Showing posts with label JP Rangaswami. Show all posts
Showing posts with label JP Rangaswami. Show all posts

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

Discovering LinkedIn In 2019

I discovered Twitter in 2009, and JP Rangaswami was a big reason why. His blog Confused Of Calcutta that a friend pointed out to had many posts where he shared his enthusiasm for Twitter. I got infected. Within a year I became a top followed in NYC on Twitter. And I was no Ashton Kutcher. I worked hard at it.

It is not like I had not heard of Twitter. I had. But at first, I thought it was ridiculous. (I was also in attendance at the NY Tech MeetUp where FourSquare first presented, and I was unimpressed with what the two Founders called "check-in") I had been an avid blogger for years. And I thought Twitter was for people who can compose full sentences, but full paragraphs are beyond their reach. I was not going to stoop down.

LinkedIn I signed up for not long after it was launched. I have been a keen reader of tech news since the late 1990s, and so I seldom missed developments. But until this year, I never really used LinkedIn. I updated my profile and kept it current, but that was just because.

This year LinkedIn has become my favorite social network. I have become an avid user. I have been using it for hours a day. It keeps running in the background. It has become more like an Operating System.

When I was living in the city (now I live 90 minutes out, more depending on your mode of transportation) I went to numerous tech events. And often you exchanged business cards. The idea would be to try and connect with those people online.

Now I realize I was doing it in reverse and wasting a lot of precious time. You meet people online. You try to connect with them. They might, they might not reciprocate. Which begs the question, did you have a good enough reason to connect, did you write a relevant enough first email?

After you connect, you can have so much communication online. LinkedIn messaging might not be the best messaging out there, but it works fine. And if you connect with someone enough, you might even want to meet. But that is a rather high threshold. What will you talk in person that you can not over email and voice chat? Especially when a meeting is so hard to arrange. For both parties.

I continue to use Twitter and Facebook, pretty much daily. And although I don't blog as regularly as I used to, my blogs are still active. Now I also blog on LinkedIn itself. But that is deliberately few and far between. If people decide to read my articles, let them be few enough that they might actually read them. That is what I have thought.

The LinkedIn profile is an excellent format. If you have only a few minutes to get to know me, reading my LinkedIn profile might be how you ought to spend your time. The kind of work people have done over the years gives you a pretty good picture of who someone is as a person. Even if your interest in them might not be work-related.

And so I have been networking on LinkedIn like crazy. I don't miss the city. I quite like the clean air around where I live. And I don't much miss the networking tech events either. LinkedIn is far superior an experience.

It feels like for the first time I am building a company (two, actually) in earnest. And LinkedIn is the Operating System I am happily using.

LinkedIn trending topics has also become my favorite place online to go for news. Although I go many places on a daily basis.

And to say I have actually seen Reid Hoffman in person. Mike Bloomberg threw a party. I don't know how I got invited. But that is where I got to meet and know Arianna Huffington also. Hoffman was the featured speaker.





Sunday, November 01, 2015

Individuals Getting Paid

Wanted -- No, Needed: Digital Philosophers
"We have stronger opinions about our hand-held devices than about the moral framework we should use to guide our decisions.” As a result, we are in serious danger of having these philosophies influence our future in ways we neither intend nor desire. ......... “Advertising is a natural resource extraction industry, like a fishery. Its business is the harvest and sale of human attention. We are the fish and we are not consulted.” ...... “The reason advertising is artificially cheap is that no one has to ask our permission to advertise at us. We are involved in the transaction only as the commodity that is being bought and sold… Our right to preserve our own attention and to make our own decisions about how we spend it and with whom our personal information is shared must become part of the political agenda.” ....... One commercial at a time leaves me in control: I can change channel, look the other way, mute, close my eyes for 30 seconds. But thousands of ads, following me around on my computer, on my tablet, on my phone, in the movies, in the toilet, overwhelm me. ..... “Is advertising morally justifiable?” Thanks to the exponential growth of digital technologies, we face, or should be facing, similar philosophical questions across a whole range of activity. Is data collection morally justifiable? Does privacy have inherent value? How do we measure security?


Companies like Google should pay local, state and national governments across the world in jurisdictions where they make money. It might only be an aggregate 10% of what they make, but they should pay. Companies like Google should also pay individuals. The money should show up in your Gmail account. Data is not free. Big Data definitely is not free. It might only be 30 bucks a month, but that is a living in many countries. Heck, that is the mobile phone bill in the richest. Google's data plan is cheaper. Small internet startups should be free from this. A tech company should have to achieve a certain scale before they are asked to pay. That would work like an incentive. More paying companies would get created in the process.

