Troy Angrignon - Adventure Capitalist

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / The Global Plant Floor with Don Tapscott

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 15:19:24 -0800

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

The Global Plant Floor, by Don Tapscott, author of the new book Wikinomics

Just now publishing "wikinomics" - a new book about how mass collaboration changes everything
Available for pre-order now:
First chapter is available here
Carlotta Perez, historian, talks about all revolutions: excitement, bubble, bubble burst, actual deployment cycle. We're now heading into the real period of the web finally.
This is the biggest change to company structures, competition, and the way companies create value that has happened in the past hundred years!
My company has done large $500M syndicated research projects to understand this stuff.
I have been studying web 2.0 for six years now.
Web 1.0: HTML; standard for presentation
Web 2.0: web services; multimedia, geospatial, mobility, integration, "the thing"; it is becoming a platform for application building in its own right but is not a presentation layer.
The act of putting stuff on the web is "programming" the machine.
Enterprise 2.0 is about the economics of collaboration:

Why do firms exist? Transaction costs; the cost of coordination to bring it all together to solve a problem. Otherwise, everything would be built by individuals. It's cheaper to do things in the corporation than as a single person.
We moved from industrial age corporations to the extended enterprise, to the business webs (think of the IT global supply chain web) and moving to "mass collaboration" - this is MUCH more than crowd-sourcing or social networking. Social networking is becoming a new form of production. Self-organization What used to take millenia or centuries can now happen in years, months, or overnight.
BMW's X3 is built by Magna, a globally distributed group of manufacturers, not by BMW. This is about changing how BMW makes cars.
Goldcorp: published his proprietary geo-data on the web and held a competition for $500K to see who could find gold on the property they owned. For $500K investment, he found $3.4B worth of gold. His market cap went up to $10B. He had all sorts of crazy responses from geologists, mathematicians, etc. and got crazy solutions.

HOLY COW

He acted globally; he shared his private data; he changed the game.

Mass collaboration:

Question: Could you create something other than an operating system with open source? Answer from Linus Torvalds: I don't think there's anything you couldn't create.
Red Hat: Linux; Spike source; open source applications are all good examples.
Zopa.com: peer lending is mass collaboration where people help other people build their businesses.
The California school board wants to open source and wikify all of their textbooks
Cambrian House lets a group of people come up with innovative ideas, grade those ideas, narrow the list to the best ideas, build those ideas, and then Cambrian House sells that widget for you and you as the contributor or team, profit from it. Click here to see how it works. [WOW. Bizarre concept. I wonder...how good will it be at manufacturing. Or selling/distribution?]
The Chinese motorcycle industry is an open source ecosystem
Ideagoras: cooperative markets innovating in business (see chart below)
Second Life: the REAL story is not that their currency is pegged to the USD but the product is entirely created by its customers (pro-sumer)
So you could pro-sume clothing, mindstorm robots,
Biotechs and pharmas could have owned gene patents but they collaborated instead.
Mashups ecosystems will be collaboratively built on a massive scale
IntelliOne: calculate the location of any cell phone over time (like watching traffic)
Boeing - the Dreamliner has no spec. Companies collaborate together, build chunks of the plane and those chunks are snapped together like LEGO. [I don't buy that statement. You can't build a wing or a fuselage or a nav system or anything else without a specification / blueprint, particularly not if the parts are going to fit together like LEGO. It will be interesting to see how Tapscott covers this in his book.]

Enterprise 2.0 is causing a crisis of leadership! It is the single largest change in corporate structure and operation in the past century.

Web 2.0 Summit 2006 - Day 2 / Net Neutrality debate between Vinton Cerf (ICANN/Google) and Robert Pepper (ex-FCC, now Cisco)

Troy Angrignon — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:19:21 -0800

Day 2 notes from Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, CA:

[my analysis and notes are in these square brackets.]

Net Neutrality debate: Vinton Cerf, father of the internet vs. Robert Pepper, ex-FCC and now Cisco

Bob:

this is a falsely premised debate setting up tyranny on the one hand (heavy-handed regulation) vs.chaos (no regulation)
As an FCC policy guy, I have fought heavy regulation for ten years. If you invite the govt in to fix the problem, it will get in there and be much more far-reaching than you intended.

