I edit therefore I am

Brad Feld has made several posts on a subject that where indirectly treated in my Venture with Wit post. The TAR problem is the following :

1. Trust
2. Attention
3. Relevance

Brad has invested in several companies trying to solve this tryptic (such as Me.dium, Lijit, Collective Intellect, and HiveLive) I am currently trying Lijiit (great!) and became a reader of its CTO blog (who loves the same comics as I do) and is quite insightfull. They all tried to get a name for the solution in a ping pong post serie, and they came with  : Intelligence Amplification.

Ryan (Brad Partner @ Moebius Venture) explains how he came with the term and where it comes from.

I think this term applies very well to what is enabled when you combine
elements of social networking, open-source knowledge (I rely heavily on
Wikipedia for links in many of my blog posts), trusted relationships, folksonomy/tagging (see the wisdom-of-crowds at work with Flickr, Del.icio.us, Technorati, Digg, etc), collaborative filters, search engines and other tools that use the internet to coordinate human-to-human sharing of knowledge and information. These tools use algorithms to leverage human activities and human minds belonging to millions of strangers, and, increasingly
friends and acquaintances, to help us find relevance in the flood of information we are trying to stay afloat in.

I like this term and I think it’s quite interesting because I agree with the gang about web 3.0: semantic web is EPIC and not for tomorrow. So we have to put Human Computation to reach such objectives as thoses of the semantic web.  It could be Collaborative Filtering or anotation …. but Human is key to create smart links and paths of dicovery or knowledge.

I love ping pong (unfortunately none of them has trackback) and it seems that we will have over the next few weeks the smart discussion I was hopping for in my previous post.

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Source : GenuineVc "The Royal Throne in the Entertainment Business – Don’t Kill the Messenger"

Analyst Spencer Wang of Bear Stearns just published a very good overview of the dynamics of the entertainment industry
which argues that “aggregation & context and not content are king.”
There isn’t anything entirely ground-breaking in the report, but it’s a
great overview synopsis of a lot of the trends occurring in the
industry. (You can download the presentation here)

Nicholas Carr summaries the report
well, “Wang argues that both ends of the value chain - content creation
and content distribution - are increasingly characterized by oversupply
and hence weak profitability. Value, as a result, is migrating to the
center of the
value chain, where content aggregation and branding take
place. The profit, in other words, is in packaging.”

[Leafar: And we are in an era of personalized packaging, think about creating your nike, writing text on the back of your ipod .... etc / People are gonna ask for a personnalized packaging that fit their identity]

I largely agree with Wang’s conclusions – that “new competitors… [of]
viable aggregators [are going] to emerge” and that “startups are likely
to be more nimble [than incumbent creators of content],” However, I’d
like to add that messaging with others, and the intersection of that
activity with content creation is a large piece in the puzzle. Yes, the profit is in the packaging of entertainment, but also in the packaging of messages as well.

Digging blog is efficient when done by the writer : found in a previous note from GenuineVc
Connectivity over content – or being content?  I haven’t been able to shake the theme from the (long and somewhat dated academic) article written by Andrew Odlyzko, “Content is Not King,” which has stuck with me since I read it last September.  Maintaining “that connectivity is more important than content,”

November 2006 will get a Hall of Fame, it’s a 24 months of work that come under the spolights over the last 3 weeks. Leweb3 is gonna be awesome, speaking with smart people about what we have been thinking about probably for almost 5 years … and working over for the last 2. Great discussions mean good inputs & outputs.

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When I was in Boston, I went to the John F Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and near the end I was confronted with the short movie realized by Zapruder. This movie is now famous for being the first home made film broadcast over the world. It seems a drop of water in the Youtube ocean, but this was a major event.

last week I came accross an article published by Michael Hirschorn in the Atlantic online using zapruder to introduce the best disruptive video I have seen over the last two years : EPIC. For those who missed it here is the article using EPIC to comment on the futur of journalism. Here is a quote from teh article :

As a piece of pop futurism, EPIC 2014 is
both brilliant and brilliantly self-subverting (at once inevitable and
preposterous). But what’s remarkable is how many of its ten-years-out
predictions have already come true—if not materially, then de facto:
the mass migration of everything to the Web, the explosion of blogging,
the near-instant embrace of social media (see YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia), the growing sophistication of Google’s AdWords and AdSense
(the latter soon to be extended to user-customized RSS file format and
other feeds), the TiVo-ization of television, and on and on. Instead of
buying Amazon, Google bought YouTube, an Evolving Personalized
Information Construct that didn’t exist in 2004—GoogleTube instead of
Googlezon. Thus does two-year-old futurism already seem hopelessly
recherché.

and here is the youtube video of EPIC 2015:

I think EPIC 2014 was a bit better …. but maybe because it was more cynic thus more realistic (I listed the changes in a previous post /in french/).

