Were you surprised that the Boston Marathon bombers were caught on video? You shouldn't have been. How about a meteor falling in Russia? Or a pizza delivery guy urinating on a customer's door after receiving too small a tip? Then there's that plane crashing on a Russian highway.

All these phenomena are part of an ubertrend I call Voyeurgasm - and it's changing our lives and maybe even your future.

CBS dedicates part of its website, called Caught on Tape, to videos like these. It's a nod to the global popularity of YouTube, which announced this March that it reached 1 billion monthly users who watch some 6 billion hours of video each month.

The History Of Voyeurgasm

Voyeurgasm, the "I like to watch" ubertrend, made its debut with the Rodney King beating in 1991, arguably one of the first surreptitiously videotaped events to make headlines. What came next was a host of candid moments caught by camcorders, surveillance cameras or mobile phones - a wave that virtually guarantees that one day just about everything will be digitally captured.

This ubertrend spurred a host of subtends, including reality shows, like MTV's The Real World, which debuted in 1992; Celebrity Worship Syndrome, coined in 2003 and propelled by "pixel paparazzis;" HDTV in 1998; helicopter police chases, including the infamous 1994 O.J. Simpson car chase; YouTube in 2005; and now Google Glass.

(See also Google Glass: What Do You Want To Know About Google's Internet Eyewear.)

The current concerns about Google Glass and the privacy issues its surreptitious use entails are just a preview of things to come. Here's how Voyeurgasm will reshape your future, including business ideas and career opportunities:

1-3. Streaming Media

With YouTube now receiving some 72 hours of video every minute, it's evident that growth of mobile videos opens many opportunities for entrepreneurs to create dedicated sites to harness the millions of hours of videos that will be uploaded each minute by 2020. Here are a few ideas that merit your attention:

1. Makeup Videos: A quick Google search suggests that this segment is wide open with Makeup Geek being the top player. Not only could beauty sites encourage the improved application of makeup, but they would also propel new makeup trends, like High Definition Makeup.

2. Nature/Underwater Videos: Nature and underwater video searches lead to YouTube channels - but YouTube is a general-interest destination and is not likely to be the first choice of dedicated birdwatchers or snorkelers. This presents an opportunity to sell outdoors or underwater gear to intrepid visitors.

3. Shopping Videos: We like to buy stuff, so we watch a lot of "unboxing" videos on YouTube. That means there is plenty of opportunity to create innovative shopping videos that provide visitors with quick, yet informative insights about buying particular products. Once again a search for "shopping videos" leads to positively benign results.

4. Video Recruitment

In the next four years, about 20 million college graduates will be looking for full-time employment. Since few possess relevant experience, a quick 90-second video might give a prospective employer a better insight into their talents. Monster accepts videos for recruiters, but few recruitment sites let you add video profiles. One new player, GetHired.com does play up this feature.

5. Looking At Cooking

As the Cox News Service reported back in Jan. 2007, "It's one of the ironies of modern life that cooking shows and books are so hugely popular when much of the time we eat on the move or settle down in front of the TV with a microwaved frozen dinner. The preparing, cooking, tasting and eating of food have become voyeuristic pleasures separated from physical reality." The trend is dubbed "gastroporn." While this segment may be well-covered by television networks, what about facility and supply management? Think kitchen demonstration studios or food prep staffers who specialize in optimizing food for video consumption.

6. YouTube Studio Rentals

So now you're ready to shoot your gastroporn or job-seeking vid - but how do you make it great? Some folks have beautiful decks or nice living rooms but few have access to camera-friendly backdrops, let alone the lighting setups needed to shoot professional-looking videos. It's odd that entrepreneurs haven't thought of opening up a national chain of "YouTube Studios" - facilities you could rent by the hour to shoot your talkshow or other viral inspiration.

7. Video Accessories

You have decided to become a pixel paparazzi- on a budget. So can you handhold your iPhone or Android handset to shoot your videos? Sure, but some kind of steady grip would be better. With the notable exception of UK-based Modahaus, which offers the iPhone Steady Stand ($20), few companies have staked out this product category. One Kickstarter project, the Paparazzo Light, failed - perhaps due to a lack of audience reach or functionality.

8. Surveillance Gear

A market research report from ReportsNReports estimates that the market for smart surveillance gear and video analytics will explode from $14 billion in 2012 to $39 billion by 2020. A poll conducted after the Boston bombing found broad public support for surveillance gear, with 78% of Americans saying they thought surveillance cameras were a good idea. Frankly, I'm amazed that those Russian dashboard cams are not more popular here in America.

Are you ready to leverage the increased transparency offered by Voyeurgasm? You know what they say, "There are people who make things happen, there are those who watch things happen, and there are people who wonder what happened." This ubertrend offers the opportunity to do the first two at the same time so you don't have to do the last one. 

See also:

• 10 Compelling Ways People Plan To Use Google Glass
• 5 Socially Unacceptable Things You're Going To Do WIth Google Glass
• Google Glass: Our Lives Are Not Reality TV
• Google Glass: Is There Any Way To Jam It?

How many times have you had a brainstorm on how to improve your local community? What about that dangerous intersection that needs more warning lights? Or an idea that could help your city become a magnet for fill-in-the-blank activities? Head to MindMixer, a platform that is helping organizations communicate more effectively with their communities.

One of the biggest roadblocks to implementing local community ideas is finding resources in city government or local organizations who might be able to help. More importantly, how can you involve like-minded individuals in the discussion?

MindMixer = A New Type Of Civic Engagement Platform

A new type of civic engagement platform - like MindMixer - can help. MindMixer is in essence a “virtual town hall,” a community forum where constituents can meet to discuss issues and share ideas. (Here’s an overview of how MindMixer works.)

Without time and location constraints, citizens can conveniently share ideas while managers gain community insights. According to the 2012 CivicPlus Digital Citizen Engagement survey, 40% of citizens want to provide input on municipal government.

From Los Angeles To Calgary

MindMixer COO Nathan Preheim tells me that the company has attracted more than 300 communities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, plus its first Canadian client, the city of Calgary. Among civic, education and healthcare organizations that are using the service to engage their communities, the governor of Colorado is using it to better engage his entire state.

Here are a few examples of how municipals governments are using MindMixer:

Orlando, FL: When residents were asked how much more they would be willing to pay to have half of their food sourced from local farms, 36% of respondents said they would pay 10% more, and 22% said they'd pay 5% more. While the response rate was low, it shows the potential of civic engagement as the use of these platforms increases.

Boulder, CO: InspireBoulder held a Reusable Bag Design Competition on the MindMixer site. The winning design is set to be used on 30,000 reusable grocery bags to be distributed by the city.

Park City, UT: One resident’s idea to implement a community composting program became a reality when Park City’s Environmental Sustainability Manager approved the concept, which is similar to an ordinance passed by the city of San Francisco.

MindMixer Buys VoterTide

MindMixer recently acquired VoterTide, a social media intelligence company that specializes in activating audiences who follow hot topics for political campaigns, non-profits and special-interest groups. Preheim says the company’s thinking was, “How can we use social media to help our clients better engage topics?”

All existing clients will have access to Votertide audiences. Going forward, adds Preheim, “We are in the process of building an application framework, called Community Insights.”

