kindle app for iphone

While not quite the technology convergence of a Roomba getting run over by a Segway, being able to read Kindle books on iPhone is pretty darn close. Amazon just released a new app for iPhone that let's you do just this and it is very slick. You connect it to your Kindle account and all your Amazon book purchases are available, with the last page you're on more-or-less properly synced up.

Very cool.

The reading experience is very good for such a small device, the interface is slick, and downloads quick on even a 1G iPhone.

Downsides? Really the only big problem is that there doesn't appear to be a way to send mobipocket, pdf, or other text files to iPhone the way you can for Kindle. This is a real bummer, as currently 23 out of the 135 books on Kindle are Amazon e-books. The rest are mostly from the Baen library. I hope they decide to fix this, as it makes both devices more valuable to me.

Still, combined with Amazon's new digital publishing platform, Amazon is working hard to create a strong ecosystem around e-books. Great opportunity for authors who can move early, I suspect.

perusing change.gov

And the combination of economic, foreign policy, and education issues jumped out at me and reminded me of one of my white papers. I went back and found the section that applied:

Certainly, outside experts and people of renown can bring attention and business to a country. Perhaps a single speech or several days of meetings can generate a few new ideas or inspire a local entrepreneur. Unfortunately, the time and costs required to physically transport senior advisors around the world ensure only a very small number of advisors will be asked to participate. This a priori determination of fitness is contrary to virtually everything understood about innovation, where broad approaches are needed. Worse, the nature of an advisory role only focuses brainpower on the nation-state's interests for very short periods of time around specific visits or events. This is reminiscent of the "Eureka!" myth that innovation resides in brief moments of brilliance rather than deep, engaging collaboration. But the real loss is that no matter how brilliant or valuable the strategic advisors are, there is the missed opportunity because the advisors rarely have time to work together. Rather than enabling a collection of great minds to collaborate, cross pollinate, and spend significant time on the problems facing a nation-state, advisory board meetings tend to be whirlwinds of speeches and posturing. It is only the rarest of events that are designed to build the kind oflasting connections so critical to collaboration and innovation.

We need approaches and technologies to help us be smarter, connect across distances, and share knowledge trapped in different networks while emitting less carbon and creating new opportunities. With Lively shutting down and Wonderland unlikely to survive Sun's massive layoffs, how will this affect Second Life during 2009?

Of course, this need goes way beyond Second Life, but that will have to wait for a later post.

finally

Having used every tool around during distributed development for Second Life, I am jazzed to finally see people moving in the direction of EtherPad. Real-time, collaborative text editing on the web done really well. Plus, from quick mucking around, it seems to work in the SL browser.

So, collaborative text editing in Second Life. Very big deal.

cscw08 keynote

The slides from my CSCW 08 keynote last week in San Diego.

CSCW 08 Keynote

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: cscw08)

Thanks to everyone who helped put together such a great conference!

digital music forum west

Last week I walked off a plane from London and gave my first music industry talk, an evening keynote at Digital Music Forum West in Los Angeles that ended just as the Biden-Palin debate was starting up. Fun talk to prep for, as the last 3 months at EMI have been such a "drinking from the firehouse"-experience that synthesizing all the data into a brief enough format was tricky, but the experiences of building Second Life -- particularly user-driven innovation and the tremendous explosion of music within SL -- provided the right scaffolding to build around.

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two books worth reading

How to foster and sustain disruptive innovation has been on my mind a lot lately. I've been coalescing my thoughts on how I would do it and reading up on other approaches. To that point, I recently read two books that apply.

The first came via the 37 Signals blog. "Maverick", by Richard Semler, is the story of how the Brazilian firm Semco reinvented itself during the early 1990's. Semco is a diverse 3000 person firm that has units doing everything from industrial mixing units to property management. What makes Semco interesting is that it is run in an incredibly democratic fashion, including groups and individuals setting their own wages, virtually nonexistent hierarchy, and limited management. Having helped craft and drive Linden's culture, it was a fascinating read to look at what it meant to take many of our ideas farther, but also gave great insight into some of the basic differences.

