Social Networks

Soundbite video from the Business Reimagined session last week, I used the term "Coasian construct" for Social Business, thought it may need a bit of background.

Firstly the Coasian bit - that is referring to Ronald Coase, a 1930's economist, and his thesis on transaction costs. Wikipedia sums it up perfectly:

The traditional economic theory of the time suggested that, because the market is "efficient" (that is, those who are best at providing each good or service most cheaply are already doing so), it should always be cheaper to contract out than to hire. [This was talking about the 1930's, not the 2010's by the way - not that you'd notice any great changes )

Coase noted, however, that there are a number of transaction costs to using the market; the cost of obtaining a good or service via the market is actually more than just the price of the good. Other costs, including search and information costs, bargaining costs, keeping trade secrets, and policing and enforcement costs, can all potentially add to the cost of procuring something via the market. This suggests that firms will arise when they can arrange to produce what they need internally and somehow avoid these costs.

There is a natural limit to what can be produced internally, however. Coase notices "decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function", including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation. This is a countervailing cost to the use of the firm.

Coase argues that the size of a firm (as measured by how many contractual relations are "internal" to the firm and how many "external") is a result of finding an optimal balance between the competing tendencies of the costs outlined above. In general, making the firm larger will initially be advantageous, but the decreasing returns indicated above will eventually kick in, preventing the firm from growing indefinitely.

Other things being equal, a firm will tend to be larger:

the less the costs of organizing and the slower these costs rise with an increase in the transactions organized.
the less likely the entrepreneur is to make mistakes and the smaller the increase in mistakes with an increase in the transactions organized.
the greater the lowering (or the less the rise) in the supply price of factors of production to firms of larger size.

The first two costs will increase with the spatial distribution of the transactions organized and the dissimilarity of the transactions. This explains why firms tend to either be in different geographic locations or to perform different functions. Additionally, technology changes that mitigate the cost of organizing transactions across space will cause firms to be larger—the advent of the telephone and cheap air travel, for example, would be expected to increase the size of firms. On a related note the use of the internet and related modern information and communication technologies seem to lead to the existence of so-called virtual organizations.

I've put the last line in italics. To explain a bit of history, I started looking at the impact of information flows on business in the mid 1980's for my MSc, and that's when I came across Coase and transaction costs, and it became clear to me that the Internet (as it came to be called, it wasn't called that in 1985 when I started playing with "wide area networks") was going to have a massive impact on business transaction costs. Researching back, it became clear that the main impact of all communication revolutions in the past had been to reduce transaction costs, and once that became clear it was possible to predict the impact of the Internet far more closely, so for example the arrival of things like Amazon, eBay etc ("Silicon Soukhs", as we called them in the early 90's before the dotcoms existed) were entirely predictable.

Secondly, the Construct bit. Now we are seeing the next jump forward in Comms technology, Social Networking. We started looking at their impact on business seriously in 2005 when we founded Broadsight, as we could see what the rise of blogging, wikis etc, and what better webtools would do to Web 1.0 technologies like groupware (If anyone would like our classic 2005 paper, "Everyone is a communication business now" email me now ). It was clear that what they would do would be to have another major impact on another layer of transaction costs, that between individuals both in any enyerprise and in the value chain, ie it would go down to the person to person messaging level. Previously the major impacts here had been the telephone and email, this would take the costs down another order of magnitude. That was also why Twitter was so interesting when it emerged, as although we had great fun laughing at the "what I had for lunch" tweeters, the bigger point was that the transaction costs had reduced to the level you would say this over an electronic medium.

In essence, what this means is that with Social Media the whole enterprise can, (in theory - see below), start to resemble the buzz of conversation around a small company's workspace, even if it is larger, geographically, and even temporally dispersed. This buzz is the stuff that makes businesses hum, that ensures many little things "go right" and its why businesses that get above a certain size they start to become much less efficient ("decreasing returns to the entrepreneur function", including increasing overhead costs and increasing propensity for an overwhelmed manager to make mistakes in resource allocation, as Coase would have it). Furthermore, Social Media is continuing outside the enterprise, so in theory the buzz of your potential customers, suppliers, competitors and existing users are also all in the room with you. The business efficiencies that are theoretically possible from this are immense. Just imagine all the little inefficiencies you see in your company, and in those you transact with, and imagine a major reduction in that.