Given the current pressure to shrink governments, the populace will have to take more active roles in the governance of their communities. Platforms like MindMixer could make it easier for people to take on and succees in those new roles.

If you tuned into the Presidential debates this past Fall you may have caught the one moderated by CNN personality Candy Crowley. Remarkably, it was the first presidential debate moderated by a female in 20 years. Wonder how that dry spell ended? Because of a petition created at Change.org.

Debate organizers were influenced by three Montclair, N.J. high school students, who, inspired by a civics class, were able to sign up more than 180,000 supporters for their online petition.

30 Million Signatures

One of the biggest challenges of finding innovative new ways of doing things is monetization, and that's where Change.org shines. The company has in effect become a marketing machine for mostly non-profit organizations. It has also boosted its beneficial standing by becoming a certified B Corp.

Change.org is designed to make creating petitions easy, and features selected petitions on its home page.

Future Changes

The way Change.org works is simple. Anyone can start a petition for free, but qualified organizations can send sponsored petitions to specific Change.org members by paying a premium. “Every package is custom built for each sponsor,” Dulski says, adding that “we have people in house who know how to make petitions stronger.”

The future for sponsored Change.org petitioners seems bright. Dulski promises that the company is “going to develop a great analytics platform for sponsors, so we’re able to better reach the kind of people who are passionate about their causes.”

One recent victory had 200,000 Gatorade consumers using Change.org to demand the removal of the controversial ingredient BVO from its product bottles. Gatorade removed the ingredient, scoring a victory for the 15-year-old Mississippi teenager who started the petition.

International Action

While most of its biggest victories have been in the U.S., Change.org has become a global phenomenon. “We have staff in 18 countries,” notes Dulski. A perfect example of that global power was the petition calling for Malala Yyousafzai, the Pakistani girl shot for advocating female education, to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize. This petition, posted by Tarek Fatah of Toronto, has gained more than 287,000 supporters.

With influence comes power that translates into more galvanizing events - and that, in turn, attracts even more users. Do you have an innovation that could use the gravy train of a complementary business? Can you leverage the Time Compression Ubertrend to create a service that helps consumers save time? I’m ready to file my petition to help America become more innovative.

One of the big promises of social networking is that it will inject your networking skills with PED (performance enhancing data), able to give you the biggest network on the block. If you're a believer in the raw power of oh-so many social connections, that's OK. But if you're like me, you'll already hearing Janet Jackson's hit, What Have You Done For Me Lately? playing in your head. 

The problem with most social media is that the quality of your network degenerates as it grows. At first, best friends and business connections are added. Only to be followed by many requests from friends with few benefits. That sentiment may be harsh but in this day and age of Time Compression, the greatest value of business networking lies in its ability to improve daily dealings.

Unfortunately, as I'm sure you've already discovered, many of your "extremely well-connected" network contacts turn out to be, more often than not, less than stellar. So expect the next generation of social networks to devote a lot more attention to the purview of social capital.

Doing It The Analog Way

One company that provides a peek into the future of social networking is New York-based Relationship Science, a company founded by Neal Goldman, who reportedly raised the first $3 million of his $60 million investment in just three days.

Relationship Science has built the ultimate business Who's Who directory, relying on a staff of more than 800 people, located mostly in India. The data gathered over the past two years is derived strictly from publicly available information, Relationship Science CMO Josh Mait tells me.

What sets the company apart from most online directories is its interface. As Mait describes it, Relationship Science offers "institutional grade data in a consumer-friendly interface."

To use the data effectively you need to identify people you know well. Once your relationships are tagged, the system will show your total number of first-degree connections, which in Mait's case was about 18,000 connections produced by just 50 tagged relationships.

Relationship Science has cataloged millions of people and organized their affinities, connections and special interests in the ultimate networking directory, also conveniently available via iPad, as this image demonstrates.

Finding A Path

One of the most powerful features of Relationship Science is Path Finder, which lets you visually see how you're connected to someone else, say for example, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. Relationship links are color-coded as either strong, average or weak.

These relationships are based on many data elements, including education, memberships, interests, affiliations, career, boards, committees, non-profit donations, public holdings, awards and events. Anyone in sales will really appreciate this level of data granularity, all delivered in a simple interface.

Mait adds, "Our investors invested in the product because they saw themselves in it, networking is how they became successful." I truly believe that social networks like Linked In could learn from Relationship Science, although the company vigorously denies that it's a social network or a "traditional CRM system."

I predict that a lot of social innovation will come in the area of superior connection building. The watchword of the future being "social capital." People who blow other people off without communication will in the very near future be anonymously rated by their social media peers.

And those ratings will pop up in social capital databases that everyone will tap into. We can't wait to see how this futuristic science of relationships helps us all perform better. Until then, I suggest you spend $3,000 a year on Relationship Science. There's no better way to get to Howard Schultz.

Images via Relationship Science.

Editors Note: A previous version of this story incorrectly noted the cost of the Relationship Science service as $3000/month. It is actually $3000/year, and the article has been updated to reflect that amount.

In the past few weeks, I have written two stories about the menace the Internet represents, particularly in view of the hacking attacks almost certainly perpetrated by the Chinese Red Army. In particular, my contention that we need to develop a next generation Internet that's more secure and, preferably, walled in, drew a lot of heated commentary.

Here are just a few of the choicest ones:

• This is unmitigated isolationist idiocy.
• Seriously... is this a spoof article?
• This post should not appear in readwriteweb.

(See World War III Is Already Here - And We're Losing and Cyberwar Imperative: We Need A Next-Generation Internet.)

Hacking As Retaliation?

That's great, and maybe there really isn't any problem here. But the fact is that about 10 days after the first story ran - I got hacked.

A coincidence? I think not.

Or maybe it was my own doing, astutely observed one reader: "I asked for it." Now where have I heard that blame game before?

So what happened? Someone hacked my email password and sent thousands for spam messages using my account. I knew something was wrong when I suddenly was inundated with "Mail delivery failed" subject lines. My Twitter account was hacked, too, but that could just be Twitter's lax security measures.

Of course, there's no way to tell if the dirty deed was done by the Chinese, or even whether it was in retaliation for the articles. But the timing certainly seems suspect.

In his State of the Union address, President Obama ranked hackers and cyber attacks among the greatest economic and national U.S. security threats. The President's response was to issue an executive order calling for more sharing of cyber-attack and threat information between private and public sectors. Naturally, civil libertarians object to this executive order due to potential invasions of privacy.

Solution: Fix the Internet Itself

A far more practical idea comes form New England Complex Systems Institute, which is set to publish a report next week that agrees with my stated principles. The NECSI report blames the problem on the Internet itself, and says that the only solution is to redesign it.

"The current design of the Internet is inherently insecure," says NECSI President and co-author Yaneer Bar-Yam in a press release. "Any node can be attacked from any other node, requiring the entire network to be fortified against all possible attacks, an unrealistic goal," adds Bar-Yam.

That would require redesigning the Internet's architecture itself. The report proposes substantial changes to routers in charge of switching data packets between network nodes.

"Collective security-preventing attacks would require that the routers of the Internet themselves would need to have protocols that allow refusal of transmission based upon content or extrinsic information such as point of origin," according to the study's authors.

The study, Principles of Security: Human, Cyber and Biological, was developed at the request of a long-term military planning group, the Strategic Studies Group, which reports to the Chief of Naval Operations. The report is being released for the first time to the public next week.

