Facebook targets the East

FT story on Mark Zuckerberg declaring at a recent conference in France that Facebook is targeting major expansion in China, Japan, South Korea and Russia, hoping to become the first social network with 1B members. These four are all nations where Facebook is not the #1 social network.

Each of the four countries features entrenched local players, like QQ in China. Then there’s China’s record with Google, ostensibly over censorship but really over market share/domination by foreigners(!).

Zuckerberg sees mobile usage as the future for Facebook, noting that India just tipped over from more web users than mobile users to more mobiles users than web users.  He sees that happening everywhere soon enough.

Globalization’s connectivity shows no signs of slowing down.

America's greatest crop

WSJ story on monster mowers that run consumers $3-10,000 per unit.

Part of it is love of technology and toys, part is monster lawns (common here, even as houses are modest), and part is just not giving a damn about CO2 emissions.

When we lived in RI, I used a John Deere rider for my 2/3rds of an acre and it was overkill.

Now, in Indy I have 4/5th of an acre, with much covered by tree groves (over 100 trees).

And I sport a monster, 18-inch cordless electric push mower, which I love.

Bottom line:  nicer to environment, and I don't need more excuses to sit on my ass toodling around (my less, staring out my window, jealously watching somebody else cut my lawn).

My wife keeps pushing me to get son to mow, but I desist.  I actually love doing it; it relaxes me immensely.

The PNM-Wikistrat connection

Got email a while back from Joel, Australia-born, now living in Israel after some schooling there.  He says he has all the books, reads everything I write online, and brags that he's seen the brief well over a hundred times (none live).  

Then he explains how he and three other twentysomethings have created a start-up company (incorporated 6 months ago) that seeks to adapt the Wiki platform to a competition-of-the-fittest-style generator of strategic planning within organizations (companies, government agencies, etc.).  After two successful pilots using mostly Israeli intell types, the company moves toward marketizing the offering.  In some ways, it reminds me of using GroupWise in the Naval War College economic security exercises I led atop the World Trade Center with Cantor Fitzgerald pre-9/11 and in other ways it reminds me of when email first starting hitting command post exercises at combatant commands in the mid-1990s (creating this fascinating individual-based work-around and highly competitive intellectual network that quickly trumped the formal thought-gathering processes).  In both instances, you escape the limits of hierarchical conversations (often broadcasts by the most authoritative figure in the room) and tap into the wisdom of crowds under conditions of much tighter latency (less time involved to reach effective decisions after weighing alternative pathways).  In a sense, a way to both speed up (under the necessary scenarios) and improve the usual pick-option-B mentality that prevails.

What attracted me was Joel's description of how the company has used my vertical-versus-horizontal-scenarios thinking to customize the system with all manner of prompts to analysts to think in both dimensions--so highly interdisciplinary.

The basic conceit is, unlike traditional wikis, we're talking more than one page per analytic target--hence a competitive environment.  What often happens in these decision-making environments is that a core group is assembled to put together the options PPT package, and a tremendous amount of poorly thought-out necking down of pathways ensues.  By creating a more horizontal playing field, freed from hierarchical bias (i.e., the guy with the most stars on his shoulder boards must be the smartest, right?), the primary intellectual traction points become the linkages between the competing options pages.

That's a thumbnail description that does not do the effort justice.  Go the company's site to see more in-depth presentations.  

Two ways this interests me:

1) Strategic consulting in the private sector requires--more than ever--some connectivity to solution-delivery, meaning almost nobody is paying the old top-dollar for PPT slide decks and reorg charts--only.  Instead, companies want your interaction to come with some technology solution that simultaneously empowers them to deal with the issue in question.  Advice just isn't enough anymore.

2) Governments as a whole struggle with these problems, and are always looking for new tools to empower individual workers while connecting them to the wisdom of crowds, whether it be fellow bureaucrats (where a tremendous amount of wisdom truly resides) or with the citizenry (their natural counterparty).

So check out the site if you're interested.  I am happy to connect anybody to Joel (although I'm sure his site has a contact function) for whatever can be arranged in demos/dialogue.

Naturally, I got a kick hearing about how the vertical/horizontal scenarios-&-thinking stuff resonated so nicely with someone in the private sector, so I'm happy these young fellas out.

Plus, does it get much cooler that seeing your ideas expressed in an Israeli start-up?

