The site is just beginning. "We have a lot to do, lots of ideas here and lots of places we can go next," Schachter told me by Twitter DM today. What's the core idea behind the site? "Search engine for people by property of the person," he says. "Portable reputation someday." There's certainly something refreshingly Delicious-like about it, the way you can navigate around the site by clicking any link and navigating by a few simple properties.

Things like this have been tried before, from WeFollow to Endor.se to other related efforts (disclosure: I may just be building something related myself).

The TastyLabs team, which is full of rock-stars beyond just Schachter, first built a social-help site called Jig last Summer. That site works well and is fun to use, but it's not clear how much traction it's seen yet. That service launched an iPhone app earlier this month, a welcome move since Jig is particularly conducive to mobile use.

Schachter is best-known for building archetypal social bookmarking site Delicious, which he sold to Yahoo who didn't know how to love it. The site has since been sold again to a team led by the founders of YouTube, who may be even worse still at loving it. Delicious offered something simple on the surface - the ability to save links you wanted to read later - but surfaced far more interesting information when analyzed in aggregate.

That potential was never really realized but it's the same kind of thinking behind Jig, and I presume behind Skills.to. These are services that offer a clear and simple value proposition to the end user, but that can offer even more derivative value once patterns of use are analyzed and used as a platform to reform the user experience.

Lots of people have tried to create a discovery-through-endorsement website, but I'd be willing to bet that the TastyLabs team is going to bring some extra special insight and creativity to this seemingly simple space.

The portable identity angle that Schachter mentions could be the first example of that dynamic: imagine taking your Skills.to endorsements with you to sites around the web. That could prove useful in all kinds of circumstances - from establishing credibility to targeting content to powering recommended social and content connections.

Disclosure #2: Upon announcing internally that I was going to write about this, RWW Community Manager Robyn Tippins also disclosed that she has done some marketing consulting for TastyLabs. Lucky them, their team of smart people goes on and on.

Steve Coast, the man who lead the creation of Open Street Map, has launched a new project to create what he believes is just what the world of location-based services needs in order to grow to meet its potential. It's called OpenGeocoder and it's not like other systems that translate and normalize data.

Google Maps says you can only use its geocoder to display data on maps but sometimes developers want to use geo data for other purposes, like content filtering. Yahoo has great geocoding technology but no one trusts it will be around for long. Open Street Map (OSM) is under a particular Creative Commons license and "exists for the ideological minority," says Coast himself in a Tweet this week. And so Coast, who now works at Microsoft, has decided to solve the problem himself.

This has been tried before, see for example GeoCommons, but the OpenGeocoder approach is different. It is, as one geo hacker put it, "either madness or genius."

The way OpenGeocoder works is that users can search for any place they like, by any name they like. If the site knows where that place is, it will be shown on a big Bing map. If it doesn't, then the user is encouraged to draw that place on the map themselves and save it to the global database being built by OpenGeocoder.

Above: The river of my childhood, which I just added to the map.

Every single different way a place can be described must be drawn on the map or added as a synonym, before OpenGeocoder will understand what that string of letters and numbers means with reference to place. Anyone can redraw a place on the map, too.

Then developers of location-based services can hit a JSON API or download a dump of all the place names and locations for use in understanding place searches in their own apps. It appears that just under 1,000 places have been added so far. It will take a serious barn-raising to build out a map of the world this way. It wouldn't be the first time something a little like this has been done before though.

"If only it was that simple :(" said map-loving investor Steven Feldman on Twitter. "Maybe it is?"

The approach is focused largely on simplicity. Coast said in his blog post announcing the project:

"OpenGeocoder starts with a blank database. Any geocodes that fail are saved so that anybody can fix them. Dumps of the data are available.

"There is much to add. Behind the scenes any data changes are wikified but not all of that functionality is exposed. It lacks the ability to point out which strings are not geocodable (things like "a") and much more. But it's a decent start at what a modern, crowd-sourced, geocoder might look like."

Testing the site, I grew frustrated quickly. I searched for the neighborhood I live in: Cully in Portland, Oregon. There was no entry for it, so I added one. But there are no street names on the map so I got lost. I had to open a Google Map in the next tab and switch back and forth between them in order to find my neighborhood on the OpenGeocoder map. Then, the neighborhood isn't a perfect rectangle, so drawing the bounding box felt frustratingly inexact. I did it anyway, saved, then tried recalling my search. I found that Cully,Portland,Oregon (without spaces) was undefined, even though I'd just defined Cully, Portland, Oregon with spaces. I pulled up the defined area, then searched for the undefined string, then hit the save button, and the bounding box snapped back to the default size, requiring me to redraw it again, on a map with no street names. Later, I learned how to find the synonym adding tool to solve that problem.

In other words, the user experience is a challenge. That's the case with Wikipedia too, and OpenGeocoder just launched, but I expect it will need some meaningful UX tweaks before it can get a lot of traction.

I hope it does.

That's just my experience so far, though. Not everyone feels that way. GIS geek Paul Wither calls it "addictive."

There are certainly high hopes for the project, too.

"I'm obsessed with the need for an open-source geocoder, and this is a fascinating take on the problem," says data hacker Pete Warden about OpenGeocoder. "By doing a simple string match, rather than trying to decompose and normalize the words, a lot of the complexity is removed. This is either madness or genius, but I'm hoping the latter. The tradeoff will be completely worthwhile if it makes it more likely that people will contribute."

Coast will certainly be able to gather the attention of the geo community for the project. As we wrote when he joined the Bing team 18 months ago:

Coast is a giant figure in the mapping world. In 2009, readers of leading geo publication Directions Magazine voted him the 2nd most influential person in the geospatial world, ahead of the Google Maps leadership and behind only Jack Dangermond, the dynamic founder of 41-year old $2 billion GIS company ESRI. Coast will turn 30 years old next month.

The more I play with OpenGeocoder, the more it grows on me. I hope Coast and others are able to put in the time it will take to make it as great as it could be.

Good software developers are hard to find. Startups are all about finding creative solutions to common problems - so why not this one too?

Two startups that have found creative and interesting ways to solve their developer shortage problems are travel photo network Jetpac and app search startup Quixey. Both used contests and games to overcome their challenges and get access to the high-level coding talent they needed. Their efforts may illustrate a part of what people call the gamification of work that's expected to be a big part of the future.

How Jetpac Built a Photo Quality Algorithm for $5k in 3 Weeks

Jetpac is a young San Francisco startup that asks you to log in with your Facebook account, then it searches through all the photos your friends have uploaded. It looks for photos with the names of places in their captions, then builds a personalized travel photo magazine out of your friends' pictures.

One member of the founding team is leading data hacker Pete Warden. (Disclosure, Warden told me this story while I was staying at his house on a trip to SF, but it's such a cool story I've been telling it ever since - and it works well with the Quixey story too.)

Warden says that when the team was first showing off its service in demos, far too many of the photos that came up were terrible. They were blurry, boring, bad photos. It was easy for a human being to look at these photos and know they should be excluded from the collections displayed.

Could a machine be taught to look at new photos and determine whether they were high or low quality? Warden suspected that it was possible, but recognized the limitations of his own knowledge. He didn't have the machine learning skills to build something himself, much less at the pace the company needed a solution.

Here's what they did: They looked at 30,000 photos with their human brains and quickly judged whether each was a good or bad photo for a travel magazine experience.

Then they visited the website Kaggle, where data science challenges gets turned into contests with prizes that anyone in the world can win. The Jetpac team took all the metadata they had about these 30,000 photos, including the dimensions, and they substituted standardized numbers for words that appeared more than once. They uploaded all that data onto Kaggle but they only included the corresponding human judgement of whether a photo was good or bad for 10,000 of the photos.

The challenge they set up was this: could Kaggle participants write code that could analyze the patterns of metadata effectively enough based on the 10k photos they were told the human judgements about well enough to accurately guess whether humans would call the other 20k photos good or bad just based on the other metadata available about them?

The startup put up a tiny $5k bounty, one of the smallest Kaggle had ever hosted, and applied a deadline in 3 weeks.

People loved it. All kinds of computer scientists moonlighting as Kaggle competitors jumped into the fray and wrote algorithms they thought could predict photo quality. They drafted something up, uploaded their "guesses" for the other 20k photos to Kaggle's server, then were told what percentage they got right - how often they accurately predicted a person would deem a photo good. Then they changed their code and tried to improve their results.

212 teams, consisting of 418 people, competed for 3 weeks. The contest leaderboard showed the top ten teams all had more than 85% accuracy.

All the algorithms found that there were some words in photo captions that make them far more likely to be connected to a good travel photo than a bad one. Among the best words: Peru, Cambodia, Michigan, tombs, trails and boats. What photo captions are the most likely to signify a bad photo for a travel magazine? San Jose, mommy, graduation and CEO, Warden says.

Part of the Kaggle terms of service are that contest sponsors must have non-exclusive IP rights to the work, so the Jetpac team was able to put code from the contestants directly into their app.

Jetpac's Warden says of the experience as a startup,

"The two biggest enemies of a startup are lack of money and lack of time. Packaging the data didn't take as long as we thought and after we uploaded it to the site, all of the details of dealing with the contestants were automated. So it saved us a massive amount of time compared to finding, hiring and explaining our problem to an outside contractor.

"And we would never have gotten anywhere near the quality from the circle of people we know. The short term nature of the project wouldn't have made it attractive as a project for most - just the overhead of setting up a contract and that sort of stuff. The caliber of people participating in these contests is amazing. They aren't starving college students, many are highly skilled professionals who make a lot more money than I do, in their day jobs. They do this for fun."

Jetpac had to think through how to set up the contest, but the Kaggle team helped them, too. It's hard to imagine a way that such a complex problem could get so much brain power thrown at it so fast and so inexpensively. Warden says the end results have been great.

How Quixey Finds Great Developers with $100, 60 Second Challenges

Quixey, a Silicon Valley app search engine (it's cool, try it - I found this on it), faces the same struggle to find developers that so many startups do. They have high-profile VC backing (Eric Schmidt of Google, among others) and had been paying $20k per developer hire to traditional recruiters.

Liron Shapira, co-founder and CTO of Quixey, says the company came up with a very elegant solution. Called the Quixey Challenge, it's a simple contest. If you can find and fix a bug in the code for an algorithm you're given, in under 60 seconds, the company PayPals you $100.

