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Parycek

TED2010: Ten fascinating people you've never heard of - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

video ted cnn onlinegaming

shared by Parycek on 20 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 20 Mar 10
     
    Jane McGonigal is one of the most interesting inventors you've never heard of.The bubbly game designer -- whose optimism seems to flow out of her wild blond hair -- is trying to get the world to play a lot more online video games, and not just for the sake of fun.The cooperative skills and hopefulness that people learn while pecking away at online games like World of Warcraft will help our society address real-world problems like climate change and nuclear arms proliferation, she says. To get people to use less oil and mentor entrepreneurs in Africa, she also is developing games that merge the digital and real worlds.
Parycek

Gaming can make a better world | - 0 views

www.ted.com/...g_can_make_a_better_world.html

onlinegaming gaming video

shared by Parycek on 29 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Parycek on 29 Mar 10
     
    Jane McGonigal - Video on TED.com
Johann Höchtl

What Happened to Yahoo - 0 views

www.paulgraham.com/yahoo.html

Yahoo Google Microsoft Facebook culture hackers innovation cubicle old

shared by Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10 - Cached
  • When I went to work for Yahoo after they bought our startup in 1998, it felt like the center of the world. It was supposed to be the next big thing.
  • What went wrong? The problems that hosed Yahoo go back a long time, practically to the beginning of the company.
  • Yahoo had two problems Google didn't: easy money, and ambivalence about being a technology company.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The first time I met Jerry Yang, we thought we were meeting for different reasons.
  • we could show him our new technology, Revenue Loop. It was a way of sorting shopping search results.
  • It was like the algorithm Google uses now to sort ads, but this was in the spring of 1998, before Google was founded.
  • I didn't say "But search traffic is worth more than other traffic!"
  • Hard as it is to believe now, the big money then was in banner ads.
  • Led by a large and terrifyingly formidable man called Anil Singh, Yahoo's sales guys would fly out to Procter & Gamble and come back with million dollar orders for banner ad impressions.
  • By 1998, Yahoo was the beneficiary of a de facto pyramid scheme. Investors were excited about the Internet. One reason they were excited was Yahoo's revenue growth.
  • The reason Yahoo didn't care about a technique that extracted the full value of traffic was that advertisers were already overpaying for it.
  • I remember telling David Filo in late 1998 or early 1999 that Yahoo should buy Google, because I and most of the other programmers in the company were using it instead of Yahoo for search.
  • But Yahoo also had another problem that made it hard to change directions. They'd been thrown off balance from the start by their ambivalence about being a technology company
  • Microsoft (back in the day), Google, and Facebook have all been obsessed with hiring the best programmers. Yahoo wasn't. They preferred good programmers to bad ones, but they didn't have the kind of single-minded, almost obnoxiously elitist focus on hiring the smartest people that the big winners have had.
  • The company felt prematurely old.
  • The first time I visited Google, they had about 500 people,
  • I remember talking to some programmers in the cafeteria about the problem of gaming search results (now known as SEO), and they asked "what should we do?" Programmers at Yahoo wouldn't have asked that.
  • In the software business, you can't afford not to have a hacker-centric culture.
  • Probably the most impressive commitment I've heard to having a hacker-centric culture came from Mark Zuckerberg, when he spoke at Startup School in 2007. He said that in the early days Facebook made a point of hiring programmers even for jobs that would not ordinarily consist of programming, like HR and marketing.
  • Hacker culture often seems kind of irresponsible. That's why people proposing to destroy it use phrases like "adult supervision." That was the phrase they used at Yahoo. But there are worse things than seeming irresponsible. Losing, for example.
  • Johann Höchtl on 12 Aug 10
     
    Paul Graham hat mit dem Verkauf seiner Shop Lösung an Yahoo 1998 Millionen von Dollar gemacht. Er ist Buchautor und respektierter Columnist. Ein Artikel von ihm, warum seiner Meinung nach Yahoo scheiterte und FB und Google erfolgreicht waren.
Johann Höchtl

