Stowe Boyd

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smarterplanet

architectural-review:

Perry Kulper’s mapping has an intoxicating complexity

architectural-review

A Bidding War For Waze, The Crowdsourced Mapping Service

Vindu Goel, Facebook Is Said to Be in Talks to Buy Waze

Waze, which has more than 40 million users globally, is unusual in that it relies primarily on GPS data and real-time information from its users, who contribute updates on traffic, routes and even where to buy cheap gasoline.

Users of the service also typically share their locations continually as they drive — a potential gold mine of data that would be useful for Facebook as it seeks to serve up targeted ads.

“These people are giving permission for the cloud to track where they are,” said Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner, a technology research firm. “This is a particularly difficult problem for social networks in general. Very few people want to be tracked.”

Facebook currently uses maps from Microsoft’s Bing, but it also has a relationship with Waze. Facebook users can log into Waze using their Facebook accounts and share their location data with their Facebook friends.

Other technology companies, particularly Apple and Google, have also been watching Waze closely and may be interested in a potential acquisition of the start-up to improve their own mobile mapping services.

The story is that the company has been shopped, and they are hoping for a $1B acquisition.

Ignore Blau’s comments: people are willing to be tracked if that data is anonymized, and deleted after the time of it’s utility. The problem arises if the US or other governments start passing laws that allow agencies to force the social tools vendors to provide that data for use in investigations, like the FBI is trying to do with wiretapping on services like Skype.

fbi wiretapping maps waze

The Rise and Rise of Social Enterprise (and the bloodbath that precedes it) | futuristpaul ⇢

Paul Higgins writes a thoughtful piece about the future of not-for-profit businesses, and their need to develop for-profit business models to survive and to continue to do good work.

In the States (Paul is in Australia) we have benefit corporations (B corps) now, which are for-profit businesses that are committed to doing more than just making money or increasing the company’s value for shareholders: they also have an explicit social cause that they champion, and which is audited.

As a result, a non-profit in a US state that allows B corps could form one as a subsidiary, and then that subsidiary could operate a for-profit business, subject to normal tax considerations of other for-profit businesses, but also capable of raising capital, selling shares, and operating with the goal of making money, as well as doing good. And, of course, some of the post-tax profits of the B corp could be directed to the non-profit parent.

b corps benefit corporations non-profits social enterprise

Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them - Stowe Boyd via GigaOM Research ⇢

from the report’s Executive Summary

“Socialized business process” — the idea of adding social tools to traditional business processes — is unlikely to work in the long term. The enterprise is now transitioning to social network–based communication as introduced by social tools, and there is a fundamental conflict in communication models with business-process-centric business. The attempt to make the socialized business process work may be part of the adoption problem reported in the social-business industry.

The shift to social network’s pull communication, where individuals more or less subscribe to information sources, will run counter to business process push communication and eventually invalidate it. Push-and-pull communication styles won’t jibe, and pull lines up with the transition to social network–based communication. Most notably, this will undermine business processes and the collective-collaborative organization that evolved in parallel with business processes. The shift won’t take place in the way that email led to organizational flattening. Rather, it will invalidate the rules and roles of business processes and turn the process logic into just another kind of information passed along through the social network.

It may be obvious, but companies that are more oriented toward a connective-cooperative style of work will get more benefits from social networks than those that are less so. Stated more strongly, those wishing to get the boost that many believe is inherent in this lean, self-innovating, fast-and-loose model of work will have to actively move away from the cultural principles of slow-and-tight, twentieth-century business.

In order to better explore these rapidly changing dynamics, this report presents a psychodynamic cultural model for business called the 3C model. The name is based on three sorts of business culture:

Competitive: wheel-and-spoke organization, decision making by edict, feudal or clan culture

Collaborative: pyramid-and-processes organization, decision making by elite consensus, slow-and-tight culture

Cooperative: network-and-connections organization, laissez faire decision making, fast-and-loose culture

We also explore various archetypes of individuals’ psychosocial matches with the various flavors of companies. The freelancer and follower archetypes, for example, do well in cooperative settings, but they are poorly matched with entrepreneurial organizations (which may explain Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s recent edict excluding remote work.)

High-performing companies of the near future will be operating based on looser ties among individuals in and across businesses. Many more of them will be supported by next-generation cooperative tools. Individuals in these companies will have more autonomy, and there will be more opportunity seeking when compared to the largely slow-and-tight, risk-averse companies that are dominant today. The value of consensus is falling in a rapidly changing, unstable world where there is a higher premium for business innovation and more uncertainty than ever before. And this leads to a devaluation of business processes, in particular those business processes intended to direct human agency and to act as a surrogate for management directing employees’ every move.

You can sign up for a seven day free trial of the GigaOM Research service, and read the entire report.

9 May 2013

3c model social networks business process gigaom research reports social business coopertive work fast-and-loose

The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from that of what kind of social ties, relationship to nature, lifestyles, technologies and aesthetic values we desire. The right to the city is far more than the individual liberty to access urban resources: it is a right to change ourselves by changing the city. It is, moreover, a common rather than an individual right since this transformation inevitably depends upon the exercise of a collective power to reshape the processes of urbanization. The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is, I want to argue, one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.

David Harvey. The Right to the City (2008)

Source: notquitenative

adhocratic

quotations david harvey the right to the city urbanism

The city is a fact in nature, like a cave, a run of mackerel or an ant-heap. But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within its communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art. Mind takes form in the city; and in turn, urban forms condition mind.

Lewis Mumford, The City In History

inthenoosphere

cities quotations lewis mumford the city in history

Adobe now feels like a company that wants to satisfy people who make stuff much more than it cares about satisfying stockholders.

Jeffrey Zeldman, Adobe Love (in the comments)

Source: zeldman.com

adobe

Adobe’s Mighty and Napoleon - digital drawing devices that are ready-to-hand instead of purely present-to-hand (Heidigger’s terms: see Matt Webb’s discussion).

adobe mighty napoleon ready-to-hand present-to-hand design drawing

I've been following you for a long time, but your most recent posts have been by far my most favorite. Rock on, mister.

Thanks.

fuq-auffe