Author: Jeremie Averous

How to Identify Quality when Products Become Commodities

Following up on our previous post ‘Why Democratization Creates Commodities‘, let’s dwell on the issue of finding quality products in the midst of the avalanche of available products and data.

5 star ratingPeer ratings are essential in new Collaborative Age to replace the filtering and quality control by institutions.

Of course it has drawbacks (creating trends and popularity which might not be entirely warranted) but not necessarily worse than the personal preference of an editor. The main issue is that while the opinion of an editor might be known, collaborative rating has a somewhat unpredictable outcome that might be influenced (and even possibly manipulated) through early ratings generated by supporters. Still when a domain becomes mature, collaborative rating does become effective and less influenced by initial ratings.

Democratization without a peer rating system won’t work. Both need to develop together. Be suspicious of democratization drives that would not be accompanied by a strong peer rating system!

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Why Democratization Creates Commodities

When capabilities are democratized, handed over to anyone that wants to contribute, they become soon a commodity. This means that their price plummets (often close to zero), and this also means that institutions that were create to vouch for quality disappear.

Flickr - democratization of photography
Flickr – democratization of photography

A typical area is photography. It is now possible to produce great pictures with mobile phones. If you invest in a dedicated camera, all sorts of automatic settings will help produce pictures of professional quality. While press photography still exists in a more restricted sense, more and more amateur pictures are available and used.

Because amateurs don’t care so much about being compensated because they are having fun, the marginal price of photography is close to zero. Of course there is a lot more average pictures available but among the choice one can still find great pictures.

An ongoing area is education. With online Moocs the institutions that were created to vouch for course quality (universities) will have a hard time, while education will be more available to everybody. At the same time many courses may be more average, but who cares?

Hat tip to Christopher Penn

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How Having Great Customers is Essential for Product Development

One of the benefits of the ‘lean startup’ approach is to seek customers very early on the basis of a ‘Minimum Viable Product’.

customer perception is your realityHaving first customers for a startup provides feedback on two levels:

  • customers are ready to buy the product: the product is bankable!
  • get real-life feedback from the usage of the product by the customer

The second type of feedback is essential as well and it is important to make the effort to collect it. It is also why the quality of the customers is essential: great customers will provide great feedback which will greatly, in turn, improve the product!

“A great customer wants you to be world class, and is willing to help you get there. Learn to spot them early, and then treat them like gold. Enough said.” – Gapingvoid

From the experience of developing a product in our new startup, I cannot agree more with this statement.

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How to Control our Posture When Using New Technology

Our posture when using portable devices is an issue. Not just regarding joint pain, but also when it comes to creativity and mood. In this excellent paper the NYT explains why ‘Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture — and Your Mood‘.

cellphone-posture“Technology is transforming how we hold ourselves, contorting our bodies into what the New Zealand physiotherapist Steve August calls the iHunch”. And posture influences our mood like we explained in our posts ‘How simple is it to get positive emotions?‘ and ‘How we actually think with our bodies‘. So, as a result, because we tend to slouch when using portable devices, we are fostering negative emotions, such as “lower self-esteem and mood, and much greater fear”.

Stand up people of the Collaborative Age! And let’s hope that maintaining posture will be one of the key learning points of the schooling of the netizens of the future!

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How Cars Are Nowadays The Most Sophisticated Machines on the Planet

“New high-end cars are among the most sophisticated machines on the planet, containing 100 million or more lines of code. Compare that with about 60 million lines of code in all of Facebook or 50 million in the Large Hadron Collider” – according to the New York Times ‘Complex Car Software Becomes the Weak Spot Under the Hood’.

le-corniaud
Cars were previously a much less complex contraption…

Complexity is there – many different parts with various codes that need to communicate so that everything works. Results can be quite unpredictable. Cheating can even be hidden inside the code, as the recent Volkswagen scandal showed.

The issue of code safety is a tremendous challenge to manufacturers and regulators alike. A strong position would require to remove all code lines that are not used in a particular model, but that is extremely costly as it goes against standardization. At some point it will be difficult to avoid unpredictable behavior of the system if there are various computing centers performing different functions in the car. Today, access to the proprietary code used by automakers is not even granted because of copyright protection. This will certainly evolve, and a framework for guaranteeing a minimum level of code reliability will have to be put in place.

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Why the Winners in the IoT Space Will be Those That Will Overcome Security Issues

The Internet of Things (IoT) means that an increasing number of “things” are connected to the internet. It’s coming, and it is going to change the industry.

Hacked_car in ditch
Hacked car in the ditch (Wired)

Read the now well-known story how hackers managed to compromise completely a Jeep Cherokee in Wired. Don’t you find that scary? And that is just the start of the problem as more and more objects get connected.

We can heap up all sorts of security layers, once something is connected to the internet, it will always be possible with sufficient effort to hack it (it needs to be worth the effort of course!). The questions about security, safety and privacy linked to the Internet of Things are substantial, and they have no obvious answer yet. This excellent article in Forbes summarizes the challenges. Now it is clear that for the moment “Connectivity [of things] has outpaced security“.

The winners in the Internet of Things space will be those that implement a comprehensive security approach – like those who won in the area of peer-to-peer online payments (like paypal) were ultimately those who were the best at avoiding fraud. It is about implementing a comprehensive systemic approach to security, and not a device-based approach.

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Why the Internet of Things Will Lead to the Emergence of New Industry Giants

The Internet of Things is coming: more and more objects have sensors that can be connected to the internet. We are actually lagging behind the available hardware to invent applications. But the actual capability is now present.

iot-infographic-212-billion“The big game changer is that when all these physical objects can sense, analyze and interact on their own, it changes how and where decisions are made, and who makes them. The important thing to remember though is the embedded device by itself is not the game changer….it’s the combination of the applications, the people, and the processes around the ‘things’” (from IBM Center for Applied Insights).