"Cable" comes to the cancer ward

WSJ story describing recent claims by researchers of notable advances in treating cancer, the focus being on targeted therapies that employ advanced genetic-based technologies.

Naturally, all of this is expensive.

This will be a constant theme of the bio-gen revolution that unfolds over coming decades:  the tech will be there, but the question will be one of who gets access.  I expect that access to such medical technologies, especially those involving the significant extension of life, will become the primary human rights struggle of the century.

But what caught my eye here was the following bit:

"Cancer is like cable television," says George Sledge, a breast-cancer expert at Indiana University and newly elected president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, which hosted the cancer meeting. "Thirty years ago you had three channels. Now you have 500."

The guy's point:  the more we learn and the better we target, the more target-complex becomes the battlespace.  Cancer, over time, will be revealed to be almost as complex and varied as the human experience. Since it is primarily a disease of aging, the longer we extend life, the more we will view it as our primary medical challenge.  For most of us who will enjoy this life-lengthening age, cancer will be less the dead-end and more the accepted right of passage.

But yeah, who plays gatekeeper will be crucial.

The iPhone makes Apple a global player, but only if it can dominate outside the US

WSJ story that exemplifies the bottom-of-the-pyramid reality of the global marketplace once Asia's billions sign on.

Apple is rolling out the latest version of its iPhone more rapidly to 88 countries beyond its already saturated American market, reducing the lag time exhibited by previous versions.

Why?  Apple's growth in recent quarters is skyrocketing in Asia/Japan and it's even significantly bigger in Europe already than in America.  Comparison: March 2010Q sees growth rate of about 25% in the Americas, but almost 200% in developing Asia.

So no choice: go global or go stagnant.

WPR's The New Rules: When Technology Becomes More Human

Oddly enough, people tend to trust computers' seeming infallibility more than nature's trial and error. But at the same time, people fear a more highly technologized future, because they assume it will be less natural. In truth, technology, including computing, will evolve more in the direction of nature than the other way around, and will fuse with it increasingly on the latter's terms.

Read the entire column at World Politics Review

Private-public entrepreneurship in the digital age

Look councilman, a pothole that needs fixing!

Or graffiti to be cleaned up . . .

Or a dead animal to be picked up off the road .  . ..

You get the picture.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek article about how a lot of these new connectivity technologies have instant and neat uses for governments that aim to be more responsive to their citizenry.

"Gov 2.0" movement, as it is described: "An emerging field that some entrepreneurs call Government 2.0."  

The purpose goes in both directions:  encouraging the public to flow data to the government and encouraging citizens to take advantage of all the new data being made available by governments and participate more actively in public-sector actions.  That way, government innovation isn't left to the government alone.  Already, the Army has some "apps for the Army" effort that tries to enlist the brainpower of its troops, just like citizens crank apps for the iPhone or Google's Android system.

And the pothole app is called SeeClickFix.

Very heartening.

The IED killer we've been waiting on?

USA Today article with very good news:  “The military has developed technology that uses a high-tech beam to detonate hidden IEDs . . ..”

The only downside: it seems to operate on a wide space, revealing the bombs in the process and—under the right conditions—puts locals in danger IF they’re not forewarned about such countering operations (you know, a blaring voice in the local language announcing that in the next five minutes, everybody should stay clear of roads).

US Marine Corps general James Mattis says, “This is an offensive capability that will change the face of this war.”

I wouldn’t call it “offensive” but resiliently defensive—in effect, we tell the enemy, “All your long and hard and stealthy work gets negated by the flip of our switch, meaning you kill nobody in the process.”

But the “offensive” part comes in the beam’ ability to trigger IEDs while insurgents/terrorists are potentially carrying them or even when they’re under construction.

Mattis advocates putting the technology on aircraft (presumably drones too) and having them sweep areas proactively.

Naturally, the Pentagon announces the capability while providing no details, as countering tactics will invariably ensue.  To what effect?  We shall see.

But this is indeed good news and a development that bears close watching.

The Office of Naval Research is credited with the development.

A familiar rule-set gap: the tech races ahead, but worker safety does not

NYT story, coming to a court near you.  Pic is David Michaels, director OSHA, which everybody despises until it's your ass on the production line.

Naturally, the leading edge is a risky place to work, starts the piece.

You work with dangerous stuff, and maybe it costs you--literally--an arm and both legs when the meningococcal bacteria infects you, as happened to a New Zealand lab worker.  

