Archive for June, 2008

Facebook is the educational uber-panacea for all ills! While Wikipedia creates dunces!

Published by Ben Kepes on June 30, 2008 in IT, Society and Web x.0. 5 Comments

Eureka! – a study just published tells us that Facebook (and other social networking sites) have a significant educational benefit. The crux of the findings are that low decile students, those formerly found to be at the lower end of the digital divide (statistically speaking) are leveraging their quality time spent Facebook-ing and are thus equalizing with their more fortunate peers.

Sorry – but this sounds like namby pamby, bleeding hearted liberal speak here and yet another retreat from effective education. Specific questions I have;

  • If there is any educational benefit to be gained from the use of social media – surely all users gain the same benefit thus the technological chasm between higher and lower deciles (if it exists) should remain the same?
  • Apparently respondents mentioned a creativity gain to be achieved from using Facebook – sorry but FunPoke does not equate to War and Peace and neither does DrawWall (or whatever it is mindlessly called) equate to DaVinci’s Mona Lisa
  • Teachers are being encouraged to increase students use of social media in order to extend these gains – in a time constrained educational system does this mean they’ll no longer be taught to read (oops they’re not anymore anyway)?

These researchers seem to confuse using technology with learning how to create technology. Sorry but using Facebook doth not another Zuckerberg create. And in the same vein listening to Eminem ad nauseum is hardly likely to create Le Quattro Stagioni for our times.

Or is it?

And then again, conflicting reports out of Scotland say that the reasons students are failing (!) is because they are relying too much on a Wikipedia resource which is “riddled with inaccuracies”. The Scotsman is somewhat more realistic when it says;

(it is) easier to blame Wikipedia than the fact that you’re poor parents and your children are out partying or playing video games.
Inaccuracies are found in standard encyclopedias (and newspapers) too. And besides, don’t your schools provide textbooks?

So… a few things here;

  • Wikipedia is just one resource among many, it’s defining attribute however, that of citizen creation, arguably makes it a candidate for more inaccuracy than traditional encyclopedias (more here)
  • Any teacher or parent who relies on only one resource is crazy (or stupid or both)
  • Just as Facebook doth not a Neanderthal create, Wikipedia doth not an Einstein make
  • Test scores fall, test scores rise – chief among the reasons are parental guidance and values, and the presence or otherwise of good educationalists
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Unlimited Potential function…

Published by Ben Kepes on June 29, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, Economic Development, IT, New Zealand, New business and Strategy. 1 Comment

Unlimited Potential is a network based in Wellington, New Zealand. It aims to connect ICT professionals and let them leverage the power of community. Start-Up is a media rich site aiming to connect tech start-ups and their entrepreneurs with good quality resources from all over the place. Silicon Welly is a community of Wellington based, and New Zealand owned, technology and creative businesses, individuals and organisations who together are making Wellington a high quality global hi-tech hub.

Clearly there is significant overlap between these three organisation, and they’re all getting together to celebrate the latest issue of Start-Up magazine (published by Unlimited Magazine which I write for) and to general celebrate all that is young, vibrant, creative and tech in New Zealand.

The event will be held on July 10th at 6pm in Wellington, I’m planning on making the trip up for it and I’d recommend anyone with an interest in tech, entrepreneurship, web community and the creative industries to head along – looking forward to seeing some of you there!

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Sometimes SaaS and the clouds are scary….

Published by Ben Kepes on June 29, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, SaaS and Strategy. 3 Comments

A little while ago I posted asking the question “can you really trust a bootstrapped startup”. I received a number of comments on the post, most of which came from the perspective that trust isn’t an attribute that results from how a business is funded, it’s something built through actions, professionalism and design.

The most scary comment cam from Dan, his tale of woe went thus;

Check out this excerpt from an email I received from a very well funded high profile startup (who shall remain nameless…)

“Yesterday morning we had a major server outage affecting our 1.0 customers. We completely lost one of our database servers. The day was spent rebuilding and restoring everything we possibly could.

There were a handful of accounts that the restore completely failed on. Yours was one of those accounts. We have exhausted all available avenues for restoring the account data with no positive results.”

This proves that even well-funded startups can make the most basic and fatal of mistakes.

Dan’s perception was that, given his experience, it’s not about trusting a bootstrapped start-up or not – it’s about trusting any start-up.

But let’s look at the extension of this which is, of course, that the real problem is trusting something that sits anywhere other than on your premises. We already know that enterprise has real concerns about a move to SaaS, in part this is due to concerns about data security – sure we never here about the good stories, only the vary rare occasions when things go wrong (as in Dan’s example above), and sure most data losses happen on poorly configured and maintained machines sitting on site.

There’s no easy answer to the perception of security issues – the entire SaaS industry needs to get together to ensure all entrants play by a common set of rules around data portability and security. In a nascent industry such as SaaS, all players will gain from a higher aggregate level of execution.

