Social media, types of media where everyday people can publish and subscribe to what one another publishes, have changed the world. At least in the United States, though, their rapid expansion through acquisition of new users may be over.
Facebook specialist Eric Eldon published a compilation of statistics from around the web this week on TechCrunch that pointed towards US and Canadian market saturation this past year for Facebook. Surely Facebook represents the forward line of all social media. Academic and tech industry analyst Vivek Wadhwa posted a set of predictions for 2012 in the Washington Post last night, starting with a prediction that the period of rapid growth for social media is over. In the future it will be a feature, not a product, he argues. To startups and investors, Wadha says "It's time to jump on the next bandwagon, folks."
They say Big Data is going to be big business, big innovation - a big deal. But how is it going to go down? Applied math and decision science company Mu Sigma announced more than $100 million in new venture backing yesterday, including from previous investors Sequoia Capital, bringing the company's total investment to $150 million. Mu Sigma provides big data services to some of the biggest companies in the world.
How do they do it? With a combination of math, science, creative thinking and long hours of hard work. As democratized publishing, network connected devices and the instrumentation of everyday life combine to create a great blue ocean of big data all around us, the latest Mu Sigma funding is a valuable opportunity to get a taste of how one emerging leader in that market combines technology, math and art to engage with this big trend. Not everyone agrees that outsourcing Big Data work like this is the solution, though.
Tools provide leverage for people to get work done; in many cases they enable us to do new kinds of work. Now consider robots in the workplace. They seem like bad news but do they have to be? What if robots weren't a threat to humanity, only intended to steal human jobs, but were tools that enabled all of us to do new things and live life differently? We may need to start seeing things that way, for our own sake.
The iPhone and iPad tablet manufacturer Foxconn employs more than 1 million human beings around the world. (They produce other electronics as well.) The company said last month that it plans to cut that number in half with the enlistment of 1 million new robot workers, a 100X increase in its robot workforce, over the next 3 to 5 years. "An empire of robots," the company says. Human workers? They will move up the value chain, the company says. How might that actually happen? People say that education is undervalued, what if robots saved us from that?
The announcement of the MITx initiative last week has several important aspects, but it is nowhere near what we have been doing at the Open University in the UK for decades. It is somewhat premature, lacks any real understanding of the issues involved in assessment, and contains an uneven mix of pedagogy as well.
First, they admit that the announcement is bordering on premature in their so-called FAQs (although how anybody has had time to ask any question frequently before something has been launched is a mystery). MIT appears not to have worked out how to deliver anything more than what's available through Open CourseWare (OCW).
The joy of learning is among the most valuable ways to find meaning in life. Combine that with the substantial imbalance between supply and demand of skilled labor in the United States, and a period of economic upheaval, and you've got a recipe for for something magical to happen.
While traditional schools struggle to fit the bill, the internet is finally rising the the occasion. Startups like Treehouse, CodeAcademy, Lynda.com and of course Khan Academy are capturing the imagination of learners around the world, of all ages. Can these sites give traditional education the "Wikipedia vs. the encyclopedia" treatment? Why are these new websites aimed at teaching new skills so hot right now? A discussion of those questions leaves me feeling very optimistic, for the future of humanity even.
It was quite a year of mistakes, with Carol Bartz leaving Yahoo, HP trying once again to re-orient itself and hiring ex-California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman. On top of this comes various reports that once again email is dead or dying (this could be a tedious repetition of the "year of the LAN" that we went through in the 1990s, even though email has been incorporated at the main notification mechanism of just about every piece of corporate software). But there were some spectacular enterprise Web blunders of the year that we've seen that are worth noting here.
Zynga CEO Mark Pincus named his gaming company after his late American bulldog, a beloved yet health issue-ridden breed with a short life expectancy. Ninety-five percent of four-year-old Zynga's business depends on Facebook. Will Zynga's overdependence on Facebook make it repeat the story of the bulldog it was named after?
Last week IBM announced that it has taken chemical data from various patents and made this information available to researchers online. It is just the latest in an ever widening of publically available information concerning patents and intellectual property. But online patent access has had an interesting history, and even though it dates to the early days of the Web, it was a difficult path and an interesting story in public access to information.
In collaboration with Bristol-Myers Squibb, DuPont and Pfizer, IBM is providing a database of more than 2.4 million chemical compounds extracted from about 4.7 million patents and 11 million biomedical journal abstracts from 1976 to 2000. IBM Research developed it in collaboration with these private companies over the past six years. It includes patents from a variety of sources outside of the US. The data will be incorporated into the PubChem archive at the National Center for Biotechnology Information of the National Institutes of Health.
Google Currents is a new tablet app that launched today. It makes reading of syndicated web content easier, faster and more enjoyable than almost any other interface you can imagine. It's like Flipboard but for RSS feeds. People are going to love it. That's the nice way to describe it.
You could also call it the sterilization of the social web. Just like today's new Twitter redesign it makes things nice and pretty for non-technical users. Google Currents is infinitely friendlier and more accessible than any RSS reader, even Google's own Reader. Unfortunately, in the current application that ease of use comes at a great cost: Google Currents does away with many of the best parts of the social web. It sings a catchy tune, but there's far less life inside the experience. It's not just a bummer, either - it's a threat to what's great about blogging.
Ambitious but largely defunded open government data platform Data.gov is now working with counterparts at India's National Informatics Centre to offer an open source body of code known as the Open Government Platform or "Data.gov-in-a-Box."
It's the kind of move that, in theory, the political Left can support because of its impact on transparency and government accountability and the political Right can support because it puts government in a role that emphasizes facilitating innovation and economic development. It sounds like a very smart way to deal with the declining financial support for Data.gov itself. It could be a big win for developers everywhere and for the people who love to use the apps they make.
