DATA Mining At The Local Level

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter work well because people enjoy sharing their lives with friends. At the office, however, social networking with colleagues can feel forced. Many businesses are adopting social-networking tools in hopes of fostering collaboration, but if employees don't sign up or participate, the effort fails.

To get around this problem, HP Labs has created a workplace social network that builds itself. The Web application, dubbed the Collective Project, tracks internal documents created or opened by about 10,000 Hewlett-Packard employees. It assigns topic words to each document by mining its content, and then computes similarity to create knowledge maps and family trees centered around employees and subject areas. The project's goal is to show how people within a large organization can automatically be connected based on "inferred expertise," providing a resource that staff can tap into for answers to questions.

"You don't have to update a profile, you don't have to declare your interests or expertise, you don't have to search," says Ruth Bergman, director of HP Labs Israel, part of the research division of the company. "The tool makes knowledge instantly accessible, rather than being a laborious process of discovery and input," she says.

In recent years, startups such as Yammer and large companies like IBM have released social and collaborative tools aimed at workplaces. Bergman says many have mimicked consumer services such as Facebook or Twitter, places where people go to socialize and have their voices heard. But at work, she says, people are usually looking to solve problems quickly, so a more passive and automated network can be more efficient.

Within the Collective Project, HP employees can search keywords and see results that recommend useful documents and employees closely connected to those files. Staff can view files they discover, as long as they have access permissions. At very large organizations, this kind of data mining could encourage serendipitous connections between coworkers working in different countries. Bergman herself used the tool at a conference and met a colleague with similar interests with whom she now collaborates.

The system doesn't yet mine e-mails to detect work patterns, but that feature could be added once the Collective Project is expanded to all of HP, Bergman says. She says it would have to be done carefully, since privacy is a concern. Currently, users can customize permissions to share the full content of some documents, or instead only allow the system to analyze information in a document, but prevent its retrieval by others.

Eventually, Bergman says, the company might market the program as a product to other large businesses that require faster ways to connect internal experts. For now, the project is expanding within Hewlett-Packard. As the program crawls new document troves, associated employees are automatically added to the network.

There will, however, be fewer employees to add. Hewlett-Packard, one of the world's largest technology companies, is rumored to be laying off up to 30,000 jobs, or 10 percent of its workforce, this week. An HP spokesperson declined to comment. (MIT ethnology Review) 

The Facebook Fallacy

For all its valuation, the social network is just another ad-supported site. Without an earth-changing idea, it will collapse and take down the Web.