Perhaps the time has come for a neutral and universal set of standards for web based hosting and storage to ensure that we protect the entire industry from the threat posed by poor execution on the par of a few.

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Brusilovsky – Visionary or puppet?

Published by Ben Kepes on June 28, 2008 in Business, IT, New business and SocialMedia. 5 Comments

I came across an interview over on GigaOm with teen entrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky. Seems Daniel is the 15 year old founder and CEO of TeensInTech, a social media site for, not surprisingly given the name, teenagers. He’s got Loic Le’Muer and Robert Scoble on his board, and has picked up a plum role as evangeliser for Qik.

Check out the video below, I came away thinking that Daniel is a nice guy, but I was also a little uncomfortable – I get a bit of a sense that Daniel is being manipulated rather than helped by his apparent mentors. He spoke all the right start-up words, but his patter seemed a little scripted to me.

I think the concept of a teen entrepreneur is great, but I wonder if Robert and Loic would be anywhere near him if he weren’t a teen? I can’t help but think that TeensInTech is a concept not unlike iYomu (Diversity coverage here) – which never would have got backing from anyone actually in the know about Web 2.0.

What do others think?

 

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Sometimes you’ve just got to exert some control

Published by Ben Kepes on June 28, 2008 in Collaboration, IT and Society. 4 Comments

Wikipedia has always been know as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit”. Contrast this with this editorial recently published in The Guardian by Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales. In the editorial Jimmy modified his definition somewhat to now read;

(Wikipedia is) the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any encyclopedic topic

Purely semantics? I don’t think so. Nick cave posts about the change and says that;

The old slogan was the language of the bazaar. The new one is the language of the club.

Wikipedia, since it’s inception, has heralded a mass democratisation of information dissemination. No longer where we enslaved to the whims of the editorial boards behind Encyclopedia Britannica et al, but now we, the humble netizens could decide what was suitable for an encyclopedic tome.

But this Nirvana-esque view ignored the reality, that when people have an opportunity to discourse, they do so generally in a way that is coloured by their individual perceptions, their personal beliefs and often their prejudices.

The reality is that an entirely open forum opens itself to misinformation and the sort of post and counter-post battles that have plagued Wikipedia in the past. The very existence of editorial control is itself an admission of the failing of humankind – Wikipedia’s new definition is merely an acceptance of this fact. Wales recognises this fact and accepts that Wikipedia is about as close to the ideal as we can get when he says;

I advocate for the value of a universal encyclopedia which is accessible to everyone and which rationally puts forward the basic facts about various arguments and controversies in such a manner that newcomers to an issue can understand what the disagreement is about. Don’t tell me what to think, don’t feed me one side of the story; give me actual facts and I will think for myself to decide. And I respect you as a human being enough to return the favour.

Wikipedia tends to be written by people who are significantly more educated than average, by people who are passionate about ideas, about getting it right. This is a good thing. Because thinking is not automatic, the avoidance of bias is not automatic. A ruthless precision in thinking is a great virtue in the project. And you have to bring that kind of precision because, unlike the comfortable writers of a classic top-down encyclopedia, you are likely to be contacted and challenged if you have made a flawed argument or based your conclusion on faulty premises. Such is the virtue of the marketplace of ideas.

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An iYomu epilogue….

Published by Ben Kepes on June 27, 2008 in Business, Design, IT, New business, SocialMedia, Strategy and Web x.0. 12 Comments

iYomu is now dead and buried – the decision has been made to pull the plug on the site tomorrow. I’ve already posted a little about this but I thought it apt to quote from iYomu founder David Wolf-Rooney – not in order to add salt to his wounds but rather to show just how wrong people can be…

For almost one year iYomu seemed to make the world a smaller place where 100,000 people came together and found a common space where grown-ups could meet, greet, debate and share interests. Yet it is not only people who rule the world, but money does too. We tried, we thrived and then we died

Actually David, if iYomu had been even moderately successful the money would have come – iYomu failed because it was a me-too offering with no real degree of differentiation. Sure you got 100,000 people signing up – but without the $1mill prize (more on that later) I reckon it would have been more like 100. Of those 100k, how many regularly visited? Bugger all I’d bet.

We tried to compete with sites in the US, but without access to the sort of funding they have, it was just impossible. We needed millions to really promote and expand the site, money we just didn’t have

Bollocks…. It’s not about funding, it’s about eyeballs, you didn’t have anything even remotely sticky to gain and retain those eyeballs – so yes its about money but if your product had worked the money would have come.

It really did impact on people’s lives in a positive way.

For Chrissakes man – it’s a social networking site (and an abysmal one at that) not a cure for cancer. I challenge you to identify in any way how you changed people’s lives in a positive way. (Apart of course from the dude that you paid out in lieu of the $1mill prize he was meant to get).

Right – that’s the Friday rant for now….