It would be a massive change in efficiency for any enterprise.

But, what still has to be controlled is data and message overload - that is what has killed email's usefulness, the lower transaction costs of writing and sending an email has not been matched with a similar reduction in the cost of reading and acting on the message - and it wil kill social media in an enterprise if it is not managed better than email. The term "Big Data" to me is an admission of failure, its occurring because we have not yet worked out how to target what we are looking for. The major risk in social business is drowning in data, and that will be the big challenge for social business systems.

There was a very interesting article in the Grauniad the other day, arguing that News can be toxic (the irony of the article being in a newspaper is there...). Its based on an essay by German writer Rolf Dobelli and argues that News deliberately plays to some of our more primitive instincts, so a glut can be bad for our health. In summary, the argument is:

News misleads. . It often looks at the wrong problem, or over-eggs the spectacular. We are not rational enough to be exposed to the press. Watching an airplane crash on television is going to change your attitude toward that risk, regardless of its real probability. If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong. Bankers and economists – who have powerful incentives to compensate for news-borne hazards – have shown that they cannot. The only solution: cut yourself off from news consumption entirely.

News is irrelevant. Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you. But people find it very difficult to recognise what's relevant. It's much easier to recognise what's new.

News has no explanatory power. News items are bubbles popping on the surface of a deeper world. Will accumulating facts help you understand the world? Sadly, no. The relationship is inverted. The important stories are non-stories: slow, powerful movements that develop below journalists' radar but have a transforming effect.

News is toxic to your body. It constantly triggers the limbic system. Panicky stories spur the release of cascades of glucocorticoid (cortisol). This deregulates your immune system and inhibits the release of growth hormones. In other words, your body finds itself in a state of chronic stress. High glucocorticoid levels cause impaired digestion, lack of growth (cell, hair, bone), nervousness and susceptibility to infections. The other potential side-effects include fear, aggression, tunnel-vision and desensitisation.

News increases cognitive errors. News feeds the mother of all cognitive errors: confirmation bias. In the words of Warren Buffett: "What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact." News exacerbates this flaw.

News inhibits thinking. Thinking requires concentration. Concentration requires uninterrupted time. News pieces are specifically engineered to interrupt you. They are like viruses that steal attention for their own purposes. News makes us shallow thinkers. But it's worse than that. News severely affects memory. There are two types of memory. Long-range memory's capacity is nearly infinite, but working memory is limited to a certain amount of slippery data.

News works like a drug. As stories develop, we want to know how they continue. With hundreds of arbitrary storylines in our heads, this craving is increasingly compelling and hard to ignore. Scientists used to think that the dense connections formed among the 100 billion neurons inside our skulls were largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. Today we know that this is not the case. Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. The more news we consume, the more we exercise the neural circuits devoted to skimming and multitasking while ignoring those used for reading deeply and thinking with profound focus.

News wastes time. If you read the newspaper for 15 minutes each morning, then check the news for 15 minutes during lunch and 15 minutes before you go to bed, then add five minutes here and there when you're at work, then count distraction and refocusing time, you will lose at least half a day every week. Information is no longer a scarce commodity. But attention is. You are not that irresponsible with your money, reputation or health. Why give away your mind?

News makes us passive. News stories are overwhelmingly about things you cannot influence. The daily repetition of news about things we can't act upon makes us passive. It grinds us down until we adopt a worldview that is pessimistic, desensitised, sarcastic and fatalistic. The scientific term is "learned helplessness". It's a bit of a stretch, but I would not be surprised if news consumption, at least partially contributes to the widespread disease of depression.

News kills creativity. Finally, things we already know limit our creativity. This is one reason that mathematicians, novelists, composers and entrepreneurs often produce their most creative works at a young age. Their brains enjoy a wide, uninhabited space that emboldens them to come up with and pursue novel ideas. News closes, not opens, minds.

Society needs journalism – but in a different way. Investigative journalism is always relevant. We need reporting that polices our institutions and uncovers truth. But important findings don't have to arrive in the form of news. Long journal articles and in-depth books are good, too.