The small quiet suits by workers have already arrived, like a $1.4M win for a former Pfizer worker.  The bigger class-action types will inevitably follow.

Michaels says, in effect, that "his agency's 20-century rules have not yet caught up with the 21st-cnetury biotech industry."

No kidding.  Same is true for US foreign policy on biowarfare, as our leaders instead prefer to obsess over the oh-so-20th-century "N" in the NBC (nuke, bio, chem) trilogy, which, in historical terms is really CNB (chemistry in the 19th C, nuclear in the 20th C--both producing weapons that debut in two world wars, and then biology in the 21st).  

Have no fear, the tragedies are coming.  Every good law on the American books had some nasty real-world tragedy as precursor. This will be no different.

Rule-set gaps, it's "what's for dinner?" in political terms.

No surprise: hottest job of 2018 expected to be biomed engineers

WSJ story.

The list:

• biomed engineers up 72%
• network system analysts (53%)
• home health aides (50%)
• personal and home-care aides (46%)
• financial examiners (41%)
• medical scientists (40%)
• physician assistants (39%)
• skin-care specialists (38%)
• biochemists and biophysicists (37%)
• athletic trainers (37%)

To me, that says an aging population, by definition living a lot longer.

Chart of the day: cranking DNA ever more cheaply

Per all the recent stuff on Venter's breakthrough, a chart from The Economist. More DNA synthesis productivity over time, with the cost declining.  Add in the fact that it used to take tremendous lengths of time to catalogue a species but now it happens in days instead of years, costing thousands instead of millions, and you got a ton of breakthrough developments coming down the pike.

Another Big Pharma purchase downmarket

Abbott buys Piramal Healthcare's generic drugs unit for almost $4B, "the latest in a series of deals by Western drug makers to strengthen their presence in emerging markets including India."

This is good, but it also undercuts Big Pharma's arguments about how there's unsafe drugs in unsafe markets and safe drugs in safe markets and never the two shall meet.

I support this M&A activity because I believe the bottom-of-the-pyramid markets should inform Big Pharma as to how it should be able to deliver drugs a lot more cheaply back home.

And it damn well better do so, because those of us American who buy their prescription drugs via Canadian online drugstores know full well that there's no reason for us to be paying these prices when nobody else in the world--either developed or emerging--seems to.

Abbott's big interest in India is that it's mostly self-pay (70%), as opposed to government-controlled--as in Europe.  So Abbott hopes to balance the belt-tightening in the West with the expanding New Core middle class being willing--and able--to spend more on their healthcare.

More on Venter's bid for godhood

FT full-page "analysis," plus Economist editorial and briefing.

FT first:

The first application for synthetic genomes may be the rapid development of new flu vaccines . . . "If this technology had been available last year, we could have cut the period needed to make a vaccine for H1N1 by 99 percent," says Dr Venter.  "We could have done it in a day."

The basic reminder:  most life extension is accomplished by defeating everyday disease, not revamping the body.  So the benefits of life extension tend to be fairly democratic, meaning everybody gets them--and not just the super-rich.

Venter, as indicated before here, is focused on creating algae that can suck CO2 out of the air and produce hydrocarbons--great stuff that should be happening here in America. 

From The Economist:

Is the answer lots of new rules?  The better answer is profound openness on developments, so a vote for open-source.  

A key glimpse of the future:  the falling cost of analyzing DNA sequences and the faster and cheaper DNA synthesis.

Face recognition: the global ID card

Pic here.  FT article.

Google, like Facebook and just about everybody else on the web right now, is suffering privacy issues, hence it has "put the launch of controversial facial recognition technology under review."

But no one expects, argues the article, that Google will back off from the technology, as all sorts of powerful face recognition techs are just hitting the market.

Hell, my new--and tiny--handheld Canon HD digital camcorder/camera does a fascinating job of spotting and tracking faces live as I film or shoot, so if that low-level capacity has reached everybody's personal cameras, you just know that far more profound technologies are being massed by major players.

Most of us have bumped into this technology in travel or across our work days, and there's long been the simple stuff for identifying faces of friends in programs like Apple's iPhoto.  The iPhone's got that bit where you record a snippet of a song and then search the web for its title, so no surprise that companies are rolling out similar technology that allows you to do the same with faces off your phone.

One telecom exec: 

There isn't a single mobile company that isn't interested in this. There are some 800m camera-equipped phones sold each year, but most people don't really use the cameras.  Mobile phone companies are looking for ways to enhance the camera experience.

