broadstuff

There is very little we can say about this, that has not already been said in spades...

Except maybe that it seems a lot like the Operating System Wars of 20 years ago.....or has that been said already

Clearly they had all been reading The Economist over the Easter weekend and were suitable influenced!

There is an article in Wired Magazine on the newly emerging trend for Open Source Millionaires.

In 2007, some 30 open source software companies were purchased for more than $1 billion — double the number of sales in 2005, according to consulting firm 451 Group. And 2008 is proving to be even more frenetic. In January alone, Sun Microsystems announced the purchase of open source pioneer MySQL for $1 billion

The key line to me, though, is at the end of the article, about how this monetisation impacts the Open Source collaboration model:

More important, software makers depend on the goodwill of outside developers, whom they rely on to keep updating their products. So the new open source billionaires might want to think twice about going 767 for 767 with the Google guys. For the coder drones, accustomed to being paid in warm feelings, such displays might make them take their coding skills elsewhere.

I'd call this the Billy Bragg Offset Economics Experience - the software creators dedicate their labour for free in the belief that they are creating a Brave New World, just to find that its Animal Farm and they're just the code-monkeys - and a very small number of people have potentially managed to get into a position to walk away with all the created common wealth at the monetisation event.

Now it can be a bit hard to follow, because the Open Source model relies not so much on the economics of "free" as the economics of "offset" (ie paying for it in some other way, including coder time subsidised by their actual employers), and, like in a game of 3-cup shuffle, the money is being moved around in new ways so that its harder to follow it - until someone walks off with it, of course.

There is, at the end of the day, no such thing as a free lunch, even in the "everything is free" internet.

And here's a tip - if you ain't eating at the table, you're doing the paying......while you maybe wait at it too,

So Caveat coder...

It didn't take us long after playing with lifestreaming services last year to work out what we needed was filtering, not more aggregation (see our post last week on FriendFeed as a recent example).

Looks like a number of others are now coming to the same conclusion....Jevon McDonald writes:

The problem that is cropping up however is that these apps are probably better called “noise aggregators” or “NoiseStreamr”s than anything else. By the time I had friended a few dozen people on FriendFeed and started trying to keep up with their blog posts, twitters, del.icio.us bookmarks, Jaiku status and more, I start to feel like I am experiencing more of a info-avalanche than I am floating down a lazy river of socially relevant news.

I don’t think that this problem is inherent to information streams, but it is pretty obvious that these tools are in their infancy and a lot of art and science is going to have to go in to improving the information flow....

.....There is a clear trend toward data streams built out of my social network, but the focus has to be on reducing noise, not adding to it.

Yup - what we said.....and I don't really see how recirculating the Friendfeed aggregation back into Twitter helps this!

(Pointer courtesy of Read/Write Web)

We had opined that this would occur last year, and more recently were amused to note that Gartner had somewhat belatedly reversed their position (Forrester have yet to admit the iPhone is fit for business purpose).

If you go to the above lnk to our article, you'll see some of the quotes from a discussion I started on the Mobile Monday London board, where it became clear to us that the iPhone will do the job in many people's eyes. (This was brought about by a discussion with a client about viability of jumping blabkberry and going straight to iPhone)

More evidence, if it is needed, that the fight for the next generation mobile email device is on in this report on C:Net.

Unfortunately for Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, the in-store price for the 8820 was the same as the iPhone. I deliberated for all of three seconds and walked out with the iPhone.

My reason was simple: I needed something that would sync consistently with my Mac. My Blackberry-to-Mac sync has been hit or miss for the past year (though I've been testing a beta of the new PocketMac and it is quite good) and I'm fed up. I just want something that works.

The iPhone "just works," and then some.

I thought I wouldn't be able to type on the iPhone without tactile feedback. I was wrong. I'm actually faster on the iPhone than I ever was on the Blackberry, and that's with only an hour of "training."

I thought I would miss a host of things with my Blackberry, but I haven't. Instead, I've been blown away by the innovative use of gestures and the user interface. I resisted the iPhone for a year or so, but looking back it was inevitable that I'd end here.

Now, what is clear is that the Apple style user interface will be copied, but the iPhone has two other benefits - it is simply a better "standard render" web device than other mobiles (which impacts RIM), and it is also less susceptible to operators fiddling with it and making it non standard.(which impacts les autres).

