Contemplating Discovery, Communication, Systems Thinking. And the occasional nonsense.

*This is a brand new talk, with the “flow” section based on a talk we gave at SXSW 2008
*Yay! Slideshare.com featured us on their homepage.
*See Andreas’s slides on his blog, which was what sparked this off

Web2 is about participation, but what comes after that?

We think it is all about Discovery, the art of helping users serendipitously discover content and people that they did not know they wanted to know. Discovery is what makes people come back again and again, interact, and explore.

The inspiration for this deck was simple- We ourselves were frustrated by apparent random-ness at which we were implementing discovery for our own startup (discoverio), and were not able to find any resources that presented discovery in a holistic manner. So just like anyone of you would have done, we decided to come out with process, and share it around with the rest of the world!

This deck explains what Discovery is, the psychological reasons behind it, and presents a set of very very practical examples and guidelines on how it can be implemented. Take a look!

The most powerful piece is probably the very last slide, but we had not had time to expand on it yet.

Here it is, and we will love feedback! Contact details at the end.

Technology has broken down the "transmission" barriers to communication. From telegraph, telephone, fax, email, IM, social networks, skype, video conferencing, the transmission barrier is being driven towards zero, and we can expect even more innovative ways to communicate at a far lower price.  My recent favorite is Jing, which i think has a fantastic chance of allowing people to communicate even better.

However, the psychological and sociological barriers to communicating has remained at most exactly the same. What are these barriers? Here are some broad categories.

• Who is interested?
• who is interested in what i am about to say?
• who exactly should i message?  I can only remember A, B, C…
• who would want to connect to me based on this need of mine?
• What will others think of me?
• what will people think of me if they see this message?
• if i send this out, am i disturbing anyone who might think this is noise?
• How can I connect with others?
• how can i know who has a specific need i can connect to?
• i want to build a relationship with him, but how?
• … on and on…

These are very very real barriers that current messaging systems and social networks,with the binary notion of communication and lack of discovery/relevance has only solved to a very small extent. Twitter solves the first one to a very limited extend, but there is frankly, much much more to be done.

The ones to break down these "new generation" of communication barriers will create the next generation of communication. Of course, we are gunning to be one of them.

From the front page of nytimes - All highly relevant information demonstrated in a very small space

Why is it fantastic? Simply, presents the most important information while clearing representing cause and effect.

• shows important current information that people wun remember
  • worst, average, best states
  • currently has support of…
• clear representation of cause and effect
  • if  - she wins xx% of delegates
  • outcome - she will need xx% of uncommited
  • why- currently has support of…

How to make it better?

• Link to the most relevant articles at the various points of the widget
• Link at the bottom to an article explaining the superdelegate system

Kick ass work.

For those who have not heard Obama’s race speech yet, please do. It was an amazingly intelligent speech that treated the voters as people who can draw upon their own experience and sense of fairness. It was an incredibly difficult balance between placating the folks after his blood, and acknowledging his roots and personal upbringing. Anyhow, watch it here for a very interesting opinion tracker that goes in accordance to participants as they view the video in real time.

http://www.mediacurves.com/Politics/J6765/

The last month has been a really interesting month, as we nailed down the people discovery problems (PDPs) we are trying to solve. I think it will be exciting to share them with everyone, so we are breaking it down into 4 different parts. So here, we go.

1) Revealing the long tail of attention
Everyone knows the stars in their own domains (the head). All social platforms, ranging from the blogosphere, to twitter, to now friendfeed has a few A-list people who consistently appear and gets quoted everywhere, and the tail goes from there to the B-list. Just think Mark Cuban, Robert Scoble with their 5000 friends on Facebook/Twitter, and the star diggers on Digg.

This focus on 0.1% of the population works for helping people discover top news in their own domain of expertise, but fails for discovering people for any form of practical purposes, say hiring, expertise finding, etc. This problem is compounded when it comes to discovering relevant information and people outside of their immediate domain, due to all the potential noise and lack of expertise. (Side note: read this great article on how 2 great ideas can combine to change the world)

The problem is even more obvious when you consider the perspective of being discovered. Say you are working on a great idea, and you know that there are going to be people who are going to be interested. But how do you actually get discovered amidst all the noise?

This process of discovering and getting discovered is what we gonna be working on helping people accomplish… It is gonna be super hard, but hey, anything worth doing is hard.

Coming up next…

2) Asymmetry in relationships

3) Lack of context in names

4) Artificially silo-ed information flow 

PS: Sorry for the lousy acronym. Not feeling so creative today.

Read this great article: Inventor Dean Kamen wants to put entrepreneurs to work bringing water and electricity to the world’s poor.

Essentially:

He’s invented two devices, each about the size of a washing machine that can provide much-needed power and clean water in rural villages.

The challenge in getting the price point of manufacturing down to a reasonable level is obviously huge, but that is never the key problem in these initiatives. The key is in delivering these to the people who need these the most without bureaucracy, corruption sucking away 90% of the benefits, and chasing away 90% of donors.

This is where the magic comes in:

The real invention here, though, may be the economic model that Kamen and Quadir hope to use to distribute the machines. It is fashioned after Grameen Phone’s business, where village entrepreneurs (mostly women) are given micro-loans to purchase a cell phone and service. The women, in turn, charge other villagers to make calls.

"We have 200,000 rural entrepreneurs who are selling telephone services in their communities," notes Quadir. "The vision is to replicate that with electricity."