The fear is easy to imagine:  the ability to snap a photo of somebody, find out who they are, and then be able to pull info up on them instantly, increasing the capacity of stalkers everywhere. Naturally, an Israeli start-up firm, Face.com, is at the forefront of the technology, having already scanned 9bn photos, yielding 52m identities.  Face.com admits it is still defining the safeguards on such a system.

But some smart words from an exec of a Swedish tech firm:

Now people are scared when they see [facial recognition products], but three or our years from now it won't be like that. At the moment, it is hard to control privacy on social networks, but it won't always be that way.  We will see a lot of legal cases over this, and a lot more control given to the user.

I believe he's right, and that this is the normal catch-up phenomenon on rules.

Larger point:  this will be a powerful security tool in a world where violence has largely migrated down to the level of individuals.

Venter's achievement

Pic here  FT story.

"We have passed through a critical psychological barrier," says Dr. Craig Venter, after unveiling his achievement--the world's first synthetic cells.  It comes after a 15-year effort, this creation of a new bacteria.

An ethics professor at Oxford puts it this way:

Venter is creating open the most profound door in humanity's history.  This is a step towards . . . creation of living beings with capacities and natures that could never have naturally evolved.

Venter's near-term goals include creating algae that can capture CO2 from the air and produce hydrocarbon fuels.  He's got a $600m deal with Exxon to this end.

The bare bones description:  Venter creates a synthetic genome, then transfers it into the shell of an existent bacteria that--apparently, had its genome stripped out.  The new synthetic genome thereupon booted-up the host cell and took it over.

You have to believe this is a big step toward the possibility of engineering human replacement organs--perhaps to the point of improving them dramatically or creating better babies through chemistry (ever seen the movie "Gattaca"?).  

It also portends biowarfare possibilities, of course.  

Venter admitted as much by calling the technology "dual-use," a term of art in my community to denote technology that can be used for civilian and military purposes.

Big pharma changes its model

FT story.

Guts of piece:

With some of his most profitable medicines going off patent, and the uncertainty of replacement drugs continuing to rise, US healthcare reform has been the least of Andrew Witty’s recent worries.

When the chief executive of GlaxoSmith Kline presented his company’s most recent financial results last month, he gave a sense of how the UK’s biggest drugmaker – and the industry more generally – is responding to structural pressures: diversify to survive.

For his company, he says, this means a shift away from “white pills in western markets”, with the proportion of traditionally core patent-protected, chemically based drugs, which are sold mainly in North America and western Europe, falling to just more than a quarter of total sales.

For many years, large companies such as GSK have relied on a handful of typically high-priced, mass-market “blockbusters” that generate billions of dollars a year in sales. But as patents expire on drugs such as Lipitor, Pfizer’s anti-cholesterol medicine that is the biggest selling medication in history, big pharma is having to rethink its business model.

Most large pharmaceutical companies have adopted four principal strategies to diversify. First, expand the range of products in the research and development pipeline and the use of external as well as in-house scientists to discover them. Second, expand geographically, especially into emerging markets. Third, increase sales of products other than patented prescription medicines. Fourth, experiment with greater flexibility in pricing in different countries and with ways to ensure drugs provide value for money.

Sounds eminently correct to me and an example of how you handle the rising, mostly non-Western emerging global middle class.

Nanotech manufacturing: are you small enough for the industry?

Pic here

WSJ story leveraging a Nature feature about researchers who create atomic-scale assembly line where DNA robots at 1/100,000th a human hair width can make 8 products--nothing too complex but still!

For the first time, microscopic robots made from DNA molecules can walk, follow instructions and work together to assemble simple products on an atomic-scale assembly line, mimicking the machinery of living cells, two independent research teams announced Wednesday.

Until this, most of the nanotech breakthroughs were novelty demos, like putting sunglasses on a dust mite--that sort of gee-whiz stuff.

Now, we're talking nano robots that crank chem compounds or do a Fantastic Voyage job on your body (BTW, Paul Greengrass is doing a 2013 remake!).

Today, nano-materials have been exploited in hundreds of products, but this is the first time production was achieved by "exotic man-made DNA objects" so small that their instructions had to be encoding in the world around them (e.g., chemical markers that direct their movements).

Still think nuclear weapons are going to define WMD and the world of security in the 21st century?