In order to qualify for the monthly contest, you've got to succeed at least 3 times in challenge rounds over the weeks prior to the big event. If you qualify, then the company calls you on Skype and administers the challenge face-to-face. It only lasts 60 seconds. If, in preparation, you succeed 5 times - then the system automatically contacts you to see if you might be interested in working for Quixey.

Shapira says that 38 prizes were awarded in the December challenge, and it resulted in 3 full time hires and 2 intern hires. Winners also receive Quixey Challenge hoodies, which Shapira says can be seen floating around the elite student body of Carnegie Mellon University.

"We've had about 5k users sign up and practice and we've reached out to 500 or something," Shapira told me. "Those are incredibly valuable leads to have."

"We just hired a guy named Marshall who doesn't have a college degree and lives in Grand Rapids Michigan. He wouldn't come in from a Silicon Valley recruiter, but he reads Hacker News and he nailed the interview.

"You can't judge if someone is one of the best programmers in the country in 1 minute, but it turns out you can in 5 minutes. You only need 3 practices to qualify for the challenge but people take 10. A low percentage like 1 in 15 or 20 users will be good enough to get contacted, so we are able to filter people out with high accuracy.

"We wasted so much time figuring out peoples' skills before. Many times we'll do the challenge or interviews and it will take 15 minutes. The fact that some people can do it under 1 minute and others, also working in Silicon Valley, take 15 minutes, is evidence of the 10x engineer idea. Debugging is something you do every day at work, if you can get more than half of the bug fixes that we put in front of you, fast, then you are probably very good and we want to talk you."

Quixey says it is looking to outsource its process to other startups sometime in the future.

Examples are just beginning to emerge, but they do seem to point towards some relief in the face of a very difficult talent shortage challenge. "We think we're still on the leading edge of this trend and it's going to get bigger," says Quixey's Liron Shapira.

"We didn't know if people would be able to produce a good result out of this," says Jetpac's Warden about his startup's experiment with gamification of development, "but we were amazed by how effective the solutions they come with were."

"The most important choice you make as a data scientist is deciding what problems you're not going to solve," Warden says. That equation changes when you've got access to compelling ways to use other peoples' skills to solve those problems.

Basketball hoop photo from MinimalistPhotography101.com

For example, you can't buy a used copy of Lee Betteridge's book "How to Survive Personal Bankruptcy" on Amazon today for less than $2.3 million. (Unless you buy it on Kindle! It's only $7 there.) It's not just that ironic title, either. Last Spring, a scientific text titled "The Making of a Fly" (about fruit-flies) was found selling for $23m on Amazon. This is amusing, but there's something deeper and potentially disturbing going on under the surface. It's an issue of the relationship between human beings and robots.

If there's ever a time when it's ok to gaze at the meta navel, I think it's when considering the unfolding relationship between humanity and the technology we build to serve ourselves.

I was testing the new version of the semantically intelligent social stream reading application Bottlenose this week (RWW's review) and I really like the content recommendations it offers. (And the custom filtering is incredible!) There's a stream of individual messages that are suggested for you by Bottlenose that look quite good. One of mine today was a Tweet about a used book on Amazon caught in a bidding war between bots and now priced at millions of dollars.

Above: If you want "Like New" - you're going to have to pay dearly for it!

The tweet was a link directly to the auction, not to a news article about it. I searched for mentions of Amazon and bots in recent tweets and found a related article, but it looked like no one had written about this phenomenon yet.

So I asked my virtual assistants at Fancyhands if anyone else had written about this before, because I needed to go meet my wife for dinner and didn't want to take the time to search around myself. Before I left, I fired off emails to a number of people who work in Artificial Intelligence, asking for their comment on the phenomenon.

It turns out that UC Berkley evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen found out about this and wrote a very compelling analysis about why he thinks this is happening, last Spring. CNN's John D. Sutter found Eisen's blog post and kicked-off a chain reaction of media coverage. That's what the person on the other end of the virtual assistant task allocation algorithm at Fancyhands found out and emailed me about, anyway.

Eisen's belief is that the book sellers operating on Amazon are running low-quality pricing algorithms that are getting caught in an escalating loop. Effectively, one bookseller is running an algorithm that says, "if we've got a book and someone else is selling it on Amazon too, change the price to be just under whatever they are charging." Then the other bookseller is running an algorithm that says "if someone else is selling a book on Amazon, let's say we're selling it too, just at a slightly higher price. Then if someone buys it from us, we'll go buy it from the original seller, resell it to our customer and pocket the profit."

In the case today of the stay out of bankrupcy book, somehow it's the same seller making two offers of the same book. One offer seeks to leave a minimum of money on the table but always undercut the other offer, the other offer seeks to arbitrage price discrepencies by offering a book the offer-maker doesn't posses. It's a crazy situation.

I asked Neal Richter, an expert on machine learning and the Chief Scientist at the Rubicon Project, a leading real time online ad buying technology provider, how he thought this could happen and what it meant.

"The APIs available for adding and removing inventory from a site like Amazon, plus the transparent pricing, means that anyone with minimal skill can trade on any price discrepancies between marketplaces," Richter said by email.

"It looks like the flaw in Mr. Eisen's example was due to the software writers not imposing any limits on their pricing.

"Amazon and other retailers need to have a tax or API fee on some kinds of function calls. If they were to charge $0.05 for every change to a unit of inventory it would setup incentives to better QA the software.

"The expansion of API usage in marketplaces means:

Version 1) Any PhD with an idea can create a startup to add value to a marketplace.

Version 2) Any idiot with an questionable algorithm can screw things up for everyone.

"Failure to account for boundary conditions will screw up a good model in a hurry."

That's an interesting solution, and it may be the best way to solve this particular manifestiation of the problem of bots gone wild, but it's not the only option, either.

Artificial Intelligence technology provider Next IT powers chatterbot services for customers like Alaska Airlines and the US Army. Next IT CTO Charles Wooters says that the fundamental strategy his company employs when it puts artificial intelligence together with big data (millions of real-time customer service queries) is to focus the machines on making it easier for humans to catch errors.

"We can compare what our statistical systems think should have happened with what actually happened, then find high frequency errors," he explained. "Those benchmark systems aren't always smarter, but we apply the rule based benchmarks vs the statistical realities - then we always have humans in the loop. We help humans get to the answers that are wrong, quickly. We intelligently sort queues so humans can quickly go through and fix errors."

That's how Next IT describes its relationship with Big Data and I think it's pretty interesting.

Several people I talked to said that what we can see in the Amazon bot pricing battles isn't really a problem, until this kind of dynamic plays out in real-world financial markets. Presumably something similar could throw a real Stuxnet-style wrench in industrial systems, too.

We do live in a world where a bot can recommend that I read what a person said about bots gone out of control selling an author's book, where I can find all the best writing about the phenomenon with the help of a virtual assistant on the other end of a queueing mechanism and where other bot-masters can tisk-tisk such a lack of self-control and offer better examples of bots focused on helping humans discover botly errors.

That's where we're at - let's hope nothing goes too wrong!

Crazy robot attack image by Sean McMenemy

The technology is similar to Beanstalkd, which describes itself as "a big to-do list for your distributed application." Leena Rao at TechCrunch first reported on the existence of SWF two weeks ago when one of her readers saw it and sent her screenshots. Tonight the service was formally announced, complete with high-profile case studies, infographics and multiple blog posts.

Amazon Web Services customers get a limited number of free workflows they can allocate and Barr's post discusses pricing at the very end. For example, "You pay $0.0001 for every Workflow execution, and an additional $0.000005 per day if they remain active for more than 24 hours."

The company launched the new service tonight with three early testimonials, including from NASA's Jet Propulsion Labs. They are, as Netflix's Adrian Cockcroft said on Twitter tonight, "very cool examples."

First impression from Patrick Debois, a leader in the international devops community: "Imagine hooking in your machine provisioning/monitoring into this logic, you can very well create nice orchestration. And have the approval process fit in the workflow."

Reto Kramer, General Manager, Application Connection Services, AWS, said in the news release: "By relying on Amazon SWF to handle the coordination of distributed task execution, developers can now focus on building the differentiating aspects of their applications and leave the undifferentiated heavy lifting of building and managing workflow engines to AWS."

In an article last week called NoOps, AppOps, DevOps, & More - Removing the OS Barrier with PaaS, Part 3.1, Adron Hall references companies like Opscode and Puppet Labs that exemplify a broad shift towards systematic abstraction of business processes. "Improvement of these complex systems is almost always done through abstraction of the complexity and simplification of the creation or deployment of these systems," he writes. AWS SWF may require an expansion of our understanding of the opportunities available for abstraction.

Automated workflow management, across multiple environments, as a platform for innovation and value creation is a very exciting prospect. It abstracts a layer of detail in order to facilitate the expansion of a developer's ability to create value on a higher level of abstraction. There may be no higher calling, as platforms go.

Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive network scalability. It appears that's what San Francisco startup ToyTalk is building, based on conversations and information available online.

The company is putting together a powerful team of technologists and creatives from Pixar and SRI (makers of Siri) and is being relatively open about what it's up to. But it has received no press coverage anywhere as far as I can tell. That's going to change once word gets out about who they are and what they're doing. The possibilities in both entertainment and education are amazing.

ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob, photo by Chuck Foxen.

Neilsen announced new numbers yesterday, showing that tablet computers are increasingly being used by children. 70% of US households with both tablets and children under 12 now report that their children use the family tablet computer, up 9% over Q3 of last year.

Imagine the youngest of children using Web-connected toys carrying character-driven chatterbot artificial intelligence programs. If done well, the possibilities for child development, education, language learning and more are awe inspiring to consider. What are the problems that need to be solved? Lovability, connectivity and sufficiently intelligent interactivity. It's that last one that seems the hardest, the least solved. Perhaps if ToyTalk can pull it off, the company can resolve one of the world's most damaging resource shortages, the shortage of engaging time and energy for childhood development.

The Brains

ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob worked at Pixar for 20 years, where he served as Chief Technology Officer. Then he was the Entreprenuer-in-Residence at August Capital. Now he's assembling a company that includes other ex-Pixar people, a heavy-duty engineer from Internet mega-pipe Akamai and a computer scientist from SRI, the research firm that created the now Apple-owned mobile personal assistant Siri. (Jacob once made a documentary film about competitive grocery bagging; more on him here.)

