products and services that feed on the cloud and/or organize it. It’s still impossible to tell just how practical this is and who will make money from this, but it’s nice food for thought.

This is your brain on gadgets

IP — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 15:33:31 +0000

Gadgets that are increasingly online all the time help you multitask – but is that good? Scientists say a loud “no”, according to this New York Times article. As you’ll see inside this post, there’s reason to be skeptical of either side of this debate, but it does recall one thing to mind: One of Waren Buffett’s overlooked skills is that of saying no to things that would disrupt his schedule, or take time away from quiet reading and “just thinking”, as he says. Sound advice.

The same NYT edition also had this article that makes shallower claims but it’s in the same vein as the one above, and there’s already a reply by Steven Pinker with interesting remarks. Steven points to yet another article, and this was something we thought about posting a stand-alone story about: “We have met the enemy and it is Powerpoint“. Taken together, this is an interesting “linguistic/ communications” debate that we pay attention to because the efficiency of communication is a very important aspect of our business – how we communicate internally, with our clients, our current and potential investors and with our service providers. Spreading the right information at the right time to the people who can make use of it while allowing for some measure of serendipity is something we’ve been working on since our foundation.

Incentives

IP — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 22:26:40 +0000

It seems obvious but Dan Pink makes it interesting in this 2009 TED talk (also embedded inside): extrinsic incentives work great for certain situations but poorly for others of higher complexity. His other point, that there’s a “mismatch between what science knows and what business does”, is also important… but trying to bridge this gap can lead to information overload and a certain “consultant-driven” frenzy, if managers try to cover all the “buzzwords” for fear of missing out on the latest (supposedly) performance-enhancing method.

Framing the question in another way: know your work/ company/ business well before assuming you need to “Blink”-fy, “Long-Tail”-fy or “whatever-fy” it. The attitude of not “marrying” with any idea – not even your own – and trying to extract and apply the useful part of every bit of knowledge you obsessively seek is a hard one to instill, let alone sustain.

Here’s the link to the working paper by Dan Ariely et. al. that Dan Pink mentions in the video.

Video:

Think twice, it’s alright

IP — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 15:29:40 +0000

Reader-suggested video (embedded inside) in the New Yorker in which James Surowiecki (author of “The Wisdom of Crowds“) interviews Michael Mauboussin from Legg Mason about “Think Twice“, Mauboussin’s book. It’s about mental traps we fall into and how to think better, and the video discusses many of the examples in the book. “Think Twice” has been out for a while – we’ve used a small bit of it in this post – and it’s a good “building block” read, a contrast to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink“. Read them both and more.

The video (21:35):

Quick update on Netflix

IP — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 18:09:52 +0000

We’ve discussed crowdsourcing and Netflix more than once. That it works for some uses better than for others is pretty clear… But Netflix has apparently messed up the database used in the original contest and that allowed some contestants to identify the actual people behind the movie choices, despite the promise of privacy. Needless to say, the FCC wasn’t too happy about it and lawsuits ensued – and Netflix had to cancel its “Contest 2.0″, at least for now.

Doesn’t mean that the tool doesn’t work, it just means that you have to be careful using it. Talk about hitting your finger with a hammer!

“Kids today have it easy”

IP — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:16:04 +0000

We can’t resist repeating this funny story about change – and we suspect more than a few readers will relate to it. But ultimately this is about how feeble our attempts at forecasting really are. For some things we are way too pessimistic and tend to ignore the exponential aspects of some innovation curves. For others, we are way too optimistic. The trick then is to not rely on either.

As an extra exercise suggested by a reader, try imagining someone writing this text 30 years from now.

Charlie Munger’s parable

IP — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:35:17 +0000

Buffett used the Thriftsville vs. Squanderville metaphor in this brilliant article back in 2003. Now it’s Charlie Munger’s turn with a parable on the wealth of a nation and how to lose it. It’s a fun read.

Peter Drucker has a question for you

IP — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:54:24 +0000

The question is: “If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?”

Apply it both in the big picture and the small picture – from the broadest strategic moves of your company to its tiniest daily processes. Now change the underlined word “company” for “department” if you want to go small, or “nation” and “regulatory system” if you want to go big. For extra fun, try “life”.

Toyota a symbol of Japan’s woes?

IP — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 17:07:55 +0000

It’s been a recurring theme in articles in the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and now the Financial Times. But to say that “a strong Toyota is a strong Japan” must be political rhetoric. How does “fixing” Toyota (whatever that means) change a country’s demographics time-bomb or its still-rattling financial system? While there are interesting food-for-thought bits in these pieces, they all seem to give way too much importance to “planning a country” in a world where central planning (again, whatever that means) for a country of this size and relatively free market is ever less effective – if it ever was.

The surfer investor

IP — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 22:03:22 +0000

In his latest post, Tom Barrack of Colony Capital writes about some similarities between a big wave surfer and a successful investor. While we would be even more conservative in general, we agree with most the “credos”.

Another interesting thing is that he alludes to a then-current state (he wrote this on January 17th 2010) of “don’t stress the distress”, that is, there was then a state of artificial “calm”. Well, judging from the last two days, the sea is no longer flat.