Parallax : Calculating Technology's Future

Revenge of the Nerds

I am always reminded how much America is fascinated by charts when I find myself reading weekend box office receipts religiously. Its odd, because I never see half those movies nor do I ever make a decisions on which movie to see based on box office tallys. I just find it interesting to track. A sort of pop culture barometer, in the vein of our mysterious but consistent compulsion to watch the weather channel. In the same way as movies, I watch record charts on a daily basis. I get (perhaps slightly skewed) through Rhapsody, which I use as a music player in juke box mode. One of the features of Rhapsody's home page is that it lists relatively real-time statistics on what is being listened to the most. Almost always you see the obvious acts - whomever has just released an album as well as some standards like Jack Johnson which seem to never go away no matter what else is going on in the world.

Well, to my shock yesterday I fired up Rhapsody and guess who was #1? Justin Timberlake, sorry, but he ain't bringing #1 back any time soon. John Mayer, nope, he'll be waiting on the charts to change. Okay, okay - that was horrible, I know. But, the winner was... Weird Al Yankovic. Yes, you read that right. The most listened to artist in the US according to Rhapsody users (which may or may not be a statistically significant sample) on Oct 2, 2006 was Weird Al Yankovic. Wow, and here is proof:

Okay - so other than the nerd's-rule factor, what is relevant about this? Well, the question I asked myself is, "How did that happen?" What I realized is that for the first time (and this is anecdote, not pure research), something that was popular on YouTube actually drove statistically relevant change in the Long Tail on a commercial site such as Rhapsody. Everyone I talked to found out about Weird Al's latest album one way - by seeing his YouTube video for "White and Nerdy". It came in email, it bubbled up on the YouTube most popular site, it was embedded in MySpace pages, etc.. Interestingly, other than being an embed in MySpace, it actually was not pushed by MySpace (Weird Al does not have a MySpace music page). And it wasn't marketed on Rhapsody. So what is this phenomenon? Well, it's Web 2.0 crossover. Popular on YouTube for free, popular on Rhapsody making money for the artist and label.

Someone Else Gets It

I just read a great article in CIO magazine entitled "ERP Systems on Steroids". Finally, someone else is starting to get it. I disagree with one comment though, it actually IS a change management problem until someone comes up with a better architecture. And from everything I have seen, Fusion and NetWeaver are not going to be any architecturally different than what we have now.

Airing Your Strategic Laundry

In the United States there has always been a healthy race between government funded research and corporate innovation. Today I noticed two similar corporate announcements that I found to be tips of the hat to some recent academic and non-profit successes.

The first comes from NetFlix who is offering $1,000,000 to anyone who can devise a movie recommendation engine at least 10% better than their own. How one accurately calculates "10% better" will probably be the subject of their next public purse, but we'll see how it unfolds. One of the most amazing things about this experiment is that they are giving a scrubbed version of their user recommendation database to any team (apparently) who signs up. That's sort of like Google giving away a database of 100 million search results to fund anyone who can come up a better search algorithm than PageRank. The downside is that the competition runs for 5 years, so no quick wins here.

The second announcement today comes from Intel who is offering $1,000,000 to anyone who can design a better looking PC or multimedia device. An interestingly technology-light contest from such a deep techology company. While it may not seem core, its probably more relevant to their battle over market expansion and dominance against AMD than one would consider at first blush. It also seems like a lot cheaper way to get good design ideas than to buy a company like HP did today with its acquisition of Voodoo.

I found both of these strikingly reminiscent of two previous prizes announced to the public with much fanfare. First was the Ansari X-Prize, who's title sponsor just recently returned from space herself (not because of the X-Prize). The first X-Prize was a $10,000,000 purse to anyone who could reach a high-earth altitude, return to earth and then do it again in a short amount of time (to simulate continous commercial travel operations). There are now two additional X-Prizes in automotives and genomics with more on the way.

The other notable public prize is Darpa's ongoing Grand Challenge, a million dollar purse awarded to any autonomous vehicle that can navigate a treacherous 60 mile driving course. While no one has yet collected, the challenge has attracted significant attention both from media and sponsored partipants.

What is interesting about the X-Prize and Grand Challenge is that the total amount of sponsorship money invested to win the prize is an order of magnitude greater than the prize itself. A pretty smart move if your real goal is dirving innovation.

So what's the point of all of this and how will is transform the business landscape? I am not quite sure yet to be honest. It's hard to tell if this is more marketing than real innovation, but i think if the trend continues, we will look back at the 90's as the decade of co-opetition and the first decade of this millenium as the decade of open sourced competition.