thinking: relating- celebrating :-)

Dave McClure over at 500hats is always a good read. His posts on reinventing venture capital there and at various conferences make a great deal of sense.

I really liked MoneyBall for Startups a recent very long essay – which is an essential read if the future of business is your thing.

“the primary issue is that investors of all shapes and sizes have become incredibly lazy and complacent over the past two decades, measured by both activity and by IRR.  Meanwhile, the consumer internet has brought a tsunami of technological & behavioral change which has resulted in stunning reductions in time & cost needed to distribute products and services to the over 2-3B connected people on the planet.”

On a recent visit to Silicon Valley and San Francisco I was personally struck by the gap between the incredible resources on offer and the sorts of projects that I saw pitched.

In my personal view I know NZ and Australian businesses who could do a whole lot better than what I saw at Web 2.0 and generally around. On the other hand I did meet some extremely smart people who are doing very well and in time will write about them as well.

There are better ways to measure all of this and I did see an applied math project that got me very excited.

Of course- it is not quite as simple as that but Dave McClure is the go to guy on these and related topics.

If you have less time and you want to try the more gentle option the slideshow below may suit.

If you enjoy reading Dave McClure you should check out David Cowan on Startups

Looks like you have visited before, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks again

When my daughter was 3 she used to ask what I did for a job. She has a much better idea now but to keep things simple I used to say something like this.

“I talk with people, I take lots of notes. Then some web stuff.”

Fairly often now some of this takes place all at the same time. Live twitter streams from events are now part of the (new) media mix.  Services like Be in the Room can aggregate social media feeds and we can take questions from external observers via the use of hashtags.

Here is recent example (August 4th) from the Unitec Forum for the Future series on Auckland Super City debates. Look at earlier posts on theDomm website for more about that event and/ or follow on twitter @UnitecFTF At the UnitecFTF those who couldn’t be there asked questions via twitter.

This was the 6th forum event so far. More are planned. Noted business commentator and journalist Rod Oram is the chair for the event and Associate Professor & Head of Department Rob Davis deserves full credit for being the catalyst & firestarter on this project.

As this debate took place in a TV studio with lots of outside media present some of this was captured on video. I even got a rare chance to see myself at work because when you are on live streaming it all tends to be a bit of blur in the moment.

The super city changeover for Auckland is an important change and  it deserves better, smarter, more engaging media and new media engagement.

Well done Unitec cast and crew for making a difference.

We have been hearing that Facebook is due to hit 500m users this month.

As a student of human behaviour this seems to be one time when the passenger get to be the driver in pretty much any way they choose.

Unlike in many areas Facebook is ideal for 500 m niches of 1 and that works pretty well for everyone. Expression is a very powerful thing.

You may have seen an earlier version of this video.

I watched the Digital Nation documentary on the multi tasking clicking on everything that moves lifestyle that many of use are heading towards. Is this wholesale immersion helping us or hindering us while making us feel like we are doing better than we really are.

Perhaps the illusion of instant activity is not just amplified by the web but actually it is distorting our perspective. (Cue Rat in Cage song here. ) See how easy it is to be distracted even by the good things we love.

View Digital Nation Chapter 1 Distracted by Everything here.

It seems that at least some of the really frenetic texting, facebooking, sm twitching is very much an illusion when it comes to focus. Here are the other chapter headings below.

• Chapter 2 What’s It Doing to Their Brains?
  Tests given Stanford multitaskers yield troubling discoveries. Other research into Net use and the brain raises more questions.
• Chapter 3 South Korea’s Gaming CrazeSome cautionary lessons from a country where Internet addiction has become a public health crisis.
• Chapter 4 Teaching with TechnologyTeachers are embracing digital media–’it keeps students engaged; new skills are needed for a new age.’ But is there a catch?
• Chapter 5 The Dumbest Generation?The debate has just begun on whether we are losing as much as we’re gaining in a 24/7 wired world.
• Chapter 6 RelationshipsMillions of people are inhabiting the Net as if it were a real place, satisfying the urge to connect to others in online games, virtual worlds.
• Chapter 7 Virtual WorldsSecond Life offers a totally new reality for humans, says its creator — and IBM has begun shifting its meetings into this virtual space.
• Chapter 8 Can Virtual Experiences Change Us?The U.S. military is using virtual spaces for PTSD therapy and for flying drones in Iraq while based in a room in Nevada.
• Chapter 9 Where Are We Headed?A school is organized around learning through video games–maybe its students are getting something we aren’t yet able to measure or recognize.