As for me, I'm glad to see that other people are thinking about realistic solutions to make our Internet less vulnerable to attacks of all kinds.

Image of alleged Chinese hackers compound courtesy of Reuters.

So Burger King's Twitter account got hacked on Monday. Apple and Facebook got attacked too. And so it goes. Within a few years, the Internet will be engulfed by "nuclear" warfare, but the bombs will be entirely created in plain ASCII text. What can be done?

We need a new Internet, that’s all. One designed from the ground up to be far more secure than what we have today. A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about the Chinese hacking into The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. All because they delved too deeply into the affairs of some Chinese government officials.

On Tuesday, Mandiant released two reports that not only provided more evidence to support its allegations that many hacking attacks originate in China, but also pinpointed the exact location, a 12-story building on the outskirts of Shanghai. As The New York Times put it, that building is the “People’s Liberation Army base for China’s growing corps of cyberwarriors.”

The hacking underground is teeming with activity, as witnessed by the Apple and Facebook attacks. In Apple’s case, a worm was unleashed when employees visited a site called iPhoneDevSDK.

No Evidence?

I shuddered at the foregone conclusion of some media outlets: “there was no evidence that any data left Apple.”

Really?

They can break in at will but they have to leave evidence that they took stuff? Then there was the wholesale hacking of the Burger King Twitter account, which resulted in a string of profane tweets.

Like I wrote in World War III Is Already Here - And We're Losing, we’re smiling the enemy in the face. In that article, I proposed that America ramp up its investment spending in cyber security and robotics dramatically, by boosting cyber-security investment to $5 billion and robotics to $20 billion, annually.

As Steve Blank observes, “We are getting our asses handed to us by the Chinese. Almost irrationally we have decided not to have a National Industrial policy — leaving that to private capital.”

Who Will Lead The Charge?

So it’s up to us pundits in the media to lead the charge for disruptive change. And one thing that clearly has to go, in its current form, is the Internet. I propose the U.S. create a next-generation Internet, a superset, or n-th layer if you will, that make our critical Internet infrastructure, which is now largely powering the U.S. economy, less massively vulnerable to hacking attacks.

We have already seen what Russia did to Estonia in 2007 and to Georgia in 2008. Now imagine what a full-blown war would look like today - or in 2015?

Way back in August 2006, Bloomberg BusinessWeek cited a counterintelligence report that found at least 108 countries engaged in “collection efforts against sensitive and protected U.S. technologies),” up from 37 a decade ago. Now that’s a trend. Among the few countries specifically mentioned, China and Russia were among “the most aggressive” in targeting the U.S.

The Fiscal Times, a publication funded by Peter Peterson, agrees with my bleak assessment: Chinese Attacks Reveal an Undeclared Global Cyber War.

Next-Generation Internet: Wants & Needs

So how should this Next-Generation Internet be architected?

I will give you my wish list and you, tech wizards, can write the spec:

• Secure: It should be extremely secure, from day one. I know some will say that anything can be hacked, but let’s put the fence up high enough so that climbing it becomes a relatively esoteric art.
• Real ID: Everyone using it in an official U.S. capacity should be readily identifiable. I propose some type of next-generation eye-recognition technology using a computer or mobile camera. This will help sites like LinkedIn and Facebook in their endless battle against identity fraud. It will also help deter spamming because each business will need to use its “eyeD” to launch a marketing campaign.
• America Only: It should be accessible by Americans only, for obvious reasons. Americans are free to leave the Next Gen Internet, but they do so as their own discretion.

I’m sure many people can’t believe I would even propose such a thing. I know that things are going to have to get a lot worse before anyone takes my proposals seriously.

That's OK. I've already called this World War III, and it's only beginning to escalate. To win, we'll need to innovate. And that means staying ahead of the pack.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Every day the Pentagon is attacked 3 million times. They’ve infiltrated our banks. They’ve ransacked our technology industry. They’ve breached the networks of the Chamber of Commerce. They’ve read our email by taking down one of America’s pre-eminent technology companies, Google. It’s already World War III, people. And all we do is smile at the enemy.

Last Wednesday, The New York Times announced that its computers had been hacked. That passwords had been stolen. That its private networks had been traversed with impunity by a bunch of brazen hackers. We’re not talking Anonymous here nor a bunch of ethical hackers. No we’re at war with China.

To paraphrase an old newspaper joke, “what’s black and white and red all over?” The Chinese Red Army, that’s who.

How do we know that? As William Gibson might bark, “Pattern Recognition!” Computer security experts consulting with The New York Times identified the malware “as a specific strain associated with computer attacks originating in China.”

There other telltale signs. Like the fact the hackers broke into The Times’ computers starting on Sept. 13, as the newspaper was putting its final touches on a report that the relatives of China’s Prime Minister Wen Jiabao had accumulated a fortune worth several billion dollars through business dealings.

The Definition Of War

In May 2011, the Pentagon promised it would announce a formal strategy to deter cyberattacks by declaring foreign computer hacks an act of war. But despite mounting evidence that Chinese attacks continue relentlessly, there has been no further action. In view of all the recent happenings, that’s tantamount to raising the white flag.

The New York Times was not the only company hacked. That same day, The Wall Street Journal admitted it too had been infiltrated by Chinese hackers who apparently were trying to monitor its China coverage. And Bloomberg computers were infected by Chinese hackers after the company published an article on June 29, 2012 about the wealth accumulated by relatives of Xi Jinping, China’s vice president at the time.

But media companies are not the only ones being breached. An Air Force Cyber Command Recruiting video on YouTube urgently proclaims, “This building will be attacked 3 million times today,” while hovering over the Pentagon. Those are blatant acts of war, people, and the daily siege of the Pentagon is just part of today’s cyber-warfare landscape.

Cyberattacks are exploding. In Jan. 2010, Google, Intel, Adobe and and more than 30 other companies were attacked in a coordinated terrorist campaign. Google said the attacks originated in China, which lead the company to abandon the Chinese market. If Google leaves the world’s largest market, what does that say about the enemy?

In January 2011, Morgan Stanley admitted it too had been hit by the same China-based hackers who attacked Google’s computers, an operation dubbed “Aurora” by cyber-security firm McAfee. Terremark Worldwide estimates that the number of companies known to be hacked in Operation Aurora now exceeds 200.

While government organizations and companies spend vast amounts of money on security precautions, the situation is so dire that the Defense Department, whose Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) developed the Internet in the 1960s, “is beginning to think it created a monster,” reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

What Should We Do?

Let me repeat that again, the inventors of the Internet you like and use so much think they’ve created a monster! So what should we do?

I believe we need a serious dose of innovation and reinvention to stem this monster tidal wave.

America today spends about $718 billion on defense and security. Most of that money is spent on resources and equipment designed for old-fashioned warfare.

The reality is that World War III is being fought in cyberspace and most real-life interaction will be handled by robots. And in both sectors our public and private capital spending priorities are completely misaligned.

The global cyber security market was valued at $64 billion in 2011, or less than 10% of what the U.S. spends on defense and security. Major U.S. players include CA Technologies, Cisco Systems, Fortinet, IBM, McAfee and Symantec. International security firms include Check Point Software (Israel) and Kaspersky (Russia).

