Deep Currents

Have you ever made a custom T-shirt? Had a friend show you how to build a really badass gaming computer? Customized your Honda Civic to look like something straight out of the Fast and the Furious? Even if you haven’t, there are lots of people these days who are. Mass-produced goods might be cheap and high-tech and available everywhere but they lack a sense of craft, personality, and uniqueness, which has spawned a subtle rebellion. The rebels are called Makers and they’re a 21st-century twist on the long-standing American tradition of creating “do-it-yourself” goods, different most notably in that they operate in communities bound together with social software (and an excellent magazine). Makers are a social movement first and foremost, to be sure, but they also represent a fundamentally new capacity for end-users to take an active role in manufacturing. The Institute for the Future recently turned out a wonderful visual map of the phenomenon, headed up with this summary of why the wider world ought to sit up and take note:

Two future forces, one mostly social, one mostly technological, are intersecting to transform how goods, services, and experiences—the “stuff” of our world—will be designed, manufactured, and distributed over the next decade. An emerging do-it-yourself culture of “makers” is boldly voiding warranties to tweak,  hack, and customize the products they buy. And what they can’t purchase, they build from scratch. Meanwhile, flexible manufacturing technologies on the horizon will change fabrication from massive and centralized to lightweight and ad hoc. These trends sit atop a platform of grassroots economics—new market structures developing online that embody a shift from stores and sales to communities and connections.

What does this mean for the rest of us? IFTF offers six major take-aways, included here in short form:

1. Network your organization: make sure your staff are in contact with the people from within and without your industry who might have insight into their particular problems, partly by using open-innovation platforms such as Innocentive.
2. Reward solution seekers: pay attention not only when a person comes up with their own solution to a problem but also when they’re able to identify and integrate someone else’s.
3. Err on the side of openness: embrace open-source culture by designing your products to be easy to modify.
4. Engage actively: if and when you design opportunities for customers to be partners with your in-house innovators, design them in a way that taps a person’s inherent curiosity, sociability, and passion for customization.
5. Go transparent: tell the whole story of how your product was made, highlighting the ecological and social implications of your choices, because customers will increasingly care and are increasingly able to discover the facts for themselves.
6. Celebrate hackers: rather than litigating against them, invite in the people who push your technology to its limits and creat custom modifications, honoring their experimentation as real innovation.

The current Technology Review is packed with interesting discussion of social networking sites. Their cover story brings up the issue that social networks aren’t making much money on ads. Why is it such a challenge? Three reasons:

- Few users pay attention to ads on social networks since they’re too busy socializing and they didn’t show up intending to find or buy any product

- The information is present to offer very tight targeting but the bar is high for even targeted ads to distract users

- Carefully-tended corporate brands don’t sit comfortably (in the eyes of their fretful tenders) next to social networks’ unpredictable and often low-brow content

These are good reasons to wonder whether a real business model is possible. One more is their walled-garden architecture and another is the faddishness that danah boyd describes beautifully: “It’s supercool when all of your friends go there. Then all sorts of other people come in. Even if the pub doesn’t start feeling physically crowded, it starts feeling socially crowded when your ex is at the other end of the bar talking to some creep who brought his fellow gang members. How long until you say, ‘Enough–I’m outta here’?”

Why all the hype? The ad spend remains a tiny fraction of the total outlay for online ads and that fraction is dominated by US firms. But there are more eyeballs on these sites than you can shake a stick at, enough to account for 20% of media consumption, and the technology remains young and plastic. Perhaps Facebook will sell services like the ability to give digital gifts. MySpace saw $800 million in revenue in 2007, presumably from advertising. Perhaps there’s a long tail of niche services that users will pay for. The air might smell of bubblegum, but that’s rarely been enough to keep money from chasing dreams.