Three billion people might opt to pay for their internet access this way. They might say, Google, create a section in your Chrome browser where you show me targeted ads, and let me have my internet access. For "free."

If we can create this pay structure, the impending era of abundance brought forth by huge rises in productivity might give us a billion artists who basically are jobless, who do nothing but surf the web, and who create content, who create art. Or not. They simply enrichen the internet by being there, by surfing. The internet is lifeless without people. They can always choose to get a job, or even build a company. But they are not starving in the meantime.


GOP plans for 'era of abundance' in energy
“Today’s energy policies are lagging far behind and are better suited for the gas lines in the 1970s than this new era of abundance”
JAVIER CREUS: “WE ARE ENTERING AN ERA OF ABUNDANCE!”
My co-authors and I found over 300 examples from all over the world of citizens organizing themselves to serve their own needs, which was so inspiring! This experience was what sparked my interest for the open knowledge, p2p production and collaborative economy movements........ Collaborative practices have grown massively and become mainstream in many areas such as for programmers on Github or for the European youth on ridesharing platforms. The collaborative / sharing economy has become widely known as a concept thanks to the interest of the media and the visibility of its communities. In some industries, such as lodging or city transportation, the impact on incumbent businesses has provoked many reactions and forced public administrations to rethink how to regulate these new businesses to benefit the public good. At the same time, some advanced businesses have started experimenting and getting in touch with the collaborative economy themselves. ....... basic concepts like mine & yours, customer & producer, partner & competitor, value & revenue, trust & responsibility may change dramatically when you integrate collaborative production systems. My impression is that most businesses see the efficiency generated by sharing resources, but have a hard time adapting to a new mental framework. ...... I’ve been researching the growth patterns of 50 digital powered organizations (from Wikipedia, to Spotify or AirBnb) that have grown at least 50% per year (in users, revenue and impact) since 2008. As I had predicted, platforms that have taken advantage of the socio-technological landscape as well as distributed or common resources and have integrated these new agents into their system or empowered their customers to find new roles, have grown faster than centralized service organizations. ........ Collaborative economy and open source projects have been financed by crowdfunding and P2P up to a point, but for the time being it is difficult to think of alternatives to VC in specific stages of growth. On the other hand, professional investors gain a profound insight into the businesses they invest in and can see when a long term view serves it better. Crowdfinancing, project currencies or open value chains are still experimental but promising. ........

we are going to see major changes in the next fifteen years towards a more fair and open society. Technology will make us more connected and thus aware of interdependence, ecology will make us energetically as autonomous as we can, economy will embrace the benefits of contributing to commons, and transparency will bring us trust in institutions.

...... I usually define a community as a group of people who share a common resource. Till the invention of the world wide web, communities where mostly confined to local environments as trust had to be generated face to face. The distributed structure of the Internet has allowed this traditional form of organization to scale directly to a global dimension. We are seeing new commons arising in all domains, and effectively already are in the age of communities! .......

We are entering an era of abundance, absolute abundance of knowledge and relative abundance of material goods.

We need a new version of capitalism for the jobless future
Andreessen steadfastly believes that the same exponential curve that is enabling creation of an era of abundance will create new jobs faster and more broadly than before, and calls my assertions that we are heading into a jobless future a luddite fallacy. ........ it’s a matter of public policy and preparedness. With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. ...... The jobs that will be created will require very specialized skills and higher levels of education — which most people don’t have. ..... millions will face permanent unemployment. I worry that if we keep brushing this issue under the rug, social upheaval will result. ......

Within 10 years, we will see Uber laying off most of its drivers as it switches to self-driving cars; manufacturers will start replacing workers with robots; fast-food restaurants will install fully automated food-preparation systems; artificial intelligence–based systems will start doing the jobs of most office workers in accounting, finance and administration. The same will go for professionals such as paralegals, pharmacists, and customer-support representatives. All of this will occur simultaneously, and the pace will accelerate in the late 2020s.

....... With less need for human labor and judgment, labor will be devalued relative to capital and even more so relative to ideas and machine learning technology. In an era of abundance and increasing income disparity, we may need a version of capitalism that is focused on more than just efficient production and also places greater prioritization on the less desirable side effects of capitalism. ........ China will be the biggest global loser because of the rapid disappearance of its manufacturing jobs. It has not created a safety net, and income disparity is already too great, so we can expect greater turmoil there. ....... Carlos Slim Domit .. He predicted the emergence of tens of millions of new service jobs in Mexico through meeting the Mexican people’s basic needs and enabling them to spend time on leisure and learning. He sees tremendous opportunities to build infrastructure where there is none, and to improve the lives of billions of people who presently spend their lives trying to earn enough on which to subsist. ........ Countries such as India and Peru and all of Africa will see the same benefits — for at least two or three decades, until the infrastructure has been built and necessities of the populations have been met. ...... Then there will not be enough work even there to employ the masses........Slim’s solution to this is to institute

