Kerabu

All the World's a Game (or at least it should be)

From Ross Mayfield:

An interesting article in Wired by John Seely Brown and Douglas Thomas Page explores the role of online gaming as job training and a recruiting qualifier:

...Unlike education acquired through textbooks, lectures, and classroom instruction, what takes place in massively multiplayer online games is what we call accidental learning. It's learning to be - a natural byproduct of adjusting to a new culture - as opposed to learning about. Where traditional learning is based on the execution of carefully graded challenges, accidental learning relies on failure. Virtual environments are safe platforms for trial and error. The chance of failure is high, but the cost is low and the lessons learned are immediate...

...In this way, the process of becoming an effective World of Warcraft guild master amounts to a total-immersion course in leadership. A guild is a collection of players who come together to share knowledge, resources, and manpower. To run a large one, a guild master must be adept at many skills: attracting, evaluating, and recruiting new members; creating apprenticeship programs; orchestrating group strategy; and adjudicating disputes. Guilds routinely splinter over petty squabbles and other basic failures of management; the master must resolve them without losing valuable members, who can easily quit and join a rival guild. Never mind the virtual surroundings; these conditions provide real-world training a manager can apply directly in the workplace...

Mayfield suggests he'll be looking at prospective hires' "extracurricular" activities, like World of Warcraft play, as well as their work achievements from now on.

I say, if we can learn to do business better by playing games, couldn't we also improve business itself by making business itself more like a game? As a manager, I'd love to have lots of Avatars. I'd also like to see Avatars in a company perform specific jobs, especially those jobs no "real" person likes to feel stuck--anyone in the company could become Vlad the Collector for the length of a phone call, or spend an hour playing Katrina the Customer Service Fairy with far less ego-involvement than they feel being dispatched to do these things now. Role-playing could make the "dirty jobs" of business more palatable (and keep egos in check for the big jobs, too).

I also like the way games quantify abstract acheivements and encourage non-monetary forms of exchange between players. Getting people within a company to collaborate has always been an issue. What if they had karma, health or power points in a game, some juju to trade?  You could look at this as encouraging "office politics," but if you've worked in an office, you know the vast amounts of energy that go into office politics no matter what you do. Why not harness and store that energy and put it to use?

Could we make work as engaging and dynamic and fun as a game? Of course we could. I'd like to someday build an entire company with a virtual office on a gaming platform, and hire from the ranks of online players. Kind of like Ender's Game, but with profits instead of destruction.

Free money

Should money be as free as speech? After all, it is also a form of communication.

In the past year, the internet has spawned a few companies aimed at helping individuals borrow and lend without bothering to involve a bank or credit agency. Zopa, based in the UK, aggregates individuals into groups for the purpose of making small loans, with a socially conscious slant. In the US, Prosper just launched a sleek, well-designed person-to-person lending site. Borrowers can also form groups on Prosper, for the sake of leveraging better interest rates. I also know of at least one nascent project, Bruce Boston's Quid St., which aims to aggregate individuals for the purpose of making capital investments (as opposed to loans).  I met Bruce recently, and he mentioned what an influence gaming had on his view of how to build an online marketplace. Which put me in mind of the Park Paradigm, a blog about digital markets whose authors think future finacial markets may evolve out of sports book and gambling sites. And not entirely unrelated note, Paypal made it possible just this week for people to send each other money anywhere, via cell phone.

Lots of internet companies entering a "hot" development space usually means that there is about to be a battle for dominance. But I do not think this another instance of a "crowded" field, like Ajax word processors or online file storage solutions, where everyone is trying to bring the killer app to market and knock the others out of the running. What we are witnessing here, I think, is the creation of a new and diverse international capital market.

But we already have an international capital market, you say. Well, yes and no. When it comes to lending and investing and otherwise redistributing capital, we make do with a rudimentary, feudal system that has never really caught up with our momentum toward the free flow of other types of currency--cash, ideas, information, energy, goods and services, even political will. We have developed extremely liberal mechanisms for exchanging these forms of dynamic and stored energy, but capital remains over-managed, its governance, distribution and oversight resting in the hands of a select few.

The invention of a truly open and free capital market will be as significant a development as the invention of the printing press, affecting the free flow of wealth and opportunity much the way that invention affected the free flow of intellectual capital. 500 years after Gutenberg, it's hard to imagine a world without cheap, plentiful and ungovernable words. One hundred years from today, it will be just as hard to remember a world where capital flowed through banks and currencies were government-issued.