Semco's business units -- by virtue of their extreme diversification -- operated almost independently of each other, allowing different groups to generate high communication rates within the group without flooding other business units with excess information. Much of Semco's business revolves around improving on existing engineering processes, and their model works remarkably well for that. In order to generate more disruptive innovation, Semco adopted a model somewhat akin to the Skunk Works model I described, with rotating participation in a team of outside the box thinkers. Semco also discovered, as I would have predicted, that an organization without structure is vulnerable to politics and rumors, so transparency -- all the way up to Richard Semler as CEO -- was critical to making it work. In addition, great people management and rigorous feedback and reviews -- great people process -- was absolutely required to make it all work. Finally, different parts of the company organize differently, so some teams and groups are hierarchical within Semco's less structued whole.

So, empower employees, build interfaces between different units, support (embrace) differences between how groups function, and make sure that people are well managed. Lots of companies experiment with this, but Semco makes for a great case study in going all the way.

The second book came via Jon Taplin, "The Dream Machine," by Mitchell Waldrop. This amazing book covers the entire history of the personal computer, from the early work of Norbert Wiener at MIT (who's history is told in equally good "Dark Hero of the Information Age"), through the WWII advances in computers, the impact of ARPA, the breakthroughs at SRI and PARC, and the subsequent creation of the personal computer. The story is tied together through the life of J.C.R. Licklider, who's career is touches nearly every aspect of the emergence of the PC and the Internet.

From an innovation standpoint, what makes "The Dream Machine" such a remarkable read is how crushing a blow it provides to anyone who wants to argue that incubators don't work or that it isn't possible to foster disruptive innovation. The story of the silicon revolution shows again and again the importance of allowing ideas to cross polinate and remix, of supporting knowledge and experience collisions in ways that preseverve the ideas and allow later thinkers to riff on them. It details the kind of management structures and support innovation needs to thrive. Young and old turks alike need impossible challenges to inspire them, but then the freedom and resources to overcome the challenges.

Both books feel timely. Larry Page had a recent interview in Fortune talking about these issues. What's interesting is that it still doesn't feel like he's really looked at the history. Google's 70/20/10 goal is a good one, but what is the unit of time it operates on? If 10% of Google's workforce focused on disruptive innovation, where would Google be in 5 years? After all, many of the breakthroughs in "The Dream Machine" were years or decades in the making. Is Larry sure that we're so much smarter today that we can get the same results in our spare time? Or, consider Microsoft. Rather than buying Yahoo! to gain some market in what is most profitable online today, why aren't they leveraging their phenomenal resources to create what will be profitable in 2015? $40 billion could support a lot of disruption.

Enjoy both books and let me know what you think!

apparently i'm not the only one rethinking innovation

There's a great article coming in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell looking at the myth that big ideas are rare. It looks at Nathan Myhrvold's attempts to engineer innovation and dovetails rather nicely with my recent post on innovating innovation. While I don't necessarily agree with patents as a measure of innovation, his results are very impressive. By bringing together bright people from disparate fields and allowing massive cross polination, disruptive ideas emerge. The challenge is figuring out how to do it in a more scalable way that Nathan has.

innovating innovation

One of the best parts of the Second Life experience was its impact on how I think about innovation. From the first conversations with Philip about how to build Linden and our embrace of user-generated content to ESC and Rivers Run Red, innovation has been central to the process. And I do mean innovation – the commercialization of knowledge – not just invention – the creation of knowledge. It’s not enough to come up with interesting new ideas; those ideas need to be taken to a market.

As I zero in on what to do next, innovation is once again a central discussion, so I wanted to write up my thoughts on how I would approach creating an environment to maximize innovation. To maximize the commercialization of knowledge.

(nota bene: “Commercialization”, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean “for profit.” It means that it has been released into a market. Case in point would be a new standard or piece of open source code released for free in order to create later opportunities.)

Innovation is very much a random walk. As much as we want innovation to be like throwing darts at the bull’s-eye, particularly in disruptive innovation it is extremely difficult to recognize a priori that an idea will be good. Moreover, most disruptive innovation emerges at the intersections of (largely) disjoint communities of practice and of different social networks.

