nuance intelligence

The Collective Intelligence Foo Camp (CIFoo) just concluded. Lots of interesting pieces:

1. It’s run on an open WIKI server, demonstrating real trust in the community.
2. It’s got a relatively active social network attached, with good comments and lots of shared knowledge.
3. Slides are posted. I strongly recommend two based on key metrics for social network development (but search around for others):
   1. ROI for social networks. Good walk-through of the creation of a business metric to justify investment and measure return.
   2. Viral marketing performance metrics. Although set in a silly pirate metaphor, the review of a full viral marketing campaign reviews several key performance metrics that define web 2.0 campaigns

What’s the nuance? It’s another great un-sung benefit of all these groovy web 2.0 tools – the outer ring access to conferences and other curricula that provides something on the order of a 50-5 Proposition, which considers that you may get half the value of the conference by spending 5% of the time to carefully read and review the site, slides, presentations and comments. This is not to say that it will replace the conference – so much of those are about who you meet and how you connect – but it’s nice to glean key learnings from a distance.

Although Boulder has an impressive stable of businesses in the green / sustainable / eco milieu, Fort Collins, a perennial David to Boulder’s Goliath, is gaining a strong base with the addition of CEO Casey Verbeck to the GenGreen team (who’s got so much going on that he doesn’t have time to update his LinkedIN profile).

The site is building local guides for cities around the US (to start), and will be merging them with the usual social network tools. They’re just about ready to mix-in commerce, which has the eco market quite excited. Casey told me that there are over 120 green businesses in Boulder without a storefront, and no easy way for people to locate them. He’s committed to organizing that market.

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Interesting to see Microsoft’s open channel to the development community, Channel9. This isn’t your Ballmer’s MSDN (reference too obscure?). I like their manifesto. Continue reading

Visa, one of the most interesting organizations in the world, is going public.

The Brits, both at the Financial Times and Economist (subscription, and well worth it) allude to the possible motivation as a hefty financial bail-out for stock-owning banks, who could collectively receive up to half of the estimated $18bn offering. All papers note that MasterCard’s shares are up 400% since their May 2006 IPO.

The Economist highlights key statistics report from “Nilson Report, a trade publication, [who] estimates that by 2011 55% of transactions in America will be cashless, up from 40% in 2005.” And all papers report that over $3bn will be set aside for anti-trust and unfair pricing claims now pending in various courts.

Never mind the fact that this will be the largest IPO is US history (read about that ad-nauseam), what’s most interesting is Visa’s structure and origins.

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Thanks to Guy Kawasaki’s excellent blog, we read a good post on Fluid Design that counters the age-old web maxim that you had to get everything (especially ads) above the fold.

visitors just completely overlooked the ads because they were coming to the site to read the content and didn’t give a doodle about what sat on the way top of the page. And really, when people were reading the content, the ads were too high to see and/or click on and website owners and their advertisers were not making any mula.

I think I first had this argument in 1995. Nice to know I was right (and on the losing side, IIRC).

Nice to see people drinking the web 2.0 collaboration kool-aid in a good way.

The editors of Complexity and Social Networkers, a blog from the Institute for Quantiative Social Science and the Program on Netwoked Governance at Harvard, had begun a comprehensive search for social network analysis tools and libraries. Not having found a single wellspring, they posted their findings on Wikipedia, and called for others to help fill it in. As they explain,

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Ah, AWhere. If you read this regularly (and who isn’t?), you are going to hear a lot about AWhere. But those posts will be talking at some level about what AWhere does, or some cool new application. Let this serve as the ‘what’ post, which I’ll reference time and again.

AWhere is a mapping software company based in Golden, Colorado. John Corbett is their CEO, and has become a friend, co-conspirator, and is now also a client. AWhere creates a new market segment, allowing any user of Excel to create rich, dynamic geographically accurate maps. Previously, large organizations like Monsanto and the Department of Defense hired PhD specialists in GIS, and bought 5-figure licenses for arcane software that puts information into maps accurately. Now you can do it from your laptop.

The benefit of this are really twofold. There are myriad applications in business intelligence and analysis, and equally many in the building and sharing understanding.

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“As with management, sometimes the best marketing may be no marketing at all…”

FROM Metacool

Understanding the strategy of Google.org, one of the leaders in the emerging financing of social entrepreneurship, has been challenging, largely because it was still in development throughout 2007.

Kevin Jones at Xigi recently pointed out Google.org’s visionary leader Larry Brilliant’s piece in Slate.com that outlines their strategy, providing some much-needed signal to those interested in doing good while doing well:

Members of our global-development team initially proposed investing money in funds that would finance small and medium-sized enterprises in the developing world, a terribly underfunded sector that has great potential for creating jobs. The reaction? “Think bigger.” The initiative now includes stimulating financing to small and medium-sized enterprises by finding ways to lower transaction costs, deepen capital markets, and catalyze the flow of other money along with our own.

Good news for the work of the Entrepreneurial Standards Forum and Business Catapult (disclosure: I am a principal in these companies), which are both focused on bringing new efficiencies to the entrepreneur, both in accelerating development and democratising access to capital.

Don’t miss Brilliant’s four additional pillars of Google.org strategic vision in Slate.

In 2005, Howard Rheingold gave a talk at the inimitable TED. Over the first 20 minutes, he reviewed the cycle of the evolution of the interrelation of biology and humanity — no mean feat, but largely review if you’ve been paying attention. Along the way, the interwoven thread of markets, communication and human evolution get highlighted, starting with the Gutenberg metaphor. “Markets are ancient, but capitalism and socialism are relatively new, and still changing,” he states.

This is where it gets good: He quickly reviews the highlights in new forms of wealth creation resulting from the most socially disruptive of technologies, the Internet, which he reminds us is still in the early days. Continue reading