The big difference between The Internet Crowd and Planet Mobile is that the IP people want the Web to run as is on a mobile device with minimal interference, whereas Planet Mobile wants to "optimise the experience". We hypothesize that the IP school will win in the next year or so, simply because the iPhone has shown it is possible.

This also means that developing for the iPhone (and following devices) will increasingly cost in vs devising services for the current confusion of varying operator stacks, operating systems and UI's out there. (There are NOT 2bn mobile phones out there, there are 2bn mobile devices operating in a "Tower of Babel" of fragmented small segments, few of which are in themselves viable markets).

I would hypothesize that the SoHo and SME world will adopt non-Blackberry first, as they have the more flexible, less legacy tech stacks, and that divisions of corporates will follow, dragging Corp CIOs kicking and screaming behind.

Looks like Billy Bragg has pointed out the lack of clothes in the Social Net value game- he has written a fairly well argued article in the NYT on who gave Bebo its value vs who actually got the money - the crux is this:

Social-networking sites like Bebo argue that they have no money to distribute — their value is their membership. Well, last week Michael Birch realized the value of his membership. I’m sure he’ll be rewarding those technicians and accountants who helped him achieve this success. Perhaps he should also consider the contribution of his artists.

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend.

Not a particularly new thought in the game, we heard similar after YouTube was bought - so why is there an unseemly rush to shout him down by the Web 2.0 A-List organs? TechCrunch and Mashable and Matthew Ingram all weigh in:

TechCrunch

Why is it the Brits have all the crazy-stupid ideas about how to screw up the music industry even more than it is already?

British musician Billy Bragg argues in the New York Times today that some portion of Bebo’s $850 million sale price should go to the musicians who uploaded their music to the site.

Note that Bragg neatly sidesteps the fact that music was uploaded to the site by artists (or their labels) themselves, with full knowledge that they would not receive payments of any kind (except free marketing, of course, and access to Bebo’s tens of millions of music loving users).

Mashable:

I’m not going to knock Billy Bragg here. “Mr Love & Justice” is really as cool as they come. He’s got quite a far-reaching audience. He’s amassed much cred in his pockets over the years. No doubt about that.

But reading his opinion piece published in today’s New York Times concerning what he calls “the royalty scam” conducted by Internet music portals like MySpace and Bebo, I can’t help but say: wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Ingram:

He may be a great musician, but Billy Bragg’s logical faculties are somewhat lacking — that is, if his op-ed piece on the music industry in the New York Times is anything to go by. Billy writes about the sale of Bebo, and how the musicians and artists who have profiles on the site deserve to have a share of that $850-million or so. Why? Because Bebo has been “using their music to draw members — and advertising.”

All this just for suggesting that some of the lolly Bebo made may just have been due to the creative content on its site, and maybe the creators should get some of the loot!

A good rule of thumb with the mass Tech Media is that when such howls of outrage are heard, the howlee is generally onto something. And what Bragg is articulating in essence is this simple thought - the only real difference between the New Music Aggregators and the (automatically despised) Olde Aggregators is that the Olde Industry actually paid the artists something.

The basic argument of the Web 2.0 apologentsia is typically articulated by TechCrunch:

Social networks have absolutely nothing to do with the decline in music sales. The fact that recorded music can be reproduced at a zero marginal cost is why music sales are declining. You can hate that or love that, but it’s simple economics that drives it.

And in fact the argument that social networks actually provide free marketing to artists is not disingenuous. In fact, it’s quite correct. Bragg notes that radio stations pay royalties for playing songs, even though they also obviously provide free marketing for artists.

The first argument is true, but has nothing to do with Social Networks either - its a distribution issue, and would exist (and did exist) independently of them.

The second argument is more the case - it essentially implies that a Social Network is a one-sided market - ie it collates eyeballs (sorry - this is Web 2.0, we don't say eyeballs - it allows people to connect to their friends, en masse) and this drives its value in its entirety - in other words the value of the network exists independently of the content, its all in the connections and their conversations. By valuing music at zero, it is essentially assuming that the value of the distribution is always a wash with the value of the input content.

Now, Nick Carr argues the obvious riposte to the above assumption, when he calls for the digital sharecroppers of the world to unite...

“exploitation is exploitation, no matter how lovingly it’s wrapped in neo-hippie technobabble about virtual communities, social production, and the gift economy.”

