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Nick Douglas interviews Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody, at Supernova 2008.
Link: sevenload.com
In this video, Kevin Werbach, Supernova 2008’s organizer, discusses the latest information about the conference, speakers, and the theme for this year’s event.
Link: sevenload.com
We caught Forrester’s Charlene Li between plane flights and speaking engagements for just long enough to find out what’s on her mind. She and co-author Josh Bernoff are spending a lot of time responding to public interest about their new book, Groundswell, about how to leverage social media. Charlene will be on a panel Tuesday morning, June 17th at Supernova2008.
Charlene Li: I’ve been looking at the future of social networks — how they will develop over the next 5-10 years. My thesis is that social networks will be like air, in that they will permeate everything that we do. This is posited on the idea that today’s existing, closed social networking sites and portals open up and make it easy for people to connect with their friends and the content created by their friends across different sites. For example, a friend’s book review written on Facebook should show up on Amazon when I’m thinking about buying that book.
Charlene Li: I’m impressed by companies like Twitter who make it really super easy to work with them, especially with their APIs. It means that their technology becomes a platform, not just a destination.
Charlene Li: There are so many start-ups that are focused primarily on the technology, not the problem that people and companies are facing. There are a lot of really tough problem out there, and nobody is really addressing them. For example, follow a busy mom around for a day and find all the friction points she faces — then figure out what tools and technologies could make it a lot better. My pet project — a workable kid/family calendar that can facilitate play date scheduling! It’s the bane of my evenings at home.
Charlene Li: My biggest challenge has been waiting patiently for the book to come out! Now it’s finally out and people are reading it. The best part is when someone comes up with a dog eared, heavily underlined book and shows me their favorite part. It’s extremely gratifying to know that the book is helping people understand this new space, and that it’s providing them with the frameworks and information that they need.
Charlene Li: I love new ideas and meeting people through whom I can see the world in a different way. Learning and thinking about new ideas is what gets me most excited.
The other day, I sat down with Esther Dyson to interview her in advance of the Supernova2008 conference. Since Esther’s emails close with the saying, “Always make new mistakes,” I asked her if she often saw people making the same old mistakes, and what advice she had for them.
Now, I was thinking she might answer something along the lines of, I don’t know, venture capitalists still act like lemmings or entrepreneurs don’t give up on stupid ideas fast enough or something. Instead, she surprised me by saying, “I am appalled at the basics of email.” I asked for clarification, and the result comes out like a primer for pitching Esther, or anybody.
In brief, Esther says, “If people did email right, they’d get better responses.” I had to guiltily admit that I’ve perpetrated some of these sins; maybe even in the email I sent her asking for the interview in the first place. Shame!
Image caption: What Esther will look like if you send her good emails!
What about real spam? “The way to solve it is to put the burden on the sender, not the recipient. It’s too easy to send mail, and there’s no penalty.” She’s trying to solve this with Boxbe, a company she has invested in. Boxbe scores email from one to ten; Esther doesn’t look unless it’s below a 7.
How does Esther sift through all the emails she gets, in an age where we are all inundated with email? She suggests “self-restraint” – Don’t sign up for those lists. Learn how to filter better. Get better at saying no politely and promptly.
The theme for Supernova2008 is “Challenges of the Network Age” – and Esther suggests that the real challenge is human nature. She told me a brief anecdote about Conrad Hilton, founder of the Hilton Hotel chain, on the Tonight Show. Carson asked him (I’m paraphrasing), “You’ve played host to kings and queens, to captains of industry. Do you have any message for the world?” And Hilton replied, “Put the shower curtain inside the tub.” Esther’s message: approaching things from the recipient’s perspective costs you nothing and means so much.
I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Esther Dyson the other day in the MeetUp offices in NYC. I’ll get to Esther in a second, but first a word about MeetUp (where she is an investor and board member).
I first met Scott Heiferman, MeetUp’s CEO, when he was leading i-Traffic, an early interactive agency, probably ten years ago. I was impressed with him then and I’m even more impressed with him now. The MeetUp offices were bustling with youthful energy and I helped myself to their ample supply of fresh fruit (carefully guarded by an inflated dinosaur). Problems with the website that needed fixing were posted on the wall so everyone there could see the importance of customer service first-hand. Nice to see a company that’s not so full of its own Kool-Aid that it can’t focus on its mistakes. Of course the successes were posted too – lots of pictures of happy in-person MeetUp groups and their pugs, knitting, baby carriages, etc.
But back to Esther. I really find she just lights up the room when she walks in, and you want to give her a hug. Not sure why she has this effect on me, since technically she should be super intimidating, given her bio. But she’s got a great smile, and she’s totally matter-of-fact and not at all pretentious, and she sits down and curls one foot underneath herself and plays with her sock. So you sort of feel like you’re talking with your sister even though she’s one of the foremost opinion leaders of the tech world. She tends to wear jeans, and t-shirts branded with the names of companies she’s invested in. I like that she invests in companies, not clothes. What a great role model – for men and women alike.
I started by asking what Esther finds exciting and interesting these days. Healthcare was the first word out of her mouth, followed immediately by privacy, since the two are inextricable. Esther sees privacy finally hitting the radar screen of the average consumer; it’s not just for privacy advocates anymore. Examples?
“Facebook did something dumb, and consumers noticed” (see my previous ConversationHub post on this topic), she said, pleased that the notion of users controlling their own data is gaining currency. “When sites put ads on user-generated content, it’s not just privacy, it’s about self-presentation for that user. People are starting to say, ‘I want to control which ads go next to my stuff’.” She warns that companies who think consumers “just want revenue sharing” are missing a big part of the picture.