The author says he "has now gone without news for four years, so I can see, feel and report the effects of this freedom first-hand: less disruption, less anxiety, deeper thinking, more time, more insights. It's not easy, but it's worth it.". I must say I did the same, a similar time ago, after spending an extended period outside the UK and realising missing out on the daily News had a similar effect. I prefer to read "the News" once a week from journals eg the Economist, as very little that happens on a day to day basis is much more than mental chewing gum.

So here's the kicker for this article. What I have been using, a lot, over the last few years is social media of many forms. I am increasingly coming to the conclusion that the more immediate types (like Twitter etc) have a similar effect to News if over-consumed and have started to curtail my usage of it too (except for blogs, which I see as the more investigative element). If you replace the word "News" with "Social Media" in the above passage, it is largely still true in my view.

Thoughts?

Source: FRS blog, Princeton


Picked up from the New Scientist:

Sociologists have long known that people have fewer friends than their friends do, on average. This strange conclusion, known as the friendship paradox, arises because of sampling bias: people with a larger number of friends are more likely to be your friend, so they get counted more often.

Now Nathan Hodas and colleagues at the Information Sciences Institute in Marina del Rey, California, have shown this holds true on Twitter, too. The team analysed 5.8 million Twitter users' followers and followees (which they dubbed friends) and found that nearly all users were less popular than both their friends and followers - perhaps not surprising, since celebrities like @justinbieber and @ladygaga massively tip the scales.

What's more, the researchers also found 88 per cent of users tweet less often than their friends, rising to 99 per cent when completely inactive users are removed, and 79 per cent of users post fewer virally spreading links than their friends.

Re the Friendhsip Paradox, it is also seen on Facebook - NYT

You spend your time tweeting, friending, liking, poking, and in the few minutes left, cultivating friends in the flesh. Yet sadly, despite all your efforts, you probably have fewer friends than most of your friends have. But don’t despair — the same is true for almost all of us. Our friends are typically more popular than we are.

Don’t believe it? Consider these results from a colossal recent study of Facebook by Johan Ugander, Brian Karrer, Lars Backstrom and Cameron Marlow. (Disclosure: Ugander is a student at Cornell, and I’m on his doctoral committee.) They examined all of Facebook’s active users, which at the time included 721 million people — about 10 percent of the world’s population — with 69 billion friendships among them. First, the researchers looked at how users stacked up against their circle of friends. They found that a user’s friend count was less than the average friend count of his or her friends, 93 percent of the time. Next, they measured averages across Facebook as a whole, and found that users had an average of 190 friends, while their friends averaged 635 friends of their own.

Studies of offline social networks show the same trend. It has nothing to do with personalities; it follows from basic arithmetic. For any network where some people have more friends than others, it’s a theorem that the average number of friends of friends is always greater than the average number of friends of individuals.

This phenomenon has been called the friendship paradox. Its explanation hinges on a numerical pattern — a particular kind of “weighted average” — that comes up in many other situations. Understanding that pattern will help you feel better about some of life’s little annoyances.

In fact its a power law thing, in any network the "connectors" at the centre of friendship nets have a large number of friends, the less connected on the ouskirts have far fewer, so the "average" is higher than the average peripheral user owing to the high score of the connected Ones - see picture above. (Read the maths in the article, its a very good primer on social graph link weightings). The other highly connected strategy is to be a Social Butterfly, a being peripherally connected to many friendship nets

In short, unless you are the social hub of your friendship network, or a social butterfly, you will suffer from the Friendship Paradox - its one of the Power Laws of Nature.

For those who may have missed it, Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister in the 70's/80's, died yesterday. She was, according to the commentariat consensus, "extremely divisive". "Extremely" doesn't factor in our more precise world of Big Data Analysis (we used to call it data analysis, but what with inflation - you know how it is these days), so we decided to see just how much, and set our trusty old media analysis engine onto Twitter for a spell of Big Data bump n' grind (the term Thatcher is still ticking over on Twitter faster than a petrol pump eats pound notes by the way).

Anyway, much Big Chugging later and we can say safely that Twitter is about 44% against and 39% for Margaret Thatcher, ie the ratio of For : Against is about 1.13:1. The error on sentiment analysis is typically 10 - 15% so its near as dammit a wash in terms of divisiveness between the Maggie haterz and fanz (The Twitter demographic is still more left leaning than the national average, so I'm not that surprised it swings slightly to the left, as it were). An Ipsos/Mori poll shows that she is still the most popular post war British Prime Minister by some way, but she was seen as the most capable (39%) far more than liked (22%). For comparison, runner up Tony Blair was also "liked" at about 26% but seen as only 27% capable. The rest make for pretty sorry reading.