Our venture capital scenario is not much better. In 2011, VCs collectively invested $935 million in tech security companies, nearly double the $498 million they invested in 2010, according to a MoneyTree report compiled by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Venture Capital Association and Thomson Reuters.

Clearly, the U.S. cyber security market is woefully underfunded. As Delaware Senator Thomas Carper puts it, “The issue of Cyber Warfare is not science fiction any more. It’s reality.” Here’s what I believe we should do:

* U.S. Defense Budget – America should reshape its defense budget to reflect the reality that World War III is already here and it’s being fought in the cyber trenches. This means the Pentagon should officially declare Chinese cyber attacks as foreign warfare and treat the matter with the utmost urgency.

* Robotics - The worldwide robotics industry today is a $25 billion global industry, with most R&D activity taking place in South Korea and Japan. How can America allow its next-generation cyber-soldier technology to be based on foreign know-how? My recommendation: put the U.S. on a robotics fast-track with a combined government-private sector investment budget of $20 billion annually.

* Cyber Security – Like the robotics industry, cyber security is in dire need of more attention, but it’s not very sexy. VCs are falling all over themselves to fund the next Facebook or Snapchat, but what if those services could no longer function because the Chinese brought the Internet to its knees with relentless denial-of-service attacks? That $1 billion VCs invested in 2011 in cyber security is a drop in the bucket compared to the Pentagon’s $718 billion budget. We need to ratchet this up to $5 billion, preferably $10 billion, by next year.

* Internet 2 – As the pronouncements of DARPA suggest, the Internet was not designed for what it’s doing today. Please take some time to read this Bloomberg Businessweek story, it’s downright scary. We need to insulate this country from the enemy, and that means designing an all-new Internet, one created from the ground up for secure operations, and preferably one that insulates the U.S. from the rest of the world.

I’m sure this last bit of advice will have free-thinkers around the world cringing. But when the Chinese decide that you’ve had enough freedom, it might be too late to come to your senses. I fully expect to be hacked by the Chinese this week.

I’ve added Mandiant to my address book. I rather be safe than sorry. And please do contribute to my crowdsourced ideation engine to suggest more ideas on how we can protect ourselves in this brave new world.

Image courtesy of Larry Ye / Shutterstock.

You have a brilliant software idea. Now you need to design a good-looking prototype. You look around. You search high and low. Chances are you will dig up a sum total of three usable tools.

That’s right, three.

Rapid Prototyping Is A Wasteland

Welcome to the largely ignored world of rapid prototyping.

If you design on the PC, you can choose from three tools:

1. Axure RP ($290)
2. Mockup Builder (free)
3. Serena Prototype Composer 3 (free/$300)

If you prototype on the Mac, your three choices are:

1. Axure RP
2. Balsamic Mockups ($79)
3. Sencha Architect ($400)

Balsamiq Mockups is a cross-platform rapid software prototyping tool that allows a UX designer to quickly create a mockup of software screens. This is a prototype I created for a next-generation CRM program. One major quibble: no ready-made icons for folders or documents.

If you develop mobile apps or websites, there are more choices, including Protoshare ($29/mo.), a Web-based (SaaS) software solution and Tiggzi ($40/mo.). If you like to design apps entirely on the iPad, there’s AppCooker ($40), AppSketcher (free), Blueprint Lite (free), Interface HD ($10), iMockups for iPad ($7) and Mockop (free), plus many others.

According to an educated guess, there are some 12 million programmers worldwide. That’s equal to the population of metropolitan Los Angeles.

Now imagine you are one of those 12 million LA inhabitants, and you have only three, maybe four, auto repair shops to choose from. What’s wrong with that picture? The size of the global information technology industry was estimated at $3.8 trillion in 2012, according to Gartner.

The same CRM mockup created in Azure RP, another cross-platform prototyping tool, that creates more buttoned-up designs. Tools that address various software design work styles are much needed.

Here’s a another cogent example. I searched the Home Depot site for cordless drills and found 348 search results. Try it yourself. And that’s for a global power tool market that will reach only $27 billion by 2015.

The Disconnect Opportunity

Notice a disconnect here? In a previous post, I wrote about the need to create 1,000 user-experience (UX) design studios in the U.S. alone. These studios would require a healthy infrastructure of innovative rapid prototyping and coding tools. Yet it's clear that when it comes to creating software, designers lack much choice.

What type of prototyping tools are needed? For one, they should be collaborative. I know this because I found a sparse factoid on the design activities of programmers that suggests that unlike the relatively solitary activity of coding and testing, designing interfaces requires much collaborative work.

Finding the above statistic buried in a Microsoft site full of articles about finding bugs was a worrisome sign all in itself. You would think that, given a $4 trillion information technology economy, there would be a lot more research about software-design habits.

Please plug this innovation gap, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists! We need a lot more help to make software work the way it was intended. And do contribute to my crowdsourced ideation engine and suggest more ideas on what type of software is needed to help create a next-generation software economy.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Cue released data this week that shows that the average number of email messages received by users of its service in 2012 was 5,579. While that figure is not representative of the market at large, it does show how much traffic many email inboxes handle year in, year out.

And how are we coping with that onslaught? Not very well. Cue reports that average email response time lengthened from 2.2 days to 2.5 days. That’s not surprising given that Cue users wrote a staggering 41,368 email words on average in 2012, the equivalent of the 1954 novel, Lord of the Flies.

Our Email Tools Are Prehistoric

The email tools many use to manage this tsunami were created in pre-historic times. Microsoft Outlook dates back to 1992 with the release of Outlook for MS-DOS. Its Outlook Express 1.0 stable mate was released in 1996.

Based on my analysis of data compiled by Campaign Monitor, these Microsoft desktop clients continue to rule the roost, with about 30% of desktop usage. Web-based email is the overall leader at 48% but that includes mobile as well. Note that these figures are not mutually exclusive since many people now use several ways to access email.

The multi-client trend is quite evident when you consider mobile use. According to Campaign Monitor, mobile clients overtook desktop-based email in February 2012, with iOS devices leading the way capturing 87% of email use.

The unfortunate reality over the past few years is that desktop software innovation has almost ground to a halt due to a major shift in focus to mobile apps.

But while it’s nice to occasionally tap an email response on your mobile device, fact is hard-core productivity still largely takes place on the desktop. And with desktop I also, of course, refer to notebook computers, since notebook sales surpassed that of desktops in either 2008 or 2009, depending on whether you believe iSupply or Reuters.

Gartner predicts that by 2015, a scant two years from now, the installed base of PCs will top 2.3 billion. By comparison, as of 2012, the installed base of smartphones was 1 billion worldwide.

So while I hate to be a bubble-bursting buzz kill, take your mind off of mobile for an instance, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, and focus on where the real productivity action remains. It’s a topic I have covered twice in ReadWrite: 'Screensucking’ Is Sapping American Productivity And Innovation and Why Aren’t Entrepreneurs Developing Innovative Solutions For Renters?

Great Minds Think Alike

Luckily, there are a few brave souls who are fighting the mobile tide. Since email is a disaster and not looking to get any better soon, progressive designers at AOL, yes you read that right: AOL, have come up with an innovative email client, called Alto.