ToyTalk's Creative Director Bobby Podesta worked on Pixar movies like A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and was a Directing Animator on Cars. Podesta is hiring a mobile UI developer and a creative writer who can build out charecter dialogue.

Martin Reddy, the ToyTalk CTO, is a Computer Science PhD with more than 40 published papers and 5 years of experience building geospatial visualization technology at the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, the organization that built Siri.

Now imagine massive data input and output from these toys. James Chalfant, ToyTalk's Director of Scalability, helped build Akamai, a massive Content Delivery Network that serves up 30% of all the web-based content consumed in the world.

Michael Chann built Pixar's animation technology and is now a visual tracking software specialist at ToyTalk. Brian Langner is a Carnegie Mellon PhD and now ToyTalk's "Senior Speech Scientist" specializing in human computer spoken word interaction. Byrne Reese was the Product Manager for Movable Type, one of the world's first major blogging platforms and is now Head of Customer Development at ToyTalk. Renee Adams, head of operations at ToyTalk, spent years working on logistics and retail operations at Apple.

Got that? We're talking about children's toys built by an AI scientist from where Siri was born, that tracks human movement, can interact with spoken words, is connected to the web and mobile by an engineer with a world-beating scalability background, promoted by an early advocate of blog publishing software that changed the world and designed by people behind the most popular children's movies in history.

That sounds incredible. And maybe a little bit frightening.

Could these be the toys that teach your children multiple languages, that help provide some interactivity to neglected children, that save the next generation from passive consumption of non-interactive broadcast media?

Or will they fall into the Uncanny Valley, seem creepy to adults but desensitize children to the true humanity of living people, ushering in a generation of humans so comfortable with robots that the robots proliferate and ultimately... Well, you can imagine. Perhaps it's post-humanity that will feel like Elvis's swinging hips for our generation, so wrong to us but a much-loved part of the future for our children.

Those are the questions I'll be asking when more information comes out about ToyTalk. The company hasn't yet responded to my request for an interview. I hope they will soon.

Why is this sector so on fire? I presumed it's not just because everyone is suddenly excited about personal professional development, so I asked a few experts in the field. This is what they said.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers 2012 Global CEO Study addressed the question of talent and found that senior executives around the world are feeling pressure related to managing talent. Those survey results made me think that Human Capital Management (HCM) technology is hot for the following reasons:

1. Companies are constrained in their efforts to meet their goals by a shortage of talent in their ranks.
2. They have inadequate means of measuring the impact of their investments in talent optimization.
   
3. They can't identify specific skills gaps well enough.
4. And they can't figure out who works best with teams in a scalable way without software.

I asked a number of different experts in the field and none disagreed with the thoughts above, but most argued that it is more complicated than that.

First, this market has been growing and consolidating quickly for years. Most of the leading vendors getting acquired by enterprise giants grew themselves through years of acquisitions.

Most recently, one company in particular has been pressuring everyone else to scramble to protect their market share: Workday. "Workday is eating Oracle for lunch in HCM," asserts enterprise software blogger Dennis Howlett. "I predict Workday will be a $1 billion business in the 2014-15 timeframe. They have a very good value proposition and solution that is well differentiated from the incumbents."

That all makes sense from a business perspective, but are there culturual and technology trends that are contributing to HCM's hotness?

Jason Averbook, CEO of Knowledge Infusion and the former Senior Director of Human Capital Managment Marketing at PeopleSoft, explains it like this:

"LinkedIn knows more about our employees than we do as CEOs and leaders of organizations," Averbook begins.

"While we work hard to get people paid and give them benefits, we do little to understand their true interests, talents and backgrounds that could help us engage and retain our workforce." This disparity of engagement is almost taunted by a growth in technology-enabled opportunities.

"The world of Software as a Service combined with access to technology in an unlimited number of ways through mobile, broadband, etc creates a major transition for all HR and talent leaders in the world," he says.

Scarcity of skills is a major factor as well. "Many people say we are in a War for Talent, while this is true, it is truly a War for Skills," says Averbook

"We don't have the right skills in the open market to fill the available jobs. The War for Skills is even more deadly than a war for talent because the only place to get the skills is from the competition. We now, more than ever, need to know what we have from a talent standpoint, what our competitors have, what we need and what it will cost to get it. The Knowledge Economy has finally caught up to the Manufacturing Economy in the need for Supply Chain Intelligence, just not of parts but of people and skills.

"We have a workforce that like to collaborate, likes to think differently, is being raised without filter and is open to trying many new things. There are no more career ladders, but hopefully career vision that we can provide the workforce to stay with our organization. This will only get worse as the economy improves."

I first heard about HCM with regard to the retirement of baby boomers, and Averbook cites that still today. "There is nothing we can do about that," he says.

"HR leaders worldwide are losing more people that have been employed by their orgs for the past 20 years than they are gaining new workers. Knowledge is walking out the door and is not replaceable by new talent. This has leaders scared to death and scrambling for what to do about it.

"[Furthermore,] more and more contractors and contingent labor is becoming the norm. This is something that the HR function is not good at measuring and monitoring, and for the most part, have not paid attention to. This trend is also causing this market to boom.

"What has always been seen as a transactional expense in organizations is finally being realized to be a competitive differentiator that is a must to have 'right' to drive an organization forward. Without this, every year an org doesn't act on these issues puts it 3-5 years behind its competition.

"This market is real and will only get hotter. The answer is in retooling HR with new processes and technology to drive true business value, not just transactional excellence."

What does that retooling look like? "HR used to be boring," says Laurie Ruettimann, a leading HCM consultant and Director of Social Media, Principal Strategist at The Starr Conspiracy.

"We hired and fire people. Now every individual step related to screening, hiring, paying, managing, training and firing someone is part of a software package. Data is everywhere. The industry is huge. And the people in charge of HR aren't your grandmother's HR. They are younger, smarter, and better educated. For real."

Employees and hiring are key cost centers, and optimizing the scarce skills of existing employees is a powerful competitive step for businesses to take.

I like to think about personal growth and skill building. I like to think about it from an organizational perspective. I like to think about online services that specialize in doing that kind of work. I think the above are viable explanations of why this sector is so hot. Do you?

I spoke this week with Bill Zujewski, Executive Vice President of Product Strategy & Marketing at M2M (machine to machine) platform company Axeda. Axeda is one of the most successful companies to date in the early M2M market and whenever I get a chance to speak with Zujewski, I ask him for as many real-world use cases for M2M connectivity as I can. The company's examples are fascinating, this time about M2M-produced big data used in the cloud.

Tracking the Use of Machines

Industrial equipment, hospital equipment, ATMs and kiosks are among the products that Axeda is working with other companies to rig with sensors and cellular connections.

Use of those devices can then be monitored remotely, so that their supply, maintenance and management can all be optimized, without having to go and look at the machines themselves.

"Typically engineers would find logs through customer tickets and it would take months to find trends based on call center traffic," Zujewski says.

"100 people called about this specific problem, for example. But now we're able to do pattern recognition across alarms and breakage data and see if there was a bad batch of a certain part or a glitch in this manufacturing plant. We're able to catch quality issues with real time data. In most cases this is advanced pattern recognition and we're providing ETL [Extract, transform, and load] tools to get the data into the cloud."

Leveraging the Data for Apps

One company's hospital autoclave machines, the washing machines that steralize surgical equipment, are connected to the internet using Axeda's technology. What does that enable? Zujewski says the customer turns the data about uptime, need for repairs, machine run completion and detergent levels into a smartphone app that hospital employees can use. Instead of having someone sit around waiting for the rare instance that a machine breaks down, now the labor costs can be slashed and an alert can be sent out when it does happen.

Hospital diagnostic equipment that's connected can incorporate benchmarks based on aggregate data from across the network. These blood tests you're doing? Here's how they compare to the results other hospitals in the area are seeing right now. Zujewski says that hospitals also benchmark their own employees' use of the machines so they know wether enough tests are being performed, whether they might be better served by more machines, etc.

From drastically cutting down on product recall costs with the advantage of knowing which specific parts are in each smart connected device, to capturing large amounts of use data and delivering them into cloud-based systems to better optimize development of future products, there are a lot of things that can be done when devices are connected.

This is of course just one vendor, but Axeda works with more than 150 other companies to connect their devices to the internet.

Use of devices can be measured with sensors, then that data can be delivered in real time with celular or wifi connectivity, and then any number of parties in the value chain can make use of that data to offer entirely new or improved products and services.

I think that's one of the most interesting types and uses of Big Data in the cloud.

Long popular for their work building games with major studios, the Double Fine team decided they wanted to self-produce and document the creation of an old-fashioned point and click adventure game. They are probably just a few hours away from breaking $1 million raised from backers on Kickstarter, they are already the new record holders for the fastest to raise so much and to receive backing from so many individual funders. Update: Adding tens of thousands of dollars every 15 minutes, the project just passed $1m.

"[This] is kind of a big deal," wrote game journalist Jim Squires at Gamezebo this morning.

"Not just for Double Fine, but for Kickstarter and the industry as a whole. Can you imagine what the gaming world would look like if big developers like this could raise the funds needed to get to market without a publisher? Sure it's worked for indies, but we're talking Tim Schaefer here. Between Tim and Ron Gilbert (also now with Double Fine), these are the people that defined the LucasArts era of adventure games."

In other words, this is a case of the famous getting more famous on a new platform - directly with their own fame instead of with a traditional publisher's help. The same was true of LunaTik, the previous Kickstarter champ. Cool stories, but the democratization of fundraising thus deserves to be understood with a grain of salt.

Game blog Joystiq reported:

"'I can confirm that there's not been a project that has raised as much as this one in such a short timeframe,' [a Kickstarter] spokesperson revealed. Kickstarter says it does not keep a running tally finalized projects, but its listing of 'Most Funded' ventures shows a number of concepts that came close to the one million dollar mark, since 2009.

