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“The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated” -Mark Twain
Given some of the recent stock performance of Silicon Valley heavyweights this week, GOOG, AAPL, INTC, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington is throwing out a jab at the Web 2.0 entreprenuers that the fun may be over, Web 2.0 is dead. I can’t help but think back to Prof. Kane’s slide on the hype cycle. Even in Arrington’s post he concedes that while the boom may be over, the technology is here to stay.
“This is the period that social networking as we think of it today was born, and we’ll never be rid of it in our lifetimes.”
So as mentioned in class, there’s a reason to believe we’ll be seeing the true use of this technology in the future. Does it mean that the valuation of Facebook might be a little high? Yes. Are VCs going to think twice before funding another 20 widget/app developers? Yes. In the current times, it might be safe to bet on startups with tangible products and related revenue. However, there’s reason to believe that the quick growth and development in the Web 2.0 tools will become the fertilizer for the next generation of technology.
TechCrunch: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/10/10/an-ignoble-but-much-needed-end-to-web-20/
a rebuttal: http://tinycrunch.com/2008/10/10/why-i-dont-buy-into-the-web-20-death-tinycrunch/
http://jonahbermanmi703.blogspot.com/2008/10/crowdsourcing-at-presidential-debate-no.html
Jonah brought up a great topic for discussion, based on a question (and classic non-answer from a politician) in the debate from a couple nights ago.
“Should we fund a Manhattan-like Project that developed the nuclear bomb to deal with global energy and alternative energy, or should we fund one-hundred thousand garages across America, the kind of industry and innovation that developed Silicon Valley?”
I think this is a great question for debate in the class, and here’s why:
1. We’ve discussed crowdsourcing, but from the standpoint of a company searching for development innovations (ex. P&G and toothpaste, InnoCentive, etc.) But how are the problems posted to the crowd really done? P&G didn’t ask for the crowd to make toothpaste, they asked for solutions to a specific problem that wouldn’t necessarily limit the crowd to those who’ve spent their lives designing toothpaste.
2. Does renewable energy and green tech lend itself to more of a Manhattan Project, or Silicon Valley? Consider the following characteristics on each side:
Manhattan Project (a series of government funded projects to produce a functional nuclear weapon)
- Many sites, spread around the country
- Top secret development
- Parallel development of resources (plutonium) and engineering
- Top minds in their respective fields in all of the sites
- A race against evil (Axis powers)
- A product that is was never meant to be sold
- Parts of the product were able to be used in other industries (Nuclear Power) but sharing was an afterthought.
Silicon Valley (a collection of economy funded tech startups that work on various technologies)
- Tight grouping of development in an area known for its high powered local universities
- Evolved from WWII era government development in radio and communication industries
- Spurred on by development of a civilan venture capital system (derived from gov’t funding processes of WWII era)
- Known for development of a variety of technologies originating for transistor technology, and has expanded into computers and computer based industries such as software.
- Creates individual products for commercial and personal consumption
- Limited government intervention in technologies pursued.
3. What should the policy be? Out of the two choices of ” Fund one mega project (Manhattan)”, and “Fund 1000 little project (half-crowdsourcing, half-Silicon Valley)” my choice would be None of the Above.
Our current politicians know that a Manhattan style project was the best that we could do in the 1930s and 1940s, and it was able to succeed based on tremendous resources, manpower, and a looming spectre of Nazis. It was good against evil, everyone pitched in. There was no opportunity to sell out, or cut and run. This wasn’t a commercial project, and was guarded so tightly that you probably would have been shot if you tried to leave. The risks involved were worth taking, because if we didn’t succeed, there might not be a tomorrow. The current energy crisis has a tomorrow, it’s just more expensive, and it’s much more difficult to persuade the taxpayers that we need to pay now to protect great grandkids.
The current holders of the government purse strings also know that they could not reproduce Silicon Valley in a bubble. Any time you limit innovation to a government specified spec, you’ll either get nothing or exactly your spec. In fact, we should be asking ourselves, why hasn’t Silicon Valley solved energy before this? They’ve tried, and it hasn’t caught on commercially. If the government selects 1000 companies/projects, there’s going to be tremendous oversight, planning, specifications, etc (Just ask anyone working at Lockheed or Northrup Grumman). That’s great for those of us in the systems engineering business, but really locks down on innovation. This just screams “Top-down” planning that crowdsourcing circumvents.
So how does the government tweak the commerical rewards system to tip the balance of rewards and profits so that energy tech will work? Tax cuts for green tech, subsidies, tariffs, taxes on fossil fuels. That would create incentives for innovative folks in Silicon Valley to work on the problem. Some government funding might work in some labs/academic situations, but this pales in comparison to the amount of capital available if it is a global economic success (How many profs do you see driving Bentleys and owning their own Learjets?). Small amounts of funding for Innovation prizes might also work, but the main goal is to give economic reasons why we should use renewable over oil.
Extra resources: The wikinomics website w/ blog posts…
http://www.wikinomics.com/blog/
And a post about how a croudsourced venture could go wrong:
The stage is set for a battle of wireless standards as seen by the excellent posts by my classmates Sunny and Chris. As we move towards greater mobility and smaller gadgets great display capabilities, there’s a battle of how we get the information on our cellphones, smart phones, iPod Touches, iPhones, Google G1, PDAs, and Wireless Laptops. Two of the contenders come in the form of WiMAX, a distant relative of WiFi standards today, and 3G wireless, from the technology we use in cellphones now.
WiMAX (from Sunny McSherry)
http://sunnysforecast.blogspot.com/2008/09/wimax-goes-to-baltimore.html
3G Wireless (from Chris)
http://bmw1blog.blogspot.com/2008/09/mobile-broadband-and-our-pdas.html
How can we compare these standards?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Wimax.svg
The success of these competing standards relies on 2 main contention points, Mobility vs. Speed and Adoption/Infrastructure.
The first (as illustrated above) is the tradeoff between speed of the communication and the mobility of the user. As an example, if I know exactly where I need an internet connection, I can run a wire to the exact location and have all the bandwidth I am willing to pay for (just adding more wires, or different technologies like fiber). This is very high speed, with low mobility, since I can’t stretch the wire too much. If you wish to have a little more mobility at the location, perhaps an office with moving workers, you can install a WiFi access point. However, the range is limited, and there is a decline in speed, down from standard 100 Mbit/s for wired down to a max of 54 Mbit/s in wireless. Efforts are being made to improve the wired and wireless speeds to double their current capacities, widening the gap between it and mobile phone data transmission standards. 3G wireless is stated to be able to hit 2 Mbit/s but experience slower speeds when the user is moving (like in a car). Closeness to relay points also increases speed.
However, Speed and Mobility is not the only concern. The installed infrastructure and user base clearly aid 3G and it’s future versions in winning the battle of high speed mobile data communication. Both sides have major players supporting them, WiMAX: Intel, Samsung, and Sprint… 3G (and higher): Ericsson, Verizon Wireless, and Qualcomm (Source: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/hiner/?p=556). While there’s only been a few deployments of WiMAX (Baltimore recently, a few areas in Asia, especially Taiwan, who has had $500 million pledged by Intel in support of a roll out there). It’s still questionable though how much it is going to take to make it successful in the US. Supporters have lined up in the last year to throw their money into the battle totalling over $3 billion for Xohm + Clearwire to provide WiMAX in the US., (http://gigaom.com/2008/05/06/clearwire-wimax-32-billion/, and http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121010437224271501.html)
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