a three-day workweek

so that everyone can find employment and earn the money necessary for leisure and entertainment. This is not a bad idea. In the future we are heading into, the cost of basic necessities, energy, and even luxury goods such as electronics will fall low enough to seem almost free — just as cell-phone minutes and information cost practically nothing now. It is a matter of sharing the few jobs that will exist in an equitable way......... The concept of

a universal basic income

is also gaining popularity worldwide as it becomes increasingly apparent that declining costs and the elimination of bureaucracies, make it possible for governments to provide citizens with income enough for the basic necessities. The idea is to give everyone a stipend covering living costs and to get government out of the business of selecting what social benefits people should have. The advantage of this approach is that workers gain the freedom to decide how much to work and under what conditions. Enabling individual initiative in the work that people pursue, in fields ranging from philosophy and the arts to pure science and invention, will result in their enrichment of their cultures in ways we can’t foresee. ....... With sensors, new nanomaterials and composites, and 3D-printing technologies, we could be building massive smart cities that use energy more efficiently and provide a better quality of life for their inhabitants. ....... Another potential solution, the brainchild of Internet pioneer Vint Cerf and entrepreneur David Nordfors, is to develop A.I. software that matches jobs to the skills, talent, passions, experiences, and values of each individual on the planet. They say that there is an almost infinite amount of work that needs to be done and that only a fraction of all human capacity is being used today. People hate their jobs, consequently losing tremendous amounts of productivity. With jobs tailored to a person’s passions, we could create a work environment in which people give 100 percent of their capacity to work and the economy expands because more is being done......

We need to be prepared and to develop a new version of capitalism that benefits all.





The (Needed) New Economics of Abundance
Molecular manufacturing coupled with AI could bring about a “personal manufacturing” revolution and a new era of abundance. But abundance could be highly disruptive, so we need to design a new economics of abundance so society is prepared for it. .... For centuries, we have built cultures and economies around scarcity. Economics is the “study of how human beings allocate scarce resources”1 in the most efficient way and conventional wisdom agrees that regulated capitalism results in the most efficient allocation of those scarce resources. ...

But what happens if resources are not scarce?

....... Is there even a point to talking about the “economics of abundance” in a culture where economic equations are entirely oriented around scarcity? ..... “My college textbook, Gregory Mankiw’s otherwise excellent Principles of Economics, doesn’t mention the word abundance. And for good reason:

If you let the scarcity term in most economic equations go to nothing, you get all sorts of divide-by-zero problems. They basically blow up.”

......... molecular manufacturing as “the automated building of products from the bottom up, molecule by molecule, with atomic precision. This will make products that are extremely lightweight, flexible, durable, and potentially very ‘smart’.” And cheap. ........ “personal manufacturing”. Such personal nanofactories (PNs) already have been envisioned and are likely to be similar in look and ease of use as a printer or microwave oven. ..... The advent of PNs should bring the cost of most nonfood necessities to near zero.

Much of the raw material for most objects we commonly use can be found in air and dirt

...... If we build things from the molecules up (and conversely, break things down into their component molecules for reuse),

materials cost will nearly disappear.

Information would then become the most expensive resource. Meanwhile, computing power — information management — continues to expand exponentially even as its cost drops precipitously. ....... as true artificial intelligence (AI) approaches, computers will become self-programming, and information cost may drop even more dramatically. It’s already happening. .....

even food eventually could be manufactured on the kitchen countertop personal at practically no materials cost.

...... What would an economy based on abundance look like? What would we call it? Could we convince the lawmakers, the regulators, and those who currently benefit most from a system based on scarcity to relinquish what has worked so well for them? ...... we must drive toward an outcome whereby the benefits of molecular manufacturing accrue to the greatest number of people. War, poverty, and business drive my reasoning. .....

To date, all our technological and economic progress has produced a world at war and in poverty. War is largely fought over scarce resources. Widespread wealth (through universal distribution of PNs) would remove the apparent fuel for most wars.

...... 2.7 billion humans live below a level necessary to meet basic needs. The organization says that this kind of poverty includes hunger, lack of shelter, no access to medicines, and losing a child to illness brought about by unclean water ....... This discussion needs to happen now, before entrenched interests develop protections and harden regulations adapted for maximum short-term profits while stifling innovation. Market forces can be too slow. What’s needed is a means to produce broad and inexpensive licensing so that early breakthroughs in molecular manufacturing can quickly benefit a broad swath of humanity. ..... Over hundreds of years, we have developed the skills of how to allocate things in short supply. For widespread abundance, we have no experience, no projections, and no economic calculations. Abundance, paradoxically, could be highly disruptive. It is time to design a new economics of abundance, so that abundance can be enjoyed in a society that is prepared for it.

