I wrote to the editors of TechCrunch last week suggesting they write a piece on faberNovel’s update of their “most favorited” Slideshare presentation, Amazon.com: The Hidden Empire. They wrote back and suggested I write the post for them myself!
Here it is. Nothing long or deep, but fun to write something for TechCrunch.
Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Want An Empire, He Wants The World.
Here is a guest post I wrote on Business Insider, about the gaming company Valve and their unusual and awesome company culture.
I hope to have the opportunity to start a company like this at some point.
A Company With No Hierarchy Makes More Money Per Employee Than Google, Amazon Or Microsoft
Last week TED announced their much-anticipated “City 2.0” project, the recipient of the 2012 TED Prize. City 2.0, The Atlantic states, is “a kind of global Wikipedia connecting citizens, political leaders, urban experts, companies, and organizations, with the goal of improving the 21st century city using up-to-the-minute crowdsourcing techniques.”
Sounds pretty cool!
But wait – isn’t there already something out there that does this? Yes, there is: Change By Us, a project launched by Local Projects a while back, which came out of their project Give A Minute. Give A Minute is a site where cities can get together online to contribute ideas for ways to make their city better.
Now THAT sounds cool.
But wait – didn’t there used to be a site just like THAT out there? Yes, there did: DIYcity, a site where people organized on a city-by-city basis to figure out ways to make their city work better (started by me in 2008, while I was still Head of Product at Outside.in).
If you ask me whether there was a site before DIYcity that did this same thing, the answer would probably be yes (though I don’t know what site that was).
Jake Barton, Local Projects CEO (and a friend) was quoted in the Atlantic saying, “You can imagine from our standpoint, I meet with (TED) early on in their project, and show them both our project, which is public, but also talk with them about the intimate details of it, and I’ve chatted with them in a friendly way since then, but haven’t heard anything about their plans [until now].”
I can definitely appreciate Jake’s soreness at not being told ahead of time about TED’s plans, but really, this happens every single day in the web, does it not? It has certainly happened to me plenty of times. And it forces us to always come back to the realization that Nobody Owns the Web. Everything is just a reinvention of some previous site. DIYcity becomes Give A Minute becomes Change By Us becomes City 2.0. And each step of the way it gets better, and comes closer to serving its intended purpose. (Or at least it should – if it doesn’t, then it crawls under a rock and dies a quiet death). And the thing that came before, quite honestly, comes to look a bit hokey in comparison with the newer stuff.
And that’s actually the whole point, all individual egos and financial interests aside.
Personally, the fact that TED improved on an idea that I played part in developing several iterations back does not fill me with angst. I’m okay with that, especially if it pushes the idea forward. Especially given that I’ve since moved on to exploring these interests in other ways.
I DO hope that the people at TED are equally understanding of this when the time comes for their own iteration to get one-upped by someone else (FacebookCity2.0?).
And the way the web moves these days, that moment probably wont be far off.
Here is the talk I gave at TEDxBigApple a few weeks ago, The Disruptive Future of Cities.
I had a great time giving this talk. Would love to do more like this one.
Give it a watch and let me know what you think.
Wow, here it is already the backside of February and I have yet to publish the year’s first post to johngeraci.com. How did this happen?
Me talking about cities (by Keziban Barry)
I have been posting over on faberNovel’s blog occasionally: see Twitter Usage in NYC Follows Patterns Established Before Columbus and Hello Storefront Retailers: Are You Safe From Web Disruption? among others.
But in general I’ve been writing less and doing more. And that feels like the right thing for right now. 2011 was a year for writing, thinking, positioning. 2012 is a year for DOING. And I’m doing, which leaves less time for writing.
I do miss this blog though. And I love that I’m still getting comments on posts I wrote several months ago. Makes it all feel kinda worth it. So I’m going to try to continue posting here occasionally, even through all of the DOING that I’m doing.
So: look for activity here to pick back up a bit hopefully over the next several weeks.
Have you read this month’s Wired article on YouTube fame seekers?
If not, please read it now.
I think it may be the most eye-opening article I’ve read this year.
What it describes is a growing group of 20-somethings living in Los Angeles trying to make it as stars of their own YouTube shows.
What it’s about is the new, creator-empowered culture of production built on top of the Internet that is (finally) coming of age and is going to change everything.
