Cognitive Labs

HBO is airing a wide variety of Alzheimer's Awareness programming...with an estimated 5 million people now with the disease...and millions more at risk. HBO is even leveraging new platforms such as Facebook and Youtube with channels to build community.

Labels: alz.org, alzheimers, facebook, hbo, shriver, youtube

Yes, it's an apocalypto moment for newspapers. Do they go the way of the Maya, and leave impressive ruins while exiting their historical role as civic monument builders and cultural beacons? Think of buildings as impressive as the neo-Gothic art-deco Tribune building in Chicago, swathed in white light. Now imagine the glittering edifice collapsed in decay in the midst of a Yucatan jungle. No need to quote Ozymandias here.



News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch, who grabbed EUNI/Intermix mySpace for a reasonable price, is now saying newspapers should begin charging for online content, a formula newspapers have experimented with before, only to gravitate towards advertising-only when the economy is expanding.

Newspaper reading devices might be an answer, like kindle and the earlier magazine-reading device zinio - started by founders of the online real estate company that had a successful IPO in web 1.0 (IPIX) right afterwards...but overall, success with pure play hardware media-display solutions has proven elusive over the past 10 years.

They really ought to look at the success of online casual games, both in terms of pay versions and free ad-supported versions, and experiment with the format of the online newspaper websites - most importantly.

Making the online newspaper sites exact copies of the offline media seems aesthetically pleasing, but won't be compelling enough to attract the younger readers that have abandoned newspapers completely and the Gen X types that infrequently read them.

To retain audience, they are going to have to invent a new user experience that integrates compelling, interactive content (not just videos) with the news. It's clear by now that there are only going to be a certain number of powerful video sites and a certain number of social networks (like 2 or maybe 3) that have traction.

So, a new format that's half news and half games is needed, or one that let's people create games from the news and then gets them to bring in friends from their social site personas.

This indeed is the only way they are going to get the user time on site up, which is now the key metric. We just closed out Q1 with over 50 minutes on site per session and we are a medium sized, high-growth niche-oriented property. Newspaper sites typically only have a handful of minutes or less per visit, even worse, people aren't reading the paper product much. So that tells you the audience is not responding to the content anymore, and it's only going to keep diminishing in size without some significant innovations.

Labels: facebook, murdoch, myspace

For a moment, let's take a detour from the theoretical and the cognitively focused and also away from the political realm and the continual hand-wringing over the Economy.

Let's look at some basic technology changes that have been a decade in coming, but are finally here.

What I'm referring to first of all, is the final collapse of the price barrier in mobile computing, with laptops and other highly portable computing devices reaching price points between $180 and $300.

This means that full-productive work capability has been completely untethered from the office setting and can go anywhere, with more power and utility than the typical smartphone.

It's a new time of excitement in hardware, with capable linux-installed computers available to the mass market for the first time.

This change was foreshadowed by all the talk of 'smart devices' and the network computer or NC, the slimmed-down device, over ten years ago. But now, the size differential is substantial, and WiFi has become ubiquitous, which it certainly was not in 1999 or 2000.

What's Coming?

Nothing less than a work revolution. People are going to realize that all of the consumer and business changes from the Internet's first decade-plus were a warm-up to what's ahead.

In this economy, one must be cognizant of the strategm of the false retreat.

An ancient battlefield tactic, one combatant makes a public display of the fact that they are withdrawing the field of battle, hoping to draw their numerous competitors in headlong flight to the exits with them. Suddenly, the fleeing horde wheels around and unleashes a deadly flight of arrows, the famed Parthian shot, skewering their incautious foe, who is then routed in a charge across the flanks. This tactic was used successfully by the Parthians to obliterate the legions of Crassus during the roman republic, later by the Huns, the Hsiung-nu on the borders of China, the Mongols, and possibly even by venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

Who knows? It's conceivable that social hubs could one day supplement or even replace government. That's a revolutionary thought. But consider this: the growth of social networks such as myspace and facebook - going from scratch to more than 100 million users in each case in just a few years is totally unprecedented from the perspective of human socio-political organization. The founding fathers would have started one if they could code, but alas, they couldn't. America and Australia, two start-up countries populated initially by losers and castoffs, - were the two fastest growing de novo countries, e.g., from scratch due to immigration.

It took the U.S. over 100 years to achieve a population of 100 million. Myspace and facebook achieved this number 33X-35X faster.

Also, imagine the potential efficiencies for government right-sizing. Today's government has enormously inflated bureaucracy at every level - Federal, state, county, and city - the structure of which originated before telephone and telegraph service was available and didn't change with this invention.

Even more mind-blowing is the fact that early America had MUCH SLOWER communications than the post system of the Roman Empire 1800 years earlier.

Since then, the U.S. absorbed radical telecom and Internet innovations, witnessed the ascent and decline of the railroads; changing business markedly - all except for the case of government, which simply grows unabated.

Some of the blubber needs to be flenced off. Social networks with their large memberships could become an efficient revenue management system. Rather than going to IRS.gov to print out hundreds of specialized forms and/or the library to pick up instruction booklets, you could simply wait to be "poked" by Uncle Sam on April 14th, prompting one to transfer funds.

Labels: crassus, facebook, flenced, gov, mongols, myspace, NC, wifi