The Future Place Blog

Great Research 2.0 Conference

If you are in London on December 6th then I warmly recommend the MRS one day Research 2.0 conference. The agenda looks really strong, and the day finishes off with a Pecha Kucha session, where the speakers include (amongst others) Andy Dexter, Fiona Blade and myself.

The conference is being chaired by on old colleague of mine (i.e. he was a colleague of mine at TRB, a long time ago, he is not necessarily old). It transpires that Martin may be the first to have used the term Research 2.0 in a public forum, when he and Russel Goldsmith presented a paper titled Research 2.0 at May 2006 Consumer Insight Forum. Unless anybody out there can point to a prior public use.

I was unaware of Martin's usage and I started using the term in this blog in August 2006, which is probably one of the earliest dates, along with Laurent Flores who also started promoting the term in August 2006.

So, if anybody knows a prior public use, let me know, and I'll blog about it!

China trade and the changing world

The Economist has an interesting article which exemplifies the changes in China's position within the World Order. The first point in the article is that shipping rates (the costs of moving cargoes such as iron ore, coal, and grain, have been rising rapidly, e.g. up 154% compared with 2006.

China's demand for iron ore has outstripped the ability of its suppliers Australia and China to provide sufficient ore, so China has been importing from elsewhere, for example Brazil. Australia's share of China's iron ore imports has fallen from about 70% 15 years ago to 40% now, because of the increase in other suppliers. However, Brazil is much further from China than Australia and India, and the cargo ships take three times as long.

Similarly, China used to be a net exporter of coal as recently as 2001, but now it is neutral, and may become a net importer of coal. Which has impacted nearby countries such as Japan and South Korea who used to import coal from China, but who now import it from much further afield.

These movements reflect a tipping point. China used to import advanced goods and export raw materials. It now imports raw materials and exports mid-range goods (plus PCs), soon it will be exporting high-end goods, and importing luxury goods.

FaceBook growing, but still behind MySpace

Erick Schonfield has a great post on Techcrunch abou the size and growth of the key social network sites in the US. His table is reproduced below, but please go and read his commentary - at the comments at the bottom of his pot..

The key points to remember are:
1) this is just US, other networks are stronger elsewhere
2) although in % terms FaceBook grew four times as much as MySpace, the absolute increase in numbers is similar
3) there are other ways of doing the numbers, and they will give different results.

Examples of Social Graphs

Valdis has recommended the following examples of Social Graphs

Online Community.

The mathematician Paul Erdos.

The site providing both of these examples is Orgnet.com.

Although these examples are interesting, I think they need to be developed futher to deliver value or actionable insight.

Great BBC Trend Programme

I have recently discovered the BBC World Service programme Culture Shock, which is billed as covering "The latest global trends and ideas driving human behaviour". This edition, broadcast on 26 November 2007, covers the use of Social Networks by women in India and the rise in Slow Fashion.

Given I work from home most of the time, I find the abiltiy to listen to BBC prorammes via the Internet a real boon.

The Social Graph

The term Social Graph is appearing more and more in the blogosphere, but it is a curiously unfriendly word. In essence it is not a graph but the actual social network that is (or reflects) our relationships.

The chart below, from Blog Pulse, shows the incidence of the term Social Graph over the last 6 months and contrasts it with Research 2.0 and Bacn (which now looks like a one week wonder).

Jeremiah Owyang has an interesting post about how to explain the Social Graph to executives, a useful resource.

I think the term Social Graph will grow in importance and the race is on to find a good (both attractive and useful) to represent the Social Graph.

Envisioning feelings on the web

This TED video show's Jonatahn Harris, who has a really interesting project where he is monitoring the sorts of emotions being expressed on the web, with some wonderful innovative ways of representing information.

Whilst I do not feel that he has cracked the problem, I think that he shows us that solutions are out there waiting to be discovered.

The electronic wake and you

The BBC have a detailed article about the sort of data that is being held on ordinary citizens. Researcher Niamh Gallagher estimates that the average economically active person is on 700 databases. A 2006/7 report from the UK's Information Commissioner estimated that there were almost 300,000 data controllers in the UK.

At present there seems to be two trends. The first is a growing sense of concern about Governments, police forces, and double glazing salesmen misusing data, along with the risk of identify ford. The second strand is that people are handing over every larger amounts of personal information in oder to receive more tailored and personalised services.

Its sigmoidal, there is a limit!

As a pedant, I love the post on O'Reilly Radar about curves that may look as though they represent an exponential distribution, but are actually sigmoidal. A sigmoidal distribution is an S shaped curve, it starts slowly, accelerates quickly, then it plateaus. In its first two stages it looks just like an exponential distribution.

The three rules for business success

On the Wikinomics blog Don Tapscott has an interesting take on the three things that a company needs to do well in order to succeed. The speaker before Tapscott at a conference put up the following three items:

1. Avoid risk
2. Hire the best people
3. Focus on your customers

The list looks fine to some people, but Tapscott attacked all three.

Avoid Risk? Last week I was speaking at a Cusotmer Insight Solutions workshop and made the point that, in the current climate, risk averse strategies will fail, because the current rate of change is inherently risky, and being risk averse will guarentee that you fall behind. Tapscott believes that companies need to open up, to share information, and leverage outsiders if they are to keep innovating. The old risk avoidance aproach will result in limited innovation, and business decline.

Hire Talent? Tapscott thinks we need to moving beyond just hiring people, we need to be crowdsourcing solutions. He points to P&G who are looking for 50% of their innovations to come from outside their company.

Customer Focus? This is the weakest of Tapscott's points, because he is basically talking semantics. Rather than using market research to find target groups, to map needs, and to sell products, he wants companies to develop relationships with customers to co-create and to turn customers into prosumers. However, I feel that developing a discourse with customers, ceding control to customers, and turning them into advocates is what customer focus means at the moment.

If I was being critical of Tapscott, I would say his third point was weak, and his examples show a VERY high degree of repetition with his other material. But, on the plus side, he makes great demolition of the risk aversion strategy, a pretty good attack on the hiring talent point, and reminds us that the times they are indeed a changing.