"The Kickstarter spokesperson also confirmed that Double Fine's project 'now has more backers than any other project on the site.' The current total of backers sits at over 17,000." [It's now up to 25k+]

The Gamification of Game Creation

I don't know as much about gaming as either of the two writers above, but I'm learning about gamification. The Gamification.org wiki lists a number of game dynamics that I think are at play in this, if not every, Kickstarter campaign.

Epic Meaning to the fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world.

The challenge to big game publishers and their conventional wisdom that point-and-click adventure games are dead confers what Gamification experts call Epic Meaning to the (in this case highly accelerated) fundraising Quest, because funders are challenging authority and changing the world. The Achievements and Reward Schedules that all Kickstarter campaigns are encouraged to include are aided by the Urgent Optimism created by the record-breaking pace of this campaign in particular, the strong reputation of the team being backed, the relatively immediate gratification of games themselves and the fact that a David vs Goliath story always has some amount of urgency to it.

There is clearly a Countdown and participants are racing it with a combination of Ownership, Community Collaboration and Virality. Finally, the Kickstarter updates in general and the video documentation of this game's creation both fit within what Gamification analysts call Cascading Information Theory. "The theory," the Gamification.org wiki explains, "that information should be released in the minimum possible snippets to gain the appropriate level of understanding at each point during a game narrative."

Put all that within the context of a known brand (the game makers themselves), the well-executed but still-fresh infrastructure of Kickstarter and the end result of a game that is easy to afford ($15 gets you a download on Steam when it's done), and you've got a recipe for some gamified game creation. In this case, record levels of game creation.

As Jane McGonigal tweeted to Double Fine's Tim Schaefer this afternoon, "@TimOfLegend You're making us all feel like we're a part of something historic ^_^"

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/02/09/meet_the_new_kings_of_kickstarter_how_double_fine http://readwrite.com/2012/02/09/meet_the_new_kings_of_kickstarter_how_double_fine Crowdsourcing Thu, 09 Feb 2012 07:09:25 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup called Rapportive, which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are emailing.

Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

Above: To receive an email from Selena Deckelmann is a meaningful thing. Take note, by putting such an email in context.

It wasn't a big acquisition (TechCrunch was told around $15m) but it was a validation of some big ideas.

Rapportive is a simple thing, and yet it's founded on some complex and potent technology trends. Trends like: identity as platform, harvesting of social network user data and APIs for cross-site functionality. On top of profile data and email adresses, you can build awesome tools.

Rapportive is magical; it's one of the first things I show people when I am excited to show them something about the internet. Many people immediately see the value of it. When we first wrote about it here, we titled our post Stop What You Are Doing Right Now and Install This Browser Plug-in. No one objected, it was clearly awesome. (The line Stop What You Are Doing is something best reserved for when you can really back it up.)

Since that time, Rapportive has served as one of the most compelling elements in the still-unfullfilling ecosystem of CRM applications floating around the internet. None solve all your problems, most are hard to make the time to come back to. Not Rapportive, though. Not if you're a Gmail user, anyway. It delivers relationship management value in almost every email you send and recieve.

Much of that value comes from the integration of 3rd party services. There's a whole list of apps built on Rapportive. They sit in your email, look at who you're corresponding with and then let you interact with that person or their content on other social networks. Twitter and LinkedIn have been the best in my experience, but enterprise Rapportive users may have prefered other apps on the platform.

Woe, woe to LinkedIn if they screw with this. If LinkedIn is to Rapportive as Twitter has been to Tweetdeck then I am going to be one unhappy user. If LinkedIn treats Rapportive as well as it has treated CardMunch (which is a miracle app) then we're in good shape.

LinkedIn may serve up less data in Rapportive simply because this is probably the end of Rapportive's relationship with the super-controversial social data mining service Rapleaf. Update: Rapportive contacted me to say they haven't been using Rapleaf for more than a year now. Noted! Many people hate Rapleaf, but they love the Rapportive interface that serves up some of that information. Fortunately Rapportive does not surface some of the information Rapleaf makes available, like home and car ownership and family status.

Rapportive was the best example of what could be done with aggregated user data though! All too often, when you ask someone about aggregated social network user data they immediately say "I'm opposed to it!"

As a platform for the creation of products, services, new ways to relate to the people and the web arround us though - Rapportive is a beautiful example of what the future of the web could be. It's not about apps like Path sucking your phone's contact info into its servers without telling you; it's not about services like Pinterest surreptitiously changing your shared URLs to capture affiliate revenue.

No, the future of user data as a platform, in its best form, is to show you the faces of the people you're meeting by email. It's about helping you connect with them. Hey, you might say, I see you sent me an email. I haven't had a chance to reply yet, but you'll notice that I just started following you on Twitter. (A person can also guess another person's email by guessing at variations of their name @ their company domain.com.)

I sure hope Rapportive can grow and thrive in its new home. And I hope that it will inspire whole new worlds of startups building

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/02/07/linkedin_eats_rapportive_lets_hope_the_magic_lives http://readwrite.com/2012/02/07/linkedin_eats_rapportive_lets_hope_the_magic_lives Analysis Tue, 07 Feb 2012 14:25:25 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Facebook has announced what will likely be the tech industry's biggest Initial Public Offering of stock ever. What do practitioners of feminism, a philosophy centered in the experiences of women, have to say about the political economy of the world's biggest social technology company? They've raised a number of interesting questions so far.

It seems that everyone has an opinion about Facebook's stated goal of being a force for good in the world. Feminists online have also raised questions about the company's unusually exclusive all-male Board of Directors and about mega-powerful COO Sheryl Sandberg's public calls for women to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. As a cultural phenomenon of historic proportion, what does the Facebook IPO mean with regard to gender?

The seven-member Board of Directors is made up entirely of men, something Bloomberg points out is true of only 11% of the Fortune 500 overall. Angie Chang, Co-Founder & Editor-in-Chief of Women 2.0, an online community dedicated to women founding companies, writes:

The all-male board of Facebook makes you wonder why a company serving a user base of at least 50% half women has no female representation on the board. We told ourselves that women board directors can build value and bring win-win strategies to the table - let's #changetheratio here.

Bloomberg's Carol Hymowitz contrasts the all male membership of the board with Facebook's avowed social mission to empower the world and to Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's powerful advocacy for women.

Facebook generally declines to comment on issues like this. It's typical of Silicon Valley's libertarian-leaning culture to believe that the best way to overcome injustices connected to gender, race, class and sexual orientation, are to ignore the existence of gender, race, class and sexual orientation. That approach may leave unresolved long-standing institutional, economic and cultural factors that stand in the way of equal opportunity and which cannot be overcome by society as a whole through the self interest and sheer force of will of people on the margins of power.

Sheryl Sandberg is the second most visible person at Facebook and will likely become a billionaire in the IPO. She's often said to be a prominent advocate of women in the workplace.

Doug Barry points out on Jezebel, though, that Sandberg's position is a very particular one: that women are fundamentally responsible for their own career development in corporate America and need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

Sandberg is well known for her 2010 TED talk Why we have too few women leaders, which has been viewed more than 1 million times.

Sandberg's message is directed at the elite crowd gathered at TED and adresses women who are not gaining top power positions in the organizations they work at. She offers three primary pieces of advice. "One, sit at the table," by which she means give yourself the credit you deserve and aim high. "Two, make your partner a real partner," or make sure that heterosexual married couples contain parents with equal earning power and responsibility and that men are encouraged to take responsibility around the house. "And three, don't leave before you leave," in other words keep seizing new opportunities despite the possibility you might take time off to have a child.

Those are relatively conservative political admonitions that speak primarily to the problems experienced by the women in society who are already closest to power.

Barry writes on Jezebel:

Not only is Sandberg exceptionally smart, but, after graduating from Harvard Business School, she landed a job at the World Bank as the chief of staff first for Larry H. Summers then the Treasury Secretary. A job at Google followed before she joined Facebook in 2008, an opportunity that Sandberg was prescient enough to take full advantage of. If success really is preparation meeting opportunity, Sandberg was more than prepared for her chance at professional success, but some women believe that when she insists on aiming high, she's discounting the fact that her meteoric rise owes itself, at least in part, to some very favorable circumstances (including the fact that her husband, Daniel Goldberg, is a successful entrepreneur in his own right and the couple doesn't have to worry about finding child care for their two sons).

Barry quotes Sylvia Ann Hewlett, president of the Center for Talent Innovation and director for the Gender and Policy Program at Columbia University:

I'm a huge fan of her accomplishments and think she's a huge role model in some ways, but I think she's overly critical of women because she's almost implying that they don't have the juice, the chutzpah, to go for it...I think she's had a golden path herself, and perhaps does not more readily understand that the real struggles are not having children or ambition. Women are, in fact, fierce in their ambition, but they find that they're actually derailed by other things, like they don't have a sponsor in their life that helps them go for it.

That paragraph had a soft ending; there are far more unpleasant ways that many women are derailed than by a lack of a sponsor at work.

Courteney Martin, on one of the web's most respected feminist blogs, Feministing, says that while Sandberg's message to individual women is valuable, it is just one story.

In essence, her message is tantamount to The American Dream for the 21st century woman: the problem is not sexism or racism or classism, the problem is not pathetic work-family policy at the federal level, the problem is not collective. The problem is you. In the Gospel of Sandberg, individual women must find partners who will share the load and negotiate fiercely, overcome their own guilt about not being able to be fully present parents, and "lean in" to their careers despite the lack of structural or systemic supports that might make that feel even slightly safe or rewarding.

Reading this profile of Sandberg, I was reminded of Nigerian novelist, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's, incredible TED Talk, in which she talks about "the danger of the single story." She explains, "The single story creates stereotypes. And the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story."

I actually think that Sandberg is smart and has great intentions with her message that women need to dig deep and stick to their own dreams. I agree with her in many ways... This is part of the story. But it's not the whole story.

The rest of the story is better told by women who didn't grow up with lots of familial and social support, women who didn't go to Harvard, women who weren't mentored by Larry Summers, women with different definitions of success and leadership.

To look at the bright side, perhaps Facebook's social technology will itself help other women tell their stories and hear the stories of women other than the most privileged elite.

