Artworld's Reaction to Citizen Art: not like Science and DIYscience

Considering the tradition of the highly-regarded place of science in society and the venerated scientific method, it is surprising that the ScienceWorld has deigned to notice Citizen Science and DIYscience efforts. Initially, the reaction of science may have generally been to dismiss citizen science, however, in many cases, perspectives shifted to wondering how to collaborate with citizen science efforts and how low-cost world-wide accessible Internet models could help to crowdsource study participants, data analysis, and other aspects of studies. The ecosystem became a continuum ranging from institutional science ('high science') to the individual n=1 quantified self experimenter ('citizen science as the venture capital arm (e.g.; starter, feeder, interest-surfacer) of science').(More)

Now the advent of new media has democratized the tools for art production. It is much easier for individuals to express themselves creatively in many different digital art venues and genres. Some of the tools that facilitate individual and collaborative creativity include Garage Band, SoundCloud, Pinterest, the Spore creature creator, blogs, Twitter, and virtual worlds. It is therefore timely to ask about the ArtWorld's (e.g.; insiders: artists, museums, critics) potential reaction to Citizen Art. As opposed the ScienceWorld's reaction to Citizen Science, the ArtWorld's reaction to Citizen Art could be much more complex. This is because art has been, and may always be something contentious. Key questions remain unsettled and even more pronounced with new media and digital art:

• what is art? 
• who can do art? 
• who can determine what is art? 
• what is the consecration process for art? 
• what is the societal and political role of art? what is the role of art as critique (of art, society, politics, etc.)? 
• is art autonomous from society? 
• what does the commercialization of art mean? 

Precisely because it is art, and not science, the acceptance of Citizen Art by the ArtWorld is much more nuanced than the tangible and quantitative nature of science, including Citizen Science, that makes results demonstrable. What is at stake is also more nebulous, although some new genres of digital art like SciArt, itself a mix of science and art, may be earlier to be acknowledged by the ArtWorld. (More)

Interconnected Big Data World: API Services Marketplaces

A feature of the data-driven modern world is different companies (e.g.; Walgreens, BestBuy) and web properties (e.g.; eBay) offering access to their data and services via API (application programming interface).

In some part an ingenious crowdsourcing ploy and more broadly having the effect of enmeshing even more deeply the interconnected data world, API access requires a lot of coordination.

A new market segment, API management services, has sprung up to facilitate both public and private (white-label) access. Some of the leading companies in the segment include: Mashape, the cloud API platform, offering developer access to hundreds of APIs, Mashery (acquired by Intel in April 2013), an API network with standardized and richly-documented access to over 50 APIs, and Apigee, a leading provider of API services for enterprises and developers. Other related companies include 3scale, WebServius, and Layer 7 Technologies. A related company Zapier enables task-automation between online services like Salesforce, Basecamp, and Gmail.

API management services are growing marketplaces for the management, distribution, and consumption of APIs. Developers gain the ability to have a standard interface for quickly accessing and working with data from hundreds of sources. Web properties and corporations gain a standardized and outsourced management solution to coordinate external developer interactions and extend their ecosystems.

DIY Philosophy: Crowd Models to Democratize Participatory Thinking

The model for computing and info tech exploded with the PC and the Internet – democratizing the field across all strata and making it accessible to any interested individual. The worldwide technology and startup industry has boomed and proliferated as a result. DIY science is doing the same for crowdsourced labor, quantified self-tracking, biology hacking, and the shift to the 21st century health paradigm of preventive medicine. The field of philosophy is ripe for similar democratization – some tip-offs are that it is one of the few remaining areas comprised primarily of white males, and where memorization is still important.

Philosophy Improves Sophistication of Modern Thinking 
Philosophy is the sport of thinking – one of its great benefits is its broad applicability beyond the dusty academic discipline to one’s own personal thinking and lifestyle. A key contemporary use of philosophy is in helping to provide a deeper and more sophisticated means of understanding our fast-paced technologized modern world and our place therein. Many people are interested in philosophy but few have the affordance or interest for full-time involvement which has seemed to have been required given the notorious density and inaccessibility of philosophical works.

