Curriculum 2.0: How to raid a bank
According to the
Information Times, students at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies in China have an assignment with a difference: they must plan to rob a bank with a team of six under seven minutes.
Through this radical assignment, the teacher wants to teach students
how to "allocate resources economically and efficiently."The above image is a sample layout of a target bank from the assignment.
Link
viaRelated: Idea of the year: Bachelor of inventionLabels: curriculum, education, innovation, students
Idea of the year: why not have bachelors of invention?
Trevor Baylis has proposed a breakthrough idea about ideas, laying out that students of the 21st century have a first hand knowledge of all topics related to the art (or science, depends on who is talking) of invention.
Advocating that the Generation Y (or Z…what ever happened to Generation A-W?) gets a head start in their life, Trevor proposes a new course the study, leading to a
Bachelor Degree in Inventing, where students get to know things like
intellectual property, disclosure, trademarks, patents, business plans, creating prototypes, raising venture capital, the history of invention…and so on.
If the curriculum makers of the world respond to it in an enthusiastic fashion, it will indeed be cool.
Read more
here.
Labels: education, innovation, invention
Bugroff: the social networking site you can’t sign up for
I am not sure whether they were inspired by Groucho Marx’s dictum about
‘not becoming a member of a club that would accept you’ or that they were plain tired of social networking, spamming and combine B.S. flying all around, but you must give it to the
Bugroff, the new antisocial networking site for those of us who prefer being left to themselves, no more friend requests from complete strangers to accept.
‘Because enough is enough’, you can’t sign up to Bugroff since you are not invited. If you manage to get in, there’s a lot you can do:
- Post no pictures of yourself or friends
- Invite no one else to join
- Switch status between 'unavailable, 'hiding' and 'dead'
- Keep what you're doing now private
- Receive no communications of any sort
- Generally hide away
Found via
JD LasicaLabels: innovation, social networking
How Print and Web 2.0 can co-exist successfully
Tim O’Reilly analyzes an interview that Dale Dougherty, the publisher of Make: Magazine did with
Publishing Executive Magazine.
Why Print publishers must embrace Web 2.0:Dale has this to say:
…(with user-generated content) you are expanding your sources at the same time you are deepening the relationship you have with your audience—again as individuals, not as an abstract demographic.
Tim
adds in,
The secret of success in publishing is finding these people and pouring fuel on their fire. Web 2.0 isn't just technology; it's attitude. If you're a publisher who looks down on "user-generated content," you're probably also a follower, not a leader, since you'll never find the great new ideas that almost always emerge from the edge.
Dale points out to
the enduring value of print:
We can do things in print that you just can’t do online—and one is hold a person’s attention for a longer period of time.
That’s a virtue. If a magazine is not going to be visually interesting and stimulating—which is to say as smart as it is beautiful to look at—why should readers care to buy this print product? If you’re going to pour lots of text in columns, you might as well put it online.
Labels: innovation, print 2.0, trends, web 2.0
Where is the next Big Internet Thing?
After blogging, user-generated content, Citizen Journalism, Youtube, Del.icio.us, Digg, I am tempted to believe, nothing new, exciting and useful has come on to the scene. This is a
phase of consolidation and rejiggling of business models.
There are far too me-too offerings.
Twitter and its ‘seemingly hipper’ competitor Pownce are time wasting lite variations of what Gmail can easily offer.
Facebook has been around for a lot of internet years now. The A-listers got to it after everyone else. The Facebook Platform is a faux –AOL application drive. T is nothing in Facebook that you can’t do on the open internet mashing Gmail, Google Reader, Blogger, Fliclkr and other freely available tools.
The
smartest Web 2.0 user of recent times is Republican Presidential hopeful Ron Paul, whose Web site is in reality a mashup of social networking, bookmarking, Youtube, Social news (Digg and Reddit) and other free tools. He is so smart he doesn’t have comments on his site and drives people to gather and hawk him on Digg.
Blog Networks were supposed to be the Newspaper conglomerates of tomorrow but barring some exceptions, some are content to
glorified content rewriters and others (e.g. Glam) are using conniving (or stupid) investment bankers to
raise more Venture Capital using dubious traffic calculation methodologies.
The really smarter blog networks are very few and focus on solid, old fashioned reporting and writing – Gawker, Gigaom, Paidcontent.
While Backfence failed to bring Citizen Journalism to every town USA, others like
Frontporch Forum,
iBrattleboro, Topix.com, New Assignment and Assignement Zero (which is now over) took CitiJ to new levels.
The Knight 21st Century News Challenge promises to support better news innovations and we will be better for them.
Copying the Digg model was, and still is, a noble cause and I am sorry to learn that the creators of Pligg, a Digg clone software, has put up its domain, Sourceforge account and community
up for sale - the
minimum bid being only $25,000.
Challenging Wikipedia and Google is always hip. Squidoo, Hubpages, Mahalo, Swickis, Techmeme and its controlled news index have to prove they can run with the giants for a long, long time and ultimately prove themselves.
Here’s to the reworking of existing models and to the next big internet thing.