What I like about Alto is how it graphically manages your email, making the process quasi-enjoyable. You can quickly create “stacks” for certain emails, click on “snooze” for others and connect your social media. Alto is currently available for AOL, Gmail, iCloud and Yahoo! webmail.

AOL has cooked up an innovative new way to manage your webmail. Alto is a free service that can quickly help you create topic-based e-mail “stacks” and leverage your social networks to help bring your e-mail to life.

While Alto is a commendable idea, let me help you architect the next big thing in email. The worst aspect of email is prioritizing. While a few startups are trying to solve this problem, namely Tray.io plus the aforementioned Cue, most require that you create cumbersome rules for each contact. That’s too much to ask of anyone in business.

Programmers - Not Users - Should Do The Sorting

Inboxes need intelligence and should learn from watching users interact. It’s far easier for a programmer to write a few rules that help auto-sort email. Cue notes that 56% of e-mails are answered in one hour. So the first if-then rule should be: “If an email reply is sent in less than 60 minutes, then add recipient to key contacts list.”

Other semantic or image parsing techniques could be used to alleviate mailbox logjams. For example, many users are inundated with “Bacn” - self-requested spam sent by merchants, social networks and businesses. Some users like to scan and delete these messages, others like to file Bacn in special folders.

An intelligent email program could manage the process for you. All emails from Macy’s go into a Stores folder or stack. All emails from Victoria’s Secret go in an Eye Candy folder (joking), etc. Here’s wishing that cutting-edge email innovation can help prevent people like Michael Arrington from having 7,000 unread emails in his inbox.

Please do not reply, this is an automated e-mail story. But feel free to use the comments!

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock. 

When “Queen of the Net” Mary Meeker landed at Kleiner Perkins she added a new initiative: Help people understand how certain trends were negatively impacting America. Her first report, USA Inc. contained a 468-slide presentation detailing these shifts. Meeker provided an update on October 24 in San Francisco, and it was yet another eye-opener.

In true Meeker style, USA Inc. is a meticulously crafted, chart-heavy presentation. This one, though, paints a bleak picture. Most startling: America’s entitlement costs accounted for 56% of spending in fiscal 2011, 40 years ago it was just 25%. Here is more food for thought:

• Expenses have exceeded revenue in all but five of the past 47 years.
• 1 in 50 Americans needed Medicaid when it was created in 1965. Today, 1 in 6 do.
• Unfunded and underfunded entitlement liabilities now total $66 trillion.

Meeker joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers in January 2011 and was put in charge of a new $1 billion Digital Growth Fund. On Feb. 25, she issued her first epic report, called USA Inc.: A Basic Summary of America’s Financial Statements

USA Inc. offers four recommendations to help spread its message:

1. Create a deep, widely held perception of the problem’s reality and stakes involved
2. Reassure citizens that there are practical solutions
3. Develop support among key constituencies
4. Determine the right time to deliver solutions.

Meeker is clearly addressing No. 1 by shining a bright light on the topic whenever she can, but what about the other recommendations?

Kleiner Perkins' Investment Strategies

KPCB’s fund specialties include typical investment sectors: digital, green tech, life sciences and China. There was a Digital Growth Fund and a Green Growth Fund, but no “USA Growth Fund.”

Among recently funded companies, KPCB’s digital list numbers 71 companies, excluding Chinese firms. There were also 33 companies in the green-tech portfolio and 18 in life sciences, both included below:

Cleantech is clearly a pro-future investment strategy. But when I examined company descriptions and compared them against Meeker’s recommendations, I found just one that indirectly addressed USA Inc.’s future needs: CodeAcademy, an education innovator.

What Kleiner Perkins and Others Could Be Doing

USA Inc. recommends that the reality of America’s fiscal crisis be communicated to the public. There are a number of ways to address this objective, but a good tactic would be to start with the basics: clarity of data.

While government agencies produce reams of raw information, access to it is not particularly easy. Many economists and analysts use a data front-end provided by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, called “FRED,” which features a wealth of information: 61,000 economic time series from 48 sources. But using FRED requires learning complicated database queries.

Kleiner Perkins should identify entities that progress the human-machine interface to databases like FRED. A straightforward method would be to use a drop-down-menu interface, à la KISSmetrics Power Report (PDF).

Another approach would be to provide a seamless connection to an intelligence platform like Tableau. The best interface would add a natural-language query layer like Siri.

To reassure citizens that practical solutions exist would require new-age infomediaries that specialize in connecting problems to solutions. Perhaps Biz Stone and Ev Williams could be persuaded to dedicate a Medium content collection to USA Inc. in exchange for a strategic investment. Their crowdsourcing concept would help redistribute this massive content effort.

Toward A "Healthy" Economy

Another clear challenge arising from Meeker’s presentation is the soaring cost of entitlement spending, most of it due to escalating health-care costs. KPCB has invested in two life-sciences companies that could be of help.

Essence Healthcare focuses on Medicare solutions and RedBrick Health aims to reduce avoidable health-care costs. More is needed, such as enterprise software that improves hospital management, given that most hospitals are poorly managed.

Another practical problem solver would be a service that forces competition by finally bringing transparency to health care and its opaque pricing schemes, as Harvard professor Regina Herzlinger proposes with an Securities and Exchange Commission-like oversight entity. Is there a way to reverse-engineer that idea?

With her thorough insights, Mary Meeker has done an outstanding job of circling the wagons around the digital and financial communities to signal that more needs to be done in order to preserve our pro-growth climate. I encourage everyone to give her a standing ovation and join in.

How would you advise Mary Meeker to spend the half-billion dollars still left in her Digital Growth Fund? Sound off in the comments.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

The U.S. public sector employs some 21 million people, the vast majority at state and local governments. That makes the public sector ripe for innovation and reinvention, a task being tackled head-on by Code for America, a San Francisco-based incubator that aims to help “government work better for everyone.”

Startups Attacking A Giant Market

Last week, I attended a Code for America demo day where seven startups, billed as the “inaugural class of the first-ever civic startup accelerator,” showed off their wares. The Code for America accelerator program hopes to disrupt the $170 billion government IT market, while providing new and improved services to U.S. citizens.

One of the startups, MindMixer, had already shown up on my radar. MindMixer helps local government and civic entities create instant online communities. The company has so far set up more than 250 organizations around the country.

MindMixer helps organizations collect ideas and perspectives and lets visitors vote on them, much the same way that I’m using Spigit to ideate solutions for America. One MindMixer community is ImproveSF, which is working to create a better San Francisco. Its “Design a New Library Card” challenge racked up 14,529 interactions.

Handwriting To Digital Isn't Easy

Another startup that drew much attention is Berkeley, Calif.-based Captricity. Co-Founder Kuang Chen reiterated how difficult it was to transform handwritten or other paper-based data into digital form.

Captricity uses real people for data entry but you do need either have a scanner or camera to upload text originals to the Web. The company currently has an offer you can’t refuse: the first 25 pages for new customers are digitized for free. It’s $0.20 per page after that.

As Code for America Director of Strategy and Communications Abhi Nemani tells me, “Captricity is one of the clearly compelling startups, it’s a problem we can all relate to.” The company already has received investments from Mitch Kapor’s Kapor Capital and others.

Social media startups were well represented by Measured Voice and Revelstone, both promising to improve civic engagement supported by analytics to track social engagement.