Crowd Models Facilitating Philosophy Accessibility 
Crowd models (analogous to the PC revolution) are starting to change the former inaccessibility of philosophy. Philosophy courses and reading groups are popping up at free public universities (the Public School, the University of the Commons), podcasts are acquiring significant listenership, and online communities and publications have growing participatory audiences (e.g.; e-Flux, Plasticities Sciences Arts).

FQXi for Philosophy
While there are some research institutes supporting philosophy like the University of London's Institute of Philosophy, one next step in creating the more overt sensibility of the DIY philosopher as the analog to the DIY scientist and software hacker would be to have Philosophy Research Institutes that specifically promote DIY philosopher participation through essay contests, conferences, and other acknowledgement and community-building activities – an FQXi (e.g.; a research institute encouraging speculative innovation in physics and cosmology) for philosophy is needed.

Top 10 Technology Tends for 2013

1. Big data ubiquity, along with machine learning algorithms, and information visualization
2. Video is the platform (example: individual YouTube channels with over 100,000 people making more than $10,000/year from ‘home video’ properties like My Drunk Kitchen, the ShayTards, and Right This Minute) 
3. Wearable computing and objective biometrics: Fitbit, myZeo, WiThings, smartwatch, smartring, wearable electronic patches and tattoos, Google’s Project Glass
4. Fracking
5. eHealth biohacking: Quantified Self-tracking, self-experimenting, group health collaboration, $99 personal genomics (23andMe), $99 personal microbiomics (American Gut Project), $5 home blood-test cards (Talking20) 
6. eLearning: Coursera, Udacity, edX, Class Central (MOOC aggregator)
7. Mobile is still the platform: worldwide smartphone adoption crosses 1 billion
8. Crowdsourced labor marketplaces: CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, oDesk, ClickWorker, Mechanical Turk, mobileworks, TopCoder, Elance, vWorker/Rent a Coder, Guru, 99designs, crowdSPRING, CloudCrowd, Soylent, microtask, LiveOps, Gigwalk
9. Computer security: increasing power of Internet-based activist hacking groups (e.g.; Anonymous)
10. New economic models (crowd-based): crowdfunding (Kickstarter, indiegogo, etc.), sustainable business, and crowdfunded debt forgiveness (from the Occupy movement’s financial arm: Rolling Jubilee)

Up and coming: Consumer EEG rigs wearable 24/7 (Axio, Interaxon) and attendant neural and biometric data privacy rights, ideally sans Faraday Cage 2.0

Still waiting for: nanotech, 3D printing, eHealth data commons with public longitudinal phenotypic data sets

Predictions for 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009 

Crowd Models Become Pervasive Across Society

Crowd-based models are becoming so pervasive that almost no major segment of modern life is left untouched by them. The concept of digital crowd models refers to the coordination of large numbers of individuals (the crowd) through an open call on the Internet in the conduct of some sort of activity.

Not only are crowd models an efficient at-scale alternative to former methods that the Internet now affords, but at another level, crowd models are also a node of progress for humanity, both individually and en masse. An inherent property of crowd models is greater autonomy, decision-making, and action-taking by the individual. This means greater individual agency whilst simultaneously enabling group collaboration projects at previously unimaginable scales, for example, possibly ultimately coordinating and employing the cognitive power of millions of human agents.  

Crowd Models by Sector

• In economics, there are crowdsourced labor marketplaces where simple tasks and professional services requests can be posted and fulfilled, crowdfunding websites for financing projects, and group purchasing mechanisms. 
• In politics, crowd models mean the use of big data and social media to organize opinion and action, conduct direct marketing, and affect change. 
• In the social venue, blogs, social networks, and online dating sites are examples of crowd models. 
• In entertainment, there are massively multiplayer online games and virtual worlds. In education, vast eLearning networks are populating the landscape. 
• In health, there are health social networks, digital health collaboration and experimentation communities, crowdscience competitions, and new movements such as the quantified self. 
• In the legal venue, digital public goods have arisen through crowd contributions such as the Wikipedia, online health databanks, and other data commons resources.

Crowdsourced Labor, Digital Marketplaces, and the Future of Self-Actualized eWork

The third annual CrowdConf on changing the future of work through Internet-based crowdsourcing labor models was held in San Francisco on October 23, 2012. The field is much larger compared to prior years (2011 and 2010), both practically and intellectually, as a range of industry vendors and other ecosystem members (e.g.; research organizations, foundations, financial community) attended the conference. Participation in crowd-based models has been increasing this year. Crowdfunding (raising money to back projects through an open call on the Internet) platforms like Kickstarter and indiegogo have been used to raise millions of dollars for projects (although both of these sites have announced that they will not be launching a new development, equity crowdfunding). Crowdsourced labor marketplaces too have been growing significantly.

