If you offer free nights and weekends, and then you offer anytime minutes, aren’t those just daytime minutes with a different name?  Just a thought.

Categories: Behavioral Economics, Business and Economics, Technology
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To prevent myself from posting every time he comes up with an awesome Wii hack, I present the Wii page of hack-Godfather Johnny Lee. The latest, which shows how to create 3-day head tracking, is simply unreal.

Categories: Technology, Video Games
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The blogosphere is no longer the cool and edgy place to publish, where maverick innovators shatter the world with their out of the box thinking.  The establishment has joined the party, with the director of the Congressional Budget Office - the Bureaucrats Bureaucracy - starting his official blog.

Via MR.

Categories: Business and Economics, Social Software, Technology
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Joel Spolsky just posted three parts (1,2,3) of a speech he gave at Yale in which he warns students to avoid corporate IT:

Now, at a product company, for example, if you’re a software developer working on a software product or even an online product like Google or Facebook, the better you make the product, the better it sells. The key point about in-house development is that once it’s “good enough,” you stop.

Spolsky is 100% right about corporate IT organizations - they are crappy places to work. You don’t get to work on fun projects, you’re disconnected from the business, you’re stuck making things quickly rather than high-quality, and everyone on the business-line hates you, to the point where they keep farming out your job to consultants like Accenture, Deloitte, and IBM.

But the reason IT is miserable is it’s own fault - in house IT is, for the most part, a monopoly, and it’s going to be just as miserable as working at any other monopoly. You don’t have to worry about what your internal customer needs, because they can’t go someplace else (you don’t run competing IT shops). You don’t have to run efficiently because there aren’t market pressures. For every complaint from someone in IT that their creative freedom is restricted, there’s a complaint on the business side for the problems that crop up when developers decide they want to play - for instance every business application needs to have it’s own authentication, with it’s own look and feel, and it’s own user database. Kerberos was invented how long ago? If you’re developing a product and you make your users sign-in a different way to use different areas of your product, creative destruction will take care of you pretty quickly, but when you’re in the monopoly that is corporate IT, the users don’t have anywhere else to go.

And what of the consultants that IT hates so much, who can charge $300 an hour to have a 22 year-old with an English degree and a crash course in .Net write applications for you? They do something corporate IT isn’t very good at - they spend most of their time figuring out what the biggest problem is, and then they develop an application that solves it. In the meantime, corporate IT has an amorphous idea of what the business is and starts developing applications that they think might be relevant. That’s how monopolies work - they push products onto the market as they develop them, without regards to customer needs. Customers, who don’t have a choice, take what they can get.

There are other structural forces that make corporate IT miserable. For instance, maintenance and new development usually come out of separate budgets, so developers have little incentive to make an efficient product that is cost effective to maintain - that’s somebody else’s problem. Because once a project ends they either have to find a new one or move into maintaining the code they wrote, they actually have a perverse incentive to write bad code that’s difficult to maintain, modify, and interact with. The best way to build job security is to invent a role nobody else can do. If you’re looking for anecdotal evidence, just look at the way the owners of legacy applications fight any attempt to modernize.

If you’re developing a product, any new feature you add provides value to the customer, that’s why it’s valued. Great companies value IT (and other support functions like HR) because they drive value to the bottom line. In fact, great companies are usually built on great people and great technology. When done right, IT contributes straight to the bottom line, and IT professionals are valuable parts of the business team.

In the end, the problems with corporate IT are based around the same issue - there is no accountability to the customer. That’s the root of line-managers’ complaints about IT and it drives into most of the problems programmers feel when working in corporate IT. Solve it, and all of a sudden IT becomes a great place to work, and a valued part of the team.

Categories: Business and Economics, Customer Engagement, Incentive Centered Design, Information Economics, Managing, Technology
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I’m a consultant, which means I consultant, then I count my benjamins, and then I network with the CEOs

From the first webisode of Dell’s web-series The IT Room.

Categories: Business and Economics, Managing, Technology
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Forget Microsoft’s Surface or the iPhone, a clever Wii hack allows for multi-touch without the touch, similar to the movie Minority Report:

For most applications, touch and touchless interfaces simply aren’t practical. You get tired waving your arms around all the time. Where I dream of using these devices is in collaboration or conferences with a big projector. By pointing at the projector, you can move around slides or digital note-cards to group ideas together, or navigate a presentation by waving at the screen. When working with lots of complicate ideas, the ability to move them around in space relative to each other is huge and doesn’t really exist digitally the same way it does with sticky-notes on a white board.

Some engineers in Microsoft Research have a hack called Soap that’s pretty cool as well if you’re looking for a good DIY project.

Categories: Technology
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A new video short from Kansas State anthropologist Michael Wesch on the changing characteristics of information in a digital world:

The same Michael Wesch created this video about Web 2.0 which made the rounds a few months back.

Categories: Information Economics, Social Software, Technology
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Arnold Kling, writing about Electronic Medical Records, says:

I spent much of my career in business, and much of my focus was on use of information technology (IT). Among the lessons I learned were.

1. Within a company, every business area gets the IT it deserves. Chaotic, haphazard business areas get lousy IT (and blame the IT department). Organized, well-run business areas get great IT.