The Start Of Something Bigger?

Three other startups, Aunt Bertha, LeanSprout and Recovers are described on Code America’s site. As Nemani says, “This is the first accelerator class. The whole ecosystem needs to be built up, but this is the start of something bigger.”

I agree. Code for America has definitely struck the right tech chord. If you need more persuasive evidence that America needs to innovate, please see Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers General Partner Mary Meeker’s presentation “USA, Inc.” Key Points, which brilliantly articulates trends we should all be familiar with.

Code on.

In January, The New York Times wondered aloud why Apple did not make the iPhone in America. The story heaped a torrent of commentary and scrutiny on Silicon Valley’s most valuable company. Whether you think manufacturing in the U.S. is right or not for Apple, Cadillac is proving that American-made technology can compete with the best.

The new Cadillac ATS was designed to be a luxury car world-beater - a tall order that required catching up to the likes of BMW’s 3-series and Mercedes’ C-class. But the folks at General Motors took a unique approach to the job and the ATS definitely arrives at the head of its class.

What Cadillac did is often overlooked in Silicon Valley. To help design the Cadillac User Experience (CUE), the company assembled a team of designers, engineers and software developers to shadow drivers while observing them in their natural habitat.

This “contextual design” technique required team members to accompany actual consumers, an eye-opening experience. The shadow team was able to identify several different driving styles, which were categorized under a pseudonym. One type of driver, dubbed “Spencer,” always needed to check text messages immediately, while ‘‘Emily” liked listening to music, whether on her phone, iPod or flash drive.

Cadillac spokesperson David Caldwell tells me, “We took a hard look at what carmakers call 'infotainment.' Everyone’s doing that, that’s sort of par for the course. We took a bit of a riskier approach: Is there something we can do that says ‘hey these guys are doing something different?’”

Enter A New GUI

What became clear quickly is that most drivers are distracted by a myriad of bells, beeps and whistles emitted by our digital lifestyle tools. So Cadillac engineers set out to develop a less invasive type of user interface, one that communicates via seat vibrations.

You might call it “BUI,” but GM prefers the less colloquial Cadillac Safety Alert Seat. The Alert Seat is able to tell a driver whether an object is nearby on the left by triggering a pulse on the left side of the seat.

Cadillac also joins another innovative force in technology: the open source movement. The CUE system runs on a triple-core ARM 11 processor and uses a Linux platform so developers can help keep the architecture fresh with new extensions.

CUE powers both an 8-inch capacitive touch screen, reportedly the first non-resistive display in an automobile, and a second, 12.3-inch fully configurable instrument cluster mounted behind the steering wheel.

Another automotive engineering feat was the addition of haptic feedback. There’s a proximity sensor, which brightens the display when a driver’s hand approaches the system’s user interface and a touch screen that provides both pulse feedback and the ability to swipe and pinch.

Living In America

That producing a product as complex as a car with its myriad of alloys and steel and hundreds of technology features is not a trivial procedure is underscored by this Esquire article, How to Build an American Car, which breathtakingly describes the production process.

So would Apple benefit from building the iPhone in America? There are two trends to consider here. First, it’s increasingly likely that volatility in the oil business will cause fuel prices to double in the not-too-distant future. That will make shipping even a high-value iPhone from China via FedEx a less attractive proposition.

Another is that increasingly the added value in any consumer product is software. And in this area, America still out-shines the rest of the world although domestic educational obstacles and the ascent of India may diminish that advantage.

Still though, I’m happy to see that once-considered-dead General Motors can not only match global competitors in engineering but also reinvent an area where automobiles will increasingly have to shine - the human-machine interface. Don’t believe me? I have just one word to say, iDrive.

Happy motoring America, and please contribute software innovations for the automobile and computer revolution to our Spigit innovation crowdsourcing engine.

There are some 40 million rental units in America today. And that segment is growing fast as more Americans choose to rent instead of own in a tepid real estate market. While some technology providers have come to the rescue of landlords and prospective tenants, much opportunity remains.

With home prices down 34% from their July 2006 peak, resulting in more than $16 trillion in vaporized household net worth, you can’t blame Americans for wanting to move on with their lives. That typically means renting a home or apartment, as fewer Americans now believe that owning a home is better than renting, 63% today, down from 89% in 1996:.

That trend has fueled a rental market with the tightest demand in 10 years. Leading the U.S. rental market is the tech-heavy San Francisco Bay Area, with San Francisco rental prices up 15% and Oakland, Calif., up 11%, as of June 2012.

But tenants and landlords know that finding and renting a home or apartment is not a simple process. The finding part has been made easier with the emergence of Craigslist as the default mother of all U.S. rental listings. Yet the procedure of applying for a rental and getting your application approved remains arduous. Thankfully it’s now being addressed by a few savvy technology providers.

Online Applications

Landlords of multi-unit apartment buildings or home properties can now use a service from Santa Barbara-Calif.-based RentApp. As its name implies, this online service is designed to simplify the rental application process. Once a free account has been set up, a landlord can create a rental application by selecting from a menu of customary items, such as financial information, pets, etc. RentApp makes money by collecting fees from screening tenants, which start at $10 per “screen.”

Once an application has been created, prospective tenants are sent a link to fill out the online application and RentApp can collect application fees, if a landlord has been set up with credit-card processing (a cumbersome process that screams for a Square-like solution). Landlords who have applied for background checking can then automatically screen each tenant. But background- and credit-checking require an on-site visit by an Experian representative, yet another tedious complication.

The good news for prospective tenants is that there’s no paperwork involved and applicants do not directly divulge social security numbers to landlords - adding an extra layer of security protection. Welcome to the 21st century!

Chicago-based startup RocketLease also offers online application creation, submission and screening, plus it lets landlords create an online property listing that applicants can use to review a rental offering and submit their application.

But when I tested their service I discovered that not only did RocketLease not actually have the iPhone app portrayed on its home page, it also prominently displays a landlord’s email address on its listing pages, which could lead to spamming. RocketLease has assured me that it will begin cloaking email addresses this week.

Digital Leases

Moreover, no existing service - and that includes other new-age outfits like E-Renter, which handles tenant screening but offers no online application submission service - lets one manage the entire rental process, in particular lease creation, submission and signing, plus rental payments.

To create a lease, many National Association of Realtors NAR agents rely on services like zipLogix, which is able to generate PDFs that must be filled out by hand, i.e. non-fillable PDF forms. But this service is not available to individual parties. Popular legal services, such as Nolo or Rocket Lawyer, offer leases that can be tailored to each landlord’s state - but none offers online fillable lease services.

Once a lease has been laboriously created, you can have it electronically signed by using Adobe’s EchoSign, which requires that each signatory field is manually specified. (Competitors to EchoSign include DocuSign and many others.) For rent payment collection, landlords have to rely on yet another service, like PayYourRent or RentPayment.

Overwhelmed yet? Now you know why I agree with Sequoia Venture Capitalist Jim Goetz that it’s shocking to see how few entrepreneurs really focus on building products for businesses.

Considering that there are 40 million rentals and 223 million computers users in the U.S. with no easy way of applying and qualifying for rentals, you can’t blame me for ranting against the lack of common-sense application development in America. While there are certainly outfits addressing the rental market with tech-based solutions, my experience suggests that the playing field falls far short of what’s needed.