What is Crowdsourced Labor? 
Crowdsourced labor is sourcing human workers via the Internet for any variety of tasks or work product, with or without remuneration, usually including an online system for bidding, quality tracking, and reputation feedback. There are digital labor marketplaces for general tasks, both short activities (e.g.; to recognize images, validate information, create electronic forms, read handwriting, classify data, tag images, transcribe audio, translate languages, and verify business listings) and professional services engagements at sites like CrowdFlower, CrowdSource, oDesk, ClickWorker, Mechanical Turk (from Amazon)) mobileworks (including real-time task-routing to the best candidate online right now), and vocational specialties such as software programming (TopCoder, Elance, vWorker (was Rent a Coder) and Guru), graphic design (99designs, crowdSPRING), writing, editing and proofreading (CloudCrowd, Soylent), document processing (microtask), and customer relationship management (LiveOps). Mobile phone-based task completion is an important category of crowdsourced labor with projects making use of time-cycles while on the go, and sites like Gigwalk ('hire your smartphone army') offering location-specific tasks.

Figure 1. Real-Time Barometer of CrowdFlower's Digital Labor Market (source: CrowdFlower)

Crowdsourced labor also includes uncompensated work in the volunteer, gift, and reputation economies in examples like Twitter’s localization service, the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup X Challenge (a $1.4 m X Prize for solutions to accelerate oil spill cleanup), and crowdscience games and competitions for protein folding prediction, and genetic and other science data analysis at sites like foldit, EteRNA, Phylo, and Kaggle.

The digital marketplace concept extends more generally to that of resource allocation, allowing supply and demand to meet in real-time on the Internet in other models such as a labor markets for physical-world tasks (e.g.; TaskRabbit and Zaarly), and resource allocation (e.g.; AirBNB (apartment rental) and Uber (private driver ride service on-demand)).

Microtask Design 
Crowdsourced labor is starting to be seen as a general resource that any individual or business can tap on demand. To do so, it is helpful to know how to design a microtasking project, which can be done either independently or through third-party vendors like CrowdFlower and CrowdSource. At the conference, YP (Yellow Pages) shared best practices from a photo moderation project: they used Mechanical Turk’s Master’s Pool of photo reviewers (96% accuracy vs. 80% for unqualified task-completers), had a batch size of 40 photos (more produced worse quality), 8 buckets of keep-suppress gradations for evaluation, and a price of $0.04 per batch (1/6 the price quoted by a third-party vendor).

The Future of Work 
The conference considered more broadly the future directions of work, labor, and organizations. One analogy is that similar to the cash register being a decisive node that allowed business to explode from small family-owned, trust-based activity to large-scale enterprise, crowdsourced labor could be a similarly explosive node. Productive enterprise is no longer confined to physically-based organization-internal corporate structures. Management has been a technology, and crowdsourcing and algorithms are disrupting it. The new challenge becomes how to build and structure work for large-scale crowdsourcing, for many kinds of productive enterprise. There are new capital streams (e.g.; social, political, intellectual, and affective) available to be directed for productive construction on a global, flexible, fungible, and accountable basis. Workers and more generally humans can be put together in new ways, likely in increasingly automated ways to direct individuals to projects in areas of personal interest, for example rated on a self-actualization and contribution scale.

Singularity Summit 2012: Image Recognition, Analogy, Big Health Data, and Bias Reduction

The seventh Singularity Summit was held in San Francisco, California on October 13-14, 2012. As in other years, there were about 600 attendees, although this year’s conference program included both general-interest science and singularity-related topics. Singularity in this sense denotes a technological singularity - a potential future moment when smarter-than-human intelligence may arise. The conference was organized by the Singularity Institute, who focuses on researching safe artificial intelligence architectures. The key themes of the conference are summarized below. Overall the conference material could be characterized as incrementalism within the space of traditional singularity-related work and faster-moving advances coming in other fields such as image recognition, big health data, synthetic biology, crowdsourcing, and biosensors.