What is more interesting though is what is meant by "extreme" - to have a total of 39%+44% = 87% taking a position is a very high %, usually reserved for spats about various 'isms and causes du jour on Twitter, and even then many people tend to play the more even handed (or popcorn eating sports fan on the bleachers) role. For comparison the average Social business would be delighted if more than about 20% of their twitterstreams got really passionate one way or the other (a national broadband outage would possibly do it), and the parallel-running Twitter'Meedja discussion* about MumsNet got to about half that at its peak.

As to actual topics of - ahem - "conversation" in the Thatcherstream, the graphic above by Martin Belam (@Martin Belam), though data-poor compared to our big data crunth-a-thon, and far more tongue in cheek, actually captures the zeitgeist of the online discussion* very well.

In vitriol veritas, as they say.....

*spitting competition

It is no surprise that the Cyprus Cyprus bank raid is sending shivers down people's spines across the European Union (and the wider world - there is something visceral about seeing a government prepared to grab 7% of your guaranteed bank savings here, now, rather than robbing you the traditional ways via raising tax and stoking inflation) so I thought I'd give our social media monitoring system a quick run to see what the sentiment looks like. Talk about a firehose, there is a huge furore going on (update - trending on Twitter now).

The wordcloud above tells the memetic story, ie the concepts that the issue is swirling around (note eurozone, ecb, fail, and the various countries mentioned). The sentiment is nearly all negative (one of the highest ratings I've ever seen on Twitter) not at all encouraging for the politico-financial Euro-elite who sanctioned this move, as no one except the most technical financial analyst-bots are in any way in favour, and very many are very viscerally against it (even The Economist, that bastion of darwinian monetarism thinks its daft). That they even agreed to doing this is "interesting", but there is definitely no excuse for not knowing what their (too oft ignored) citizens' opinions are (update - seems like everyone is now running away and blaming everyone else for the deal). Putting my cliodynamic hat on, I'd say this may well be one of those major tipping point moments, as it is now very clear to every EU citizen just who their ruling Elite's hearts and minds belong to, and it ain't their own citizens. Will be interesting to see what happens next, I think I will poll sentiment every few hours to see how it shifts - who knows, we may be able to predict a riot.

(Post Script - the alternative currencies being posited for holding money on Twitter are gold and mattresses (no surprise) , but also bitcoins before dollars - now that is interesting)

Was musing after yesterday's post about where the future of Social Networks is going, and after kicking it around at Tuttle today I am increasingly thinking that it will be an enabling technology like email or web browsing, i.e (apart from the early frothy IPOs), a true Zero Billion Dollar industry. I went down this thought line:

1. It seems to mee that the we are way past the huge innovation of the early adoption phase, in fact it may even be that phase is coming to an end as reports of Facebook usage dropping in its early markets picks up.

2. The next stage is commoditisation, this is typically brought about by a mass move to a de jure or de facto standard that then becomes used by all, and is very low margin if not free so easily affordable.

3. The last stage is when it beomes embedded in the infrastructure (like email and web browsing now is) and "just works". Once upon a time the Internet didn't "just work", nor did email, or printers, or WiFi, nor did web browsing when Mosac first came out....now these all do

Email and Web Browsing both went this way (as did SMS), initially they operated in wa;;ed gardens, the walled gardens were then broken by interconnection (driven by outsede emergent open standards) and then taken over by open technology.

Seems to me that is going to be the path of Social Networking, so I expect to see my Stage 2 emerge over the next few years, and in 5 years time it will just be there, like web browsing and email, ignored unless it doesn't work, embedded in the Infrastructure

Friendster Collapse - the reverse S curve


Interesting article in MIT Review of research looking at why Social Networks collapse (carried out by another of the great Technology universities, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich - here is the paper). In short it's about cost/benefit (or hassle factors, as they were once called) and the number of friends people on average have on the network (the k-core score):

1. Cost/Benefit

When the costs–the time and effort–associated with being a member of a social network outweigh the benefits, then the conditions are ripe for a general exodus. The thinking is that if one person leaves, then his or her friends become more likely to leave as well and this can cascade through the network causing a collapse in membership.