Implementing the IoT will take time, and many trials and inventions. A good summary of the challenges in this ParisTechReview paper ‘From flowerpots to containers: a subtle anatomy of Internet of Things’.

We can already predict the emergence of new giant players that will master the applications in the Internet of Things, like Google and Facebook emerged from the first and the second version of the internet. And it is not a given that this time they will emerge from the Silicon Valley. The game is open!

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Are You Suffering from Nomophobia?

Nomophobia is the most common phobia nowadays: the phobia of being without one’s phone. (literally: NO-MObile-PHOBIA)

nomophobiaMost people are anxious when they misplace their phone (and most don’t spend one hour without checking it for updates!) – so don’t feel special if that is what happens to you.

It’s quite tough to remember the time when we did not have any mobile phone, and then we had a mobile phone that was dumb. Still, amazingly, people did live well and be happy at that time. It just required a bit more advance planning for appointments and navigation…

Anyway, here’s a link to a nomophobia test. Some questions as an extract – do you recognize yourself?

  • I am annoyed if I can’t look information up on my smartphone when I wantto do so.
  • Running out of battery in my smartphone scares me.
  • If I have no data signal or can’t connect to Wi-Fi, then I constantly check to see if I have a signal or can find a Wi-Fi network.

Be aware of your nomophobia – it starts to be a condition that is studied by psychiatrists!!

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How To Use Technology To Open More Possibilities

Technology is often seen as a threat – like Artificial Intelligence and the singularity where machines will become more intelligent that man. But technology is not too often mentioned as opening possibilities.

Since a long time technology is opening possibilities in the form of compensating for failing senses: pairs of glasses, hearing aids and other prosthetic help a lot of people live an normal life. Even more visibly for people with disabilities or who have lost limbs.

Neil-Harbisson
Neil Harbisson and his permanent cyborg implant

But technology also enables us to do things that we could not perform with our body alone: transport ourselves quickly, above ground and under ground, fly in the air… New technology will also give us the possibility to open new senses, in addition to provide support to our memory, allow us to understand foreign languages instantaneously, etc..

Some are already quite advanced in the cyborg world of increased senses such as Neil Harbisson, auto-proclaimed the first cyborg. As an artist he seeks to increase his perception by adding sensors that capture colors he can’t see and give him the information otherwise (through some brain wiring). Have a look at his TED talk!

In the future we should rather see how technology can expand our capabilities and support our creativity rather than shrink from a fear that it might replace us completely. But how we will operate with the new technology is still something that needs to be invented – a real revolution!

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What the Biggest Act of Love is

I loved Manal Ghosain’s post on The Biggest Act of Love. As she writes,

“The biggest act of love is to allow others to be who they are—fully and unconditionally“.

WOW – how true this is!

It is amazing when I searched the internet for an illustration for this post, how many quotes I found about being oneself and defending oneself against others’ influence – and how few quotes I found about allowing others to be themselves.

be-who-you-areStill it is really what is the reflect of true love. It is true romantic love and it is true love to your children.

Allow them, encourage them to be themselves. Love them.

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How We Continue To Create New Neurons as Adults

Following on our post on brain plasticity there is new evidence that we continue to create neurons in our brains throughout our lives, and in particular in the Hippocampus, where our memories are stored.

neurogenesisA good summary is in this post ‘How Our Behaviors and Activities Control the Growth of New Cells‘ by Valeria Maltoni.

We do produce some new neurons. Not so many, but ‘Jonas Frisén from the Karolinska Institutet has estimated that we produce 700 new neurons per day in the hippocampus. You might think this is not much, compared to the billions of neurons we have. But by the time we turn 50, we will have all exchanged the neurons we were born with in that structure with adult-born neurons‘.

The next question is then, how we could or should influence this creation of new neurons. The post referred to supposes it is better to foster the creation of more, but I guess that is still part of research.

In any case, this research is another blow to the Industrial Age theory or all theories around the fact that we can’t change significantly behaviors and memories.

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How Our Brain Remains Highly Plastic at All Age

I have been quite astonished lately to read a number of accounts of nerve rewiring that work. Nerve rewiring is about taking some nerves from a distinct region to rewire a region that has been cut-out for some reason. And suppose the brain will make sense of the change to regain functionality.

Prosthetic limbs operated by thought - the result of nerve rewiring
Prosthetic limbs operated by thought – the result of nerve rewiring

It starts to become a way to treat people with damage to their spine (like here) and also a way for amputees to operate their prosthetic limb (like here and here in the Economist in 2010).

I read the most bizarre account of such a possibility in Scott Adam‘s (the cartoonist creator of Dilbert) latest book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life‘. Scott Adams has been suffering from a condition called spasmodic dysphonia: his vocal cords did not respond in a normal manner when speaking in public. A very debilitating condition, and Scott Adams could not find any solution for years. The full account is also in this Wired post. Finally the solution was found when a surgeon proposed to reroute some neck nerves with other functions to his vocal chords. Suddenly after 3 months, as predicted, after his brain had learnt to use these new entry points, Scott was able to speak again, and after some exercise, regained his voice.

All these experiments prove that our brain is able to relearn and rewire at all ages, and keeps an astonishing plasticity to adapt. We need to stop believing these industrial age cliche that our brain is formed in our 20s’. It continues to evolve, and can even manage dramatic changes, any time during our lives.

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