Key Themes:

• Singularity Thought Leadership
• Big Data Artificial Intelligence: Image Recognition
• Era of Big Health Data
• Improving Cognition: Bias Reduction and Analogies
• Singularity Predictions

Singularity Thought Leadership
Singularity thought leader Vernor Vinge, who coined the term technological singularity, provided an interesting perspective. Already since at least 2000, he has been referring to the idea of computing-enabled matter and the wireless Internet-of-things as Digital Gaia. He noted that 5% of objects worldwide are already embedded with microprocessors, and it could be scary as reality ‘wakes up’ further, especially as we are unable to control other phenomena we have created such as financial markets. He was pessimistic regarding privacy, suggesting that Brin’s traditional counterproposal to surveillance, sousveillance, is not necessarily better. More positively, he discussed the framing of computers as a neo-neocortex for the brain, extreme UIs to provide convenient and unobtrusive cognitive support, other intelligence amplification techniques, and how we have been unconsciously prepping many of our environments for robotic operations. There has also been the rise of an important resource in crowdsourcing as the network (the Internet plus potentially 7 billion Turing-test passing agents) filters optimal resources to specific cognitive tasks (like protein folding analysis).

Big Data Artificial Intelligence: Image Recognition
Peter Norvig continued in his usual vein of discussing what has been important in resolving contemporary problems in artificial intelligence. In machine translation (interestingly a Searlean Chinese room), the key was using large online data corpuses and straightforward machine learning algorithms (The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data). In more recent work, his lab at Google has been able to recognize pictures of cats. In this digital vision processing advance (announced in June 2012 (article, paper)), the key was creating neural networks for machine learning that used hierarchical representation and problem solving, and again large online data corpuses (10 million images scanned by 16,000 computers) and straightforward learning algorithms.

Era of Big Health Data 
Three speakers presented innovations in the era of big health data, a sector which is generating data faster than any other and starting to use more sophisticated artificial intelligence techniques. Carl Zimmer pointed out that new viruses are continuing to develop and spread, and that this is expected to persist. Encouragingly, new viruses are genetically sequenced increasingly rapidly, but it still takes time breed up vaccines. A faster means of vaccine production could possibly come from newer techniques in synthetic biology and nanotechnology such as those from Angela Belcher’s lab.  Linda Avey discussed Curious, Inc, a personal data discovery platform in beta launch that looks for correlations across big health data streams (more information). John Wilbanks discussed the pyrrhic notion of privacy provided by traditional models as we move to a cloud-based big health data era (for example, only a few data points are needed to identify an individual and medical records may have ~500,000). Some health regulatory innovations include an updated version of HIPAA privacy policies, a portable consent for granting the use of personalized genomic data, and a network where patients may connect directly with researchers.

Improving Cognition: Bias Reduction and Analogies (QS’ing Your Thinking) 
A perennial theme in the singularity community is improving thinking and cognition, for example through bias reduction. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman spoke remotely on his work regarding fast and slow thinking. We have two thinking modes, fast (blink intuitions) and slow (more deliberative logical) thinking, both of which are indispensable and potentially problematic. Across all thinking is a strong inherent loss aversion, and this helps to generate a bias towards optimism. Steven Pinker also spoke about the theme of bias, indirectly. In recent work, he found that there has been a persistent decline in violence over the multi-century history of time, possibly mostly due to increases in affluence and literacy/knowledge. This may seem counter to popular media accounts which, guided by short-term interests, help to create an area of societal cognitive bias. Other research regarding cognitive enhancement and the processes of intelligence was Melanie Mitchell’s claim that analogies are a key attribute of intelligence. The practice of using analogies in new and appropriate ways could be a means of identifying intelligence, perhaps superior to other mechanisms such as general-purpose problem solving, question-answering, or Turing test-passing as the traditional proxies for intelligence.