What Esther @kcolbin and Thomas Wells talk about here is part of why I care about web science. Must-read. And I think I'...

Posted by JP Rangaswami on Sunday, November 1, 2015


Wednesday, December 22, 2010

JP Rangaswami: Chief Scientist: Salesforce.com

Image representing Salesforce as depicted in C...Image via CrunchBase
ZDNet: JP Rangaswami and the future of Salesforce.com: The appointment of JP Rangaswami as Salesforce.com’s first chief scientist could push the company in an even more radical direction than we’ve already seen if he’s given any say in product strategy.
This is the first I am learning of JP's move from British Telecom to Salesforce.com. JP, of course, is the guy who introduced me to Twitter. According to WeFollow.com, I am number 52 in NYC on Twitter.

Congrats JP. Keep making bold moves.

Wednesday, September 01, 2010

Women In Tech: The Debate Rages On

This women in tech debate has really taken off, and I am glad.

Here's the guy who introduced me to Twitter, JP Rangaswami.
Women are underrepresented in a number of dimensions in the tech world, and this is noticeable in conference line-ups and in start-up founder lists. .... Take The Indus Entrepreneurs, TiE in short..... TiE was created to ensure that people of South Asian extraction were given the funding opportunities they were otherwise being denied. There was general acceptance of the engineering excellence of such people, but for some reason question marks were raised about their ability to run companies. Which meant that the “engineers” never got funded when they went forward with business plans..... We need to make sure that we eradicate prejudices that go along the lines of: Women don’t code. Founders must code. So women can’t found startups…..Systemic problems often need systemic solutions
I am glad he mentions the organization TiE, and draws the connection between gender and some of the challenges faced by brown people. And the thing he says about it being just fine for women entrepreneurs to not be coders, that is a theme a ran with when I blogged about a panel discussion here in New York City during Internet Week. (Women In Tech-Media Event At JP Morgan: Internet Week) I just had an email from the panel host Neha Chauhan yesterday saying she is working to launch her own startup in October.

And finally JP touches upon a theme I touched upon in a post I put out this past hour, (Gender Talks) that some of the biggest solutions are perhaps political.



Shefaly Yogendra: “Women in tech”: What Gives?:

Thursday, January 07, 2010

JyotiConnect: Executive Summary

A little over two hours ago I sent my executive summary and powerpoint presentation to Irene Hodes and Yao Huang for the Dot Com Hatchery event on January 13. This is what I sent. I hope to elaborate on the themes at this blog over the coming days leading up to the presentation. That is the social media way.

Hunger, Vision, Money 

JyotiConnect Inc.
Executive Summary by Paramendra Bhagat

JyotiConnect Inc.’s vision can be encapsulated in two letters: IC. IC, as in Internet Computer. The PC ended the mainframe era. The PC will not die. But the center of gravity in the computing industry is going to shift to the IC in a rich ecosystem of computing devices from smartphones, to netbooks, to PCs, to servers, to huge data farms. The IC will be the primary way the average human being will interact with the internet in a meaningful way.

The smartphones are all the rage today as they should be. And the mobile space will bring many more people their first web experience than the PC ever could have. That is exciting. But you can’t write a term paper on a smartphone. You need a device that speaks to the human dimensions for the screen and the keyboard. The hardware will look like a laptop of today but will be vastly different. Something much simpler, much cheaper, much lighter, much stronger.

There are three components to the IC vision: connectivity, hardware and software. My company would like to tackle it in that order. One and a half billion people are online today out of more than six billion. That is not good enough. Down the line we have to be able to offer wireless broadband supported by ads. But in the short term we have to be technology agnostic in how we bring people online.

You create few pilot projects, and once you have the basics down, you grow globally through the franchise concept. That way you tap into local capital, local ad markets, and locals’ awareness of the local political, social, cultural knowledge.

The hardware part could be a great second step. And you could argue everyone but everyone is already doing the IC software. Google is in the lead. Google today is the premier IC software company.

You want a barebones operating system that runs the browser, because all your computing needs are met online. If Web 2.0 has taught us anything, it is that the people, the masses are the very center of computing. Technology is secondary. And the web is poorer for every human being who is not yet online. The push for globally universal broadband, I am calling it Web 3.0. The semantic web is not it. That would be Web 2.1. (Competing For the Web 3.0 Definition)

I was done raising my round one goal of 100K and then in February 2009 most of my investors walked away reacting to the worst economy in 70 years. I took some time off, focused on social media, and now I am taking a second crack at my idea. This is the very first round, round 1, as I call it. I am looking for 100K.