Michael Wolff

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Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it.
Given its vast cash reserves and the glacial pace of business reckonings, that will sound hyperbolic. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.
At the heart of the Internet business is one of the great business fallacies of our time: that the Web, with all its targeting abilities, can be a more efficient, and hence more profitable, advertising medium than traditional media. Facebook, with its 900 million users, valuation of around $100 billion, and the bulk of its business in traditional display advertising, is now at the heart of the heart of the fallacy.
The daily and stubborn reality for everybody building businesses on the strength of Web advertising is that the value of digital ads decreases every quarter, a consequence of their simultaneous ineffectiveness and efficiency. The nature of people's behavior on the Web and of how they interact with advertising, as well as the character of those ads themselves and their inability to command real attention, has meant a marked decline in advertising's impact.
At the same time, network technology allows advertisers to more precisely locate and assemble audiences outside of branded channels. Instead of having to go to CNN for your audience, a generic CNN-like audience can be assembled outside CNN's walls and without the CNN-brand markup. This has resulted in the now famous and cruelly accurate formulation that $10 of offline advertising becomes $1 online.
I don't know anyone in the ad-Web business who isn't engaged in a relentless, demoralizing, no-exit operation to realign costs with falling per-user revenues, or who isn't manically inflating traffic to compensate for ever-lower per-user value.
Facebook, however, has convinced large numbers of otherwise intelligent people that the magic of the medium will reinvent advertising in a heretofore unimaginably profitable way, or that the company will create something new that isn't advertising, which will produce even more wonderful profits. But at a forward profit-to-earnings ratio of 56 (as of the close of trading on May 21), these innovations will have to be something like alchemy to make the company worth its sticker price. For comparison, Google trades at a forward P/E ratio of 12. (To gauge how much faith investors have that Google, Facebook, and other Web companies will extract value from their users, see our recent chart.)
Facebook currently derives 82 percent of its revenue from advertising. Most of that is the desultory ticky-tacky kind that litters the right side of people's Facebook profiles. Some is the kind of sponsorship that promises users further social relationships with companies: a kind of marketing that General Motors just announced it would no longer buy.
Facebook's answer to its critics is: pay no attention to the carping. Sure, grunt-like advertising produces the overwhelming portion of our $4 billion in revenues; and, yes, on a per-user basis, these revenues are in pretty constant decline, but this stuff is really not what we have in mind. Just wait.
It's quite a juxtaposition of realities. On the one hand, Facebook is mired in the same relentless downward pressure of falling per-user revenues as the rest of Web-based media. The company makes a pitiful and shrinking $5 per customer per year, which puts it somewhat ahead of the Huffington Post and somewhat behind the New York Times' digital business. (Here's the heartbreaking truth about the difference between new media and old: even in the New York Times' declining traditional business, a subscriber is still worth more than $1,000 a year.) Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users.
On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway.
The subtext—an overt subtext—of the popular account of Facebook is that the network has a proprietary claim and special insight into social behavior. For enterprises and advertising agencies, it is therefore the bridge to new modes of human connection.
Expressed so baldly, this account is hardly different from what was claimed for the most aggressively boosted companies during the dot-com boom. But there is, in fact, one company that created and harnessed a transformation in behavior and business: Google. Facebook could be, or in many people's eyes should be, something similar. Lost in such analysis is the failure to describe the application that will drive revenues.
Google is an incredibly efficient system for placing ads. In a disintermediated advertising market, the company has turned itself into the last and ultimate middleman. On its own site, it controls the space where a buyer searches for a thing and where a seller hawks that thing (its keywords AdWords network). Google is also the cheapest, most efficient way to place ads anywhere on the Web (the AdSense network). It's not a media company in any traditional sense; it's a facilitator. It can forget the whole laborious, numbing process of selling advertising space: if a marketer wants to place an ad (that is, if it is already convinced it must advertise), the company calls Mr. Google.
And that's Facebook's hope, too: like Google, it wants to be a facilitator, the inevitable conduit at the center of the world's commerce.
Facebook has the scale, the platform, and the brand to be the new Google. It only lacks the big idea. Right now, it doesn't actually know how to embed its usefulness into world commerce (or even, really, what its usefulness is).
But Google didn't have the big idea at the company's founding, either. The search engine borrowed the concept of AdWords from Yahoo's Overture network (with a lawsuit for patent infringement andsettlement following). Now Google has all the money in the world to buy or license all the ideas that could makes its scale, platform, and brand pay off.
What might Facebook's big idea look like? Well, it does have all this data. The company knows so much about so many people that its executives are sure that the knowledge must have value (see "You Are the Ad," by Robert D. Hof, May/June 2011).
If you're inside the Facebook galaxy (a constellation that includes an ever-expanding cloud of associated ventures) there is endless chatter about a near-utopian (but often quasi-legal or demi-ethical) new medium of marketing. "If we just ... if only ... when we will ..." goes the conversation. If, for instance, frequent-flyer programs and travel destinations actually knew when you were thinking about planning a trip. Really we know what people are thinking about—sometimes before they know! If a marketer could identify the person who has the most influence on you ... If a marketer could introduce you to someone who would relay the marketer's message ... get it? No ads, just friends! My God!
But so far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook.
So the social network is left in the same position as all other media companies. Instead of being inevitable and unavoidable, it has to sell the one-off virtue of its audience like every other humper on Madison Avenue.
Here's another worrisome point: Facebook is a company of technologists, not marketers. If you wanted to bet on someone succeeding in the marketing business, you'd bet on technologists only if they could invent some new way to sell; you wouldn't bet on them to sell the way marketers have always sold.
But that's what Facebook is doing, selling individual ads. From a revenue perspective, it's an ad-sales business, not a technology company. To meet expectations—the expectations that took it public at $100 billion, the ever-more-vigilant expectations needed to sustain it at that price—it has to sell at near hyperspeed.
The growth of its user base and its ever-expanding  page views means an almost infinite inventory to sell. But the expanding supply, together with an equivocal demand, means ever-lowering costs. The math is sickeningly inevitable. Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isn't Google; it's Yahoo or AOL.
Oh, yes ... In its Herculean efforts to maintain its overall growth, Facebook will continue to lower its per-user revenues, which, given its vast inventory, will force the rest of the ad-driven Web to lower its costs. The low-level panic the owners of every mass-traffic website feel about the ever-downward movement of the cost of a thousand ad impressions (or CPM) is turning to dread, as some big sites observed as much as a 25 percent decrease in the last quarter, following Facebook's own attempt to book more revenue.
You see where this is going. As Facebook gluts an already glutted market, the fallacy of the Web as a profitable ad medium can no longer be overlooked. The crash will come. And Facebook—that putative transformer of worlds, which is, in reality, only an ad-driven site—will fall with everybody else.