Going back to Healthcare as a topic, Esther described some of her experiences with 23andMe, where she is an investor and board member. It’s a company that has combined DNA testing with a graphical web interface; “you spit on the kit and send it to the lab”.
It outsources the DNA analysis to a third-party lab, and focuses on the task of making the data meaningful. It presents both individual data about you and your health risks, along with visualizations of your genetic closeness to the people with whom you are sharing data (by two-way permission). You can share just aggregate, quantitative data, or specific health data as well.
They do an analysis of 500,000 SNPs (single nucleotide polymorphisms or “snips”, which were new to DNA lingo ten years ago. Then they send you the results, along with tools for how to look at and understand the data. Esther recruited 30 of her family members to participate, and in true Esther style she posted pictures on Flickr.
23andMe has selected some anonymous prototypes participants can measure themselves against, one of whom is an African man; this was the most dissimilar person Esther found when comparing her family’s results, being 69% alike on the selected data points. The most similar people in her data set were two of her sisters, who were 89% similar. People are generally about 84% like their parents and range from 82% to 89% like their siblings.
She was careful to point out that much of this information is not necessarily actionable or especially surprising, unless you don’t know your parentage (or discover previously unidentified relatives). It’s just “more information” – something for the curious to think about. Although it’s expensive for not being tangibly useful, she says, “I’m a big fan of knowledge and informed behavior. There’s no better way to understand risk than when it is visually displayed and personal. It’s one thing to know you should eat your vegetables, and another to consider that information in the context of a personal 23 percent genetic risk of getting diabetes. The number itself may not mean that much, but it’s about you.”
For now, it’s the pioneers or the curious who will seed the 23andMe database and jump start the system, and they do it out of a love of knowledge or a desire to help others. “The first users are the benefactors,” says Esther. “The later users will be beneficiaries.” Later, when enough people’s codes have been collected and we start to see the precise impact of our genetic commonalities, the database will be more helpful for health purposes. So it’s still early days.
Which social networks are of interest? Esther likes Facebook as a platform, saying they are doing a lot of things right. She likes Dopplr – it’s “exactly” what she is interested in which is why she invested (read why on one of her Huffington Post blog posts). She loves Flickr (also an investor) and posts faithfully nearly every day. How about Twitter? It’s “too much”, she says. “I do space, healthcare, am involved in such different sectors … most of what I do is meaningless to most of the people I know. I don’t want to impose.”
I asked Esther what she thought of the whole Microsoft-Yahoo drama we’ve seen playing out over the past few months and days. Her take: “It’s absolutely the right move for Microsoft to drop Yahoo … They shouldn’t want to beat Google, they should do their own thing. It’s stupid … They should make a big effort in health care, which is the last frontier besides education. But they should make mostly small acquisitions and grow organically. That’s why this is exciting; ther’s lots to build, not just buy.” Esther explains that despite Microsoft’s negative reputation with some, their assets as a company are extremely strong. They have a great deal of consumer trust, they know how to sell to governments and large institutions, and they have a very international reach. Her recommendation is not to buy one thing and grow it, but to buy many things and grow their strength in the sector. (One of Esther’s portfolio healthcare companies, Medstory, sold to Microsoft in early 2007).
Esther argues that healthcare desperately needs data-based analysis, combined with an emphasis on users’ control of their own data. We’d all get better privacy with better control of records if healthcare data were kept online. Right now there’s “paper flying around”, she says, and when doctors request patient records they either get nothing, or they may get way too much information, not just what’s relevant to their request. Of course Esther’s already shared these recommendations with Microsoft executives, so maybe we’ll see some more action on this front.
Stay tuned for a shorter post about the second half of our interview, where Esther shares some advice for the best way to approach her with a pitch.
Lili Cheng has done much at Microsoft, from some of the earliest experimenting with v-chat to the user experience for Vista. Lili is currently a Director in Microsoft Research focusing on “creative systems”- how people interact and use tools to create projects.
In this conversation over Skype, she describes some of the things that have her attention, including social networks in a business context, as well as how kids can learn programming using what they know about gaming.
Link: sevenload.com
Your thoughts are welcome in the comments.
Supernova always ends with an introspective session featuring leading thinkers. At Supernova 2007, Umair Haque (Bubble Generation), Liz Lawley (Rochester Institute of Technology), and Jerry Michalski (Sociate) reflected on the insights of the conference and the current state of the Internet.
John Hagel is a renowned strategy consultant and author, whose work over the past decade has illuminated the Internet’s transformative impacts on business. He recently joined Deloitte and Touche, where he will head a new Silicon Valley research institute. At Supernova 2007, John outlined critical research questions regarding the future of digital business that remain unresolved.
Known as the guru of Internet measurement, KC Claffy is a researcher at the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA). At Supernova, she gave an impassioned plea for better data to study Internet traffic patterns, without which policy and business decisions are bound to be misguided.
Business author and blogger Nicholas Carr offers a sneak peak of his forthcoming book, “The Big Switch.” Drawing parallels to the industrial revolution, Carr illuminates the significance of modern data centers and web-based application platforms as the basis of an entirely new computing industry.
Twitter feed -- follow it for news and notes.
Supernova 2008 Facebook group.
IRC channel -- live web chat. To get around issue of IRC being blocked at UCSF- use http://is.gd/yKa - MIbbit.com
IT Conversations -- audio podcasts.
2007 Video Interviews by our blogging team.
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