Singularity Predictions 
Another persistent theme in the singularity community is sharpening analysis, predictions, and context around the moment when there might be greater-than-human intelligence. Singularity movement leader Ray Kurzweil made his usual optimistic remarks accompanied by slides with exponentiating curves of technology cost/functionality improvements, but did not confirm or update his long-standing prediction of a technological singularity circa 2045 [1]. Stuart Armstrong pointed out how predictions are usually 15-25 years out, and that this is true every year. In an analysis of the Singularity Institute’s database of 257 singularity predictions from 1950 forward, there is no convergence of time in estimates ranging from 2020-2080. Vernor Vinge encourages the consideration of a wide range of scenarios and methods including ‘What if the Singularity Doesn’t Happen.’ The singularity prediction problem might be improved by widening the possibility space, for example perhaps it less useful to focus on intelligence as the exclusive element for the moment of innovation, speciation, or progress beyond human-level; other dimensions such as emotional intelligence, empathy, creativity, or a composite thereof could be considered.

Reference
1. Kurzweil, R. The Singularity is Near; Penguin Group: New York, NY, USA, 2006; pp. 299-367.

Memory and empathy studies launch on crowdsourced health platform!

Two new health studies organized by DIYgenomics and collaborators have recently launched on the crowdsourcing platform Genomera. One is a memory study: Dopamine Genes and Rapid Reality Adaptation in Thinking and the other is an empathy study: Social Intelligence Genomics & Empathy-Building.

The Genomera platform boasts over 700 community members who are interested in participating in studies. While several of the approximately 30 listed studies investigate genetics as a related component of health, it is not necessary to have data from 23andMe or other consumer genomics services to join the health collaboration community and participate in studies. There are already 40 participants in the memory study and almost 20 in the empathy study.

The objective of the memory study is to see if genetic variants related to dopamine processing in the brain impact the processing of memories. The study is being conducted in conjunction with leading researchers at the Center of Cognitive Neurorehabilitation in Geneva Switzerland. The participation requirements are to complete an online Memory Filtering Task which takes approximately 40 minutes and a short Demographic Survey.

The objective of the empathy study is to confirm and extend research linking genetic profile and social intelligence, specifically whether individuals with certain genetic profiles may have a greater natural capacity for optimism and empathy, extraversion, and altruism. The participation requirement is to complete two short standardized online surveys for empathy quotient and other personality attributes. In addition, there is an optionally available Personal Virtual Coach app for empathy-building, a sort of SIRI 2.0 for mental performance optimization.

Open science Wikis

Wikis are a great tool for facilitating open science through ease-of-use and transparency in the conduct of research studies. Wikis allow real-time updating, archived recording of changes over time, and the general ease of information flow in the digital era. In the health arena, wikis are being used to empower health-self management. One example is the DIYgenomics wiki which is used to operate crowdsourced health research studies. Two key activities are open deliberation regarding study protocols and data results.

1) Open Study Protocols – wikis can be used to post and continuously update study design protocols. Study advisors, ethicists, potential funders, organizers, participants, press, and any other interested parties may review and give input in an open format. Two current examples of study protocols under development are a Quantified Self-tracking Diabetes study and a Social Genomics study (e.g.; linking personal genomic profiles to empathy, altruism, optimism).

2) Open Data Results – wikis can be used for study participants to log and discuss data results. For example, in one study looking at genomic mutation and Vitamin B deficiency, all data was tracked via wiki. Study participants were asked to post their genomic data and blood test results to the study wiki page as they came arrived. Separate validations were carried out from the underlying PDF copies of the lab test results, but anyone could follow the ongoing study results in real-time from the wiki edits. Later, the data collected in the wiki tables was easy to convert to the form needed for scientific journal publication.

Crowdsourced stock market trading

Stock market trading has become a dirty word, or if not that, at least uninteresting. Wall Street excesses and the 2008 crash have led to little recent opportunity for financial return (non-existent interest rates for saving, and flat stock markets for equities (the S&P 500 return in 2011 was 0% (S&P 1257 at 12/31/10, 1258 at 12/31/11). Gold has been one of the only asset classes to realize real return (142% five-year return, $632 as of 12/28/06, $1531 as of 12/29/11). The particular subjective day trader gave way to faceless high-frequency computer algorithms as one of the only means of squeezing profits out of the stock market.

One thing that could turn this around, and have the dual benefit of bringing more transparency to markets and market practices is crowdsourcing. The enormous amounts of clean, freely available, computable, straightforward-to-understand data without privacy issues are ideal for crowdsourced manipulation.