Here’s a snippet from the article:
Most people move to Hollywood with the hope of making it big, but Zonday is helping show the way to something strange and new: making it small… A narrow, lucrative fame is the path that has opened up for him and for the thousands of others like him. After going viral, they’ve figured out how—against all expectation—to stay viral.
Going viral, staying viral, and making that work for you without a studio – that’s the name of the game these people are playing.
The article goes on to describe a company that has sprouted up to help these creators out, and how it operates, what its business model is, etc. Great read.
Almost makes me wish I was living in Hollywood.
But of course the implications here are much bigger than just how video content gets made. You could take the topic of video in the article and replace it with anything: writing, music, software production, physical products – anything – and the article would work to describe the new model of creation and production that is now taking root around the world.
And among other things, this is what 2012 is going to be about – seeing this new type of production begin to grow into maturity, and seeing what that does to industries everywhere.
It should be an interesting year.
Happy New Year, see you in 2012…
I know there are all sorts of noteworthy IPOs making the news this week, but the OTHER news item that’s filling the papers, and the one I felt like blogging about here, is the news about DRONES.
Drones are everywhere suddenly: first, one drops out of the sky in Iran, then one does the same in the Seychelles, then Google Maps reveals images of a secret drone base in Nevada.
That sure seems like a lot of drones in our lives in one week.
But it’s nothing like what the future may hold. Why? Because drones are poised to displace helicopters and airplanes as the way police agencies and even corporations do their business in the skies.
This LA Times article about drones caught my attention a few weeks ago when it said that helicopters cost the LA police $1.7 million each, whereas the new five-pound police drone would cost just $40,000.
In other words you could buy 40 5-lb drones for the cost of one helicopter. That’s some serious disruptive potential if ever I’ve seen it.
(Here’s a question: if the police can suddenly buy drones for 1/40 the cost of a helicopter, do they pocket the extra money, or do they just buy 40x the number of aircraft they had previously, and use them all?)
Police aren’t the only ones who want in, of course – FedEx is interested too, among others. They envision “using a fleet of package-laden drones led by a traditionally piloted plane that could keep an eye on the robotic aircraft.”
And what about TV news stations and local delivery services? At $40k, they’d want drones too of course. Along with just about any other service that could take advantage of a small, pilotless, aircraft. Farmers in Japan are already using them to dust crops.
Hell, I might even want a drone of my own for forty thousand dollars. I could think of some pretty cool things to do with a couple of drones. I can think of a few startups off the top of my head (which I doubt I’d want to ever actually start).
Yes, the future is looking very drone-filled indeed. Drones drones drones. I don’t know if it’s the future we want, but it’s the one we’re likely to get.
I have to point out that the FAA hasn’t yet approved domestic drones. They see a lot of issues to be resolved first, starting with how to deal with drones that crash (as is happening a lot this week). So for now – in the U.S. at least – it is in the hands of the government as to whether or not this plays out.
But with a few more iterations on the technology, plus a little lobbying effort on the part of companies who make drones, I expect we might see a dramatic change in the way our skies are used.
If your business revolves around charging people money to deliver messages by hand over a period of days, how do you survive in a world where anyone can send anyone else a message for free instantaneously?
That’s the question the U.S. Postal Service has been worriedly asking itself as it gazes into the mirror for the past ten years.
Yesterday it announced that the answer to that question was to cut next-day mail and close half of their processing plants.
That’s their response to the crisis, which they perceive as a budgetary crisis. They’re trying to save $2.1 billion a year in the face of collapsing revenues.
Those steps may save them their $2 billion, but they will also create a service that is even worse in comparison to the technology that disrupted it in the first place. It will speed the end of the Postal Service altogether.
If the Postal Service wants to survive in this new era, it has to embrace the disruption that has happened all around it. It has to transform itself, shed its baggage, and get with the times, damn it.
Embrace the disruption!
How should it do this?
Here are a few ideas.
For starters, make all delivery of personal mail free. That’s right, free. No stamp needed. Just drop your letter in the mailbox and away it goes.
Wha? Why? Well remember – we’re living in a world where sending messages is free. How can you make it as an organization charging money to deliver messages in that kind of world? You can’t. If you’re going to stay in business, you’ve got to saddle up and ride out to meet the competition. Free delivery of messages.