These two realities – no certainty of direction and the need for heterogeneity – have implications if you want to maximize innovation. First, it means you want to create situations where you are able to try lots of different ideas. Second, you want as much diversity as possible in how and who tries. Third, it means you want to recycle ideas as the people and expertise around them changes.

Some of these implications are easier to leverage than others. Y Combinator, for example, does a very good job of optimizing for the first one and a reasonable job on the second. By drawing from a large set of submissions and then pushing participants through a short development cycle, Y gets to do a lot of experimenting and draw from a broad set of people. By focusing on such junior, hungry teams, Y creates massive incentives for those teams to bring a project to market in order to get funding or to be acquired.

However, there are tradeoffs. The micro scale of the funding means that participation is biased towards younger, more junior entrepreneurs. The cyclic approach of not being an incubator means that projects are strongly incented to succeed enough to get the next round of funding, rather than having the opportunity to fully explore an idea, decide there are better options and start over. Finally, Y doesn’t directly participate in funding projects at the next level or supporting more expensive experiments, constraining the exploration space.

(None of these are criticisms of Y, by the way. Paul, Trevor, Jessica, and Robert have adopted a specific strategy that is generating lots of interesting ideas, is clearly a blast, and may end up being financially successful.)

It simply may not be an optimal strategy for innovation, so there are a few aspects that I would approach differently.

You need greater diversity of participation, particularly of experience, temperament, and expertise. You want to be able to build teams that can blend years of expertise with youthful fire, impetuousness with wisdom. Filtering participants down to only those who can dispense with income, health insurance, and non-Ramen caloric sources robs you of the ability to leverage this diversity. Instead, I would argue to make them employees, to give them the scaffolding and support -- salaries, health care, vacation -- required to take huge risks, to experiment freely.

(Of course, this adds cost. Worse, it risks creating a comfy environment without innovation, but I think you address that through cultural and other means.)

Innovation needs a high failure rate. Paul et al are justly proud of the incredibly high percentage of Y teams that reach demo day with a product and that later to go on to achieve funding. However, what if the incentives that drive this performance – the Y team picking projects likely to launch in 3 months, teams not having an easy second chance, tight finances – mean that they are also more risk averse than they should be? If you change those incentives and support greater failure, the initial project ideas can explore a far larger set of ideas, resulting in more failures, but also more learning. Philip had a great saying about the benefits of “noble failures” which I think was dead on. You need to celebrate failures, capture the experience of them, and then preserve that information so that a later group can decide to riff of the failure, to build knowledge and try again.

About now, some readers will be commenting that this looks like an incubator and that all incubators are failures. Yes and no.

This does look like an incubator, but an incubator in the Bell Labs, ARPA, PARC, or Stanford grad school sense, not the modern “will trade space for equity.” Existing teams don’t need incubators, so the idea of providing a home to a set of them doesn’t seem like a good one to me. However, incubating ideas – where you bring bright, motivated, diverse, interested people together, give them challenges, and then get out of the way – has a long history of producing world-changing innovation. So, historically incubators weren’t failures, it’s just that we’ve changed what we mean when we talk about them.

The downsides, of course, are cost and comfort. If you have to employ everyone, to give them competitive salaries and benefits, you have a much higher burn rate. Worse, you must ensure that employees take great ideas out of the incubator to go start them. On the comfort side, you need appointments, contracts, or term limits, combined with a culture that your goal is to join startups. You can probably incent this as well – unpaid parts of your contract get transferred to the startup so startups recruit people, greater ownership of startups you helped launch if you also launch one, etc – but transparency and experimentation is needed here.

The cost is still a challenge, especially if you insist – as I think you should – on focusing the value generation on the launched ventures rather than the incubator. The incubator builds knowledge and expertise but should not be trying to IPO itself, since this strongly misaligns incentives with maximizing innovation.