Earlier attempts at applying crowdsourcing to stock market trading (for example, Yahoo Prediction Markets with leaderboard-style tracking of traders’ mock portfolios) fell by the wayside with the 2008 crash, but the concept could be reincarnated. There are several obvious ways to deploy crowdsourcing in stock market trading startups:

1. First would be a direct implementation of crowdsourcing as from the Wikinomics, fold.it, eteRNA model: making usable web-based datasets available to the wisdom-of-crowds to apply diverse ideas from different disciplines, often resulting in better results than those produced by the ‘experts’ in any field. Leaderboards, competition, leveling-up, forums, badges, and other gamefication techniques would be expected.
2. Second would be a platform where real-life traders can open source their trades, either before or after execution. Interested traders would grant open access to their trade logs, inviting crowd review to find winning trades, strategies, and traders, and conduct meta-analyses like what strategies work well in a high-volatility environment, a down economy, etc.
3. Third would be prediction markets 2.0, a more social gamefication implementation of prediction markets for stock trading, sales forecasting, movie hit projections, elections, and flu outbreaks through platforms like Iowa Electronic Markets, Intrade, etc.

Craigslist 2.0: task outsourcing to local crowd labor

In the time, reputation, and fun hungry modern world, new tools like task outsourcing are emerging to provide these qualities, offering better ways for the invisible hand to meet in your meatsphere neighborhood.

The concept is that the crowdsourcing workplace meets Craig’s list in a local listing service with a reputation economy and badging/leveling up.

At least two startups offer task outsourcing services, TaskRabbit, which has accepted 1,000 reputation-garnering runners into their network to run tasks on demand, and Zaarly, where a consumer names their price for anything and obtains it from people nearby.

It will be interesting to see if there will be crossover in task outsourcing between physical-world tasks and online tasks, whether tools like TaskRabbit and Zaarly could become a 2.0 version of outsourced labor communities like elance, odesk, and 99designs.

Crowdsourcing the stock market

New market tools are emerging that could be much better (real-time and objective) indicators of performance than the traditional methods of speculation-driven stock market price, quarterly reporting, and financial statements.

These tech tools are a nice response to the perceived social economic malaise of the times, and could help to realize some of the new thinking promulgated by both theorists and activists that markets are more of a Darwinian game of the fittest rather than an invisible hand meeting favorably for all parties.

The new market tools - real-time performance indicators:

• Prediction markets (SimExchange, Hollywood Stock Exchange, Intrade) for unit sales data
  
• Real-time purchasing feeds (Blippy, Google Wallet, social shopping sites) for the aggregation of real-time purchase data
• Social media check-ins (FourSquare, Facebook, etc.) for revenue prediction
• Forum badging and site gamification (Badgeville) for measuring the digital economics of brand sentiment

Quantization trends of the future: crowdsourcing and geolocation

Two conferences held in San Francisco last week underline key future trends, the crowdsourcing of work (and maybe everything), and hyper-local mobile-phone based services such as payments. Thematically, crowdsourcing and mobile services both deal with quantization – the idea of resources being granularized to the smallest unit, and then directed fungibly and automatically to where they are needed and requested, like routing internet data packets. In this case labor units and targeted personalized mobile services can be delivered on a quantized basis. Market principles continue to seep into life with quantization models which typically provide superior value creation and exchange.

Crowdsourcing
CrowdConf2011 (November 1-2, 2011) was bigger and broader than CrowdConf2010. The main focus continued to be on crowdsourced labor, but these models are also emerging in e-government, consumer travel, entertainment, fundraising, and philanthropy (and health, though not included at CrowdConf). Software, professional services (i.e.; graphic design) and R&D have long been staples of crowdsourced labor, and these models are now being extending to almost all areas of the enterprise including sales, social CRM (customer relationship management) and finance, accounting, and administration.

Mobile-phone based services
Mobile is the platform. One billion smartphone users are expected by 2013 and app downloads grew explosively from 300 million in 2009 to five billion in 2010. Arguably, the mobile phone has become an indispensable human augmentation accessory: the loss of a phone is noticed within five minutes, versus the loss of a wallet which takes an hour. The intimate continuous connection individuals have with their mobile phones suggests the platform as a critical delivery mechanism for many important future services such as mental mood performance optimization.