Michael Wolff writes a column on media for the Guardian; is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair; founded Newser; and was, until October of last year, the editor of AdWeek.
(MIT Technology Review) 

How Much Is A User Worth?

When Facebook went public last week, the company was valued at $104 billion, an astonishing figure for an Internet company. Is the figure preposterously high? That depends on how you look at it. The value in Facebook lies in its enormous audience—901 million people every month who are potential viewers of advertisements and buyers of virtual goods. So you could think of Facebook this way: it is worth about $116 for every user it has. On that basis, the company isn't being valued as highly as Google ($200 per user) or even the question-and-answer service Quora ($145). This metric also reveals that investors are much less optimistic that Twitter (worth less than $60 per user) or Tumblr (about $8) will profit handsomely from their very large audiences.

Another reason this metric is useful: it indicates that for all the hype around Facebook and its kin, the situation isn't as hyperbolic as it was in the dot-com boom. Remember Excite, one of the first Web portals? It and its 18 million users were worth $6.7 billion—$372 per user—to the @Home Network in 1999. The next year, Lycos was acquired for $5.5 billion, or $186 per user. It might be of little solace that valuations aren't as inflated as they were 13 years ago, but at least today, unlike then, there is a sizable amount of Internet ad revenue to vie for. (MIT Technology Report) 

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Is Mobile Computing Good For Productivity?

Yes, of course, but things got out of hand. A quarter of executives admit to having slept with a smart phone.

Jessica Leber

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Consultant Deborah Lovich could be accomplishing the management feat of the mobile era. She's convinced hundreds of agile-thumbed, on-at-all-hours colleagues to put down their smart phones and stop working or checking e-mail all evening long.
True, the break happens only once a week. But Boston Consulting Group's "predictable time off" experiment has been a hit. Since it was widely introduced in 2009, more than 900 internal teams have taken part, and the program has become standard practice at most BCG offices in North America and Europe.
Lovich, head of BCG staff in Boston, developed the program with Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow, who in studies begun in 2005 found that BCG consultants felt burnout not only because of long hours, but because they could never predict or control when they might have a break from work.
The problem was BlackBerrys and other mobile devices. BCG workers felt pressure to respond to e-mails from a boss or client right away, even when it wasn't urgent. Responding to one message could set off a chain reaction of e-mails lasting until bedtime.
"Our lives are all about being either on, or on call," says Perlow, who just published Sleeping with Your Smartphone: How to Break the 24/7 Habit and Change the Way You Work, a book describing her work with BCG and other companies. "That is the fundamental interesting question: What is work these days? How do you define it? Is it work when you're at the beach thinking you have to check your e-mail?"
In one survey of 1,600 managers from multiple companies, Perlow found that about half checked e-mail continuously while on vacation or just before bedtime. Some didn't stop there: 26 percent admitted to Perlow that they brought their mobile device into bed with them.
Today, BCG teams that join the predictable time off program meet regularly to work out schedules so that every member can take an official break from e-mail one night each week, not including weekends.
While digital communications and computers have led to huge gains in efficiency, there is evidence that heavy smart-phone use may also interfere with work. Statistics gathered by Perlow, for example, indicate that consultants who had time off felt happier and better at their jobs than those who did not. They were also more efficient. One team she studied decreased its average workweek from 65 to 58 hours while accomplishing essentially the same amount.
Some companies, particularly in Europe, are starting to enforce time away from e-mail during nonwork hours. Volkswagen has programmed its e-mail servers to stop sending messages to many of its German employees after their shifts end. Atos Origin, a French IT company, has plans to end internal company e-mail entirely, claiming it is a waste of time—only 15 of the 100 e-mails its average employee received each day were deemed useful.
It's not just about time off. In some professions, e-mail and the Web are considered a hazard to clear decision making at work. Some venture capitalists who invest in mobile devices say tablets and phones should be banned from board meetings when important decisions are being made. In hospitals, experts worry, the devices are now the cause of "distracted doctoring."
The blurring of work and personal life doesn't only affect highly paid white-collar workers. Union workers, or those with regulated work hours, are also using mobile devices. That is raising new legal questions: Brazil, for example, just passed a law requiring employers to pay overtime when employees use smart phones at home to answer messages from work.