2. k-core

If a large fraction of people on a network have only two friends, it is highly vulnerable to collapse. That’s because when a single person exits, it leaves somebody with only one friend. This person is then likely to exit leaving another with only one friend and so on. The result is a cascade of exits that sweeps through the network. However, if a large fraction of people on the network have, say, ten friends, the loss of one friend is much less likely to trigger a cascade.

Be interesting to see if there is any maths about the interplay of these - is the cost benefit a slow rise thing or a step "last straw" thing? Is there an 80/20 k-core number, where a "state change" occurs, or does stickiness increase with connections linearly, or maybe by Metcalfe's Law?

Anyway, as the paper notes, Friendster got it wrong and everyone left. However, there was a 3rd factor operating then which isn't right now, viz:

3. Where else would they go? Friendster fell apart in a world with Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, so the collapse was very fast. Today, where would one go? Wouldn't a Facebook collapse just be a slow tailing off of activity as the cost/benefit rises, (as is happening in the early facebook countries in fact), but there is not a clear go to alternative Social Network.

Now THAT is the factor to really watch methinks

Lots of angst today following this WSJ article, the key point being:

Overall the amount invested in consumer information services was off 42% in the first nine months as the difficulties of newly public Internet companies such as Facebook and Zynga cast doubt on the business models and valuations of social media companies.

Fred Wilson, always very interesting to read, argues it is driven by 3 main trends - summarised below:

1) the consumer web has matured. we are almost 20 years into the consumer web and we have large platforms that are starting to suck up a lot of the oxygen..... but consumer behaviors are starting to ossify on the web and it is harder than ever to build a large audience from a standing start.

2) the consumer is moving from desktop/web to mobile/app. we've talked about this transition ad naseum on this blog....(but) strong product market fit is no longer enough to get to a large user base. You need to master the "download app, use app, keep using app, put it on your home screen" flow and that is a hard one to master.

3) the momentum/late stage investors have moved from consumer to enterprise. there is a large pool of money in the venture capital asset class that is opportunistic, momentum driven, and thesis agnostic. this pool is driven largely by the public markets. this pool of capital was "all in" on consumer web/social web in the 2009-2011 time frame. it drove a lot of activity throughout the venture capital markets because each layer of the VC stack (angel, seed, Srs A, Srs B, Srs C, etc) needs to be aware of what the next layer up wants to fund. when the momentum/late stage wanted web/social, the layers below gave them web/social. now that the momentum/late stage wants enterprise, we should expect the layers below to give them enterprise.

The last point is in my opinion the crux of Fred's post, but he doesn't address the "why" it has shifted - and I think this comes down to the WSJ's point - the demand is falling because the returns (outside of the insiders) are as virtual as the products.

Those more wedded to the Consumer Web VC model disagree fervently:

Recent articles by the WSJ, Fred Wilson, & others are noting a shift in investor interest to enterprise and away from consumer. If true, this is a huge error… at least for entrepreneurs, angels, and smaller funds. There is no better time than the present to build cheap & scalable software-based businesses that make money. And while there is lots of new potential for using consumer marketing techniques in the enterprise, let’s not be too hasty in digging an early grave for the Interwebs, shall we?

Having been in the valley for over twenty years, and an investor in startups for almost ten, I’ve seen at least 2 investor cycles of switching back & forth from consumer to enterprise. While i agree with Fred it’s helpful to know what themes downstream investors are funding, IMHO most VCs switching from consumer to enterprise are clueless about why they’re doing so.

Perhaps they are, but I would argue that the market is behaving totally rationally here - "Return On Investment" is still deeply unfashionable among the Consumer InterWebzerati as the profits are as virtual as the products, but it is becoming increasingly clear to investors that the current business model for the Consumer Web is a busted flush* - Freeconomic market grabs plus a great IPO/exit to the dumb money only works for a while until the dumb money catches on, and "everything sold through iTunes" is hardly better. Facebook in my view stopped the Consumer Web VC party bubble.

(*It always was, as we showed in 2008, but we underestimated how far greed and "mass dumbness" can go in pushing a market)

Two trends...firstly, and predictably, the minute there is a new social currency, there will be the attempts to inflate it for commercial gain - Facebook Likes being the latest example - CNN:

Facebook has begun a purge of fake accounts and "Likes" as part of a set of site improvements announced last month. The result has been lower numbers on fan pages, including some of the site's most popular ones, but no actual loss of real followers.