The world's largest communication network between people is taking a big financial step, it's infamously opportunistic with changing ideas of privacy and it's lead by an all-male board and a woman whose perspective on gender is likely applauded by conservatives around the world. That all seems important to discuss.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/02/05/what_feminists_are_saying_about_the_facebook_ipo http://readwrite.com/2012/02/05/what_feminists_are_saying_about_the_facebook_ipo Analysis Sun, 05 Feb 2012 11:24:16 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick The Internet may have grown up first in the United States, but it's a global phenomenon now. The same can be said for the fast-growing body of educational content on the web. YouTube announced a new batch of partners that were added to its Education Channel today and noted that nearly 80% of the viewership of educational content on the site came from outside the United States. Less than 70% of the site's total traffic is International, so the educational content is disproportionately viewed by global audiences.

Both YouTube and iTunes U are serving up huge quantities of educational content to a world already in the throes of a 50 year revolution in global education. In some ways they represent exactly the kind of education that a new world needs, too: learning that augments existing education and fosters life-long development of non-routine analytical and interactive skills. That's a recipe for good times.

YouTube now hosts more than 500,000 educational videos, on a wide variety of topics. The new mobile-friendly iTunes U also offers 500,000 educational resources and says that 60% of its viewership comes from outside the United States. This global consuption of US-created online educational content may be the newest chapter in a radical transformation of global education over the past 50 years. Life in this world is not like it used to be just a few decades ago, and the availability of world-class education on-demand, at almost no cost, is likely to help things change all the more as this century unfolds.

Global Transformation

"During the past 50 years, the expansion of education has contributed to a fundamental transformation of societies in OECD countries," wrote the authors of this year's lengthy report Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators. (500 page PDF, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development)

"In 1961, higher education was the privilege of the few, and even upper secondary education was denied to the majority of young people in many countries. Today, the great majority of the population completes secondary education, one in three young adults has a tertiary degree [Colleges, universities and polytechnics] and, in some countries, half of the population could soon hold a tertiary degree."

In other words, it's not an uneducated world gaining its first access to the information available in these free online education repositories. What's happening is augmentation of already historic global education levels.

Below: The United States used to be the most educated society in the world. That's no longer true. Click to view full size. From the OECD.

"Half a century ago, employers in the United States and Canada recruited their workforce from a pool of young adults, most of whom had high school diplomas and one in four of whom had degrees - far more than in most European and Asian countries," reports the OECD. "Today, while North American graduation rates have increased, those of some other countries have done so much faster, to the extent that the United States now shows just over the average proportion of tertiary-level graduates at age 25-34."

"It has become increasingly evident that to realise human potential in today's societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling." - OECD

The OECD recognizes that formal education has a meaningful connection to economic development, but that the two are not equivelant. "The level of education that an adult has completed may be a proxy for the competencies that contribute to economic success, but it is a highly imperfect measure," the report says.

"First, each country has its own different processes and standards for accrediting completion of secondary or tertiary education. Second, the knowledge and skills acquired in education are by no means identical to those that enhance economic potential. And third, it has become increasingly evident that to realise human potential in today's societies and economies, lifelong learning is required, not just an initial period of formal schooling." (emphasis added)

That lifelong learning no doubt contributes to the global audience that amasses around this educational content online. For a high school teacher to be able to give their lectures not to 30 students at a time, but to 100,000 viewers around the world on YouTube has got to be a powerful opportunity. If many of those viewers are adults, so be it.

What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills. Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve.

Learning new information that helps inform our understanding of the world is, in fact, growing more important for economic well-being than the development of routine skills.

According to a presentation (10 page PDF) by Francesc Pedró, Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for Research and Information, OECD, the last 50 years have seen a dramatic change in the types of skills in demand in the workforce. A trend began, at least in the United states, as far back as 1985: demand for "routine manual skills" has held relatively steady, demand for non-routine manual skills has plummeted. Demand for routine cognitive skills climbed through 1970, then fell. What's hot? Non-routine analytic and non-routine interactive skills.

Those are things that a good YouTube or iTunes U video about world history or global ecology can help improve, your non-routine analytic and interactive skills. More than for just economic well-being, those are skills that positively impact quality of life in many ways.

Disruption

"A new phase of education change awaits the world, for those who embrace it," writes radical Canadian educator Joe Bower in a summary of last month's 2012 International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement (ICSEI) in Malmö, Sweden.

A central message of the 25th ICSEI conference was that change brings challenge but also opportunity, with the need to find new means of collaboration, participation and networking to reshape education for the shifting demands ahead. A whole range of papers and presentations from 450 delegates from over 50 countries set an optimistic tone, with strong commonality in themes of respect, trust, new power relations and moving to evaluation as joint enterprise. In presentations from Iceland to Malaysia there were common threads of renewing teacher professionalism, establishing change via collaborative networks, and emphasizing systems perspectives through linkage and understanding, rather than prescription and grading...

"The central message of ICSEI 2012 was of strong common issues facing schools and their communities in far separated contexts, with global similarities in connecting responses. A few countries stood out in stark contrast, chastising schools and denigrating teachers, seeing change not as opportunity for partners in prospect, refashioning and renewing learning, but as a threat to be sanctioned in audit prescription. But whilst those systems are shrill and close at hand, a more pervasive and positive way forward was signposted in Malmö to a new responsible professionalism, embracing complexity and change, more loosely configured in uncertainty yet promise."

Good luck, teachers of the world, keeping up with the Internet. It's great to hear that so many are embracing change, surely caused by technology, as an opportunity and not a threat.

That's the kind of life-long learning that professional development has always required but that will go on in a global context for perpetual learning with increasing access to high-quality educational content online.

That's a recipe for a very different world than the one we lived in last century.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/02/01/how_youtube_is_part_of_a_global_economic_transform http://readwrite.com/2012/02/01/how_youtube_is_part_of_a_global_economic_transform Analysis Wed, 01 Feb 2012 16:36:44 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Amazon Web Services just reported jaw-dropping growth in the number of objects stored in Amazon S3 year over year.

"As of the end of 2011, there are 762 billion (762,000,000,000) objects in Amazon S3. We process over 500,000 requests per second for these objects at peak times," AWS Evangelist Jeff Bar wrote on the company's blog tonight. The company reported 262 billion objects in storage in Q4 of 2010. "This represents year-over-year growth of 192%; S3 grew faster last year than it did in any year since it launched in 2006." Independent analysts say this is indicative of the growth of the cloud in general and of Amazon's striking dominance of the market.

"Stunning, isn't it?" Randy Bias, co-founder of Cloudscaling said to me about the news by email. "From 150% to almost 200% growth. That's crazy. 500,000 requests per second at peak. Blows my mind."

Bias says these are the big take-aways.

"S3 growth is accelerating, not just increasing. If other AWS services are accelerating similarly then we will see a major shift this year in AWS usage and likely revenue reporting in SEC filings.

"This is the largest storage system in the world bar none; there isn't anything like it anywhere else that I'm aware of unless it's some secret government/NSA vault.

"Check my math, but at 1Kbyte average per object, that would be 780PB of disk storage:
- 762,000,000,000 * 1024 (traditional KB)
- 780288000000000 / 1000 (KB for disk) / 1000 (MB for disk) / 1000 (GB for disk) / 1000 (PB for disk) [ disk capacity is in even 1,000 increments, not multiples of 2 ]
- That's 780PB, but unclear if that's replicated or unreplicated; probably replicated, which means 260PB of data with 3x replication.
- Average of 1Kbyte is probably too low.
- At 100TB per storage system that is 7,222 storage *servers*, each with 36 spindles at 3TB each; that might not be their configuration, but even if it's 2 or 3 times as dense, that is a *lot* of storage servers.
- At those numbers, it's a 26M/month business and a 300M/year run rate, which means it's still roughly 30% of AWS revenue with EC2 being most of the rest.

"I don't understand how people can't see this kind of thing and just have their jaw hit the floor. People are paying for this. At this rate they will have 2 TRILLION objects in another year and it will be a $600M/year business."

What's behind such numbers? Widespread technology change.

"What we are seeing is the geometric explosion of cloud growth from multiple points," Constellation Research analyst Ray Wang told ReadWriteWeb.

"First, broad based adoption driven by consumerization of IT. Second, the shift from transaction to engagement - we have social, mobile, analytical, and other unstructured data. Third, true elasticity has come to fruition as the promise of the cloud gets delivered. People are taking to the cloud because the tools are easy to use and they don't have time or money to provision expensive servers. Instead they are using elasticity, which was the original premise of AWS. We could see it happening last year but this leap in growth is tremendous."

Dave Linthicum, CTO and Founder of Blue Mountain Labs, says Amazon's dominance is clear. "The rapid growth of AWS S3 is pretty much in-line with what I'm seeing in enterprises adopting cloud computing. The reality is that they are the 800 pound gorilla, and continue to gain weight. Unless they do something stupid, they are the storage provider to beat."

Ray Wang concurs. "There are only a few companies in the world who can compete with Amazon," he told me by IM tonight.

"It has established itself as one of the leading contenders. The barriers of entry are high. Very few folks can afford to build the data centers, the software infrastructure, and momentum to be profitable. Amazon is in the same league as Google, Microsoft, IBM, etc. The only other folks that could do it if they woke up are the telco's - but we've all been telling them that for years. They haven't paid attention."

Amazon's Barr explains the growth thusly. "Although we definitely made it easier for you to delete objects using Multi-Object Deletion and Object Expiration, we also gave you plenty of ways to upload new objects using Multipart upload, AWS Direct Connect, and AWS Import/Export," he wrote in his blog post. He concluded by noting that running a system so complex is hard work and pointed to open jobs at AWS.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/30/amazon-s3-says-it-tripled-in-o http://readwrite.com/2012/01/30/amazon-s3-says-it-tripled-in-o Cloud Computing Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:26 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick In June of 2009, leading up to the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square uprising, the Chinese government blocked access by its citizens to Twitter, Flickr and a number of other US-based websites. Social media being already widespread throughout the country, perhaps the Chinese government feared the possibility of events like unfolded elsewhere 18 months later, in what became known as the Arab Spring.

Two and a half years later, Twitter remains blocked in China, though many people find ways to make use of it none the less. China isn't the only country that's related to Twitter's announcement last week that the social network will now selectively censor messages country-by-country when it receives "a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity." Debate went on throughout the last week about the policy, but I think there are at least three big questions that remain unanswered.