Wiki:Government 2.0 | Social Media CoLab - 0 views

socialmediaclassroom.com/...government-20

gov2.0 datasf open government

shared by Johann Höchtl on 08 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Internal (intra or inter-government) collaboration. Institutional presence on external social networks Open government data Employees on external social networks 
  • Increased government efficiency Increased government accountability Increased citizen engagement and participation Increased innovation
  • Potential loss of privacy Invalid data
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • 1) what data should the government share and 2) how does data influence the public sphere
  • The optimists decry the modern instantiations of bureaucracy and policy in which democratic governments operate as the source of democratic ills and support the normative idea of an informed and engaged public.  Pessimists counter that the normative model of democracy most accepted in the literature is a novel construction that is not grounded in the natural behavior of citizens.
  • The innocence of Americans is either explained as a rational choice under the principle of rational ignorance (Downs, 1957) or explained as something inherent in the lack of mental sophistication in humans.
  • Government 2.0 attempts to correct the problems of information diffusion by assuming that people are simply unable or unwilling to find information in the offline world.  If the barriers to information acquisition are lowered then, the theory goes, people will be more likely to find, synthesize and use information in decision-making processes.
  • Feedback loops: Who will be active in these loops? How will the public respond? 
  • People usually think about explicit citizen participation, but some of the most pwrful Web 2.0 tools aren't about that: it's about ppl who are participating w/o knowing they are participating. Google is actually one of the great engines of harnessing participation, anyone who clicks on a link is participating, a link is a vote, meaning hidden in something they're doing already. Wikipedia isn't the only place where people are contributing.
  • The amount of data being shared/collected about people is growing exponentially, old notions of privacy need to be replaed by ideas of visibility and control: give more control over who gets to see it. We are better off with more visibility and control than stopping people from collecting data. The data is incredibly useful, applicaitons depend on data, people willingly giving up that privacy about where they are all the time.
  • many programs go wrong, generically, (what worries me) government is still very much an insider's game, we have not yet really built a system that allows real participation
  • Another gov 2.0 observation: it's very hard for a government agency to start over, it's not like private sector, where companies with bad ideas go out of business. Government agencies don't go out of business. (consumers benefit from newspapers going out of business) We don't have creative destruction in gov't, the basic machinery of it just gets bigger and more entrenched. Need to figure out how to start over: what not to do
  • The toughest part about Web 2.0, Gov 2.0, etc, might be the role of management. It used to be about defining the outcome and monitoring the progress towards that outcome. In Web 2.0 you don't know what that outcome is, it's a huge leap of faith, and takes a tremendous amount of adjusting to that approach. Do we need a different set of metrics? Yes. Media is intersecting with technology, technology is a new channel for media, even Hollywood is changing: oh my goodness, we have to create entirely new financial models!
  • "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed." It's a cultural issue here, people are stuck in the past and we need a new wave of innovators or we should just expect slow results.
Parycek

Twitter, SXSW, and Building a 21st Century Business - 0 views

blogs.hbr.org/...er_sxsw_and_building_a_21.html

twitter hbr future

shared by Parycek on 18 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Principles, not product.
  • Be a force for good. That's Twitter's new foundational principle — and it's interesting because it takes Google's foundational principle and does it one better.
  • Openness as a survival strategy. I
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • Twitter's been focused on openness, and his response was that it's a "survival strategy." New ideas, new concepts, new applications — all flow to open organizations. That's a great way to express the point that for next-gen organizations, openness is now table stakes: fail at it, and you're not even in the game.
  • That's what 21st century organizations look like: networks, not pyramids.
  • Doors versus windows
  • That's pretty radical. Wall St, Detroit, Big Food, Big Software and HMOs are just a few for whom win/wins have mattered little, if at all. It's a simple, powerful way to frame next-gen strategy in a nutshell.
  • , Ev said: better connections, better information — better choices
  • Just as the fundamental challenge of the 21st century is making authentically, meaningfully better stuff, for the 21st century media it's communicating in better ways — not simply bombarding the reader-"consumer" with more, bigger, louder ads.
  • Erasing information asymmetries is where the future of advertising lies. But you can't get there unless you can build a 21st century business first.
  • Parycek on 18 Mar 10
     
    Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review
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