(To be more precise, I'd say its economic arbitrage - ie the present monetisation structure of a Social Net is at odds with where the value is created - even more so than with the Old Evil MusiCorps)

TechCrunch's view of artistic content's value is simplilfied to:

Recorded music is nothing but marketing material to drive awareness of an artist. Websites that bring that music to listeners are doing artists a favor.

And this is really where the difference lies - do you see value in art over and above social connection, or not?

Or, to take it to its obvious conclusion - if artists were not going to be paid in future, and thus stopped therefore creating music etc and instead went and became life insurance salesmen and wittered on in Twitter and Facebook and Bebo, do you believe that either (a) Arrington is right and that the original art was essentially value free, or that (b) the world has lost something of value?

Or more practically, if no musicians were to allow their content onto Social Networks, would the buyers of Bebo et al still find their valuations quite so sky-high?

I suspect that everybody, TechCrunch included, knows what the real answer to this is. And they also realise that Mr Bragg is probably one of the few people who can, with a high level of gravitas, point this out. He is exactly the sort of Don Quixote who can upset the social network value arbitrage applecart, because by tilting at these windmills he draws attention to their existence.

(The unmentionable truth is that the value of conversational social content in a social network is very low - hence the lousy CPMs. They need that talent to fund the big dollar exits.)

Hence the wails of opprobrium, because if Mr Bragg (who has been a pretty effective campaigner for social justice throughout his lfe, so is by no means a perceived tool of the music industry) can in any way create a movement around talented people not giving Social Nets access to good content, without some stake in its euventual financial success (or paying them a usage fee), then they are left with a combination of the babble of the crowds plus piracy - and the piracy can be rapidly fixed via lawsuits.

And as we showed in an earlier piece, the babble of the crowds alone nearly inevitably leads to declining usage and implosion. And at that point the wheels come off the whole consumer social network bus, and all who ride on it, and all who collect the fares.

Update - interesting angle from doctoe, arguing that:

The reason why is because these platforms, services and “communities” are not all about the professional artist. Yes, music and other parts of popular culture give people social objects to talk around and to build conversations and groups upon. But it is a complex ecosystem. Without the people themselves making the ties, the conversations, the fan art or wom tributes around these artifacts, there would be very little value.

So where do you draw the line? I am reminded of Cory Doctorow’s proclamation that content isn’t king - conversation is. Content just gives people something to talk about.

I don't think Doctorow is right by the way, as my reductio ad absurdum argument above shows - if you removed all music, art, talent etc would the conversation still be quite as valuable with a far lower grade set of social objects to bat around?

However it is very true re drawing lines - there is a clear utility for aspiring artists on Social Networks, as it is a low cost access medium (cf blogging for writers). In fact, as doctoe also notes...

We hear again and again that service a, application b would be nothing without the cast of community characters who make it so and give it its flavour. Well then, isn’t it about time we/they were recompensed too?

For people who generate UGC, absolutely - it will come, its just that there is no payment or rights management mechanism right now. (For users, the traditional deal was advertising will subsidise your access to valuable content, but as noted above the fact that CPM's are so piss-poor on social nets implies that the value of "the conversation" is pretty minimal sans talent.)

But right now, all the value in the game accretes to a tiny band of founders and funders of the utility at its point of sale, and I would hypothesize that Bragg is right, and that this is essentially due to (short term) structural arbitrage rather than the true division of value creation in the supply chain.

Ronald Coase was an economist working in the 1930's and as far as I know was the first to wonder why organisations were the size they were - and he came to the conclusion it was due to transaction costs. If it is more expensive (hassle, price etc) to do a transaction with a 3rd party than supply X in house, then a ompany will do that. If not, it will outsource. This is encapsulated in Coase's Law:

" As transaction costs decrease, the complexity of the firm diminishes. A firm tends to expand till the cost of organizing
that extra transaction within the firm become equal to the cost of organizing the same transaction from the open market. "

I first re-visited this law about 15 years ago, when it became clear that the emerging internet was going to change the transaction costs of business (and much else) by at least one, if not several, orders of magnitude. At that time corporates were large (probably on average larger than today, conglomerates were still unwinding) and the "startup / SoHo" scene was minimal. Articles on electronic cottages, the hollow / shrinking / transparent company etc duly appeared with the zeitgeist of the time, and then suddenly it seemed that everyone was a startup, and the dotcom bubble began.