2. Data cannot be maintained unless there is clarity of ownership. It must be clear who is responsible for creating, maintaining, updating, and deleting the data.

The best IT organizations are run like a great store (complete with consultative sales). In order for them to be affective, they need to be attached to a well managed company that knows what it wants. It’s not IT’s job to champion projects, to drive change, or to come up with ideas. It’s their job to understand what the business needs, come up with products that support it, and work with the business to implement them. If your technology department keeps turning out crap, you need to stop complaining and start thinking about what exactly you asked them for. Odds are, it was either nothing or crap, and either way, it’s not really their fault.

Note, however, that undisciplined software projects that are poorly executed are the fault of IT. That’s where they stop running a great store, and it makes the business side want to shop someplace else. Business leaders need to intervene there and take a look at how they can shake up the IT organization, most likely through some sort of change in leadership.

Categories: Business and Economics, Managing, Technology
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If the information economy is driven by the young, and it’s millenials who are saturated with the share-your-life-with-everyone world of the internet, why are most of the blogs I read written by old people, either Boomers or late Gen-Xers? Some hypotheses:

1. Young people aren’t very good writers yet, so nobody wants to read them. Older bloggers have had decades to refine their writing, and practice makes it better. It doesn’t matter how good your ideas are if you can’t communicate them well.
2. Older people have more to say. They’ve spent decades accumulating experience, usually in a specific area (economics, human resources, technology), and that makes their opinions more valuable. It also gives them a greater bank of stories to share from, tempers their ideas with a knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in the real world, and most importantly, lends them credibility on an internet that’s something pretty scarce.
3. Good blogs have focus, and young people don’t. Millennials are still trying to figure out what they want to do with their lives through some magical personal quest that nobody cares about. It makes their blogs tough to follow. Boomer blogs have a single cohesive idea that attracts those who are interested and keeps them tuning in.

After the recent lapse in posting, prepare for some changes in this blog. Cohesive idea: making better decisions.

Categories: Generations, Social Software, Technology
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Jane Galt passes along another look at the power of digital beautification:

Categories: Information Asymmetries, Technology
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Data from the latest National Health Interview Survey suggests that the land line is becoming a thing of the past. Yahoo news has a summary:

One in four people aged 18 to 24 had only cell phones, as did 29 percent of those aged 25 to 29, the study showed. The percentages declined with age after that, with 2 percent of those 65 or over having only cell phones.

The group most likely to have only a cell phone are young people with low incomes. Studies on the subject still conclude that the cell-only population isn’t large enough to skew broad polls, but it certainly has an affect on segmentation, especially towards these target groups.

Categories: Generations, Polling, Technology
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In an interview, Tim O’Reilly points out the big deal of Web 2.0 - it’s about the information:

That goes back to a major theme of web 2.0 that people haven’t yet tweaked to. It’s really about data and who owns and controls, or gives the best access to, a class of data. Amazon is now the definitive source for data about whole sets of products — fungible consumer products. EBay is the authoritative source for the secondary market of those products. Google is the authority for information about facts, but they’re relatively undifferentiated.

Information is the oil/gold/guns of the twentieth century.

Categories: Business and Economics, Distribution, Information Economics, Information Markets, Social Software, Technology
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Slate has announced a guide to political futures markets for the 2008 US Presidential Election. Political futures generally predict outcomes better than polls for a number of reason. Slate is going to track the big prediction markets along the big races and report along.

For a snapshot, the Iowa Electronic Market, the Big Daddy of prediction markets, shows Clinton and Obama neck and neck for the Dems, and the Field Candidate (anyone but McCain, Romney, and Guiliani) taking the republicans. Guiliani leads among those candidates with their own futures. The dems are also predicted to win by a slim margin.

Also, I haven’t investigated the differences between contracts in the markets, but the wide price differences between the Iowa Electronic Market and Intrade seem like an arbitrage opportunity for those who can trade in both.

Categories: America, Information Markets, Politics, Polling, Social Software, Technology
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Another bit of down to earth wisdom for the masses from Tycho at Penny Arcade:

People seem to think that by posting in threads and agreeing with other people they are changing the world. They are not. They are posting in threads online. The universe will not be altered by forum threads, even those which are very wry. Being outraged online is a form of entertainment, and refreshing a thread to receive a hit of consensus packs the thrill of genuine activism without requiring any sweat. I’m afraid this test may require more from the community than a sardonic jpeg.

One day, hopefully before I go back, I’ll get to a write up about my impressions from their PAX convention. The short version: there are real people behind lots of the stuff you see written online, and most of them are exactly like you’d expect, and don’t behave that differently offline.

Categories: Information Economics, Politics, Social Software, Technology
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Or will at least be on a TV.

Tycho of Penny Arcade writes:

Forming your own bands which create original music and then upload these tracks - complete with vocals - to a community rated central repository verges on the supernatural. That’s the new MTV. It’s what MTV looks like when we seize the reins in glorious revolution.

He’s talking about Rock Band, the upcoming game from the makers of Guitar Hero.

Established companies are finally starting to ‘get it’ and empower their users or risk becoming irrelevant.

Categories: Business and Economics, Community, Information Economics, Social Software, Technology
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