Right now there is an active debate about whether right now is a good time to start a new company. Companies have to get money from somewhere to fund operations, and if the potential to make money directly (consumer spending), indirectly (advertising in general, and specifically and separately online advertising and social media) and through support (venture capital investment), then entrepreneurs are facing a pretty grim market for new ventures.

But even in wildly uncertain markets and consumer sentiment, change creates opportunities, especially in a cultural climate that is crying out for significant political, social and economic change.

Why is now a good time to start a business and what opportunities will emerge?

• Change.

  Change was obviously an overriding message throughout the current election season and it rode Obama and numerous other politicians into office. But what other political themes emerged and what opportunities will be created?

  How will the outcry over the excesses of capitalism impact large and small companies? What new standards of information transparency will we want? How can private enterprise create the standards, analysis tools, platforms and devices to deliver more powerful business and public government oversight and management?

  The web has fundamentally changed the power of individuals and small teams to create companies. How will the same forces creating the democratization of the tools of production and distribution have an impact on political organizations and government?

  We’ve all read endless articles analyzing what Obama did to magnetize and mobilize an army of “ground troops” to win the election. Now what will everyone do? How will the focus of the troops shift from winning an election to governing a country? How will consumer change? How will companies adapt?

• Stabilizing the economy is going to fall to government intervention and investment.

  What will the government invest in? What themes did we see in the campaigns? Off the top of my head: Iraq, energy independence, infrastructure investment and revitalization, economic and financial stabilization. Obama has already declared his intention to create jobs by investing in transportation and energy infrastructure projects. While these may not sounds like obvious areas for startups, they are probably more meaningful than another desktop or mobile Twitter client or a new way to share photos.

• Consumer spending is down, but it’s looking for options.

  Yes, consumer spending is down: but it’s also shifting as people re-evaluate where and how much they spend. Anytime a consumer decides to change their spending behaviour, that’s an opportunity for a competitor to offer a better solution more tailored to their current economic situation.

  How will a desire to save money and spend less manifest itself in the consumer marketplace? What can companies help people do?

  • A fundamental shift towards value for money: luxury consumption, organic foods, expensive personal grooming or styling, etc.
  • A broader shift away from spending money and instead spending time.
  • Comparison shopping: prices, value, quality, production origination (“Made in USA”?).
  • Increased bartering for services, more second-hand selling, more of a need for online and offline marketplaces for goods and services, better vendor management and reputation services.
  • Decreased use of credit, less purchasing on credit and more use of rental agreements and shared use across groups of people (including known or unknown people).
  • Decreased desire to enter into long-term contracts (especially in deflationary conditions). How can companies help people get out of long-term contracts, especially for discretionary purchases such as cell phones, gym memberships, etc.?
  • “Insourcing”: shift away from outsourcing the home. As people re-take the responsibility for laundry, cleaning and cooking services back from outsourced providers, what do people need to learn, what do people need to buy, what goods are homeowners, renters, singles and families going to invest in to save money?
  • Continued pressure to reduce transaction costs, decreased use of middlemen.
  • Continued or increased push for inferior goods or counter-cyclical assets.

  The broad cry against over-consumption and the excesses of capitalism will be wide, deep and far-reaching.

• Market uncertainty forces businesses to freeze up, under-invest and under-innovate.

  As companies pause and cancel testing and growing new business opportunities to focus on their existing business lines, now is your time to innovate and catch a company off-guard. Find and hire good people (cheaper than before). Test new working relationships with employees and new partnership and outsourcing arrangements. Negotiate prices and long-term contracts and create new risk-sharing agreements with buyers and suppliers.

  Companies with leveraged excess capacity will be looking for ways to keep their sales and production pipelines full, and now is your time to get them to take a chance on you.

• Less venture capital can be a good thing.

  Less venture capital creates less competition, less overfunded competitors, less focus on finding outside funding and more focus on delivering immediate, tangible value.

  More capital will be diverted from potential new investments to support existing investments to keep them alive. Let venture capitalists throw good money after bad. Given the current costs to launch startups, you may not need significant external funding anyway.

• A slowdown in online advertising will force startups to deliver tangible value from day one.

  A plateau in online advertising will force companies to create better ads. Obviously, it will be harder to create businesses based on indirectly monetizing large audiences through delivering advertising, but similar to the decreased capital argument, the constraint will force entrepreneurs to give up on the misplaced dream of advertising revenue to refocus on demonstrating tangible value from the beginning. That’s a good thing.

  But I’m not declaring the death of web services such as Twitter, Backtype, Disqus, Facebook et. al. These businesses create tangible value solving human problems and desires, but the eventual business models will not be based on advertising. Attempting to monetize communication services by applying the tired model of interstitial, interruptive corporate spam is short-sighted: the nature of the intentions underlying communication and content consumption are very different and require very different business models.