However, the dotcom bubble popped, but while everyone was watching that a far more rudimentary execution of Coase's law took place - offshoring stuff from high labour to low labour cost countries, as the transaction costs of managing something halfway across the world started to fall. Then from about 2004, ubiquitous broadband and falling hardware costs led to the rise of many Small Office / Home Office (or increasingly No Office) businesses (and I use the term increasingly loosely as increasingly we see ad-hoc collaborations rather than companies doing things), and websites, blogs and organisations sprang up to represent them - Web Workers Daily being a typical example.

What was happening was that broadband penetration and the ability to communicate via the 'Web was massively reducing transaction costs, and I think we are in a situation today where Coase's Law suggests that many organisations are far too large for the new costs of doing business. Things don't all fall apart at once of course, I would argue that Coase's Law works at the edges initially "in the Wild" - as transaction costs go down, various parts of organisations loosen their ties - some secede, some are seceded, not all succeed etc etc.

This was all under the radar of course, people just got on and did what was economically and technically rational - but all things go in cycles, and I have noticed the re-emergence and resurgence, in the last year or so in the academic literature of the "small and independent is beautiful" zeitgeist. Recent books on Starfishes and Spiders and books by Clay Shirky, Charles Leadbeater et al are all signs of this meme climbing back over the parapet.

(Maybe some economist can explain the 10-year cycle in Zeitgeists )

I was discussing this the other day with Nico MacDonald (who hosted the recent lecture by Clay Shirky at the Royal Society of Arts in London) expressing my concern that the "pop-academic-media complex" tends to then grab these things and then charge down a typically (simplified) channel, often not taking into account difficult nuances (or those that are unsupporting of the zeitgeist), and you then wind up with the "Flat Earth News" effect (to bring another recent zeitgeist to my aid), ie a whole lot of self interested parties start bailing onto the zeitgeist and transforming it into a fully blown Bandwagon, and it becomes impossible to have a reasoned discussion about it if you in any way oppose the idea.

(Read the Flat Earth News section on how the Millenium bug was pushed, or the note that in the UK there are about as many PR people as there are journalists providing news, and you start to get the picture)

That this may be happening here, now occurred to met when I say this essay today by Paul Graham, titled “you weren’t meant to have a Boss”

Now don’t get me wrong – I thought Paul’s book “Hackers & Painters” was excellent, and I’m a great fan of his essays, but he has an agenda in this game – he runs an incubator, so the aim of the writer is not so much to explore the issues of working in small vs large organisations, but to persuade as many technical people as possible to become startups despite the evidence. As he notes towards the end:

In an essay I wrote a couple years ago I advised graduating seniors to work for a couple years for another company before starting their own. I'd modify that now. Work for another company if you want to, but only for a small one, and if you want to start your own startup, go ahead.

The reason I suggested college graduates not start startups immediately was that I felt most would fail. And they will. But ambitious programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than going to work at a big company. Certainly they'll learn more. They might even be better off financially.

Now we already noted last year that what research has been done suggests they will not be better off financially, there is a considerable Founders Discount in fact – but the problem is that the Zeitgeist is ramping up, so inconvenient data like that will increasingly be buried.

And back to my original conversation with Nico…elsewhere Paul notes that:

What's so unnatural about working for a big company? The root of the problem is that humans weren't meant to work in such large groups….

…Companies know groups that large wouldn't work, so they divide themselves into units small enough to work together. But to coordinate these they have to introduce something new: bosses.

These smaller groups are always arranged in a tree structure. Your boss is the point where your group attaches to the tree. But when you use this trick for dividing a large group into smaller ones, something strange happens that I've never heard anyone mention explicitly. In the group one level up from yours, your boss represents your entire group. A group of 10 managers is not merely a group of 10 people working together in the usual way. It's really a group of groups. Which means for a group of 10 managers to work together as if they were simply a group of 10 individuals, the group working for each manager would have to work as if they were a single person—the workers and manager would each share only one person's worth of freedom between them.

In practice a group of people never manage to act as if they were one person. But in a large organization divided into groups in this way, the pressure is always in that direction. Each group tries its best to work as if it were the small group of individuals that humans were designed to work in. That was the point of creating it. And when you propagate that constraint, the result is that each person gets freedom of action in inverse proportion to the size of the entire tree.