As a landlord you should not have to visit half a dozen sites to get a unit leased. Rental apps should be downloadable to a tenant’s mobile phone, filled in and signed directly from wherever they are. I know that day will come but it’s not here yet.

Submit your ideas to help revolutionize our software industry at our ideation engine and here’s hoping that your next rental experience is a seamless one.

The recent political conventions underscored a few disconcerting trends. Our political leadership is not only out of touch with reality but also tends to distort the truth. How can social-media-based innovations address these challenges?

Given that social media excel at connecting people with society’s leaders, there is no question social entrepreneurs can play a major role in the country’s future. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted in his company’s S-1 IPO filing that he viewed Facebook as a tool that could “bring a more honest and transparent dialogue around government that could lead to more direct empowerment of people.”

While Zuckerberg believes that social media can more bring accountability to the political process and offer solutions to some of our biggest problems, how is this vision being realized? A number of startups are approaching the social engagement process in different ways. 

Clicktivism

Founded in 2006 by two Stanford University undergrads, Change.org aims to overcome microcosmic challenges. The company lets citizens create online petitions. Its most famous win was “forcing” Bank of America to rescind its planned monthly $5 banking fee, a petition started by a 22-year-old nanny Molly Katchpole.

Demonstrating the budding interest in online activism, often dubbed “clicktivism,” Change.org has signed up 17 million members and is adding 2-3 million clicktivists each month, according to Change.org Communications Manager Charlotte Hill.

In August, Change.org helped three high-school students succeed: in getting a woman, CNN’s Candy Crowley, to moderate the presidential debates, something that hadn’t occurred since 1992. (Look here for other Change.org victories

Hill tells me that Change.org generates revenue by accepting advertisements from non-profits, basically “sponsored petitions.” The formula may be working because the company already has grown to 150 employees.

Civic Engagement

POPVOX was born to address the problem of too much information. Founder and CEO Marci Harris worked as a legislative assistant in Washington and discovered that congressional staffers were drowning in too much noise, so the idea to create an online sentiment platform was born.

POPVOX automates the process of constituent communications with their political representatives. The online platform makes it easy for citizens to follow proposed legislation and express support or opposition, which is then sent with a personalized note to involved representatives.

Harris tells me that POPVOX relies on a freemium model. Politicians are welcome to place a free widget on their site but if they need analytics, the company is more than happy to oblige for a monthly subscription fee.

POPVOX users are not required to be citizens or even registered voters. So users can keep civic logins separate from their Facebook or Twitter login. This feature lets members rely on anonymous screen names yet communicate with Congress using their real name.

Voter Engagement

Votizen takes a different approach. It spent a lot of money and time digitizing voter registration records for 200 million Americans. It took two years to capture the data, which was supplied by local registrars on floppy disks, magnetic tape and even spreadsheets.

The resulting 1TB database was used to create a social-media-driven service that lets members discover who their social media connections like - or to find like-minded individuals. Votizen has raised $2.25 million from the likes of Napster co-founder Sean Parker and angel investor Ron Conway in addition to Twitter celebrity Ashton Kutcher.

Votizen believes politicians and activists will pay to reach its members, selectable by affinity or geography. The service says it has so far attracted 1,549,231 members. Votizen co-founder and CEO David Binetti says the goal of the service is to reduce the role of money in politics by making “the size of a person’s network more important than the size of their wallet.”

Clearly, social entrepreneurs have heeded the call to help reshape America’s political landscape, whether through clicktivism and heightened civic or voter engagement. I plan to look at the other challenge, realtime transparency and fact-checking, in an upcoming post.

Soldier on America and do contribute your ideas to our Social Revolution ideation engine.

You can thank Mark Zuckerberg, Evan Williams and others for turning America’s legendary productivity into wasteful social media “screensucking.” While social media may be engaging, it does not always help us accomplish what really needs to get done. It’s time to refocus America’s software ingenuity on making productivity software as delightful to use as social networking.

Computers were once productivity boosters. Now they’ve morphed into social media touchpoints. This global trend - plus a dearth in computer innovation - is reining in productivity.

Americans spend about 1 billion hours each month on Facebook. And 140 million U.S. Twitter users devote 36 minutes a month to the service - totaling 84 million hours! The pervasive habit of being glued to LCD screens was aptly dubbed “screensucking” by Dr. Edward Hallowell in 2006.

Innovation Drives Productivity

Technology innovation became a substantial productivity driver during key periods in our country’s economic growth. Between 1973 and 1995, U.S. productivity grew about 1.5% per year. But between 1995 and 2000 productivity growth nearly doubled to 2.9% annually (PDF).

The New York Fed concluded in a December 2004 analysis that the sudden surge in worker productivity was fueled by “sectors of the economy that produce information technology (IT) or use IT equipment and software most intensively.”

So the dot.com boom markedly boosted productivity. Yet in the past four years productivity growth has fallen to a 2% annual rate. And while the recession and subsequent market doldrums are partially to blame for this decline, I believe that paying more attention to the development of entertaining “apps” has shunted innovation in software that could significantly boost our country’s productivity.

You’re A Drag On My Drop

Every day, office workers - you may be one of them - toil using technology meant to improve their efficiency. That is, until an email gets misdirected or a last-minute graph needs to be created and dropped into PowerPoint. Or until or a marketing list gets compiled in a spreadsheet and then exported as a .csv file so it can be laboriously imported into yet another tool in order to do whatever needs to be done.

.CSV files? In 2012? What hostile planet are we on?

Even Apple, a stalwart in mobile innovation, has spent a lot of time refining the faux “printed book” look of its address book program, yet its latest iteration, Contacts, is still not Facebook or Twitter-aware.

In 2004, I wrote an article for Fast Company titled “The Need for More Drag and Drop,” in which I expressed my wish that even the folks in IT should experience the joys of drag and drop. A casual search of Google shows that my dream remains unfulfilled.

Yet survey after survey shows that ease-of-use remains the paramount concern of computer users. In a study of 255 business intelligence tool users, ease-of-use was rated as more important than features or analytics, with 47% saying ease-of-use was “very important,” while 32% called it “essential.”

Fact is productivity software innovation, including Mac and PC software, is in a moribund state. And our economy is taking a direct hit as a result. We should be trailblazing exciting new software directions. Instead, we’re still chewing on leftovers from the ‘70s. Metaphors developed in another era, before the Internet and social media.

And this is why I believe software needs to be reinvented. As developed right now, it’s inefficient, cumbersome and not intuitive. Email, and in particular Customer Relations Management (CRM), need to enter the 21st century.

Here’s how it should work. Anyone, including Joe Sixpack CEO, should be able to push one button to send an email to the top 20% of customers without having to invoke the voodoo magic of the IT department. Creating a promotion should be as simple as graphically connecting a line between a database and word processor icons, and filling out a properties form. Yes, that simple.

Apple’s address book should intelligently sort contacts by social network, and allow you to seamlessly share subgroups with other programs without requiring a .csv degree in engineering. Next-generation software should anticipate user needs, so when you drag a name from a contacts list to your email program it should create an email. Drag it to your promo tool and it exports name and email address.

Thousand Points of UI Lights

To get there we need to pivot our development priorities toward software applications that will boost productivity. We need to create a thousand user interface (UI) design studios specializing in a new craft - total user experience (TUX).