—- Very Much worth a look —-Watch it online

Anyone who has been around for more than a decade will have seen incredible change come – and go.

“Action is no substitute for direction.” Me

I actually wrote that more than 20 years ago in a list of recommended reading books that I used to try and compile every year or so.

Outcomes are what really counts most of the time. And yes there are many distractions along the way. For my 2 cents – I reckon switching down a gear and going to the film festival or for some really long swims works better for me.

At least that is the plan.

For years we ‘ve had endless conversations about online traffic. Now its all here and on tap I believe it is time to be more selective. Sure not every movement means anything in the way that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar but lets see some outcomes other than burnout and various over use symptoms.

Traffic is NOT the same as engagement. A like on facebook is not the same as a comment on a blog but the ability to click on the like button does give some clues. #justsaying (like they do on Twitter:)

So is a Facebook fan worth anything ?

I’m sure that there are some formulas.  All fans are different and their FB activity may give some clues as to what their influence or “clout” might be.

If only life was that easy to quantify.

Mashable had some ideas on what FB, LinkedIn and Twitter might be worth. A simple division of total by numbers of actual users might give some ideas.

Of course Linkedin may well be close to reaching full potential and actual earnings. For FB and Twitter they have yet to really monetize much more than a fraction of what they might be capable of.

In a few weeks I’m off to my 4th WordCamp. WordCamps are community organised and local events for bloggers and othere users of WordPress.

What I really, really like about the WordCamp crew is that everyone has a story and often they are are extrememely proactive about projects and outcomes.

WordCampNZ is on Aug 7th & 8th at Unitec in Mt Albert Auckland. Feel free to come along and join in. Go on change the world with us.

Here are just 16 of the speakers ( * a few more to be annouced)   who will be sharing their insights with us.

• Bill Bennett – Writing Online
• Sacha Dylan – Who Are Your Audience
• Alex Shiels – Automattic
• Jeff Ghazally – extending WP e-Commerce through Plugins
• Dan Milward – WP e-Commerce
• Robert Popovic – BuddyPress
• Quintin Russ – WordPress Security
• Grey Lynn 2030 – Community Management Suzanne Kendrick & Pippa Coom
• Courtney Lambert – Marcomms
• Online Video – Wine Vault Way Jayson Bryant
• HTML5 & CSS with Darren Wood
• Advanced Webhosting with Liz Quilty
• Jo Couchman Creative Web Ideas
• SEO 101 for WordPress Michael Brandon – Searchmasters
• Mogul Time Matt Miller
• Blog Design – Rachel Cunliffe

With Christmas coming up time to hit the beach with a book (Southern hemisphere here).

We have been through a precarious business year where our faith in the vagaries of the “free market”  should have been very considerably challenged although I personally don’t see too many people taking real notes and they should be.

This is more witless economy than weightless since for all the technology – business growth is still inextricably linked to energy usage patterns and efficiencies.

It seems like the global financial systems are much more unstable than previously acknowledged.

When there is a market meltdown it makes sense to check out the models to see if we missed the equivalent of a fractal thunderstorm. Somewhere there must be an economist who has a much clearer view of the rolling trainwreck we have been witnessing.

Robert Ayres is one economist who might have some clues based on his previous work. I’d be keen to hear from anyone who has read and thought about “The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity” which seems incredibly apposite to this time.

One of the best things about reading The Last Oil Shock was to get an overview of the work of Professor Robert Ayres on what is coming to be called industrial ecology.

Since 1956 the Solow Residual has been an albatross around the neck of economics because it made a mockery of the very arguments it was trying to support.

Ayres worked out the correlation between energy and economic growth is 14 times larger than that assumed by Solow. In doing so by implication the impacts of a new oil shock are much, much higher than any economists had assumed before then.

Economics has often been dismissed as a dismal science because of many of the classical economic theories have been less than convincing, putting it generously.  As Robert Frenay surmises in this piece when talking about the oil shocks of the 70′s.

“Mainstream economics not only didn’t foresee what happened in the seventies, it couldn’t explain it. To those focused on bioeconomics, the cause was less mysterious. The economic models that held the field then, and in modified form still do, were not connected to the real world.”

Now that is an understatement with far reaching implications.