There are a whole bunch of things that are being mixed together here, and a promised land is being painted largely by ignoring uncomfortable facts, in true Flat Earth News style. So lets go through the issues raised:

(i) Actually, any evidence from human organisations through the ages is far less kind to Paul’s thesis – humans have worked in large, hierarchical structures for at least 5,000 years. In fact some anthropologists, economists and even mathematicians note that civilisations that failed to be able to aggregate in larger units were pushed out of the more desirable areas by those that did.
(ii) Ditto, even in initially informal human groups hierarchies rapidly emerge – a “boss”, whether de facto or de jure, will arise. In fact studies of most social creatures show fairly rigid hierarchies, pecking orders, etc.
(iii) And in many of these less formal structures, the de facto leaders can be far more capricious, despotic etc than in most countries’ larger organisations, where laws have been developed to reign them in.
(iv) In addition, there has been quite a lot of more recent research into various “modern” organisation structures showing that in actual fact the de-layered, flat, matrixed structure actually has less freedom of action than a more structured approach of yore because its far less clear where boundaries and responsibilities lie – allowing empire builders, politicos and the workshy huge leeway, while causing confusion and demoralisation to the rank and file.
(v) This was put very well in a comment on another blog on the subject - a small startup can build a widget for Facebook, but building the Space Shuttle requires a bit more

I'm not saying that big corporates are not sometimes soul destroying, nor that their structure doesn't make them potentially psychopathic, nor even that working in a startup isn't great fun What I am saying is beware of the opposite pendulum pushers, and be aware that the new new thing won't solve all the problems - and that uncomfortable counterfacts will be buried.

Coasian theory will have its way, the evidence is all around us - companies shedding labour and recruiting contractors, the rise of So/Ho/No, co-working etc are all evidence of this. Large companies will (are) restructuring, but the near anarchic opposite is not therefore the logical solution - as the Starfish guys (implicitly) concede, these sort of structures tend to be best as protest movements, and are usually unable to stay stable in their utopian "all equals" state for long.

And I say this with a slightly heavy heart - I love the idea of small, happy, equal systems pulling down The System. But any quick reading of history tells you that Animal Farm is probably a better model for all Utopii than any other.

I'd also like to bring in something that has worried me for a while - the concept that the DNA of existing businesses is all bad and wrong and crap. If Bizgurus are going to use biological analogies, I'd like to make sure its done correctly and differentiate between the genotype - the blueprint of the organism via its DNA - and the phenotype, which is how it evolves in any specific environment. I think too often the two are confused. As the environment changes, the "DNA" will drive changes in the phenotype, while the DNA stays the same, becaus ethe DNA is from us. As Pogo once said, I have seen the enemy, and he is us".

So net-net the story as it stands now is this:

- Yes, Coasian theory implies that organisations today are probably too large for the emerging transaction costs, and they will start to dis-integrate and re-integrate in new ways. To me this is a more coherent explanation than the argument that the DNA of large companies is inherently wrong, or that the "edge economy" is where its all at. Its more a continuum as transaction costs force structural changes in how and where logical subunits are bonded together across the economy.
- Changes will occur in organisation structure over time, undoubtedly, and it will start at the boundary edges of organisations, especially ones being impacted earlier by the reduced transaction costs (think Media, blogging and UGC for example)
- The optimal structures are still unclear, they won't be what we expect. For example, many people hold up the "Hollywood Model" of ad-hoc teams, while not realising (or conveniently forgetting) that the overall meta-structure within which these teams operate extremely tightly defined by a small number of majors.
- Sadly, Social Networking, like Darwinism before it, will increasingly be bent to all sorts of agendas it was never quite designed to fit (I have noticed the move of the topic from pretty academic tome, eg Barabasi to pop-psychology over the last 5 years, for example)
- Thus, from now on a whole raft of Flat Earthers will be jumping onto the zeitgeist, for a variety of motives, to persuade people that their particular utopia is the right one. They will be beautifully argued for maximum press pickup, but as I've tried to indicate above, the facts that don't fit will be Pan-glossed over - so caveat web worker!

In other words, take a good hard look at where the Proposer of any New Utopia is coming from - if they get to drive the Rolls Royces, then its probably you that's doing the polishing.....