Some have said that this is an unacceptable compromise by Twitter. World-renowned Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei says, on Twitter, "If Twitter censors, I'll stop tweeting."

"If Twitter censors, I'll stop tweeting." -Ai Weiwei

But many free speech advocates begrudgingly say that the company is doing everything it can to stay engaged in repressive countries where non-compliance with local censorship is not an option.

"I understand why people are angry, but this does not, in my view, represent a sea change in Twitter's policies," blogs Jillian C. York, Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "Twitter has previously taken down content-for DMCA requests, at least-and will no doubt continue to face requests in the future. I believe that the company is doing its best in a tough situation...and I'll be the first to raise hell if they screw up."

It's interesting to see York say she'll raise hell if the policy is misapplied and Ai Weiwei to say he'll go silent on the network if the policy is applied at all.

Three questions in particular remain in my mind.

How Will This Censorship Be Used?

What kinds of content will be censored with this new capability? What will governments around the world demand be removed from the site? Will it be things like the identities of people involved in court cases, as the UK's controversial Super Injunctions looked to ban on Twitter this Spring? That's information that has long been banned from newspapers. Would Twitter have co-operated with that kind of legal move if it was instructed to today?

"I believe that the company is doing its best in a tough situation...and I'll be the first to raise hell if they screw up." -Jillian C. York, EFF

As London-based Matt Brian pointed out at the time, enforcement of such legal prohibitions could be complicated by the abscence of Twitter business operations on British soil. Will that be a relevant matter in the future?

Or will Tweet-zapping be called for in places like Syria, where users rallied under the hashtag #RamadanMassacre in August, to bring global awareness to the brutality of the Syrian government they protested? If told to do so by a government massacring its citizens in the streets, will Twitter render all people in that country unable to see messages of protest on its network? Will shouting into such an eerie silence change the way such Tweeting campaigns also engage with the outside world? I would think so.

At what point would such demands no longer be interpreted by Twitter as being "a valid and properly scoped request from an authorized entity?" When the US State Department ruled a foreign government invalid, perhaps?

How Will Twitter Censorship Impact People Arrested for Their Tweets?

It is not unheard of for people around the world to be arrested for their Tweets. As Curt Hopkins reported on ReadWriteWeb in November, 2010:

Cheng Jianping has wound up in a Chinese 're-education camp' with a record-breaking five words on Twitter. Mocking nationalistic vandalism that flared up around a Chinese-Japanese dispute over the ownership of uninhabited islands, she retweeted another's message and added the ironic admonition, 'Charge, angry youth!'

Middle Eastern Tweeters have been arrested for quips mocking their ruling royal families.

Will the governments in question issue a take-down order to Twitter on their way to knock down the doors of the Tweeters in question? Or will they not bother?

Will people be arrested for messages that no one else in their country can even see anymore? How Orwellian.

Will This Reduce Conspiracy Theories About Twitter Censorship? Should It?

What's unique about Twitter's position, some people say, is not the censorship but the transparency about it. One might hope that if every instance of censorship is openly and loudly announced by Twitter, that critics who have long suspected Twitter was censoring conversation about topics of great importance to them might be less inclined to be suspicious.

In recent months some have worried that Twitter was systematically de-emphasizing discussion about the Occupy protests. In 2010, some of the first wide-spread concerns about Twitter censorship arose when the Israeli army clashed with a flotilla seeking to deliver aid to Palestinians despite an embargo.

Charles Arthur of the Guardian told the story as follows:

The attack by Israel on a flotilla of ships approaching Gaza has, as you'd expect, generated a huge response on social media - and of course Twitter, with its real-time content, was quick to react.

Many users began the morning by tagging their comments about it with "#flotilla" - a "hashtag" which gives a structure to a discussion or emerging event, as you can filter searches in applications such as Tweetdeck so that you only see those with that tag.

But at around 11am, as #flotilla began "trending" - rising to the topmost-used hashtags on the service - it seemed to vanish.

Was this censorship by Twitter?

Twitter Headquarters investigated why that happened and found that there was another event, elsewhere in the world, that was using the hashtag #flotilla as well, at the same time. Twitter's automated spam fighting software saw unrelated uses of the hashtag and zapped it from the Trending Topics list. Conspiracy resolved.

In all likelihood, critics will still suspect in many cases that Twitter is engaged in censorship even if the company doesn't take the steps for transparency that they have pledged to take. No one but perhaps some of the very deep pockets who have invested in Twitter is really evil, though, (not the employees) and so now under the new policy, the simplest explanation of why some communication is less visible on the network than expected will likely never be covert censorship.

It's a complicated situation, though. Much remains to be seen with regard to how the new "feature" will be used and what it will mean for people facing repression around the world. Twitter will no doubt face ongoing scrutiny for its practices, as all communication network infrastructure companies deserve.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/29/twitters_censorship_policy_three_unanswered_questi http://readwrite.com/2012/01/29/twitters_censorship_policy_three_unanswered_questi Analysis Sun, 29 Jan 2012 14:57:55 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Today is International Data Privacy Day, an event backed by companies like Intel, Ebay, Facebook and Microsoft, and dedicated to educating data owners about best practices in protecting the privacy of consumer data.

The need to keep people from being exploited on account of violations of their privacy is clear, well-known, intuitive and amply articulated by highly capable people. The up-side of making use of peoples' data is far less so. The two concerns are closely tied together. That's something Bill Gates is likely very aware of, if his comments 10 years ago are any indication.

The forthcoming era of computing is all about data. In as much as that data is associated with people, it's essential that data owners feel secure in the belief that they can make use of their data in computing without concern it will be misused.

Bill Gates got this about the last era of computing, the first instances of e-commerce and the web. He wrote a famous company-wide memo ten years ago this month all about the importance of what a controversial hardware-based security paradigm called Trusted Computing.

"If we don't do this, people simply won't be willing -- or able -- to take advantage of all the other great work we do. Trustworthy Computing is the highest priority for all the work we are doing. We must lead the industry to a whole new level of Trustworthiness in computing."

Regarding Privacy in particular, the Gates memo put some things in ways we can relate to today, but other things seem antiquated.

"Users should be in control of how their data is used. Policies for information use should be clear to the user. Users should be in control of when and if they receive information to make best use of their time. It should be easy for users to specify appropriate use of their information including controlling the use of email they send."

Users should be in control of when and if they receive information to make best use of their time! Can you imagine that? Info overload as privacy violation. It makes sense, yet it seems hopelessly antiquated too.

"In the past, we've made our software and services more compelling for users by adding new features and functionality, and by making our platform richly extensible," he wrote.

"We've done a terrific job at that, but all those great features won't matter unless customers trust our software.

"So now, when we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security. Our products should emphasize security right out of the box, and we must constantly refine and improve that security as threats evolve."

Here's how the International Data Privacy Day organization puts it today.

"In this networked world, in which we are thoroughly digitized, with our identities, locations, actions, purchases, associations, movements, and histories stored as so many bits and bytes, we have to ask - who is collecting all of this data - what are they doing with it - with whom are they sharing it? Most of all, individuals are asking 'How can I protect my information from being misused?' These are reasonable questions to ask - we should all want to know the answers.

"Data Privacy Day promotes awareness about the many ways personal information is collected, stored, used, and shared, and education about privacy practices that will enable individuals to protect their personal information.

Robert Siciliano, an Online Security Evangelist at McAfee, paints a much more negative picture in a blog post yesterday - probably even about the companies participating in International Data Privacy Day. McAfee is owned by the primary sponsor of the event, though, Intel. Siciliano speaks for many people when he says:

"Lately, it seems that barely a day goes by when we don't learn about a major Internet presence taking steps to further erode users' privacy. The companies with access to our data are tracking us in ways that make Big Brother look like a sweet little baby sister.

"Typically when we hear an outcry about privacy violations, these perceived violations involve some apparently omnipotent corporation recording the websites we visit, the applications we download, the social networks we join, the mobile phones we carry, the text messages we send and receive, the places we go, the people we're with, the things we like and dislike, and so on.

"How do they do this? By offering us free stuff to consume online and infrastructure for the online communities that tie us together. We gobble up their technologies, download their programs, use their services, and mindlessly click 'I Agree' to terms and conditions we haven't bothered to read."

It's a cynical perspective that refers to all the glory of the Interwebs as simply free stuff to consume with mindless clicks.

I think I prefer the description Gates might have offered. The global computer is now rich with features and opportunities, but those will be put at risk if people don't trust the network. Please, Mr. Zuckerberg, don't spoil this opportunity.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/28/data_privacy_what_bill_gates_said_10_years_ago http://readwrite.com/2012/01/28/data_privacy_what_bill_gates_said_10_years_ago Data Services Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:46:29 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick iTunes U has been around for a long time, but its expansion last week onto iPhones and iPads, as well as into new content like K-12 curriculum, has truly made this a 2.0 release. And it's very, very good.

The iTunes U website carries the bold title "Learn anything, anywhere, anytime." That's an overstatement for sure, with 500,000 assets it's more like learn something about many things. But it's great either way. I spent the weekend neglecting other duties to play with iTunes U and below are some thoughts, positive and negative. It's not perfect, but I am really excited about it and I know I'm not alone in that. I'd love to know your thoughts about it too.

"Algorithms are at the cutting edge of innovation, because they help move the line between the feasible & infeasible," says the Prof on the first day's lecture in MIT's Introduction to Algorithms. That's a tasty nugget to ponder, served up in the middle of a lecture which started with 15 minutes of "no cheating on tests" and other administrative advice. Most of the lecture was over my head, but I do spend a lot of time thinking about algorithms so I was very thankful for the opportunity to hear it. Thankful enough that I listened to it once on my phone while walking my dogs and once again on the iPad with the whiteboard visible, propped up in my cupboard while I put away the dishes in my kitchen.

Learn anything, anywhere, anytime? It was certainly feeling that way in the first few hours I was glued to iTunes U.

Awesome, With Limits

"At first, I was excited by this, because it appeared that this was iVLE, aka VLE (Virtual Learning Environment) in the cloud. And the iPad app is very nice. But sadly, the app functionality is not replicated well in iTunes, thus cutting out students who do not own iPads, and all Windows users. iPhones/Pods are OK for listening to a couple of podcasts, but no-one in their right minds is going to attempt a full-blown statistics course on an iPhone. And the content on iTunesU is still as variable in quality as it ever was.