To summarize a lengthy profile in the New York Times: while the environmental movement continues its infighting over whether it’s time to work with or against heavyweight corporations, Jim Rogers has been pushing for sustainability from his seat at the top the country’s third-largest carbon emitter, the coal-fired Duke Energy. He pumps 100 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere a year and yet is also one of the world’s most powerful environmentalists. Powerful because he speaks for the interests of corporate energy, a lobby that can both demand and afford Washington’s ear, and yet has decided to use his voice to promote sustainability. His stated motivation is to get out ahead of the issue: it’s clear to him that curbing emissions and pollutants is a necessary shift, and as he said, “It’s the old saw — ‘If you’re not at the table, you’re going to be on the menu.’” His new project is to cut emissions in half by 2030 and fully decarbonize the firm by 2050, cutting coal from two-thirds of its portfolio down to a quarter while phasing in a diverse group of new options including nuclear, wind, solar, and other new varieties of cleantech. He also talks about “the grandchildren test” of his decisions. He got to this point by inviting his biggest critics into his inner circle: he’s had long dinners with Gaia-theorist James Lovelock, NASA climatologist James Hansen, and has made fast friends with many other prominent greens. He’s worked in tandem with them on Capitol Hill, using his influence to clear the way for cap-and-trade legislation. Cap-and-trade will be a staple of the next president’s agenda in no small part thanks to his work. He has consistently shocked his industry peers and remains an iconoclast. There are some environmentalists, such as Frank O’Donnell who heads up Clean Air Watch, who view his reforms as too weak and accuse him of mere greenwashing. They should not look a gift stallion in the mouth.

If you’ve been keeping track of the equity markets in the past few years, you’ll be familiar with sovereign wealth funds (known as SWFs and not to be confused with the lonely souls of the personals section) and the question of whether their fealty to blue-blooded bosses means that they should be considered a political risk. They’ve stepped prominently into the limelight during the recent credit crunch by throwing lifelines to Citigroup and other major investment banks. Since the public debate surrounding them appeared uninformed by some of the basic facts, the Monitor Group decided to do some research into the matter and put out a report last week called “Assessing the Risks” that debunked many frequently-stated beliefs. It’s a worthwhile read and conveniently organized with its primary conclusions front and center in case you don’t happen to have the patience to wade through all 92 pages. The conventional wisdom, it says, claims that SWFs are “targeting investments in OECD countries; that they wish to invest in politically sensitive sectors; that they prefer to acquire minority stakes; and that they are moving from conservative to higher-risk investments.” What the report uncovered is the following:

Continue reading

There’s a new service called CitySense out for the BlackBerry that takes advantage of a very interesting dataset: the exact paths of thousands of GPS-tracked cabs. (Don’t worry, Mac cultists, it’ll be out for the iPhone soon.) The much-heralded age of pervasive sensing and ubiquitous computing is finally arriving, in bits and pieces, and (like many potential uses of such data) this application gives us a fascinating new window on our own behavior while falling just shy of violating privacy. (Hat tip goes to O’Reilly Radar and Global Guerrillas for noticing the news, and I’d recommend Adam Greenfield’s Everyware for the big picture.) This one is a juxtaposition of past tracks and the present moment, first showing you where in the city there is typically a lot of activity at the present day and time, then comparing that with data from what’s happening right now to show you what places have an above-average number of people. Say you’re about to go out for a night on the town but you’re wondering whether North Beach or Soma is more of a hotspot at the moment. You pull out CitySense, note that Soma is 35% above par to North Beach’s 10%, and decide to join the mob. The really interesting part comes when they deliver the next promised feature: data about where people “like you” have gathered in the past and are gathering right now, presumably segmented by personally-chosen options such as age, gender, income, ethnicity, religion, or perhaps a lighter-weight set of factors such as taste in music or favorite fashion labels. The next step beyond that would naturally be social network connections: where is my Facebook network, and where are their friends?

This is my latest Monitoring and Scanning Report to the leadership of the Packard Foundation on behalf of the Monitor Institute as part of the “Philanthropy and Networks Exploration” (PNE), a series of projects exploring how our rapidly-developing understanding of networks can be put to innovative use in philanthropy. The reports alternate between collections of relevant links and brief overviews of related topics.

There are increasing innovations in tech-enabled activism in the developing world as mobile phone usage reaches new heights, Internet penetration continues to climb, and the social media technologies of Web 2.0 have matured. Here we will briefly discuss (1) basic data on infrastructure, (2) the use of mobile technology as a tool for social change, and (3) the use of Web 2.0 for the same.

Continue reading