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In march Avc introduced the freemium model. Yesterday Chris Anderson turned his economy of abundance to the freeconomics in reference to the book of Levitt.

We need to put more thinking in the model to make it work, think about side effect, free ride, incentive (for UGC for example) … That’s what economy is about. Building it will be very fun. Hope I will get sometimes to spend on it.

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I just found this video thanks to John Wilson. It’s fun. I know it’s TV but ….

Here are one of John’s advice. Crystal Clear (even if sometimes validating hypothesis on revenus is more subtile game, especially if you have seen it from the other side of the fence) :

Most fundamental thing in funding meetings - be yourself and say what you passionately believe, not what you think you should say. There’s just no point being false because that will come back and bite you when you actually revert to whoever you really are.

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We had a great discussion around the Wikipedia monetization. Guy has found a good study about the relation between Money and Contribution.

“To examine this idea in a more controlled setting, Vohs, now at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and colleagues recruited several hundred college students to participate in a variety of experiments. In each experiment, the researchers subtly prompted half the volunteers to think of money—by having them read an essay that mentioned money, for example, or seating them facing a poster depicting different types of currency—before putting them in a social situation. In one experiment, the researchers gave volunteers a difficult puzzle and told them to ask for help at any time. People who had been reminded of money waited nearly 70% longer to seek help than those who hadn’t. People cued to think of money also spent only half as much time, on average, assisting another person who asked for their help with a word problem and picked up fewer pencils for someone who”d dropped them.”

He uses these fndings to talk about evangelism… very interesting

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If you missed it, Fortune’s journalist Jeffrey O’Brien has just  written an interesting article about recommendation  titled : "The race to create a ’smart’ Google !"

He presents the recommendation star system : Choice Stream [I dislike their "we picture you in one sec apporach"!], Pandora [it's editor recommandation], Slide [that one is trickier] from apprition order for the pitures.

Here are some extracts :
"We don’t just buy products, we bond with them. We have relationships with our things." and No Logo is also a way to define yourself.

There’s a sense among the players in the recommendation business - from newcomers like MyStrands and StumbleUpon to titans like Yahoo and Sun - that now is the time to perfect such an algorithm.

The Web, they say, is leaving the era of search and entering one of
discovery. What’s the difference? Search is what you do when you’re
looking for something. Discovery is when something wonderful that you
didn’t know existed, or didn’t know how to ask for, finds you.

But there is no go-to discovery engine - yet. Building a personalized
discovery mechanism will mean tapping into all the manners of
expression, categorization, and opinions that exist on the Web today.
It’s no easy feat, but if a company can pull it off and make the formula portable [= Movable Playlist & Library] so it works on your mobile
phone - well, such a tool
could change not just marketing, but all of commerce.

Personalized recommendations," says Brent Smith, Amazon’s director of
personalization, "are at the heart of why online shopping offers so
much promise." So far, the company has struggled to deliver on that
promise. Its system favors popular, obvious items and tends to come off
less like a trusted shopkeeper than a pushy salesman

Levchin is careful to say he’s rolling out features slowly and will
only go as far as his users will allow. But he sees what many others
claim to see: Most consumers seem perfectly willing to trade preference
data for insight. "What’s fueling this is the desire for
self-expression," he says.

[Identity my dear Levchin, you need to be puzzling]

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Who ! Here is a post from avc taken from the comment of the day serie :

"With all of these killer music apps, I really wish their was a way to aggregate all my music attention into one place so I could store it, view it, share it, and plug it into other web services like this:" Comment from David Henderson.

Avc add-on:"That is exactly what is missing. I need a music attention aggregator. Last.fm comes the closest to do that for me, but the explosion of cool music web services is leaving last.fm in the dust. I need something akin to Netvibes for music."

[Personnal add-on : turn Music into Entertainement]

We have the widget, we have the attention, we now need the API to make playlist comes into Happy  Widget mode. Cool Stuff.

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Since my first post on the Netfix Prize on 03/10 a lot have changed. I made a post about Netflix Prize being a new philisophy of Innovation (in french), the progress done by competing teams are not bad.
So in order to follow the reflexion here is a post from Steven D.Levitt the author of Freakonomics on the same topic.

If you haven’t read is book, it’s great, a fun way to see economy (practical). Here is the kind of questions he tries to answer :

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do
schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers
still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What
kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime?

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No comment. just listen to the crowd.

Macintosh .. insanely great!

Steve rules.

[thks : A venture forth]

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