"Presumably Apple could not see a revenue angle in iVLE. Oh, what might have been."

- Dr Alan Cann, Science of the Invisible

I found that in the business management section, much of the content isn't classroom lectures. Much of it is short-form video content made by non-traditional educational institutions. I listened to all of Jill Geisler's What Great Bosses Know segments, each about 5 minutes long, some I listened to twice. I'll probably go back and listen again. It's really just a podcast though, from Geisler who is associated with the Poynter Institute.

Geisler's content is heavily book-ended by promotions for her forthcoming book with the same title. I hope to buy the book. That experience was not like transporting into a college classroom though.

The Cranfield University collection on Leadership is similar, but in video with black backdrop and awesome, knowledgable, 50-year olds with British accents. It's great, but it's more like curated video podcasting than traditional educational content.

There are full, traditional classroom courses available though and I've subscribed to a few. I haven't worked through a full one yet and I haven't tried interacting with any of the worksheets or PDFs. I did jailbreak my iPad this weekend and turn the bottom right of my screen into a hot corner I can swipe from and pop up iTunes U immediately whenever I want. (Top right is Al Jazeera, if you were wondering, bottom left Twitter, swipe the title bar to launch the Sonos controller. It's a lot of fun.)

There's a lot of science and a good amount of humanities on iTunes U. Can you learn about anything? I watched an interesting video about a pizza place and there's plenty of content about beans, but search for Oregon and it's a real stretch. Transgender history (something my university in Oregon was great at teaching) is not a search query that brings much in the way of results.

Existentialism looks OK, psychedelics are a wasteland, rodentia is touched upon but birthday parties as a query is a bust. So it's a mixed bag! That was my whirlwind tour through brick and mortar university and I don't know that iTunes U can compete, but now that I'm a boring old 35 year old with a job, I love what Apple's put together so far.

Former RWW writer and leading education technology blogger Audrey Watters has criticized iTunes U for lacking in the social interactivity that so characterizes the rest of the web today and that delivers so much value elsewhere. At first I thought she was looking a gift horse in the mouth, but in time I've grown annoyed by that as well. Please, Apple, would you at least let people post comments on the videos, let other people vote comments up and down, and let us view either all comments or just those from our friends on Facebook, Twitter or...Ping? OK, so maybe it's not so hard to imagine why Apple skipped the social this time around. It sure would be nice if I could post a link to iTunes U content out to the web, though.

It is a walled garden, it's part of the iTunes Empire of Blah and there are other problems with it, but great content overcomes many things.

Witness the story of Jeremy Gleick (via), for example, a young man who has spent one hour per day learning something new, over nearly 1,000 hours now, often from iTunes U.

"Maybe you don't become an expert," Mr. Gleick says, "but you can get really good at something."

Maybe.

"What iTunes U is missing," argues web commenter Brian Crumley, "is a way to show you the steps needed to master a subject. We can all learn physics 101 but without a simple and easy way to find 102 and beyond it can get frustrating. Also the quality of many of the recorded lectures is not all that good."

Indeed, some of the lecture series aren't even in the right order in the app.

"Even though I am complaining here I still think it's an awesome service and hope it expands to anyone, not just schools," says Crumley. "If I have knowledge let me teach it to anyone in the world."

That sounds great, and it is in fact the world that is consuming the content that's here already. Estimates before the release of iTunes U on mobile were that 60% of the service's traffic comes from outside the United States.

The courses and content available on iTunes U are expanding the minds and lives of people all over the world, for only the price of an expensive machine to consume the free content. It's the only thing I've been interested in listening to when taking my dogs out lately (sorry HuffDuffer) and I'll be interested to see if I can take the time to work through some of the full courses it makes available.

Anybody that even claims to help me learn anything, any time, anywhere starts out in my good favor.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/23/itunes_u_20_not_perfect_just_awesome http://readwrite.com/2012/01/23/itunes_u_20_not_perfect_just_awesome mobile Mon, 23 Jan 2012 13:50:29 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Google announced today that it is closing a number of services that it wasn't able to attract millions of users to without making any effort. The worst of the lot to lose are two: the Social Graph API and DIY data extraction service Needlebase. Following on the heels of the kitten-stomping-bad sunsetting of Postrank, these latest closures are really meaningful, even if the adoption of the services never was.

Back when there was hope for Needlebase, the Social Graph API and for Postrank, those services represented hope for the web making the world a better place. Of course people can still use stupid Facebook to organize a protest, or Twitter to speak without hinderance to the world, but with the demise of these three efforts, some important things are lost from the web. These are the kinds of things that a benevolent organization would have invested a lot of support in, for the sake of the world.

"As we head into 2012," Dave Girouard, VP of Product Management at Google and probably the kind of person who boos after children's Christmas plays, wrote today, "we've been sticking to some old resolutions--the need to focus on building amazing products that millions of people love to use every day. That means taking a hard look at products that replicate other features, haven't achieved the promise we had hoped for or can't be properly integrated into the overall Google experience."

Rest in Peace, Needlebase

Needlebase, which came to Google in the acquisition of travel data giant ITA Software, was (is) like a magic wand; you could touch a part of the marbled, veiny web with it - and its magic would flow through every crease and crevice until the web's swirls and pockets were traced and could be illuminated in a flash of data visualization. Specifically, you could point and click to train Needlebase to recognize the various parts of a web page, then jump from page to page of structured data, extracting information and placing it in a database, map or other visual experience.

If, for example, you were preparing to attend a big conference, you could point Needlebase at the conference speakers' biographic entries, show it where the home page links are, where the "next page" links are, and then set it free. Like a cross between a bloodhound, a sheep dog and a magic unicorn, Needle would gather all those links up into a bundle. Set them inside a custom search engine and what have you got? Instant access to the collective published knowledge of every speaker's organization at a conference, usable to better understand what any other speaker says in context. In minutes.

My favorite story about using Needlebase is this one. One day here at ReadWriteWeb we caught wind of a local Salt Lake City newspaper that ran a story about a big new data center opening in town with a mystery anchor tenant. The paper believed that the tenant was Twitter, opening its first data center outside of San Francisco - as the company said it would, in a location undisclosed. We used the (now Google-acquired) web app called Needlebase to investigate.

We grabbed the URL of the Twitter List of the staff of Twitter Inc. and we trained Needlebase's point-and-click screen scraping tool to recognize what a user name, Tweet text and location field (when there was one) looked like on the page of staff Tweets. Then I clicked a button and said "go!"

In just a few minutes, the most recent 1125 Tweets from staff were pulled into Needlebase and we said "show 'em on a map!" Sure enough, one Twitter network engineer had posted a Tweet with a location attached to it right across the highway from the alleged mystery data center. He'd just left San Francisco, he had Tweeted, and arrived in Salt Lake City ready to get to work.

That Tweet was quickly deleted after we reported on it.

Needlebase was one of the most accessible of a class of tools that made data magic available to non developers. Magic.

There is too much information on the web for the human mind to understand it all, of course. The ability to draw sets of it together, to extract and sort it, and thus to discover new qualities about that which is described with the data, is humbling, it is a thing of contemporary existential beauty.

"It's not simply that there are too many brickfacts [datapoints] and not enough edifice-theories," writes author David Weinberger in his new book, Too Big to Know. "Rather, the creation of data galaxies has led us to science that sometimes is too rich and complex for reduction into theories. As science has gotten too big to know, we've adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all."

At least some of us have begun to adopt new ideas about what it means to know at all; there are not millions of happy people playing with DIY data extraction tools as a little part of that experience. And since they have not scaled in adoption, Google has decided to dismantle these instruments of ecstasy, just as the curtain began to rise from in front of the stage where the real story of life was to be seen.

Social Graph API, Great if You Care About Other People

The Google Social Graph API was an API that indexed all the rel="me" links connecting social media profiles around the web. You could use it to search for a person and discover all the places they had profiles. If you cared, that is. Google apparently doesn't, because now there's Google Plus. Presumably, not enough other people cared either. I cared though.

Here at ReadWriteWeb we like to use Martin Atkins' AJAX interface for the Google Social Graph API to find all the places that people post things around the web, just by searching for their names. It's a crude use of the tool, so much more could have been done with it.

Right: a search for my name surfaces my blog, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Quora and other profiles. Who really wants to learn new things about other people though? What a bore!

How else can you programmatically discover, from one hub of a person's identity, all the arms of their star of activity online? Being unable to know that, or being told to go instead to one single social network to learn more about real dynamic people, feels like a throw-back to the Dark Ages.

PostRank...

The worst loss to humanity at the hands of Google's startup eating monster of late remains PostRank, which Google acquired this Summer. I can't bear to write about that again, but the gist of the story is this: Postrank ingested RSS feeds and then let you filter for just the hottest content coming from any source over time; enabling you to subscribe to a much larger number of voices, with the knowledge you'd be less likely to miss anything really important. Google ended that part of the service and made it all about publishers tracking their own social media accolades, though.

The original version of Postrank was like a magic horn that a woodland fairy called Learning and Empathy could hold to its ear to hear the tiniest caterpillar stretch and yawn in the morning, along with the rest of the whole concert of forest noises (blogs), from all around the world. It was captured by Google and refashioned as a mirror for the fairy's hideous ogre sister Naked Self Interest, which the ogre (a publisher using Google Analytics) thought made her more beautiful and rich with pageviews, but which really only made her uglier and more vacuous every day.

I can't believe they are killing Needlebase and the Social Graph API. I can believe it, of course, but I'm thankful that my cynicism is still thin enough that it hurts every time something like this happens again. There are only so many more tools like this on the web left to kill, though.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/20/google_hates_kittens http://readwrite.com/2012/01/20/google_hates_kittens Analysis Fri, 20 Jan 2012 08:08:51 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick It's hard to wrap my brain around the cold cynicism of Apple's releasing a new tool to democratize the publishing of eBooks today, only to include in the tool's terms and conditions a prohibition against selling those books anywhere but through Apple's own bookstore. There's just something so achingly awful about it.

Portland, Oregon iOS developer Dan Wineman calls it unprecidented audacity. Writer Ed Bott calls it "mind-bogglingly greedy and evil." I just find it very, very sad.