Cerf:

The architecture of the internet (separation of layers) has been responsible for success of the internet
Power is at the edge (you can grab an application and install it without central control.)
But with the current broadband monopoly/duopoly and their inherent desire to be anti competitive, we want to pre-empt them from being anti-competitive.

Bob:

There was some legislation that would have given the FCC teeth to do much of this but that legislation died

Cerf:

We didn't back that legislation because we hadn't seen FCC enforcement work properly in the past.
we wanted common-carriage rights but you didn't want that.

Bob:

This is more complex than you think.

Cerf:

"That's theorem 207. EVERYTHING is more complex than we think." [Funny theorem...but I'm not sure that I have the theorem number correct.]
The internet is a layered structure. We need to factor that into the law.

Bob:

Cerf and I agree in end-to-end principles, punishing anti-competitive behaviours, and universal access.
We just disagree on how to get there. You want regulation. We want case law developed over time.

Cerf:

Case law takes too long to develop. We want to lay it out up front so that we know what is right, what is wrong, and what are the bad behaviours that will get published.

the big lie is that the application service providers (google etc.) were getting a free ride.

Cerf: Bob and I both want to crush the anti-competitive behaviours so that we protect the innovation on the web. We just differ in our thoughts on how best to get there.
[At the end of the day, this debate appears to be more based on: what is the best regulatory mechanism to fulfill one's desired ends? There is something to be said about understanding these things and taking the more complicated route (case law?) vs. the easy route that might have more complicated spill-over effects? There have been many cases where the "simple" legislated answer ended up having all sorts of complex effects that could not have been predicted in advance. Case law does tend to be more iterative.]

President Bush has signed into law the complete destruction of Writ of Habeus Corpus - the U.S. govt can now put legally put anybody in jail and hold them there indefinitely. 200 years of Constitutional protection gone.

Troy Angrignon — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:47:16 -0700

Ben Franklin said it best: "Those who would trade liberty for a bit of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

This is appalling.

I urge everybody to watch this:

Please go and vote for our Web 2.0 Manifesto over at ChangeThis!

Troy Angrignon — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 09:00:54 -0700

Some friends and I decided that we want to write a Web 2.0 manifesto over at ChangeThis. We submitted our proposal to the ChangeThis team and they accepted!

So now we need you to go over and vote for us on this page!

Here is the summary of the proposal:

There is a change occurring on the internet and it is called Web 2.0. It is already beginning to transform the way we connect, collaborate, create and communicate. It allows people to work together across time and space. It allows machines to read. It is the manifestation of six degrees of separation, a way in which we can see the weak links that hold our networks of networks together. Everybody who uses the internet for business, non-profit, government operations or pleasure needs to know how it works because it allows people to communicate more easily with their network, experience faster feedback loops, collaborate more effectively, and work in ways that were not possible before. Our manifesto trumpets the arrival of this evolution of the internet, weighs the benefits of moving and the risks of staying on web 1.0, articulates the principles underlying this paradigm shift, provides resources for further exploration, and calls all readers to begin making their own transition. We will also explore the hype factor and talk about the current investment atmosphere in this area.

Please forward this to anybody you know who can assist us. If enough votes come in, they will then take the polling page down and notify us that the manifesto is a go.

Then comes the hard part - we have to write it!! Luckily we're part of the way there already.

Once it is written, they choose whether or not to finally accept it and publish it as a Manifesto.

Thanks for the help everybody!

P.S. To those of you who voted for my last manifesto back in December 2004, thank you. It never went in because after they accepted it, they sent the submission rules and the rule 1 was "It shouldn't be angry." Given that my Technology Buyer's Manifesto was like one big Dennis Miller rant, it would have had to have been completely re-done from the ground up and I didn't have time what with the new job and everything. So here goes try #2, this time with the help of my friends. In fact, they were the inspiration for it since they got me into all of this stuff to begin with!

Social Network Mapping: This time, they're mapping who is on what board of what company or institution in the U.S.

Troy Angrignon — Fri, 22 Oct 2004 13:49:16 -0700

Cool mapping site. You can do the following:

• look up a person to see what they're connected to
• look up a company / organization to see who they're connected to
• find the connection between two companies (it will draw you a map of the connecting humans.)

This is COOL. I still want something that will do this for my address book.