In the United States, Chicago police sergeant Jeffrey Allen is suing because he was not receiving overtime for checking and answering work-related e-mails, calls, and texts at home on his department-issued device. The lawsuit, now awaiting a trial, is among a few emerging cases testing how the U.S. Fair Labor Standards Act applies to smart phones.

"If an employer wants you to wear the ball and chain, and work during your off hours, I think they should have to pay something for that," says Paul Geiger, Allen's lawyer and also a counsel for the city's police union.

Automated Days of Our Lives 


So, how is automation going in your life? Are you hurried and worried about your job? Are you stressed out about your job being outsourced? Ever wondered if there is not an app out there that can or will replace you? Welcome to the automated society. 

Where human interactions are being clicked out by online life. 

Online learning depends on what the meaning of online is. Is it Web 2.0 based where email, along some video, a few links and copied/paste replies/comments from professors accompanied by a graphically enhanced textbook dominate the environment. 

Web 3.0 which is just emerging which includes texting, video chat rooms, more links, better textbooks, more mobile and multiple intelligence teaching and grading applications.

Here's a secret you folks don't know. My two professor buddies who already teach online using Web 2.0 and 3.0 hate the work. They don't hate the technology, nor the students, nor their bosses, universities or their beloved subject matter. What they hate is the lack of human emotion and connections, the real stuff. The stuff that exists in the vibe around the classroom. The feeling you get from real life human connections.

For the first time in their lives they're in it for the money, not the love of the game, just the cash. Keeping their jobs, fearful that soon the university will outsource their passion to a CFC (Cheaper Faster Country). 

I teach online my friends, and I teach well, but I gotta be honest here you're missing the magic.

My sense is that we've, our socieity, have been on the take too long and we've lost our ability to give. Most of us are hurried and worried about our jobs, families, friends, and communities. We've been witness to the great dismantling of our social connectors like schools, hospitals, banks, and local markets by outsourcetionsit and big box semiprofessionals. 

The Creatives

I call it circumvention. Creative people can't walk the path followed by many, they need the path followed by few. So when we, government, academics, and educationist place barriers in their way creatives spend more energy and time thinking/inventing their way around the problem we've created for them. They are non-traditionalist. They are what makes us great. 

They see obstructions, not passing or failing grades. They see a new something the rest of us can't. This I believe is form of darwinian social circumvention and it is the true spirit of capitalism. 

The creatives simply can't drive up to the window or stand in line waiting for their burger. They need to invent a whole new way of getting their burger, or a whole new food group. Its way cool, and its what makes America great. The rest of us traditionalist simply can't understand them so we grade them down. They, like the Gates and Jobs before them simply create new norms while the rest of us complain about change they build empires.