Like Steve Jobs said years ago, the PC wars are over, Microsoft won, let’s move on to the next thing. And he gave us the iPod and the iPhone. I am saying the dot com wars have been won by Silicon Valley. If the center of gravity in tech is going to shift to NYC, it is not going to be because NYC finally outdid those on the West Coast in the dot com space. I don’t see that happening. But NYC is magically suited to take the lead on Web 3.0, as I define it. My company would like to take the lead. (Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World)

Presentation


JyotiConnect Inc.
The IC as in Internet Computer Company
5 slides for 5 minutes
By Paramendra
Twitter.com/paramendra
Facebook.com/paramendra
LinkedIn.com/in/paramendra
paramendra@gmail.com
Google “paramendra”

Slide 1: The Vision

o Mainframes ---> PCs ---> ICs
o Web 1.0, Web 2.0, Web 3.0
o And the visionary.
o Me, the butterfly effect, and Nepal’s magical April Revolution 2006.
o I am extremely good at vision and group dynamics.

Slide 2: The People

o Adam Carson, former Morgan Stanley banker, currently at the Tuck Business School, no longer a team member, though still a friend.
o Khushboo Vaish, IIT, IIM graduate, same school as Indra Nooyi, the Pepsi CEO.
o JP Rangaswami, CIO of British Telecom, mentor. (And If This Is Not JP Rangaswami, JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta (2))
o Anu Shukla, friend, California person, sold a company for $300 million in 2000. (Anu Shukla Has Found The New Frontier In Advertising)

Slide 3: Step 1, Step 2, Step 3

o Step 1: Raise and burn 100K. One full timer in NYC, a pilot project in Nepal, the poorest country outside of Africa.
o Step 2: Raise and burn 1-5 million. 5-10 full timers in NYC. 20-50 full timers in Nepal and Mumbai, Calcutta.
o Step 3: Grow like crazy globally through the franchise concept.

o I was done raising round 1 money and then most of my investors walked away in February 09. I let them. This is me taking a second crack at it. Ride the upswing. The future is now.

Slide 4: Round 1

o Looking to raise 100K.
o 15-20 K for the pilot project in Nepal.
o 25-30 K for a mobile, global team of part timers.
o 50 K for one full timer in NYC.

Slide 5: Web 3.0 and NYC

o Like Steve Jobs said years back, the PC wars are over, Microsoft won. Let’s move on. And he gave us the iPod and the iPhone.
o If the center of gravity in tech is going to shift to NYC, it will not be because we will produce the next big dot com. Silicon Valley won that round. Let’s move on to Web 3.0 as I define it. We will win. No place quite like NYC. (Empire State Of Mind)


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Wednesday, August 19, 2009

[WordPress #336657]: Not Being Able To Leave Comments


Category:Wikipedians who use WordPressImage via Wikipedia

For several months now I have not been able to leave comments on any Wordpress blogs. That is a lot of blogs. And I am not a happy camper. Wordpress has this wonderful thing called Akismet. Akismet's boast is that it does away with spam comments. I am an avid blogger and an avid commenter, I am no spammer. Looks like I got caught in the net, which is fine. What is not fine is I have written to them repeatedly to get me off the hook and so far they have not responded. This is a shame.



JP Rangaswami's blog is a Wordpress blog. TechCrunch is a Wordpress blog. To deny me their comments sections has got to be a misdemeanor.

I like the idea that I can leave comments at these two blogs - right now I can't - and I like the idea of trackback. If I link to posts on these two blogs, I want to be able to show up in their trackback sections. Right now I don't, and that is such a waste.

I have tried writing to them, I have tried tweeting them. Now I have resorted to blogging my complaint. Get me off the hook, folks. Or are you punishing me for having my blog on Blogger and not Wordpress? That can't be the reason.