“There is a potential for confusion here between technological progress and “progress” in the more general, even more undefined sense. Along with many others, I have long tended carelessly to equate economic growth with that kind of undefined progress. Though aware of the difference, I nevertheless assumed for convenience that the one is virtually a surrogate for the other. The time has come to try to sort out this confusion.

In a certain simplistic sense the difference between growth and progress is all too obvious: It is the difference between “more” and “better”. In challenging the growth paradigm itself I am not assuming that growth necessarily means “more” physical goods. Far from it, I insist that the true measure of economic output is not the quantity of goods produced, but the quality and value of final services provided to the consumer. What is most wrong about the “growth syndrome” is not its tendency to consume material resources (as Barry Commoner, for instance, assumed). What is wrong with it is that growth of the kind now occurring in the US and Europe is no longer making people happier or improving their real standard of living.

It is possible to have economic growth – in the sense of providing better and more valuable services to ultimate consumers – without necessarily consuming more physical resources. This follows from the fact that consumers are ultimately not interested in goods per se but in the services those goods can provide. The possibility of de-linking economic activity from energy and materials (“dematerialization”) has been one of the major themes of my professional career.”

Retrieved from “http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Ayres” from Turning Point: The End of the Growth Paradigm (London: Earthscan, 1998)

Idea that just as Sir Ken Robinson takes educators to task for an education framework built on a propping up an industralisation view of the work that no longer has much sway.

Abstract from ACCOUNTING FOR GROWTH: THE ROLE OF PHYSICAL WORK
Robert U Ayres & Benjamin Warr
Center for the Management of Environmental Resources
INSEAD
Fontainebleau, France – 2004
Email: robert.ayres@insead.edu

This paper tests several related hypothesis for explaining US economic growth since 1900. It begins from the belief that consumption of natural resources – especially energy (or, more precisely, exergy) — has been, and still is, an important factor of production and driver of economic growth.

However the major result of the paper is that it is not `raw’ energy (exergy) as an input, but exergy converted to useful (physical) work that – along with capital and (human) labor – really explains output and drives long-term economic growth. We develop a formal model (Resource-EXergy Service or REXS) based on these ideas.

Using this model we demonstrate first that, if raw energy inputs are included with capital and labor in a Cobb-Douglas or any other production function satisfying the Euler (constant returns) condition, the 100-year growth history of the US cannot be explained without introducing an exogenous `technical progress’ multiplier (the Solow residual) to explain most of the growth.

However, if we replace raw energy as an input by `useful work’ (the sum total of all types of physical work by animals, prime movers and heat transfer systems) as a factor of production, the historical growth path of the US is reproduced with high accuracy from 1900 until the mid 1970s, without any residual except during brief periods of economic dislocation, and with fairly high accuracy since then.

(There are indications that an additional factor, possibly information technology, needs to be taken into account as a fourth input factor since the 1970s.) Various hypotheses for explaining the latest period are discussed briefly, along with future implications.

Here is more detail on the latest book.

The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity
Edward Elgar, April 2009
Robert U. Ayres and Benjamin Warr

The authors of this unique book explore the fundamental relationship between thermodynamics (physical work) and economics.

They take a realistic approach to explaining the relationship between technological progress, thermodynamic efficiency and economic growth, the findings of which conclude with a fundamental explanation of endogenous growth that is both quantifiable and consistent with the laws of thermodynamics.

A major implication of this is that future economic growth is not guaranteed inasmuch as efficiency gains that have driven past growth may not continue in the future.

Ayres explains: “According to the standard theory, energy is an intermediate good that can be ‘produced’ by some combination of capital investment and labour (plus technology). This means that economic growth is essentially independent of energy use, which suggests – in turn – that growth can continue indefinitely at historical rates. And when people talk about recovery, implicitly that’s what they’re saying – that right now the world economy has a hiccup or is perhaps suffering from a case of the swine flu, and that we can expect to get back sooner or later to a trajectory of growth that’s based on the last 100 years.”

“But if we’re right – and I think there’s much more than a small chance that we are – you can’t make that assumption. It’s a very dangerous assumption and it’s leading to potentially very risky advice to political leaders. For example, we’re immediately faced with a possible inconsistency  between the idea of taxing energy use, or putting a cap on carbon emissions – either of which will raise the price – while, at the same time, hoping that growth will not be affected.”