Here's section 2b of the End User License Agreement of the new iBook Author program.

B. Distribution of your Work. As a condition of this License and provided you are in compliance with its terms, your Work may be distributed as follows:

(i) if your Work is provided for free (at no charge), you may distribute the Work by any available means;
(ii) if your Work is provided for a fee (including as part of any subscription-based product or
service), you may only distribute the Work through Apple and such distribution is subject to the following limitations and conditions: (a) you will be required to enter into a separate written agreement with Apple (or an Apple affiliate or subsidiary) before any commercial distribution of your Work may take place; and (b) Apple may determine for any reason and in its sole discretion not to select your Work for distribution.

The tension between the creative potential enabled by this kind of software and the crushing authoritarianism of the conditions it's shipped with is remarkable. Professional cynic Paul Carr says that's just how Apple rolls; he says we'll complain and then we'll genuflect and then we'll like it.

The multimedia interactivity of a self-published multi-touch tablet-dwelling learning experience formerly known as a text book ought to be set free to do its work - the elevation of the human condition! The web is a read/write miracle, not a read/write with permission test of aesthetic and commercial purity. It's a new world where people often give freely of the value they create in the knowledge that the aggregate results will enrich everyone. Maybe that's Wikipedia more than it is Apple though.

Steve Jobs on podcasts, September 2010. "[People want] Hollywood movies and TV shows ... they don't want amateur hour."

Perhaps no great work will ever be created with this new authoring tool. Perhaps many will be created, they just won't travel very far. What a terrible thing to do to a book; to brand it forever constrained for sale by a single vendor only.

Is this what the world is to come to? To a clean, crisp, cold beauty of high-end consumer goods that promise to empower but only under the watchful eye of the world's most profitable corporation? Why does it have to be this way, Apple?

See also former RWW writer Audrey Watters at HackEducation: Apple and the Digital Textbook Counter-Revolution

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/19/why_apple_why_does_it_have_to_be_like_this_the_col http://readwrite.com/2012/01/19/why_apple_why_does_it_have_to_be_like_this_the_col E-Books Thu, 19 Jan 2012 10:50:40 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick Unemployment among youth of color is widespread & complex; can a tech education startup change things?

The White House announced new participation in a jobs initiative yesterday from fast-growing technical education website Codecademy, as well as some venerable social justice oriented organizations Level Playing Field Institute and College Bound Brotherhood, a group dedicated to increasing the number of young African American men prepared for college. Called Summer Jobs +, the program aims to get young poor and marginalized people into paid technical training programs over Summer vacation.

It's an ambitious effort to tackle a very complicated problem. It's going to be a lot easier said than done.

A Big Problem

While the national unemployment rate remains high after years of recession and economic change, unemployment is even higher among African American youth (estimated at 40%) and Latino youth (estimated between 25% and 35%). "With youth unemployment nearly triple the overall rate and much higher among young Americans of color, attention to this problem is more than welcome," Roberto Viramontes, Vice President of Education Policy at the First Focus Campaign for Children, said in response to my request for comment on the Summer Jobs + program.

The decline of employment opportunities for unskilled workers in general has long lead to calls for youth training programs. Critics say the federal job training programs for young people have long been in need of modernization.

Anti-poverty advocates (none of whom I inquired with were anxious to say much on the record) emphasize that meaningful change requires more than just skill building in things like software coding. Some believe that in order to succeed such programs need to invest first in finding young people most likely to benefit from this kind of support. Then, after training is completed, programs must work directly on connecting newly trained young people with employers if they are to make a meaningful difference in people's lives. Will the Summer Jobs+ program include those kinds of steps? There was no mention of them in the program's announcement this week. It may take years of experience before a person can get a job coding, maybe this is just to get a taste of what's possible.

Other anti-poverty advocates say that technical skills like coding are not enough to provide the comprehensive preparation young people on the margins of society need in order to become meaningfully employed. Many young people need training on things like creating a good resume and dealing with difficult questions in an interview if they are to be prepared to remain in the workforce over the long term. That comprehensive set of skills is something that several organizations participating in the Summer Jobs + program are well-equipped to confer.

Can the amalgamation of organizations working to teach young poor people of color to code, pull this all off? The depth of need in the communities at issue is such that advocates say many programs in the past have seen their funding sucked dry with huge need remaining.

This is a very complicated, challenging problem.

Codecademy

Codecademy, the hip new web app that teaches its users basic coding skills and that will be an important part of this initiative, is one of many new education and personal change apps to emerge online in recent months.

Codecademy in particular has faced criticism lately concerning its ease of use. Specifically, some people have said that the site makes it difficult to know how to get back on track when a user has made a mistake in working on a lesson. I've experienced that on the site, too. Others say it still presumes too much knowledge of how computers work. The developer-centric community at Hacker News was very critical of Codecademy this week and the site's founders appeared in comments there to assure readers they were working to respond to issues raised.

In Codecademy's own announcement of the partnership with the White House and the other participants in the program, there was a conspicuous absence of any discussion regarding the race or class dynamics of the program. I raised this concern in a comment on the announcement post last night, but none of the comments posted have been responded to by Codecademy.

I'm concerned that failure to even mention that part of the program could indicate that the makers of the technical education materials aren't taking matters of race and class into much consideration. US Federal CTO Aneesh Chopra said the purpose of the program is "to provide pathways to employment for low-income and disconnected youth." Codecademy describes it simply as a program intended "to get more kids and adults learning to code."

You know what they say: those who ignore history risk repeating it. The Libertarian political leanings of so much of the tech industry puts programs like this at risk of ignoring the historic marginalization of certain segments of society and thus repeating it, as part of a faux-egalitarianism where blindness to difference effectively keeps the same people on top, in the end. I don't know any of the people involved in Codecademy, but I bet I'm not the only person who looked at its co-founders' Venture Capital backed, Ivy League educated, white boy resumes and their announcement about this program with no mention of race or class, with skepticism.

That the announcement of a White House partnership to train young poor people of color in coding shared a Codecademy blog post with an announcement of offline meetups of Codecademy users around the country and that the post called the meet-ups more important just seemed rude. ("...This will be a shorter course than Code Year that aims to teach people the basics of programming. You can find a bit more on the White House's blog. More importantly, we're pleased to announce that we're moving Codecademy from being a strictly online learning platform to something you can do offline as well.")

The politically questionable announcement of the partnership with the White House was a small paragraph surrounded by multiple paragraphs of rah-rah about Codecademy's hitting 1 million users (thanks to a year-end push and 1 hour of design work) and a list of tech industry luminaries' names getting dropped that the startup thanks for its success.

Paul Graham says that young people are often the only ones ignorant enough of how much hard boring work is involved with building a company that they are willing to do it. Simplistic youthful bravado may not be an asset though when the problem you're trying to tackle is the underemployment of poor young people of color.

It's a big initiative tackling a big, complicated problem, but it sure is important. I'm concerned about how well tech and politics will come together in this case, but we can all hope it will work out well and the world will be changed for the better.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/18/can_codecademy_teach_poor_black_brown_kids_to_code http://readwrite.com/2012/01/18/can_codecademy_teach_poor_black_brown_kids_to_code Analysis Wed, 18 Jan 2012 12:02:10 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick The official blog of Open Street Map reports tonight that someone at a range of Google IP addresses in India has been editing the collaboratively made map of the world in some very unhelpful ways, like moving and deleting information and reversing the direction of one-way streets on the map.

Update: Google sent the following statement to ReadWriteWeb on Tuesday morning. "The two people who made these changes were contractors acting on their own behalf while on the Google network. They are no longer working on Google projects."

The IP addresses match the same ones that were caught last week running a long-term scam wherein telephone directory listings were scraped from a crowd-sourced phone directory in Kenya called Mocality. A Google contractor then systematically called those phone numbers claiming to have a paid placement deal jointly offered by the Kenyan company and Google! A Google spokesperson told BoingBoing on Friday that the company was "mortified" by the discovery - but now it appears the same Google contractor may be behind mayhem rippling throughout one of the world's biggest maps. Google says it's investigating these latest allegations.

Open Street Map said tonight that two user accounts have been found vandalizing streets in New York, London and elsewhere since at least last Thursday. Full investigation of the actions may take time, OSM said, because at least 17 user accounts have accessed OSM from those Google IP adresses more than 100,000 times over the past year.

Is this a Google contractor with something against crowdsourced projects? That's one thing both targets have in common. Neither offense seems short-lived or trivial though, either.

Open Street Map is like Wikipedia for world maps. It's a fabulous and inspiring project, I think, but not everyone agrees.

In August 2010, Open Street Map co-founder Steve Coast wrote a long blog post titled Enough is Enough: Disinfecting OSM from Poisonous People. That post has been read by almost 175,000 people.

Coast said that divisive conversations "have spilled over now from poisonous people merely making life difficult on the mailing list, to paralyzing the project and even systematically corrupting the data we serve out using bots...Many (if not most or all) of the key people in OSM are feeling drained, distracted and upset. Some are talking of hiatus or resign. These are the key people who write code, build things, maintain things and run our working groups."

Three months after writing that post, Coast left the company that supports Open Street Map and became the Principal Architect at Bing Maps.

Coast was one of three signers of tonight's blog post that concludes as follows:

"These actions are somewhat baffling given our past good relationship with Google which has included donations and Summer of Code work. As a community we take the quality of our data extremely seriously and look forward to an explanation from Google and an undertaking to not allow this kind of thing to happen in the future."

In response to our request for comment, a Google spokesperson said tonight, "We're aware of OpenStreetMap's claims that vandalism of OSM is occurring from accounts originating at a Google IP address. We are investigating the matter and will have more information as soon as possible."

It will be interesting to see how the company responds to this, the second serious allegation of wrongdoing by one of its contracting companies inside of a week.

It would be nice if Open Street Map could continue to flourish and grow. Bad actors may be an inevitable issue for an open site building collective knowledge at scale, but it would be good if people sitting in Google offices around the world were all helping instead of hurting such efforts. Reversing the direction on one-way streets is a particularly nasty thing to do.

]]> http://readwrite.com/2012/01/16/google_osm_vandalism http://readwrite.com/2012/01/16/google_osm_vandalism Google Mon, 16 Jan 2012 13:37:49 -0800 Marshall Kirkpatrick