Labels: innovation, social news, trends, web 2.0
The Two-headed Patent Hydra
MercExchange, a small Viriginia-based company went to the courts asking for a injunction against eBay which uses the "Buy It Now" feature, an innovation reportedly patented by MercExchange. However, the Federal court
refused to issue an injunction. Reasoning this, the judge wrote,
'MercExchange has utilized its patents as a sword to extract money rather than as a shield to protect its right to exclude or its market share, reputation, good will, or name recognition, as MercExchange appears to possess none of these,'
The Patent problem can be seen as a
two-headed monster. First, you have companies, big and small, (aka
Patent Trolls) patenting just so that they can extract money or stop competition in any way they can. As a result, we have a treasure trove of patents, rarely used by mankind for any benefits. The Federal Court 's decision aganist MercExchange can be seen as an indictment against such practices. However, this alone can't solve the Patent problem.
To solve it, we must change the laws and for that we first need to find a way to curtail the lobbying machinery employed by Big corporations to keep lawmakers in check. Big companies use the absurd Patent laws to protect their Legal monopoly.
As they say,
"the laws apply differently to the big, rich and powerful".Come to think of it, what if MercExchange was a giant company that was suing a small company for Patent infringement?
Would the results have been different? I bet they would.
Related StoryLawrence Lessig's new plan to save the worldLabels: innovation, legal, patents
Top 20 most significant E-Commerce developments of the last 10 years
Not satisfied with the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA)’s recently released list of
‘Top 10 most significant E-Commerce developments of the last 10 years’, I added some of my own:
SIIA'S TOP 101. Google (Sept. 1998)
2. Broadband Penetration of US Internet Users Reaches 50 percent (June 2004)
3. eBay Auctions (Launched Sept. 1997)
4. Amazon.com (IPO May 1997)
5. Google Ad Words (2000)
6. Open Standards (HTML 4.0 released - 1997)
7. WiFi (802.11 launched - 1997)
8. User-Generated Content – Blogs, Youtube, Flickr, social networking
9. iTunes (2001)
10. BlackBerry (1999)
My additions:11. Craigslist
12. Legal downloaded music – iTunes
13. P2P – Napster, Kazaa, Skype (VoIP)
14. Spammers and Scammers
15. Online Identities and Identity theft
16. Aggregators: Google news
17. Bookmarking and Voting: Del.icio.us, Digg
18. The Bubble of 2000 and the impending bubble
19. Wikipedia (although the SIIA’s list includes UGC, Wikipedia deserves a special, separate mention
20. Mobile Networks
What are your choices?
Labels: innovation, top 10, trends
The 14-year Copyright solution
On the legal side, there are two main problems with this information - patents and copyrights. In both cases there is... too much of everything, which is bad for creativity so necessary in the information and entertainment businesses.
More than individuals, it is big corporations who would like to enjoy benefits of almost eternal (as it seems now) copyright, paying their overpaid and under-worked staffers in comfort for as long as they can, long after the creator of the original work is dead.
Now, Cambridge University PhD candidate Rufus Pollock has used economics formulas to calculate the optimal level of copyright- finding that
14 years is the maximum term for granting copyright status.
Although, it is impossible that legislators (lobbied by corporations) would go in for this optimal level, it isn’t hard to point out entities that would like this to never happen – Walt Disney Corp., for example, is famous for having ‘forced’ into existence the
Copyright Term Extension Act (also called the Mickey Mouse Protection Act) that made it possible for Disney to extend copyright on its brands such as Mickey Mouse for more time to come.
In short, the 14year copyright means hell for Copyright life-termers.
On the other hand there are publishers who are
up in arms against Google’s Print project, which is digitizing mostly out-of-print books. In this case Publishers are protesting because without protest there is no fun, is there?
Labels: copyright, innovation, legal, trends
Google’s biggest fear: Googlers
Consider this the sequel to my earlier post about
10 things that ex-Googlers could do.
Sometime back, CNN Money carried out a story about many Google employees deciding to sell their Google options, cashing out while the going was good.
Robert Cringely writes about the dangers (For Google) of Google’s much-hyped
20% time – the freedom given to Google’s employees to spend 20% of their time on working on new ideas.
Robert says out of 4000 or more probable new ideas that the Googlers come up with, in the end Google can’t take more than 10 new projects in a year, if it has to really make a good effort at successful execution.
Then there is the hurting reality, plaguing many Googlers that their company is still a one trick pony –
Search Giant to Ad Giant. How many more innovations still left in the giant?
What about the discarded 3990 (or more, or less) discarded ideas?
Let is put aside the pride of those bright PHDs, MBAs, for a while.
How long are Googlers going to be satisfied frolicking in the cool Googleplex ( great PR point) and bragging to others they aced 20 interview sessions (PR point#2) before they got in?
Someday I would like to learn in detail what exactly those thousands of the
‘nerd and the nerdiest’ do at Google, Microsoft or Yahoo?
What does that entire IQ go into? However, that is another story, to be explored another time.
Robert talks about the possibility of
frustrated Googlers, whose ideas have been discarded, leaving the company, selling their options and investing the money into a startup centered on their idea.
The possibility that their startup might be bought up by a giant, including Google, is full of delicious ironies, indeed.
Googlers leaving Google to start their own is not a fantasy.
Someday, business professors might call the phenomenon,
‘Creative Destruction, Google Style’.
Or
'How the Giant was beaten by his own'.One of these companies might beat Google at their own, coming up with the
next disruptive innovation to beat.
Labels: google, innovation, startup