Because of this, an attempt to innovate innovation may require very different – dare I say innovative? – approaches to funding in order to have enough runway to have a chance to succeed. It might be best applied within a larger company rather than as a stand-alone incubator. Consider a large company with a need for disruptive innovation but suffering from the “raising mice in elephant cages” problems common to large corporations. Rotating employees through a Skunk Works – and potentially letting them mix ideas with academics, outside experts, or interns – might form the kind of catalyst needed to break out of the innovator’s dilemma. As employees came and went from other groups and divisions, a Skunk Works would act as an innovation virus, spreading innovation processes and ideas throughout the organization. More importantly, by committing to experimenting with innovation, funders or the supporting corporation can avoid the micromanagement and hyper focus on short-term gains so deadly to innovation.

When we think about markets or technologies that seem moribund and unable to change, disruptive innovation is probably looming. The challenge is how to avoid Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" and drive that innovation rather than letting it happen around you. The answer may be to look backward -- to PARC, to Bell Labs -- in order to reinvent a path forward.

apoc week 11 (part 1)

So, to be different, I'm going to post these during the lull between faculty seminar and class. Great fun preparing this one, because I've been doing a lot of thinking about how innovation, education, and entrepreneurship intersect and what interesting projects could be built around that intersection.

But more on that in a later post.

First, the faculty seminar slides:

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free

Chris Anderson, Wired’s Editor-in-Chief, just posted the main arguments from his new book, “Free.” Chris is well known thanks to his last book, “The Long Tail,” which explored the interaction of consumption patterns and distribution. “Free” is the logical next step. Just as decreased search and distribution costs enable niche demand to generate as much aggregate consumption as the more popular part of the curve, decreased hosting, processing, and bandwidth costs are driving the cost of web services to zero.

To free.

Chris is a very sharp guy. However, what inspired me about “The Long Tail” was not the story he told about long-tail consumption. Instead, it was how long-tail thinking could be applied to community, innovation, and learning. I wrote about this in the “Collapsing Geography” paper, but to sum up:

This same power law distribution is a suitable approximation for other aspects of innovation and collaboration, beyond the Long Tail of consumption Anderson describes. Consider the potential entrepreneur: how many factors act to prevent someone from even attempting to build a business? Remember, this is not just the investment of dollars, but also includes time, social risk, and other elements. Even a basic requirement for a lawyer or license is a substantial hurdle.

In cultures or nations that generate many of these impediments, only a few entrepreneurs even try. While they may be the best funded, most determined, or most risk-tolerant entrepreneurs, innovation — as a random walk through design space — is dampened by significant reductions in participants. Inventory and shelf space pressures will tend to constrain a market to the top of the power law, reducing the variety and ignoring a lucrative customer base. In the same way, regulatory, legal, or social pressures also prevent entrepreneurial activities.

Given that innovation occurs at the intersections between information and social networks, yet another Long Tail exists, that of long-tail communities. New York city supports an unparalleled number of differing, overlapping communities, thanks to the density and diversity of its population. When communication technologies allow similar numbers of communities to form and intersect at a distance, the opportunities for innovation expand tremendously.

Long-tail communities aid long-tail innovation.

In a similar way, what excites me about “Free” is less the insight that any web-based service is going to face enormous pressure to be free, but the increased relative cost of what is left. After all, if duplication, storage, and distribution are free, then the percentage of your product or service costs associated with design, development, and support increase proportionally.

Not to mention the cost of your customers’ time.

Intel and AMD are fighting it out to ensure that computing power is free. Where is the competition to make it free to develop a great user interface? A compelling experience? To support millions of users?

To create something worth spending your increasingly fragmented and limited time using?

Certainly, open source development, Creative Commons, and other crowd sourcing models are creating additional tools for reducing design and development costs. Moreover, Y Combinator, 37 Signals, and others are demonstrating that certain forms of software development are much cheaper than they used to be.

But the iPhone’s interface wasn’t created by two people over a weekend. World of Warcraft was an enormously expensive endeavor.

Tools and technology to attack the not-free portions of development are one my favorite topics when I think about what’s next. They could make for some really fun projects.