Next: double (or triple) the price of delivery for junk mail to compensate for that freebie to writers of real letters. That will have the combined effect of increasing revenue per transaction, and also decreasing the number of non-primary transactions that happen in the first place. It will free up resources to focus on real mail being sent. With all of those free resources, it might even increase the ability to deliver real mail to destinations same-day.
Then: advertise on the backs of letters. Attach a little advertisement sticker to each (free) piece of mail that goes through the Postal Service. Now suddenly you’ve got revenue for your free mail system. Will people care? No, they’ll love it – just like they love free web pages that have ads on them. People love free services and don’t mind seeing a few ads in exchange for them. The web has taught us that a couple billion times.
(Conversely: people hate spending their time searching for stamps to attach to letters. Life has taught us that over and over again.)
Finally: remember who the customer is and what the mission is. The customer is the people of the U.S., and the mission is getting their messages securely to their destination. There are a lot of ways to go after that, just one of which is delivering mail. The Postal Service should be ruminating on that idea, and ought to be reinventing itself in different ways along those lines. I think there could be lots of ways to go there.
If the Postal Service took these steps, or similar ones to transform and reinvent itself, we might see a leaner, healthier service, and one that was actually optimized to the world around it, instead of one that was slowly but surely collapsing in the face of newer solutions to old problems.
There’s a fantastic article in Wired this month about The Rise and Fall of Bitcoin.
It’s a great read and a well-written article, but reading it one gets the sense that Bitcoin failed, and all of the P2P currency experiment has failed with it. Paul Krugman dismisses it, a consultant calls it a pyramid scheme, the author concludes that “beyond hardcore users, skepticism has only increased”.
That may be so for Bitcoin, but isn’t there a precedent to this with other big ideas on the web? Didn’t it take Friendster breaking new ground and then failing in order to bring us MySpace, and ultimately Facebook? (I say “ultimately”, but FB is less than ten years old – it could easily flame out and be replaced by a hardier version of it in the next several years). Didn’t it take Napster, then Gnutella, then Kazaa etc etc etc to arrive at the hardened, shutdown-resistant BitTorrent for file sharing? (Not to defend BitTorrent – I don’t use it, feels gross to me, but I use it to make a point).
Reading the article, I feel like the unmistakable conclusion, which the author doesn’t make, is that Bitcoin failed, but in doing so it blew a gigantic hole in the concept of money, broke a lot of new ground, and that new ground is bound to be claimed by some other player in the next few years one way or another. Some Mark Zuckerberg of bitcurrency will emerge, tweak the Bitcoin model to fix the problems that destroyed it, and we’ll have the biggest currency disruption the world has ever seen.
This seems inevitable, does it not? People have played with the concept a few times, and gotten it wrong. But that just exposes where the potholes are for the next guy coming along. The idea is only a few years old. Give it another few iterations, and someone is going to get it just right.
(If you want to read some interesting comments on Bitcoin and the possibilities for P2P currency – as well as lots of derision – check out the comments in Paul Krugman’s article on it from September.)
Last week (or was it the week before?) I blogged about what I see as a big problem with the issue of global warming: contextualizing it as something “global” instead of local.
When you frame something as global, it becomes nobody’s problem. When you frame it as local, it becomes everyone’s problem. I suggested we start thinking in terms of “local warming” instead of global warming, and start mapping CO2 output by city, so that communities can see and understand what their own contribution to the problem is.
What I love about the web is that as soon as I wrote that post, someone (Phil Green) responded by setting up a group on a site where people interested in this could crowdsource maps of local CO2 output, using openly available data.
The group now has six members. Not a deluge yet, but a nice first showing all things considered. Better than DIYcity had a few days after launch.
Now comes the moment of truth: will people in the group – or you, if you’re reading this and want to help out – get together and actually make a prototype of a local CO2 map? I think a simple map, hacked together in a day with existing resources, could make a big splash and set the ball rolling.
Do you want to help out? If you do, go to the website and sign up for the group. Or ping me at john at johngeraci.com and I’ll help set you up with the people at that site who are interested in this.
Would be great timing, with the U.N. Climate Change Conference happening right now in South Africa.
John Geraci lives in NYC where he is Head of New York Operations for faberNovel. He co-founded Outside.in, started DIYcity, and likes innovation, disruption and starting new things. For more about him, visit johngeraci.com.
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