On the Rolls Royce point, I have to mention the irascible Nick Carr's note on Bebo here - kit's too good to ignore :

A little over a week ago, the Birches sold Bebo, the third largest social network, to AOL for $850 million, about $600 million of which will reportedly go into the pockets of their jeans. As for the millions of members who have happily served as sharecroppers on the Birches' plantation, they'll get the satisfaction of knowing that all the labor they donated to their "community" did indeed create something of tangible value.

Now good on the Birch's is my view, but its a good lesson in Rolls Royce spotting!

Update - interesting thought on Zoho blog, ie that transaction costs also define the lifecycle of an organisation.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then cutting someone else's work and pasting it on your own blog is downright adulation - this is a fascinating piece of analysis by Louis Gray, shows what is possible with crunching Social Network data.

The new company profiles on LinkedIn are a gold mine for reporters who want to get data beyond what the PR guys may want to dish out. (See: LinkedIn Is a Paradise for Smart Reporters)

Want the average age of an employee? A good estimate is on LinkedIn. Want to know if there is a high level of turnover, and people don't stay long? LinkedIn has that too. It also can provide hints as to whether a company is so strong that folks aren't leaving at all, or if they are leaving in exodus. And if you peer closely enough, you can see the Silicon Valley carousel, as employees move from company to company in search for the next big thing.

You can see employees move from PayPal to Google, Yahoo! or LinkedIn. You can see Friendster employees went to Yahoo! and Zazzle, or from Napster to Apple, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google. And if you think Google is getting all the good employees out there, there's no question they get their share, but so far, it looks like Facebook is getting a lot of new hires, and nobody's leaving - a boomtime for the social networking giant.

Interestingly, due to Apple's tenure, and the company's rising from the ashes with the return of Steve Jobs, you can see employees that once left the company have returned, having never lost the Mac religion.

Check out the diagrams on Louis' blog. The thoughts Pandora and Box come to mind................

Fascinating video of the DARPA/Boston Dyamics legged robot walking independently.....



I'm interested mainly because it has 4 legs, not 6. The initial thinking behind "proper" walking robots was that they would be 6 or 8 legged, since insects / arachnids require less computing power to use 6 / 8 legs than higher order animals need for 4. Also, 4 legs has no limb redundancy. For those who follow the development of robotics, here is a simple summary of leg from MIT's work on planetary surface explorers - the "Little Martian Robots" (LMR's)

2 Legged LMR
Many bipedal robots have been designed. For a selection of some of these intriguing machines visit the MIT Leg Lab Website. It is conceivable that these robots could be designed to be stable without the need to stay in motion. The martian surface, however, will not be particularly flat making bipedal balance a fairly tricky issue. Also, the Martian winds and weather would make it difficut for a bidepal robot to stay standing. Should one of the legs break, the robot would become an imbalanced mono-legged rover. Such a robot would be incapable of balancing whether in motion or in stand-by mode.

4 Legged LMR
4 Legged LMR Quad-legged robots like the Leg Lab's quadruped, have more realistic leg configurations. It is fairly easy to balance a four legged robot, even on a fairly irregular surface. The rover would be capable of motion across the Martian landscape and would have the ability to stop and remain standing. A four legged LMR, however, would not be very rugged. Should one leg break, the robot would find itself imbalanced and fairly incapable of moving. Indeed, a three legged rover would need to be programmed in an entirely different way than a four legged rover, making it necessary to include a separate control program in a case a leg were to break off.

6 Legged LMR
6 legged LMRs like the MOBOT Lab's Hannibal and Atilla are more realistic models of legged motion. The success of the Hannibal and Atilla prototypes clearly show that a 6 legged LMR would be capable of functioning on the Martian surface. It would be capable of balancing well, even with strong winds and the Martian dust storms. The LMR would also be capable of sustaining itself even if one or (under certain circumstances) two legs were broken. There would be no need to completely reprogram the LMR as the models of motion for a six legged LMR and a five legged LMR are very similar.

8 Legged LMR
8 legged LMrs would allow for the greatest usable level of redundancy on the LMRs. It is conceivable that the LMR could continue functioning if up to four legs are broken. This should give the small LMRs the capability to stay out in the field for longer periods of time. A more important use of the extra two legs of an 8 legged-LMR exists however. It would be possible to use any pair of legs as a proximity detector (Angle and Brooks, 1990 "Small Planetary Rovers" ONLINE). If the leg were to brush against anything, the LMR woulld be capable of noting that it is close to an external object. In this way, the safety of the LMR in-motion can be gauranteed with more certainty. It could also be possible to carry sensors of some sort on the non-critical front two legs. Indeed a whole variety of options are opened up in having an 8 legged LMR.

