Parallax : Calculating Technology's Future

Great Books I Am Reading

Some random books that are informing my thinking these days:

Jeff Howe, Crowdsourcing

Stephen Baker, Numerati

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everyone

John Winsor, SPARK!

Trada Customer: PosterBrain

Trada's rocking along and growing quickly. Just wanted to give some blog-love out to one of our customers: PosterBrain. Here's their blurb:

www.PosterBrain.com is a local Boulder/Denver company that makes it addictively easy  to turn any picture into a poster overnight. Its a super simple web design, same-day shipping, incredible print quality, and great customer service. 

We have one of their signs on our front door. If you're promoting your business using PPC (like PosterBrain does) you should drop Trada a line and find out more about what we're doing: info@trada.com.

The Death of Newspapers (and the Rebirth of the Editor)

TechCrunch had an interesting link today to this article written by a newspaper industry pundit on the "Link Economy". His basic point is that the value of inbound links to news sites is overshadowed by the ability of site scrapers to use them and disintermediate the newspaper site from their readers.

Why won't newspapers realize their long term fate is sealed in the same way that the music industry's fate was sealed - if your business model has been based on controlled distribution and bundling of variable quality media units (e.g. songs on an album or stories in a newspaper) into one purchasable SKU, you'd better hope that you don't loose distribution control. Whoops!

Why won't the newspapers and the music labels realize the same basic thing: what they have on their side is the editorial (or curatorial or AR or whatever you want to call it) function. That's their bag. Monetize that! The music industry is figuring out how to do that with merch and live shows -  newspapers just need to do it with their own versions of the same (e.g. Wired and New Yorker's thought leadership conferences).

I wrote about this transformation a long time ago now and i believe my arguments hold even more true today than when i wrote this: 

http://parallax.blogs.com/parallax_calculating_tech/2008/06/editor-20.html

If the NYT won't own the editorial function for news, then I guarantee you someone else will. 

TechStars Global Domination: Step 2

The very successful TechStars mentorship-based incubator program has spread its wings to Boston:

http://www.pitchengine.com/free-release.php?id=4714

Congratulations to Brad Feld, David Cohen, Jared Polis and all the mentors that have made Boulder's first version of this so successful.

I am Being Stalked By the State of Colorado

Dear The State of Colorado,

I'm starting to think you're stalking me. 4 times in the last 2 days (including right now, on the weekend) your automated dialing system has called me resulting in the following back and forth:

IVR: This is the Colorado Secretary of State with a very important message about <one of my company's names>. Press #1 if you are the right person to handle this call.
Me: <pressing 1>
IVR: Thank you, we have an important and urgent message for you. Please press #0 to speak to an agent.
Me: <pressing 0>
IVR: We're sorry, there are no agents available. We will call you again at a later time. <hangs up>

I know I can be pretty intimidating some times but why do you keep hanging up on me when you find out i'm home? Was it you that i gave my number to at the bar last weekend? If so, just leave me yours and i will hit you back - I promise. Maybe i missed Secretaries day or something and you're just wanting an apology? Okay - i really am sorry - you're doing a great job! But can I tell you something? If this was an ex-girlfriend i'd actually be thinking about calling the police right now.

But Colorado, let's not start off on the wrong foot. Maybe you can pass this suggestion on to your IVR engineers: it's not really that complicated, just a little code change to your system

agent = AgentQueue.get_available_agent()

if  !agent.nil?
{
    lock(agent)
    call_tax_payer(agent)
    unlock(agent)
}

Just wrap this in a happy loop that checks the list for any unresolved cases and voila, no more restraining orderer needed.

I do need to get something off my chest though. I was amused the first time I went through this process and i even ignored the imposition that it was on my cell phone. But now i'm getting a little annoyed. If you don't have an agent available at least give me a phone number to call or an email address to write to or something!  If you wanna get ahold of me so bad you can find me in two minutes on Facebook! Maybe you're being very mysterious about this all for a reason and I admit I am a little intrigued. But that aside, this is getting pretty silly and on my personal cell phone I consider it to be at do-not-call spam levels. Not to mention it makes you and the Secretary of State look a little bit like bumbling idiots. Not necessarily the best fist impression to make with me.

Please, if you're going to use technology then at least write some decent requirements beforehand. And if you see me out this weekend just come over and say hi. I won't bite i promise.

Signed,
Baffled in Boulder

Putting the Crowd Horse Before the Cart

In my recent post The Wisdom of Sales Crowds i talked, among other bigger things, about the idea of crowdsourcing your dating choices. It seems like the folks at SideTaker probably agree with me that crowdsourced dating is coming and have already prepared a way to crowdsource the inevitabnle arguments you'll have in those relationships. I see a merger in the future!