Geo-Loco (November 3, 2011) focused on hyper-local mobile services delivery. The biggest growth area is mobile payment programs where the prevailing methods in use are 2-D barcodes (as used in Starbucks smartphone apps) and NFC (near field communication) chips which send encrypted data over short distances. The development of corporate and brand marketing strategies for mobile services delivery was another big focal area. The poster-child of success of branded smartphone apps, from Starbucks, allows payments, store locating, and checking nutritional information. Ironically, drinks can be configured out of 85,000 possibilities and shared with friends, but not actually ordered!

Rating ubiquity

Ratings have long been used in product and service reviews (Amazon, Yelp, etc.), and are now being extended to other areas such as real-time customer service (Tello). There are many other areas where ratings could be helpful.

For example, it would be useful to have an event rating system, the usual simple quantitative stars (1-5 or 1-10 rating) plus rich tag (both adjective + noun) descriptors for meetups, conferences, lectures, etc. Yelp’s ‘Review Highlights’ is a nice start at trying to summarize salient qualitative descriptors.

Rating systems could proliferate to other contexts too, with tag clouds being ascribed to individuals and organizations. This could be a step in filling in the missing pieces of job-seeking or online dating; helping to get an idea of what is it actually like to spend time with a person or organization.

Citizen science genomics

A group of interested citizen scientists came together to explore how they could make their 23andMe personal genomic data actionable. A small (n=7) non-statistically significant pilot study was conducted looking at polymorphisms (e.g.; typos) in SNPs in the MTHFR gene and their connection to Vitamin B deficiency and high (undesirable) homocysteine levels. Four out of seven participants, though healthy, had high baseline homocysteine levels. For five of the study participants, a regular drugstore multivitamin worked best for reducing homocysteine levels. Overall, homocysteine levels were reduced 19%, commensurate with 23% reductions achieved in traditional clinical trials.

This is an important example for two reasons: the preventive medicine model and the crowdsourced research model.

1. This study illustrates one approach to the challenge of preventive medicine. Prospective tracking of genomic data + phenotypic data + interventions could help to establish baseline measures of wellness in large populations, shift health management responsibility to individuals, and potentially prevent or delay the clinical onset of conditions.
   
2. This study shows the value of crowdsourcing citizen scientists for research studies as they increasingly have access to their health information, may be willing to contribute their data to various studies, and have the interest and motivation to investigate conditions of personal relevance.

Paper: Citizen Science Genomics as a Model for Crowdsourced Preventive Medicine Research, December 23, 2010

Crowdsourcing: labor-as-a-service marketplaces

The dynamism of the information economy, the internet, and the recession have forced and allowed the flowering of labor-as-a-service marketplaces. Individuals can self-direct their professional activity with greater empowerment, and service-consumers can be more selective and focused in their purchase of labor services through crowdsourcing. More productive use of time can occur for both service-providers and service-consumers.

Work is becoming quantized.

The big shift is to labor-as-a-service generally, where in the past marketplaces were more focused on software coding and other vertical markets. The new labor marketplaces include oDesk, CloudCrowd, CrowdFlower, ClickWorker, crowdSPRING, LiveOps, and editLift. These startups broaden the existing affinity marketplace landscape of companies such as 99designs, Justmeans, TopCoder, RentACoder, Elance, and Guru.

You know an industry has arrived when Freelance Camps and conferences (CrowdConf2010) start happening!

Thought-leadership provided by Dan Pink’s Free Agent Nation, the ROWE (ROWE (Results Oriented Work Environment) concept, and Tom Malone’s The Future of Work is finally coming to greater fruition.

Dollar Van Demos

Easily the phreshest idea from New York’s Internet Week, held in Manhattan June 7-14, was Dollar Van Demos! Dollar Van Demos are a showcase of musicians, rappers, and comedians performing inside a dollar van with real passengers. Numerous Brooklyn-based artists are featured in a collection of videos filmed inside dollar vans as they travel along their usual transportation routes.

The site has new videos from Cocoa Sarai, Tah Phrum Duh Bush, Grey Matter, Zuzuka Poderosa, Kid Lucky, Atlas, BIMB Family, I-John, Top Dolla Raz, Hasan Salaam, illSpokinn, Joya Bravo, Bacardiiiii and Jarel soon!