We have chosen that our small LMRs use the 8 legged system over a 6 legged system for the above reason.

A remembrance in the week of Arthur C Clarke's death - I was one of those kids of my generation fascinated by (i) Space Travel and (ii) Robotics, and thus especially space travelling robots. However in the 1980's when I did my BSc and MSc Engineering degrees, the computing power and various associated tech. (eg battery power) required to make these things work just was not there (My final year design project was a robot btw) - it was sadly clear that we had to wait quite awhile, so I turned my interest to the emerging networked computing field. In the 1990's we also saw the emergence of Evolutionary algorithms, Neural networks, fuzzy logic etc which have really pushed the capability of self-controlling automata

(Thanks to LLoyd Davis for link)

...Terms Sheets 101 over here at Venture Hacks. Other pages on the blog also quite good.

I was intrigued by this piece on John Battelle's thinking re online advertising's future (link via Centernetworks - thx Allen) when he said:

The problem with vertical ad networks is that until you have engagement, integration, and proof of that consumer awareness, you are just going to keep devolving down to direct response pricing, which is sub $5 cost per thousand (CPM) for an ad.

We want it at the kinds of CPMs that supported the magazine and the cable industry, which is above $20, $30, $40, $50 cost per thousand. Advertisers will pay that once they feel like they're getting that value for it, and once the media is created that proves that value, and it's not just the publisher's job to create that media, it's the publishers working in partnership with the marketers and that what we try to do it with them.

Question in my mind is why these values are not already there, i.e I am the same person online or on TV or reading a magazine, I have the same net present value of future spend regardless of the media I watch, so in theory my value is the same. Given that the TV is less likely already to serve me the Ads that are interesting to me, how come those more relevant websites I frequent aren't already getting better CPM's?

It may be true that no-one understands the online metrics, but I don't think that's the whole story - the top line metrics are fairly easy to grasp anyway by Old Ad standards. Heck, given the shift of my attention-hours alone they should be coining it!

No, I have another thought - still a hypothesis, but hear me out - the Internet is not actually a very good Ad delivery platform.

To an extent old broadcast media held me captive in the linear stream of their stories, to get to the next bit I had to sit through those pesky ads.....until channel surfing and TiVo came along, of course - but even then there's inertia because you are in that passive, listen-to-a-story mode.

The 'Web is different, it's a lean forward experience, Ads are less impactful because I just am not "doing" ads when I'm online.

So John may be doing great stuff on the tactical cut and thrust of the Risk game of the AD-field, and may eventually own lots of the real estate - but winning that battle could be irrelevant because actually the main war is on another front entirely, which is actually how to tell me stories about products I want to buy, not bombard me with Ads.

This brings me to C2B models, such as demand aggregation and more sophisticated ones such as VRM thinking, where essentially the idea is to let me have a conversation with suppliers for stuff I want when I want it. In terms of "when am I most valuable", its that moment when I want to buy that X, surely.

Run the numbers any way you like, but the question you want to ask is "what is the CPM equivalent of being there at that point", and its probably the marginal cost of customer capture, which for most industries is far higher than the 2 - 3 % average we spend on Ads as % of GDP.

But to be there, to get a CPM equivalent of say $200 or even $2000 for more valuable things - you won't get the answer "advertising as we do it now"

And I don't think you'll get the answer "advertising with every single Beacon trick in the book thrown in" either.

No, you're going to get it by by making me want to come and buy something from you, when I want to buy it. And that is what an interactive internet does very well.

Different battle. Same War though. My time and my money are a zero sum game.

So, you can all aggregate all the "me-too" vertical sites that you can find, but its like building castles - great bastions of media, towering Ad networks.

Maginot product lines

But its all irrelevant if the actual transaction is "here I am, this is what I want - who can give it to me?"

Just a hypothesis of course

Reason I was intrigued - Mr Battelle wrote a book on Google, so he of anyone wpuld surely be aware of this? Or is it a roll up and sell to the "generals of industry who want to fight the last war" play, because as he notes re why buy Ad networks today when the model is so unclear:

people don't understand them and they hope things that they don't understand will pan out.