Capital, and as a consequence personal wealth, will exist in a much more fluid and dynamic state than it now does, and all our discussions about wealth, wages and income will take place in an entirely new financial language. We may not end up solving poverty, so much as rendering it obsolete, all because of the technology-driven privatization of capital that is just now beginning.

Cross-posted on Samizdata.net.

A priest, a rabbi and a software engineer walked into a bar and...

Jeff Trexler calls isolatr "Web 3.0." I just call it funny:

The non-obvious utility of patents

subtitle: beat the horse slowly (as in I've said all this before, I know, I know)...But I just posted this on Samizdata.net, and Qumana is making it easy for me to spam my own blog with cross-posts, so here goes:

Tags: patents, IP, intellectual property

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Different people have described the Metabolite patent, currently under review by the US Supreme Court, as being about protecting a fact, but if you could patent the fact of homocysteine's correlation to B12 levels, then we'd all owe Metabolite licensing fees just for existing in a state of B12 homeostasis. To play devil's advocate, I read the patent as applying to the observation of the relationship. As such, it is a bit as if Galileo had filed on his observation that the earth orbited the sun. At the time, his view certainly met the USPTO's criteria of originality, utility and non-obviousness.

There is a dangerously bumpkinesque notion afoot, which holds that patents obstruct progress. This is (pardon the pun), patently false. Why is it that the most vociferous critics of the patent system, the citizens of the web--people who can understand that markets are conversations--can't seem to grasp that patents are conversations, too? Patents protect the free flow of ideas within our business, academic and entrepreneurial cultures.

Before we blitely trash the Patent Office, let us be clear on the actual ethos of patent protection. The point of patents is not to protect the patent-holders; it is to allow the rest of us to read the patents, adding to our collective knowledge base. The protection provided is a carrot. Nothing more….

By offering a proprietary position on a piece of work, for a fixed period of time, we gain permanent open access to the idea and the process that led to it. The granting of patent rights is a collective cultural and financial investment we all make--and if you're a libertarian, this is the kind of tax you want to pay. For the applicant, the filing of a patent is a form of open intellectual engagement with the world of ideas, a bit like the exercise of free speech. You can also call it opportunism if you like, but it's a functional question at root, not a moral one. Like them or not, patents and the culture of open exchange surround them foster more innovation than they retard.

Look at Gallileo: had he been able to hand a patent application over to some proto-Jeffersonian (the US's first VP took patents home in his briefcase every night), rather than having to lobby a bunch of recalcitrant "experts" in skirts and surplices, he might have enjoyed some freedom from worry and gone on to further acts of creativity. If not by profiting from his work, at least by virtue of the systemic protection afforded by the very existence of a patent office.

We tend to blindly assume that all great men and women we admire maxed out their creative potential--they achieved greatness, didn't they?--but if you look at their histories, you find that usually they limped to greatness under extremely unfavorable conditions. The culture of the patent has gone further toward ameliorating this culture-retarding situation than any other institution in the history of mankind. And it can go further.

There are plenty of valid arguments out there for why our patent system is broken, like this one comparing the USPTO to Bastiat's Fallacy of the Broken Window. And there are also plenty of ways to fix it. But I'm concerned about the baby in the bathwater. Why should these protections not apply to the inventors of non-corporeal stuff, as well as thinkers whose contribution is to connect non-obvious dots?

BMW Audio Books: Beyond Product Placement

I like to listen to moody, noirish mysery novels while driving around in the Southern California sunshine. It's a sweet-and-sour thing. Never gets stale for me.

Which is why I was intrigued recently when I stumbled upon BMW Audio Books. The company has commissioned original fiction by some unexpected authors, and to judge by a first listen, they've done it right.

This weekend I downloaded and listened to James Flint's Outer Limits-ish Master of the Storm this weekend while winding up the Pacific Coast Highway. The production was impeccable, far better quality than most of the books I've purchased on Audible.com, the story performed (rather than merely read) by Forbes Masson, a Shakespeare-trained Scotsman with an intoxicating, single-malt voice. Flint's work has a distinctive style, and like the other authors BMW has engaged, he has enough edge-dwelling credibility that there's precious little chance anyone will mistake him for a shill... even though the story does take place in a car--a BMW.

The presence of the car in the Storm has a nudge-nudge, wink-wink quality to it, and little to do with the story itself. But any expectation that the story would be advertorial in nature is quickly dispelled  as the protagonist gets behind the wheel after one champagne too many and plows into an innocent bystander. Not a particularly safe plot point for a car company, but a turn that had the effect of instantly earning my trust and attention.

When you're a successful luxury brand, your job is to keep your profile up and not lose your cool--all the while acting like you have nothing to prove to anyone.