Bye Bye Geocities
Google Wave API Google Group: Got To Undo The Ban On Me

Image representing WordPress as depicted in Cr...Image via CrunchBase


My Twitter Suspension Lifted
Netizen Is No Spam Blog

In The News

Looking Back at Google's I.P.O. Five Years Ago
  1. Google and Microsoft: The Battle Over College E-Mail Time
  2. Home Nurse Visits: A New Health-Care Fear for Conservatives
  3. Baby Einsteins: Not So Smart After All
  4. The Volt's 230 M.P.G.: Is M.P.G. Still Relevant?
  5. Why Exercise Won't Make You Thin
  6. Less Vegas: The Casino Town Bets on a Comeback
  7. California's Prison Crisis: Be Very Afraid
  8. Trying to Keep Cell Phones Out of Prison
  9. Afghanistan Exit Strategy: Buying Off the Taliban?
  10. Vulture Restaurants: Clean Carcasses for an Endangered Bird
150 Years of Central Park
Obama Heads for a Montana Showdown
U.S. Sen. Jim Webb Meets Burma Junta Leader
Drought and Famine: Ethiopia's Vicious Cycle Continues
President Obama's Latin Challenge
Why an Investment Guru Is Bullish on Recovery
What Came Before the Big Bang?
Death of the Guitar Man: Les Paul (1915-2009)
10 Questions for Ashton Kutcher
Swimming with the Fishes in Palau
Eating in the Windy City

Is Britain's Health-Care System Really That Bad?
Bollywood Star Shah Rukh Khan
Will Iran's 'Kennedys' Challenge Ahmadinejad?
On India's Matchmaking Sites, the NRI Groom Goes Out of Style
A Brief History Of Wikipedia
Bollywood Changes its Tune

Threat Assessment: When Protesters Bear Arms Against Health-Care Reform
German Election Campaign Takes a Racist Turn
Health Reform Without Cost-Cutting Isn't Worth It
Why Does Obama Keep Flip-Flopping on Gay Marriage?
Huckabee: Palestinian State 'Unrealistic'
Syria Intervenes In Iran Cases On Behalf of New Friend France

http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/3408247089
http://twitter.com/paramendra/status/3408249560
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Friday, June 19, 2009

JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta (2)


JP Rangaswami, Utterly Confused Of Calcutta

I talked about my round one investors pulling out in February. Okay, it is not as bad as I make it sound. There is a possibility all of them might come back by the end of summer. Keeping fingers crossed.