There’s promise lurking over the horizon. HTML5 will make it easy to add drag and drop to Web-based services. And I’m encouraged by companies that broke through in data visualization (Mint), simplicity (Simple), or have made heretofore difficult tasks, like customer invoicing, much easier (The Invoice Machine).

But we need a bigger push toward new ways of doing things. You can help. Here’s a link to my Social Revolution ideation engine, where your ideas will be collected and ranked. I would like to hear your thoughts and opinions on what makes for better software and have other visitors like, or unlike, them.

It’s time to become productive again, and have fun doing it.

Lead image courtesy of Shutterstock.

In 2000, venture capitalists poured a staggering $112.2 billion into startups nationwide, according to an analysis by the Public Policy Institute of California (PDF). Today, venture capital deal flow has slowed to a relative trickle, just $28.4 billion was invested in startups by venture capitalists in 2011.

Slimmer Pickings

This slimming down has sent shockwaves through the startup world. According to Dow Jones VentureSource Senior Manager of Corporate Communications Kim Gagliardi, 3,404 venture financing rounds were completed in 2011, down 47% from the 6,361 closed in 2000.

Sure, $28 billion is far from being a “trickle” but consider this. In 2005, The Wall Street Journal tried to estimate the “world’s cash hoard” and arrived at a figure of $46 trillion(PDF), based on global insurance, pension and mutual funds holdings alone. That was up 29% over 2000 in just five years.

Granted, 2005 was before the financial meltdown but why would America’s startups now receive a quarter of the investment they got in 2000, when seven years ago the total pool of money available for investing was already a third higher than it was in 2000?

One reason is that it’s so much cheaper these days to get a startup off the ground. Data from Dow Jones VentureSource appears to support that notion, with the median size of venture capital rounds decreasing over the past decade:

New Funding Models

Luckily, innovation today isn’t occurring only among startups. It’s also happening in the funding models that help create those startups. Accelerators and crowdfunding are elbowing the fat boys of venture capital aside.

The success of the Pebble watch, which took in a whopping $10.3 million on Kickstarter is a perfect example of how venture capital is being complemented by new approaches propelled by social media.

As Bloomberg reports, the creators of Pebble raised $375,000 in angel funding but when it came to raising another round, Pebble was roundly rejected by venture capital firms that didn’t want to risk betting on a hardware startup.

Accelerators are also booming. So much so that Jeff Levy, an entrepreneur and investor at Lamberts Cove, believes that an accelerator bubble may be forming. Levy should know, in 1999 he founded eHatchery, an Atlanta-based precursor to today’s accelerators.

But Levy agrees that accelerators such as Y Combinator:, 500 Startups: and Kicklabs are helping spur innovation while making significant improvements in the incubator model, including funding many companies at once and investing small amounts - $20,000 or so - in their ideas.

Venture Capital ≠ Innovation

So does less venture capital mean less innovation? Depends on who, and how, you ask. A 2007 study of Dutch companies by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that venture capitalists had a positive influence on their portfolio companies' innovation strategy because they pushed their “capacity to assimilate and exploit new knowledge.” (PDF).

But a 2008 study by professors Masako Ueda and Masayuki Hirukawa, entitled Venture Capital and Innovation: Which Is First?, concludes that venture capital does not directly stimulate innovation.

So can these new funding models help spur innovation? Absolutely, judging by the 68,929 people who decided to back Pebble. You can bet that the big watch companies are now cooking up a similar customizable watch recipes.

And how about British entrepreneur Piers Ridyard, whose innovative Nifty MiniDrive has already received $384,319 in funding, rendering him speechless 

Y Combinator, meanwhile, has funded such innovative startups as Dropbox and Airbnb:, the latter just recording its busiest night with 60,000 concurrent guests.

All of these innovative products and services would never have seen the light of day if they had to rely on traditional venture capital funding.

Accelerators and crowdfunding have improved the odds by spreading the risk of investing over many startups and investors, respectively. Could this hors d'oeuvre approach to venture capital help keep innovators properly fed? I’m betting dinner on it. 

How often have you thought our country needs to change? That something is fundamentally and systemically wrong that needs fixing? And that things could be fixed if we leveraged social media to find the best ideas to agree on?

In the world of technology, we’re used to upheaval. In fact, we rely on it to drive innovation and improvements. So why can’t we use technology to solve some of the underlying problems we all agree need to change?

Technology innovations have often been able to fill gaps - even leapfrog them in many cases - between our “old world" habits and the demands of the "new world.”

How Technology Plugs Gaps

Apple is a classic example of what I’m talking about. We used to live in a world where music lived on compact discs. Then came MP3 files, which made music infinitely more accessible - too accessible some might say.

But it took Apple to make buying music and transferring it to a portable player easy, putting your entertainment microcosm in the palm of your hand. Today, the iTunes Store is the world’s largest music retailer.

Another revolution is taking place in retailing, where the use of “big data” - the technology of parsing huge amounts of customer information to help companies like Target, for example, identify whether a female shopper is pregnant and offer her appropriate products - is significantly reshaping marketing.

This type of insight has privacy advocates up in arms. Technology’s benefits often cut both ways, yet it’s evident that this type of arrangement holds the potential to benefit both marketers and consumers - letting Target offer shoppers useful and timely promotions without consumers having to lift a finger.

In our high-speed world ruled by Time Compression, nothing has roiled financial markets more than the art of high-frequency trading, which combines sophisticated algorithms with millisecond performance to give equity traders a distinct advantage.

And in education, perhaps the thorniest challenge of all, Khan Academy has made giant strides using a primitive set of YouTube videos that can be watched for free. This is a remarkable achievement considering U.S. spending on education has jumped 17-fold since 1970 without a lot to show for it.

Change Everyone Can Believe In

These examples vividly illustrate how technology has brought beneficial change to entertainment, retailing and education, so the question is why can’t we use technology to change the body politic?

As the founder of Social Revolution, I am trying to do just that. Social Revolution aims to harness innovative ideas through crowdsourcing, and distill them into a “Business Plan for U.S.A.” to help propel the country forward.

We’re going to crowdsource ideas in five key areas - education, healthcare, business, finance and government. All these sectors are clearly ripe for a major disruption.

To manage the idea stream, we’re relying on an innovative crowdsourcing platform from Pleasanton, Calif.-based Spigit. If you’re a company or individual that wants real change, and have a cogent idea about how to implement it, we want to hear from you. If you’re using technology to make things better, we need to hear from you.

At Social Revolution, we believe that applying the new technologies offered by social media will unleash the power of ideas and turn the status quo on its head. Crowdsourcing has already shown its disruptive power in a number of fields.

Wikipedia is perhaps the best-known example of a crowdsourcing success story, leading Encyclopedia Britannica to give up on its print edition earlier this year.

Yelp has similarly reinvented the restaurant review business, while TripAdvisor has upended the travel industry with its incisive crowdsourced reviews.

The time is certainly right. A surging interest in “clicktivism” has enabled Change.org to sign up 13 million clicktivists, proving that our population wants to get more engaged and involved.

As President John F. Kennedy once said, “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on.” To put a sharper point on it, allow me to paraphrase Steve Jobs' pitch to hire Pepsi's John Sculley, “Do you want to read sugar water the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?”