That's not an easy prescription to follow. Just ask Jaguar, which, under Ford, ran a series of banal suburbanite ads that left one wondering whether the product were a car or a washer-dryer set. Sales of the Tauruses--er, Jags--predictably suck.

Publishing slightly off-color, risk-taking fiction is a brilliantly safe way of owning the edge, I think. Unless you start slandering mullahs, literary fiction isn't likely to upset anyone, even pretty out-there fiction. And it's an art form in serious need of patronage. 

I think one of the ways in which the arts have helped to marginalize themselves is by subscribing to a basically socialized view of artistic production as lying properly outside of the commercial arena (sure there is money in the arts, but only speculative money; I'd argue that there's no robust arts economy as such). Corporate-sponsored literature is something that could give serious literary fiction a real boost, and actually improve the quality and range of what's available, as a paying commission frees the artist to work, whereas speculative work is always done behind a door with a wolf on the other side of it.

Tags: BMW, BMW Audio, fiction, literature

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Europe, Innovation and the C Word

Umair Haque thinks Europe is poised to be the next "fountain of innovation", now that it's time to fill up all that new space we've made online with content:

Europe needs structures which create more liquid markets for entrepreneurship, sure. But that's a very small part of the next great economic game, truth be told; and Eurocrats are working to build them, in their own ponderous way.

But to focus solely on entrepreneurship is to miss the bigger picture. I think Europe is poised to be the world's next fountain of innovation; far more so than the US. Here's why.

Europe has two huge capital stocks that no one else in the world does: social and cultural capital.

I agree with Umair that Europe is a nice place to live, because of its superior cultural environment (as opposed to the mini-mall wasteland of the US). Yet... I think that Europe defines culture too narrowly, and too aesthetically. To me, the fact that Europe does not have an entrepreneurial ethos is itself a cultural shortcoming--if you define culture the way I do. I have lived in Europe, and in India back in the days of the closed economy, both places with rich cultures if your definition of culture favors the arts over commerce. But in both places, there's a quiet brutality to the socialist ethic that culture belongs strictly to the social and the artistic spheres.

Europe is responsible for this secularization (I mean this in the broadest sense) and subsequent ghettoisation of the arts--for making culture precious, and toothless. (Des Esseintes anyone?) The result is downright dissociative, a cultural sensibility marked by self-defeating superiority--paired with a sweet-and-sour cocktail of economic snobbery and self-pity.

Culture is about context and meaning, and should be expressed in the context of our economic life, where most of us spend the majority of our productive energies. And right now, the US is the world leader in business culture--more and more, we create, innovate and engage, rather than merely "working". It's the only place where work and commerce are talked about in terms of fulfillment, idealism and even pleasure. This, to me, is where the cultural innovations are occurring. Not in the arts, which are geared toward creative iteration, but not necessarily innovation. And not in Europe.

Tags: Europe, innovation

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The (Techdirt) Greenhouse Effect

One more thing became clear to me during Techdirt Greenhouse: There is perhaps no better way to find out how an entrepreneur thinks than to get them to talk about what they'd do with someone else's business. Anyone should be able to pitch and defend their own startup, but ask them to parse something they've spent five minutes getting to know, and you really do get a fair picture of how fair and nimble an entrepreneurial intelligence they possess.

In the bricks and mortar world, business people sort each other out by playing golf--I'm not making excuses for them; they really do deserve the write-off, because golf is a very, very difficult game to play, let alone be good at, and four hours on the links can tell you a lot about how a person will handle stress, embarrassment, failure and frustration.

The unexpected fun yesterday was to see how entrepreneurs performed when called upon to parse the complexities of other people's companies. It is one thing to listen to someone pitch you something they care about and have lived and breathed for months. It's another thing altogether to see how they field entrepreneurial challenges, well, in the field.

All entrepreneurs, and doubtless all investors, have had the experience of being very keen on someone they've vetted with duly and diligently, only to find that under pressure--sometimes just the pressure of day-to-day ops--there's no one home, or worse, Mr. Hyde answers the bell. Finding out how robust an intellect you're dealing with is really very difficult. But I had the spooky feeling, walking out of these forty minute sessions, that I'd met people I'd like to work with, and also people I'd probably have made the mistake of working with if I hadn't seen them in action.

The upshot: If I were a VC (or a founder looking for partners, or a startup looking for key staff), I'd be pretty excited about seeing Mike, Mike, Mike, Mike and Dennis turn this into a regular event, so that I could avail myself of this forum to gauge my potential investment's performance, not just in a pitch meeting or interview, but on the "green."

