Brigner, in Weinberger’s summary, “says what he would tell the Broadband Strategy Initiative: Build on our this country’s current success providing access to the Internet. Do no harm (= beware of Net Neutrality). And question the research that shows that America has fallen behind other countries in the ubiquity, price, and speed of broadband.”
In this video, David Weinberger interviews Supernova attendee and MuniWireless founder Esme Vos on
“the benefits of competition among access providers, and what we’ve learned from countries that have enforced a structural separation between those companies that provide access to the Internet and those that provide content and services over the Internet.”
Doc Searls, Fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard, moderated the panel on Telecom as Software at Supernova on Day 3. Doc observed that it is still very early in the current cycle of telecom innovation, and even though we are able to treat some calls as data, most are still a challenge. He asks why we can’t switch carriers and networks when there’s connectivity on one but not the other.
Doc also describes the project he’s working on at the Berkman center, project VRM, which stands for Vendor Relationship Management. He tells us a little about what VRM means, and how it affects the relationships between customers and companies.
JP Rangaswami of BT and “Confused of Calcutta” discusses his learning from Supernova’s Real Time Flow track, including the challenges in both standards and technical connections, as well as the social interactions that connect us. While there’s lots of focus on the “network” part of social networks, it is the Social part where there’s a lot of room for new learning.
JP appreciates insights from Danah Boyd’s talk, as well as those of John Hagel and Umair Haque.
Towards the end of the discussion, JP gives some of his predictions for the future of telephony and communications.
In case you’re looking for it, I referenced an interview with Joseph Smarr from Plaxo during the discussion.
Craig Walker, the Group Product Manager for Realtime Communications spoke on the “Telecom as Software Panel.” In our talk he describes Google Voice for those who haven’t yet seen it. As telephony increasingly becomes IP (Internet Protocol) based, and more able to be manipulated like data, the innovation we’re seeing now with products like Google Voice, Ribbit, Skype, and others will continue to increase.
We also discuss what things are going to happen over the next 3-5 years in the telephony industry, including how to innovate with the user as the center of your innovation.
One of the great conversations that started at Supernova 2009 was around “Building Startups Today.” What does it take to build a great startup today? And how do you get it funded and connected to a passionate customer community?
What separates “modern” social network systems from “first generation” social networks like Friendster (and, to an extent, systems like LinkedIn)? It’s the architecture.
Join us as we explore how current systems “design for social sharing” with Rashmi Sinha, cofounder and CEO for SlideShare. Slideshare is the world’s largest community for sharing presentations and documents. SlideShare is growing rapidly (more than 18 million monthly uniques) letting everyone from marketers, conference speakers and academicians share presentations and connect with others. Rashmi has a PhD in Cognitive Psychology from Brown University and did research on search engines and recommender systems at UC Berkeley. She is a frequent speaker at conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo and Future of Web Apps. She writes a blog at rashmisinha.com about running a startup.
If you’re heading to San Francisco for the Supernova Annual Conference (or merely want to understand what’s on the minds of the best thinkers in business, technology and policy), you can load your iPod up with interviews from our year-round Network Age Briefing series.
Listen to interviews with industry and policy heavyweights including David Weinberger, danah boyd, Scott Harris and dozens of others as we discuss what’s happening now (and next) in the Network Age.
Dr. Bernardo Huberman is a Senior Fellow at HP Labs, and spends a lot of time studying the actual social interactions we all have on Social Networks, in email, and in person.
He notes in this interview that “given the collapse in the value of information, attention is very very valuable, if only because it is so scarce.” Some of the work he’s doing will help people get the maximum value out of the attention they “spend” on content, while at the same time helping content providers get the maximum value out of the attention we give their content.
Huberman and his team are also creating software to help us understand those networks and how we’re interacting with them. People in networks declare a large number of “friends” or followers but Huberman actually studied how many people users on twitter actually interact with, versus how many they follow. The number is actually somewhat small. And they researched the process of reciprocity – we tweet those who tweet us. If you’re a good at reciprocating, you’ll be more valuable.
He also talks about people who have “attention income” – celebrities are people whose attention generates income. He notes that when people pay attention to your content, you’re more likely to create more, and when that attention wanes, you’ll create less. Seems logical, but it has a bunch of implications for people contributing to large public projects like Wikipedia or open source efforts.
Dr. Huberman also discusses possible alternate models for how attention can generate income. Thanks to him for a fascinating discussion, and I look forward to his session in just a few weeks at Supernova.
“In a networked world where everything is just a node, the individual is often the natural place for information and control to pivot around.” – Keith Hopper, from the comments here.
What separates “modern” social network systems from “first generation” social networks like Friendster (and, to an extent, systems like LinkedIn)? It’s the architecture.