JP is also the guy who introduced me to David, virtually speaking: David Gelernter: Manifesto. It was a mind blowing experience to me.
  • Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 6: Musing about Role-driven Induction
  • Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 7: Communities Facebook is not a “social networking” site. It is a community of communities. Now this is potentially of immense value in an enterprise
  • Facebook and Bloomberg how “addictive” communications can made significant business impact
  • musing about facebook and enfranchisement The pressure group, all 14,000 of them, became visible and vocal. Via Facebook. And Cadbury’s listened.
  • Continuing to muse about Facebook and enfranchisement a small proportion of the populace are sufficiently risk-hungry, open-minded, bored, curious or just plain nosy enough to get involved in anything and everything.....I’ve had the privilege of being able to watch “Enterprise 2.0″, as it now gets called, experimented with, made a fad off, written off, subverted, faced off to and rounded up by lynch mobs a few times now...... After Facebook entered the enterprise scene, everything changed. ...... The organisation structures and management styles and financial processes and HR policies were all descended from the Assembly Line Ape. And the knowledge worker didn’t fit that evolutionary process. ........ these marauding smart mobs made it into the enterprise. Much worse, they’ve found allies inside the enterprise walls. Even worse than that, they’ve found allies amongst their customers and their partners and their supply chains. ........ it’s turned up in a nonhierarchical beyond-the-firewall way, and this scares many people. ........ The 21st century Trades Union movement for knowledge workers. ........ No longer held hostage by a single trade or profession or company, switching roles between employee and partner and customer. ........ In the meantime, do tell me why I’m wrong, why this post is so much horseshit, why you disagree.
  • Social software is political science in executable form social software is a much larger category than things like groupware or online communities..... de-coupling groups in space and time ..... the internet has ushered in a host of new social patterns, from the mailing list to the chat room to the weblog. ........ A group of people interacting with one another will exhibit behaviors that cannot be predicted by examining the individuals in isolation
  • Maybe it’s because I’m a Calcuttan….. In its simplest sense, a collaborative act is a bit like making a baby. It takes two people with somewhat different characteristics and abilities to produce one. ......... most examples of social software tended to fail in the past, because there was more effort expended on creating and maintaining the complex barriers and walls that exemplified the guts and innards of the institution.
  • Fire And Rain and Sholay I’m one of those soppy sentimental guys who loves the “soft” rock that oozed out of the late Sixties into the Seventies, part folk-rock part acoustic-ish harder stuff......... [Isn't it nice when you get to that age when your tastes are genuinely your own?] ......... They’re re-making Sholay. ...... Sholay is the highest-grossing Bollywood film ever, and one of the few (maybe 50) that I’ve actually seen. ....... I can remember actually queueing in the rain for cinema tickets only once in my life (with Gary Martin, in Calcutta). The film I was queueing for? Sholay…. translated as Fire. In the Rain. Fire And Rain.
  • No, but I think my secretary does This is what some captain of industry is meant to have said when asked if he used Facebook. ..... I’ve heard this precise phrase twice before. The first time, it was in the mid 1980s and the question was about PCs. The next time around, it was in the early 1990s and the question was about e-mail.
  • Thinking about Citizendium and Wikipedia: Part 1 I must be Confused...... Experts can be bought, often just for the price of a little ego-stroking. Experts don’t like admitting they’re wrong. The worst kind of groupthink is when a bunch of experts get together. Experts have more to lose, like their status. Which is why they fight so hard to retain it.
  • The Maker State: From self-buttering toasters to social software in the enterprise the madness of hiring intelligent people and then carefully draining every last drop of intelligence from them
  • Little orphan albums My father’s lifetime was contained in one job. I will probably have seven. My children will probably have seven —- but in parallel, not like my sequential efforts. ........... In my father’s time a musician belonged to one band. In my lifetime musicians belonged to seven. My children will see musicians belonging to seven bands at the same time.
  • Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 8: Musing about signals the “recipes” for the best companies start with “First get good people”. ....... People use all kinds of signals to communicate. From keeping doors open to shutting them. From answering e-mails promptly and diligently, all the way to “deleting them unread”. From being early for a meeting to not turning up. From giving their attention to not giving their attention. From listening to not-listening. ............ There’s something non-threatening, something non-invasive about the way we can signal to people using social software.
  • Musing about 21st century irritations and concerns and the Because Effect
  • A Saturday stroll musing about advertising
  • Continuing to muse about advertising
  • Musing about open access publishing and economics-of-abundance and DRM by looking up a word or phrase first in Wikipedia, I seem to be able to establish “baseline” information about the topic quickly and cheaply ......... Almost 3000 journals already use the new system: instead of charging people for access to journals, they charge researchers to publish in them. ....... The articles are then made available for free online ....... possibilities of using virtual worlds as means to a very specific end, that of empowering disenfranchised people.
  • They don’t all use the same physics What’s possible in one virtual world may not be possible in another - unlike the real world, they don’t all use the same physics.
  • London calling: Musing about crowdsourcing a case where the crowd will always beat the computer, where it was actually quite difficult to write a program to compile the list.
  • A bug’s life It’s been a very long time since I wrote any code at all.
  • None of the above
  • Just pick one: Musing about toothpaste in Calcutta and its effect on enterprise information For the first twenty-three years of my life, I’d never known a home other than Calcutta. I’d visited other cities, sure, but never actually lived anywhere else. And I’d never left the country. .......... The culture shock I experienced wasn’t big and immediate and in-your-face, it felt more like a disjointed series of very small events over a long time. ........ One place I felt distinctly uncomfortable was the supermarket. I could not conceive of a whole aisle containing things to do with something like dental care. ........... the Facebook series (now on Part 9), the Wikipedia series (now on Part 2) and the Opensource series (as yet unpublished).