Tags: techdirt greenhouse, techdirtgreenhouse

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Yesterday at TechDirt

Jackie and I spent our Saturday at TechDirt Greenhouse in San Jose. The idea: early-stage entrepreneurs who ranged from venture-backed cos with a launched product to college kids with a fresh batch of home-cooked Ajax gave five minute presentations, followed by small group discussions aimed at generating constructive advice.

One of the groups I landed in was charged with discussing the "new" business model for 2006 (result: "organically grown"--ie., "97% investment dollar free!"). The group also disagreed with Andy Kessler's assertion that every business has to scalable to the moon and back--the web needs its mom and pop dry-cleaning shops, too.

Another session dissected topix.net, at which point I briefly (and annoyingly I'm sure) dragged out two of my rickety soapboxes: the one about how I don't think the news aggregator is the killer new media app everyone else thinks it is, and the one about "information overload" being a myth:  Analogy: Do you sit around fretting about the fact that there are six billion people in the world, and how will you ever sort through them? Of course not. Another analogy: Do you walk into Borders and suffer a panic attack over how many books there are? Of course not. So there are a lot of blogs now--you'll get used to it. More importantly, as Umair Haque said, if you're under 18, you're already used to it.

I was very curious to hear Umair keep making quietly prophetic references to MySpace. He thinks we're not talking about this consumer end of 2.0 enough--and I agree. I'd like to see Umair, who is the Robert Venturi of Web 2.0 architecture, to write a "Learning from MySpace" manifesto in the spirit of  Learning from Las Vegas (that's Venturi's 1972 book about the significance of architectural kitsch, not the movie about the drunk and the hooker).

Tags: techdirt greenhouse, techdirtgreenhouse

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The Truth About Fair Trade Coffee

The Globalisation Institute (a British think tank with ideas as fresh as my brother Din's daily brew at Ristretto Roasters) has some really interesting thinking on what the Fairtrade movement really means for growers in the developing world. Here's a snippet of what Alex Singleton has to say on the subject:

It is Fairtrade Fortnight, and we are all being encouraged to pay extra for everything from coffee to bananas. Coffee, a totemic product for the development community, is a product where many producers have suffered from lowering prices. Massive overproduction, caused largely by mechanisation in Brazil and the rise of Vietnam as a major producer, has had its effect on prices.

To read Singleton's manifesto on how to renovate the Fairtrade movement to make it truly meaningful to growers, check out Fairtrade 2.0 (n.b., best viewed while imbibing a nice cup of Ristretto's Kenya AA Katuro).

Tags: fairtrade, coffee, globalisation

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Is Equality a Dirty Word? Or Just a Euphemism?

I think the problem with equality as we use the term in political and economic debate is that it implies the existence of an axis when it comes to the measurement of prosperity.

After reading David Schmidtz's lead essay on this month's Cato Unbound topic, When Inequality Matters, I started thinking about whether equality was absolute or relative. Well, it's both, I thought.... no, wait a minute, it's neither.... wait, what was the question?

Or rather, how good is the question?

The problem with the seductive notion of "equality," in actual use, is that it's really a crippled concept to start with. Imagine you had ten kids, and someone asked you whether or not they were "equal" in your eyes. You'd answer, "Of course they are!" while thinking all the while, "What a stupid question; this person I'm talking to obviously doesn't have kids."

That's pretty much how you feel when the IRS asks you if you're "rich", too.

It's a bit ludicrous to think that there exists a truly rational means of measuring success, whether economic or personal or otherwise. The unspoken truth is that our judgments as to whether or not a person is successful or wealthy are emotional and impressionistic at root. Like art, wealth is something about which I can safely say, "I know it when I see it."

Scmidtz writes:

Liberal political equality is not premised on the absurd hope that, under ideal conditions, we all turn out to be equally worthy. It presupposes only a traditionally liberal optimism regarding what kind of society results from giving people (all people, so far as we can) a chance to choose worthy ways of life. We do not see people’s various contributions as equally valuable, but that was never the point of equal opportunity, and never could be.

Makes me wonder whether or not our collective failure to grasp the meaning of prosperity comes from the fact that we keep calling it equality. As euphemisms go, it's a sloppy one. Distracting, too.

By endlessly parsing equality instead of prosperity we keep 90% of our discussion focused on the relatively small "grey area" of the debate. It's a bit like trying to define what a celebrity is by endlessly debating whether or not the people on Celebrity Fit Club are "really" celebrities. The real answer to that particular question isn't to be found on an axis, nor in any relative valuation--the real answer is: It doesn't matter. Except perhaps to Chastity Bono, but I doubt that even she cares.

Tags: Cato, David Schmidtz, equality, inequality, economics, wealth, prosperity

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