This is my best hope so far for world change, and demonstrates clearly what happens when you combine 2 disparate, but extremely complementary domains. To understand the full context, read Mohammed Yunus book on microfinance…. amazing book!

Do read on. If intrigued, hit me up anywhere from facebook, email, to teh good old phone!

You need to find someone great to be part of your project. You search on Facebook and LinkedIn, and find thousands of names that mean exactly nothing to you. Frustrated, you resort to emailing your friends, thinking: a better solution must exist.

Elsewhere…

… your ideal dude is also hanging out on Facebook. He would so love to
work with you, yet there is a small problem: he does not know you exist.

We want to solve this problem.

——————–
We are looking for smart, adventurous and fun developers who are passionate
about creating a new method of communication that enables discovery.

Are you

• A technical superstar who wants to drive development?
• A machine learning wizard who can create the magic of serendipitous discovery?
• An interaction designer who loves to bridge between the current and new paradigms?
• Interested in truly solving this awesome but challenging problem?

If so, please touch base with us, and we can have a great chat!

Mingyeow Ng | mingyeow@gmail.com | (917) 697-3800 | mingyeow.com
Andreas Weigend | aweigend@stanford.edu | (650) 906-5906 | weigend.com

PS: And yes, if you are wondering, this task of finding people for our startup is precisely the type of problem we want to help solve.

Gotta love how he makes fun of everyone, somehow not never pissing off anyone who can take a good laugh.

PS: I love comedy central - check out their app on facebook too ya?

Worked together with Andreas to come out with a pretty cool new topic for a class for MBA students in Berkeley. Apparently very well-received by the MBA students (see email by school admin below). Think the class will be so much fun! Well summarized by:

Weigend will explore how Web and mobile communication led to a power shift from companies to individuals, who are now contributing data and in return, demanding transparency and value for themselves.

I always fear to tell people that marketing is one of my key focus area, because people typically think I mean advertising, SEO, online marketing, etc. The class description as a explanation of marketing is actually close to my heart, being all about understanding consumer needs, leveraging technology trends, and appreciating new customer expectations to be able to create solutions and services that add serious value.

The interesting thing to me about this class description is that it is not about marketing, nor about technology, nor about customer service as we traditionally know these domains. I guess because it requires an intermesh of all these disciplines, it is probably hard to find top management who can appreciate this.

As a simple example, think of airlines frequent flyer programs. If they can combine the various sources of data available to them:

• the unique data that they already have about individual travel plans, past travel patterns, their co-travelers
• the public data of these individual users already online on Linkedin/Zoominfo
• the onslaught of latest data being posted across the web, whether it is reviews, pictures, videos (see delver.com for a superb example for social search)

Airlines now compete like crazy to offer "special first class seats" which now looks the same everywhere. Even SIA’s pretty ladies are being undifferentiated with the onslaught of pretty Chinese air stewardess. (And I bet there are more than 4 million pretty chinese girls in China…)

For a fraction of what it cost SIA to upgrade the seats on one of its planes you see the opportunity for them instead to create an extremely compelling and personalized user experience by delivering special updated recommendations, making the boring trip into compelling business sharing opportunities, making connections between frequent travelers who have common interests who also travel frequently to specific locations, etc.

Ok, i can go on forever, but i gonna get back to real work. Contact me to find out more! (When Discoverio is out, you can hit me up there! :P)

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Web 2.0 Marketing Among New Spring Classes

MBA and undergraduate students are enjoying an expanded lineup of new elective classes on a wide range of topics, from Web 2.0 marketing to entrepreneurship to address global poverty, this spring semester.

"The Haas School is continually innovating its curriculum," says Jay Stowsky, senior assistant dean for instruction. "New elective courses, student-initiated courses, external speakers, and one-day seminars allow us to respond quickly with relevant content to current issues and student demands."

Here are some examples of the most popular new courses brought online this semester. Registration for these courses is closed for the semester.

Associate Professor in Marketing Florian Zettelmeyer invited Andreas Weigend (weigend.com), former chief scientist of Amazon.com, to share his insights in a two-day course, Marketing in Web 2.0: The New Data Revolution, offered to Berkeley MBA and Evening & Weekend MBA students in April. Weigend will explore how Web and mobile communication led to a power shift from companies to individuals, who are now contributing data and in return demanding transparency and value for themselves. Weigend will explain recommendation systems, behavioral targeting, and personalization and its trade-offs, and discuss emerging new business models and opportunities.

This study by MIT highlights the importance of connected as an information hub in the digital economy. Connected not in terms of friends or connections in facebook/Linkedin, but connected as in receiving important information, updates, and communicating from relevant people.

This is how they did it: By tracking email patterns, workloads, and compensation, they confirmed what was probably intuitive to many. The more diverse sets of information you get access to, and the faster you get it, the more likely you are to complete more projects, and generate more revenue.

This is a pretty important aspect of what we aim to do at Discoverio: wanting to get the most important, credible and relevant information to you, and allowing you to get your information to others as well. Email is great for private communications, but has no inherent discoverablity, sharing or when you do not know who to hit up.

We are still at the relatively early stages of the project, so if any of these blog postings sounds intriguing to you, please feel free to ping me @ mingyeow@gmail.com.

As a side note: The power of digital data is that everything is now measurable. The power of measurement lies in the its power to dispel arguments. Everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but no one is entitled to their own facts.