On August 31, Facebook announced plans for improvements to its "site integrity systems." That, according to a blog post, included increased automated efforts to sniff out and delete fake accounts or Likes that had been illicitly sold or gained by otherwise shady means.

"A Like that doesn't come from someone truly interested in connecting with a Page benefits no one ...," the post read. "When a Page and fan connect on Facebook, we want to ensure that connection involves a real person interested in hearing from a specific Page and engaging with that brand's content."

It was ever thus....but the more worrying trend to me is the increasing belief that systems that measure this are in some way measuring something valuable - Klout has just got significant investment from Microsoft and it will be linked to Bing - TechCrunch:

You’ll begin seeing Klout scores — the combined measure of a person’s influence across Twitter, Facebook and other social networks — show up in the search engine today. The initial implementation will show Klout scores for friends in the “People Who Know” section of the right-hand column, alongside other third parties already in there, including Twitter and Quora. Search for a hot topic like “Facebook advertising”, you’ll see people with socially-proven expertise showing up. Mouse over an expert’s name, and their Klout score will appear, along with their Klout-determined areas of expertise.

There seems to be a mass amnesia about the GIGO concept, in that these reputation systems' parameters are half bake...sorry, "currently imperfect", and are measuring an easily inflatable and unstable social currency, based on the actions of a relatively small number of noisy vessels. Still, no doubt there will soon be a Klout Engine Optimisation industry (if there isn't one already).

Hopefully these Index systems will become more discerning over time, but i don't think that's where the payoff is today. To me its just another example of the online forces inexorably driving Greshams Law of Information - ie bad information is increasingly driving out good on the "Free" Web.

Attended the McKinsey event on Social Business in London Social Media Week yesterday, overall I don't think I heard anything new (the mere fact that McKinsey is sponsoring a session and pushing out a big report tells you Social Business is now over The Chasm, and is something saleable to the blue chips, not an early adoption technology). Even the Elephant idea is old now, we used it in the first "Social Business" talk we did at the first London Social Media week 2 years ago Most of the "ahas" I got, had to do with other implementation lessons (here are some of ours, from our own experience).

The only thing that has changed is that the market now has an £800bn price tag attached to it (a lareg anmount from the rebadging of Enterprise 2.0, I'll warrant). Anyway, here are my notes on "aha's" and "oh really's":

Implementation

- ROI is a hygiene factor. Early adopters are now getting benefits, but no one can cost justify it early up, so...
- Pilots are the best first step
- iPad was the game changer for Social Media in business, it combined power of notebook and ease of use of smartphone
- Social media business software has become far easier (and cheaper) to use (Lotus Notes to Wikis to Yammer)
- The "implementaion gap" is in middle management - juniors know how the tech works, seniors get huge support to make it work. Middle managers have neither. (Also, middle management gets the least benefit/is most at risk from its adoption)

The conflict between IP and getting Social benefits

- Social media "theory" today relies too much on trust, fine in consumer systems but motivation to cheat is v high in business, the problem of how to police this dichotomy is still in infancy. "Most people are good" vs "yes but the few who aren't can cause a lot of damage" issues still not clearly addressed, still a conflict between open-ness and IP protection.
- Key is to draw a hard barrier bewteen IP sensitive areas and those not, can't be at the business bariier.
- Is the user device in or out the enterprise now ( lock down vs user owned or shared resource)

"Oft repeated Theories still to be Proven"

- We are in "A world where abundance is possible". Saying something isn't possible is a clarion call to developing world developers everywhere. But what is abundant? Is the abundant worth having? See my notes on the declining quality of what is abundant in my "Gresham's Law of Information" posts
- "Open source has given a lot, it works" But look at who who makes money - the ones who can wrap up Open Source in their own IP
- 3D printing are next major assault on IP

Some Predictions from the Panel

Social Media Winners - Healthcare, Education, Consumer businesses, Electronics
Losers - Government, Consultants
Next Social Media company to to be acquired? Twitter
Next IPO? - Twitter
Most impactful next gen Social Media technology - Healthcare, User trust/rating

Good news was I saw quite a few faces I haven't seen for ages. And a Free Lunch