Figure 1. Example videos from Cocoa Sarai and Top $ Raz

Social media and Enterprise 2.0

There is a much deeper application of Web 2.0 technologies and concepts possible in the enterprise than is currently being contemplated and implemented. Some companies have an early effort to use some of the tools but have not noticed that the concepts themselves can be applied to generate significant benefit. Worse, misapplication is also occurring such as the creation of Social Media Officers oblivious to the bottom-up rather than top-down property of social media.

Future of social media
The long-term future of social media is lifelogging - the auto-capture and permissioned auto-posting or archiving of every person’s every thought and experience. Feedhavior’s digital footprints continue to drive individual actions. The corporation goes away. Artificial intelligence becomes the most efficient form of outsourcing. People and organizations spend more time in simulation worlds than physical worlds. Entrepreneurs and organizations provide goods and services by making offerings proactively to groups of potential customers aggregated through their web-based interest communities. Marketing must be relevant to avoid being perceived as advertising.


Applying Web 2.0 Technologies to the Enterprise
There is no part of the firm at present that cannot make use of Web 2.0 and social media technologies. There are two dimensions for application:

External and Internal
Externally, a firm can use Web 2.0 and social media technologies for branding, re-inventing and testing business models, product and service sales, customer relationship management (CRM), partner ecosystem management, R&D outsourcing and recruiting. Internally, firms can use Web 2.0 and social media technologies for communication, collaboration, work assignment, task and project management, resource allocation and performance feedback.

Tools, Concepts and Values
Some examples of the direct application of social media and Web 2.0 tools are using blogs to supplement or replace marketing, APIs to supplement or replace business development, and crowdsourcing ideagoras to supplement or replace R&D. Applying concepts is for example not just using Digg for the firm’s industry news feeds but Digg functionality to bid up and down work assignments or performance feedback. Using Web 2.0 in the enterprise is not using mash-ups but mashing up internal applications, putting a virtual world front-end on any data application to represent the information in a high-resolution way. Internal trainings and meetings are conducted as open space unconferences. Everyone can participate in everything.

The values of social media are also applied internally and externally: authenticity, openness, transparency, participation, creativity, perpetual beta, new linkages, asking the wisdom of crowds (web, twitter), acknowledgement that everyone can have good ideas and contribute and using freemium and open-source business models (free + fee-based).

Social finance has arrived with crowd funding

Peer-to-peer micro-finance is expanding from lending marketplaces like Prosper and Zopa to peer-to-peer affinity-driven financial support for a wide variety of arts, humanitarian and software development projects.

The phenomenon has many names: crowd funding, crowd sourcing, social finance (coined here?), and virtual affinity group capital. Crowd funding is the natural extension of memes like the long tail, smart mobs and social networking and is an obvious capability of an increasingly linked online populace. Social finance is Money Now! - instant market support for good ideas attached to validated reputations.

Several websites are accommodating crowd finance: bands via Sellaband (description), movies via A Swarm of Angels, and citizen vlogging via HaveMoneyWillVlog (using a Wordpress plugin) which importantly lists the deliverable(s) and has feedback loops for on-project progress. Austin TX-based Fundable is a clearing house site for social finance and sees many uses for its platform including project financing for individuals, non-profit organizations, relief efforts and software development projects as well as other social finance practicalities such as splitting the cost of purchases and club dues collection. Fundable's beta site is a bit under-built (needs better listing and search functionality) and their 7% fee is steep (Prosper takes 1% of funded loan amounts).

Social finance projects are most often open-source, and are sometimes executed in interaction with the funding sponsors. A minimum contribution of $10 is generally required and the total amount to be raised is a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. PayPal (perhaps finding itself much more extensible than initially envisioned) handles the mechanics of the crowd pledges and fund disbursement, sometimes including some degree of escrow functionality for the commitment of funds and return of pledges if the project does not fully fund.

The funding levels are still fairly low for social finance projects but as the model becomes more proven, hopefully the OpenBasicResearch.org idea could be used for longer-term science research funding and looking out even further, the economy could shift to include freelancers with consistent regular affinity support as dependable sustenance.

It is exciting to see the power of virtual affinity groups in providing capital in both lending and grant financing models. The next obvious capability of virtual affinity groups will be in providing political support. The impact of social finance, text and video blogs and video clip websites like Blip.tv and YouTube will likely be significant in the 2008 presidential elections.