The Year in Ideas

Toward the end of every year, the New York Times publishes a magazine dedicated to interesting ideas of the past 12 months.  It's a wide-ranging list, with lots of things you'd never think about.  Here were my favorites from this year:

* Randomly promoting people gives better results than the system you have.
* Printable batteries.  And you thought e-ink was pretty impressive.
* Older workers are just as productive.  Equally important: age-mixed workforces outperform homogeneous ones.  So don't staff that start-up with just college kids!
* What Google search teaches us about species preservation.
* Your yearbook photo predicts your likelihood of divorce.
* "I will regard the experiment as a success," he wrote, "if [comments on my blog] leads to anything that could count as genuine progress toward an understanding of the problem." Six weeks later, the theorem was proved.

Here Comes Everybody

Could the giant corporation become a thing of the past? You might reasonably reach that conclusion after reading Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody.

The logic runs like this: thanks to new digital communication and organizing tools, the cost of organizing has dropped close to zero. Self-organized people will inherently rally around the "right" things (serving the interests of the most people). Most attempts at starting movements and clubs will end up dying to do a lack of interest. However, a few will hit a goldmine of unmet need and succeed spectacularly, usually in areas that surprise us (otherwise the need would have been met). Stay-at-home mothers are one of the most popular groups using Meetup. Who knew?

In this way, we get "failure for free" on our way to identifying unmet societal needs -- a truly hyper-efficient market.

In contrast, large corporations often organize around the wrong things (serving their own interests). They fund a big staff of marketing and sales people to generate interest in products and services they've created. Failure for them is most definitely not free. A big bet placed on a software roll out (uh, Vista?) or blockbuster movie can be devastating.

Google seems to be doing the best job of becoming a big company while still maintaining an entrepreneurial attitude. They put out beta products frequently, some of which fail. How long can they keep it up?

They maintain a high organizational cost by necessity. At some point, an organization becomes risk-averse, and tries to protect its gains for itself (employees, managers, shareholders, brand image). Hiring lobbyists is usually a first step in that process. Next comes predatory or monopolistic behavior. Who does that sound like?

The brilliance of Here Comes Everybody is that it talks about lots of little things that you know already, and makes you think about them in new ways, or generate new thoughts about them. Clay Shirky never says the corporation is dying, but it sure made me think that way.

Cool software: instant check deposit

Depositing checks is one of life's little tediums, and this app solves it:

The friendliest bank in the world, USAA, will soon let customers instantaneously deposit checks through its iPhone application.

The check itself is mainly ceremonial. It's a convenient, self-contained document with a couple of standardizations for machine readibility, but otherwise it's nothing special. Makes sense to combine recent technologies to simplify the process.

Using pictures of checks might seem to invite more fraud, but anyone wanting to engage in deception could always print their own checks by getting MICR toner and the font, both of which are easily and legally obtained. I've actually done this in a previous job. (No, I am not wanted by the FBI.) We were an outsource for printing balance transfer checks you get in the mail from credit card companies. Our printing press was an unremarkable HP Laserjet 4.

Why doesn't every major bank doesn't do this for all their customers? Use a Firefox / IE app if there's too many phone platforms. Simply tell customers that the cash can't be withdrawn until the check clears, which is often the case anyway.

Gaming search engines for 15k a month

This article gives the inside scoop on how to manipulate search engines and blogging to generate lots of traffic and earn lots of money via AdSense. It seems one step removed from a scam.

I say "seems" because on closer read, I conclude that it is a completely legitimate business practice. In fact, it may be the future of newspapers, or, rather, what will replace them.

The author's basic strategy is this:

Your goal is to build a site which contains everything someone would ever want to know about your root keyword.... Now you have some original high quality meat for your microsite which is truly original content and is highly targeted for each long tail keyphrase.

Later, he markets the site by connecting to other authors and experts on the same topic, and creating a self-referencing blog.

Ultimately, this is exactly how people have always built businesses. They create a product -- say, "Rosetta Stone" language software -- then run infomercials about it. Or, they investigate a subject, write a book, and tour the country promoting it. (Malcolm Gladwell comes to mind.) The only difference is that this replaces monetary cost with technical know-how.

It is the kind of job that only technically savvy people -- do-it-yourself, non-corporate programmer types -- can do today. Tomorrow, it will go mainstream. But today, there are a growing number of these kind of jobs available to the right individuals.

Meanwhile, he has done a tremendous favor to the people who were interested in a somewhat obscure subject, by sorting and centralizing an ocean of information and creating new, relevant content. That's not gaming the system, that's providing a highly-focused news service.

Welcome to the golden age of information!

(Thanks to Jose for the pointer.)

What's the value of 10 seconds?

I love this creative use of software.

As you must know, some sites require you to translate a distorted word and type it in when leaving comments, to filter out spambots. The guy who helped create that system "realized that he had unwittingly created a system that was frittering away, in ten-second increments, millions of hours of a most precious resource: human brain cycles."

It could be defended as a small cost and necessary evil, but he decided that surely all that power could be harnessed for something useful. So he reinvented it.

If you've visited those sites [e.g., Facebook], your squiggly-letter-reading ability has been harnessed for a massive project that aims to scan and make freely available every out-of-copyright book in the world, by deciphering words from old texts that have stumped scanning software.

For example, through this effort, every issue of the New York Times, back to 1851, will be digitized by the end of the year! Which just goes to show, the sum of those small costs was very large, indeed.

This reminded me of another fascinating application that I learned about from a former professor of mine, the excellent Panos Ipeirotis. In his class, he mentioned the esp game, a very clever way to get real people to label images for free. Google licenses the game to improve searches on its millions of images.

As with fuzzy words, people interpret pictures better than computers. Both of these applications struck me as being like manual grid super-computing networks.

No wonder, then, that I later came to learn that both applications were created by the same guy, Luis von Ahn. I also came to learn, through my professor's blog, that von Ahn has recently started a blog. Full of interesting ideas, no doubt. We are in the golden age of information!