  • Pottering about on copyright and Calcutta “We had no clue that we had to seek permission from the author,” Santanu Biswas, secretary of FD Block Puja Committee of Salt Lake, the community group which designed and paid for artists to make the tent. ...... [Mr Biswas, there will always be a house for you wherever I live.]
  • Seeing is believing: macro microscope photographs of snow crystals Some of us are passionate about our faith and our beliefs. Some of us are passionate about science and things scientific. Some of us are passionate about both. (I belong to this category). ..... these photographs. ....... I’ve had a childlike interest in science all my life, and I guess I’ve striven to have a childlike faith as well. ........ “taken aback” is too weak;”fascinated” does not do it justice. “Entranced” is not enough. Neither is “spellbound”. Even the vernacular “gobsmacked” is woefully inadequate.
  • Musing about “laziness” Some people get called lazy because you see them lounging around at work, chatting to people, occasionally even smiling. Dare I mention it, even laughing out loud. Some of these “lazy” people get a lot of “work” done, if you measure work in outcomes rather than in perceived effort. .............. many times the (exclusive) troubleshooters are the ones that cause the problem in the first place, be it a hard-coded value, duplication of code or a large complex method only they can understand.
  • The Becuase Effect (sic)
  • On toilet paper and cultural differences I used to think I’ve been a foreigner all my life. My father was born in Calcutta. So was I. But we “came” from the south of India, we were Tamils ........... Neither Calcutta, nor its Calcuttans, made me feel a foreigner; I made myself feel that way. .......... A foreigner at home. A foreigner away. A foreigner everywhere. ......... when I started seeing different cultures. I began to feel comfortable everywhere. ....... visit over 50 countries, and felt at home in all of them. ...... I was a native. Everywhere. ...... a native of Calcutta, of Liverpool, of London, of Dublin, and of Windsor: the five places I’ve lived in. ......... Years ago, when I used to market and sell offshore software services, I tended to open sales pitches with a simple cultural point. I said “The English and the Indian cultures can sometimes be seen to be separated by something as thin as toilet paper. The Indians think the English are dirty, because they use toilet paper .............. this post
  • Facebook and the Enterprise: Part 9a: Meandering around with ecosystems Where I work, we’ve been going through the laborious process of bringing together our network, process, product and IT skills into one coherent “converged” unit. ....... every enterprise is a community ....... The entire opensource movement is an example of the value generated by open ecosystems. ...... When I started working in software, everything was proprietary and siloed. Way back in 1980, there was already a well-established offshore software industry. But it wasn’t much use. .......... [By the way, ten years ago, who would have believed that the day would come when Apple would be worth more than IBM? Other than Steve, of course :-). ......... the firewall was designed to form a perimeter around an enterprise, a thou-shalt-not-pass barrier with intensive checks ....... This will change. This must change. The overlapping communities model that is emerging requires it to change. ........... People will belong to multiple communities, those multiple communities will overlap in many and varied ways. Innovation will blossom at the edges of the communities, as professions collide, as the distinctions between some of the professions continue to blur. ........... The concept of the firewall will continue, but perhaps it will become more personal. Like identity. Like authentication and permissioning. ........ In addition to being nourished by information, the ecosystem thrives on an alternate source of energy. The interactions between the people. ....... a set of rights as well as duties. Liberty, not licence.
  • Stuff I’m reading, part 142857 0.142857 (recurring) is the decimal representation of 1/7 .... 2/7 is 0.285714, 3/7 is 0.428571, and so on. The same six digits, gently moving around. Circulating. ...... 14 plus 28 plus 57 equals 99. 142 plus 857 equals 999. 1 plus 4 plus 2 etc etc equals 9
  • Musing about music and politics Gracenote maps
  • Musing about openness and security “most murders are committed by people known by the victim, so it’s best not to know anyone” ....... First we take living things and make abject skeletons out of them. Then we carefully build cupboards around the newly formed skeletons. And then we wonder why we have skeletons in cupboards.
  • But Miss, they’re not listening to me I learn from the behaviour of “fresh” graduates. In fact I learn quite a bit from observing what babies do. All this does not stop me from learning in other, more traditional, ways. ..... switch from hierarchical to networked ...... in a networked society, everyone is a peer
  • Learning from my children, part 97 we are going to see Generation M using things like Facebook creatively and differently, using the functionality in ways we do not expect. More importantly, using the functionality in ways that may not have been designed for, yet remain possible.
  • I’m a Believer in the 21st century, product-driven advertising is fundamentally flawed
  • Musing about Kurt Vonnegut and writing software A Man Without A Country
  • Meandering around as a result of strange Facebook status messages Facebook is a multidimensional conversation
  • More musings about what makes Facebook different “organic gardening”, this concept of having shared interests beyond work, but at work ....... there is a critical link between relationships and privacy
  • Chewing over jhal moori and chicken tikka masala When I came to the UK in 1980, there were many things I had to get used to, and many things I got wrong ...... the scariest thing I had to overcome, in the context of culture shock, was this: getting used to Western cuisine ........ What I hadn’t been prepared for was the way people here cooked Indian cuisine. That hurt. It really hurt. ........ I was expected to order the “curry” on the menu. Which meant saying a little prayer and then manfully working through meat with apples and raisins, with a bit of stale curry powder thrown in, and if you were lucky, a large dollop of turmeric for colouring (which had the salutary effect of killing all other tastes for a short while). ................... even good Nepali fare.
  • Cricket: The Sound and Numbers Game VVS Laxman scored his 112 all in ones and fours. .... 111/1, 222/2, 333/3, 444/4, 555/5. ....... For those of you who don’t follow cricket, all I can say is it’s never too late.
  • Enterprise Blue Zero Using any device, anytime, anywhere, with whatever modality of communications best suits purpose. Collaboratively filtered, rated and ranked. Learning and teaching.
Jobsworth


Larry Ellison
Google's Newest Venture: Google Ventures
Bad Time To Start A Company?
The Big Money Is Not In Blogging
New York City: Transformed Forever?
Reimagining The Office
David Gelernter: Manifesto
The United States Of Entrepreneurs
Spamming Om Malik
The Human Is The Center Of Gravity In Computing
Visionary Entrepreneurs Will Recreate The World
That StartUp Mentality (2)
That StartUp Mentality





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