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Low risk plays provide no differentiation

Published by The Unreasonablemen on June 27, 2008 in Business, Design, Efficiency, Governance, IT and Strategy. 4 Comments

A guest  post from the Unreasonablemen.net

This might be obvious but I see it time and time again. Old world companies are so fixated on risk that they are going nowhere. Old world companies behaviour can be characterised by panic, followed by engaging consultants and outsourcing to drive down cost and build ‘unique capability’. End result: not a lot of action, no differentiation, but a whole host of warm fuzzies are derived. That is to say it’s more about the process and less about the outcome.

Let me expand on this.. I had coffee with a friend who attended a senior managers day at a large Telco. The interesting thing about this conference was some very insightful thinking provided by Michael Porter who spoke at this event. He asked the executive if they had engaged McKinsey’s to help with their strategy. When the response was ‘yes’, he challenged this decision saying

how do you think you are going to be different from your competitors when you are all engaging the same consultants and getting the same advice?

Michael hit the nail on the head there. It’s an interesting phenomenon, maybe 15 or 20 years ago it wouldn’t have mattered because everyone played cosily in their own markets, but globalisation has changed all that. Unfortunately management practices haven’t kept up. His point also raises a cultural issue. To me he also said “why is your culture supportive of outsourcing key decision functions, ticking a box and not on creating real differentiation”

Consulting isn’t unique in this. The current flavour of the month with Telcos is reinventing themselves. But here’s the kicker, they are all doing this with the same company. Check this out

Tech Mahindra, a company which is incidentally 43% owned by BT, is currently doing systems/transformational/rebuilding of the following Telecommunications companies, Fuji, BT itself, Telecom NZ, Botswana and if you look at their own website a bunch more.

How are these guys going to differentiate themselves when there is a strong possibility they will be getting the same stuff – consulting, design, software…

It appears to me that New World companies are different, they’re disrupting, attracting talent and getting on with it. They back themselves to achieve and, generally speaking, make things happen. Why can’t old world companies have this kind of attitude?

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A cool new SaaS offering….

Published by Ben Kepes on June 27, 2008 in Business, Collaboration, Design, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, New business, SaaS and Strategy. 1 Comment

I met this morning with Alan Cox, MD of LeftClick. LeftClick is a really cool post-click conversion services company that has shown some pretty impressive results for their e-commerce clients.

I first met Alan at a business roundtable where he was bouncing some ideas of people for a SaaS product idea he had. Since then we’ve met fairly regularly to discuss general business strategy and specific’s for his product idea.

Today I saw a breakdown of what that SaaS offering is and I’ve got to say its pretty exciting. At this stage I’m not in a position to give away details, a Beta1 release should be out before Christmas, but suffice it to say that it’s a product that stems from Alan’s post-click conversion optimisation experience and fulfils the requirements that I believe are important in a SaaS app;

  • aggregation
  • value-add
  • doing the heavy lifting for the target audience

Even more excitingly Alan and I bounced around some ides about how the product could leverage community and also incorporate some opensource attributes in a way that meets the suggestions I made in a post last year.

It’s an exciting prospect and I’m looking forward to sharing more as and when I can.

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Mobile to displace fixed line broadband?

Published by Ben Kepes on June 27, 2008 in Business. 3 Comments

New research by You Gov shows that one person in ten regularly accesses the Internet from a mobile device. Jumping on this trend, the broadband comparison sites are suggesting that mobile will displace fixed line as the default method of Internet access by 2010.

The research not surprisingly shows that current users of mobile as opposed to fixed are students and other “highly mobile” individuals who frankly can’t be bothered with the hassle of a fixed line connection.

As I see it there are two distinct lines to be drawn on a graph. One measures possible speeds set against a fixed, dated but, most importantly, already paid for delivery method. Clearly this line is fairly flat. The other line measures possible mobile data speed and ubiquity of service. This line on the other hand is moving fast as newer technologies, and more widespread coverage, come into play.

The interesting question is when the mobile graph overtakes the fixed graph – when there is no real reason to continue to utilise fixed lines. I’d say a two year estimate is generous – but give t a decade and it’ll be all on.

What do you think?

Mobile will displace fixed-line broadband...

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Who said it’s all about the iPhone?

Published by Ben Kepes on June 26, 2008 in Design, IT and New Zealand. 6 Comments

Nick posted about the new HTC offering that could very well eat (at least some of) Apple’s lunch.

Sporting WCDMA which should be rolled out in New Zealand by the end of the year, the HTC Touch diamond is a pretty sexy unit. It’s Tri-band, it’s got WiFi, coverflow (in another name) and a nice touchscreen.

image.axd

Specs are;

    • 2.8-inch touch screen, with four times the pixels of most phones
    • Vibrant TouchFLO 3D user interface
    • Built in GPS
    • HSDPA internet connectivity (7.2Mbps download)
    • 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera 
    • 4GB of internal storage 
    • Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR
    • Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g

I wonder if our local Telco will be getting them?????

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