• Available talent and time.

  Unemployment goes up (seemingly) by the day right now. What will everyone do? How will private enterprise re-train and educate the unemployed? How will private enterprises learn to deploy and use the new market of freelancers?

  Even the employed can create the opportunity to create time. Whether that’s the right strategic approach or not, in trying economic conditions most larger companies will focus on reaffirming their core business. It will be difficult to most entrepreneurial and change-oriented employees in larger companies to convince managers and executives to attack new business opportunities. Millenial (Generation Y) employees will be particularly hamstrung; Millenials are ready to dive in and create change but are not yet trusted by the generation of business leaders holding the purse strings.

  Instead of waiting for companies to say yes to your ideas, say yes to yourself. Keep your day job and use your spare time to work on your skills, to build networks and to create and launch business ideas. The opportunity to test your ideas is brighter now than ever; just set your goals accordingly.

How can companies take advantage of broad deflationary conditions, declining consumer spending, massive deleveraging, a loss in trust in big companies and a cry against overconsumption and the excesses of American capitalism?

What trends can entrepreneurs leverage to create new businesses?

—

This post was inspired by a notes from Bryan Landers on Twitter about microstartups and by Brooks Jordan on Friendfeed about the opportunities in deflationary conditions. Since I didn’t specifically address either topic here, I’m looking forward to future explorations on those topics…

Following up on “Don’t create a company, create an ecosystem”…

I can’t always pick my bosses, but I can pick who I work with.

I don’t pick people based on expected compensation or their ability to pay: I pick people to work with based on how I can help them and what I’ll learn.

Building a treasure chest of valuable experiences is more important than building a treasure chest of money.

—

After Thanksgiving I’ll be driving cross-country from Virginia to California, heading through the deep south, Texas and the southwest. I love driving cross-country and I love helping people think about ideas.

If you’re on my route, and if you’ve got an idea for a product or company, or if you’re an entrepreneur and you want a bit of free consulting and advice, or if you want to do a little interview about your idea, or if you just want to say hello, drop me a line…

Roger Ehrenberg, Markets, Politics and Change:

Throwing $25 billion at the U.S. auto sector is akin to the $25 billion thrown at Citigroup; money flushed down the toilet. With over $100 billion of legacy pension and health care costs, a lack of globally competitive, fuel efficient cars and bloated cost structures, the U.S. auto industry as we know it has to die. Putting politics aside, it is simply foolish to pander to the UAW and their lobbyists by trying to save an industry that can’t be saved. Let’s take this opportunity through the bankruptcy process to purge unnecessary costs, sell valued assets to the private sector and re-purpose a skilled labor force towards infrastructure projects that can benefit the economy. Obama needs to make a stand that he is up for doing right, not simply thanking those who donated huge dollars and expect repayment – fast.

I can’t bear to watch or read the news about the automotive industry’s attempt to strip-mine taxpayers and the government. The automotive industry needs to fail first to succeed. Please don’t let the automotive companies, lobbyists and entrentched interests convince the government to delay the inevitable. We don’t need to flush billions of dollars into the pockets of the sycophants of a failing industry. Please.

—

Random
Why do we constantly compare our current economic situation to the Great Depression?

We’ve all seen and read tons of articles and academic papers discussing our current economic situation, many with titles similar to “Worse than the Great Depression”. But we live in a massively different economic and geopolitical world than the 1930s-40s and the answers to our current problems are very different than those faced during the Great Depression.

Comparing our current economic situation to the Great Depression creates the wrong frame.

I’m not a practicing economist, so if I’m wrong, please tell me. I’d love to know why I’m wrong: I’m here to learn.

—

What do I read for economic analysis? Mostly:

• Information Arbitrage: Roger Ehrenberg
• Marginal Revolution: Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok
• Paul Kedrosky
• The Big Picture: Barry Ritholtz

And, of course, a lot of other sources that might not make immediate sense to everyone…

Forrester Research (subscription required): How Nico Nico Douga Energizes its Community to Create Appealing Video Experiences:

Japan’s second largest online video portal – Nico Nico Douga – has succeeded in engaging its target audience of young Japanese consumers.

Nico Nico Douga – a homegrown video-sharing community – grew to 7 million registered members between its January 2007 launch and July of 2008.

If you’ve never seen the interface, it’s wild. It’s a complete, anonymous free-for-all: viewers of videos create colorful, witty, comments that appear at selected times, overlayed on top of the video, creating an immersive, cluttered, meta-rich viewing experience for online videos. And since the users’ additions and comments only stay up for days or weeks, the experience is constantly changing. This is not YouTube.

[Nico Nico Douga was originally] an interface for viewing YouTube content rather than a site in its own right. However, after YouTube blocked Nico Nico Douga from showing YouTube content, the owners … relaunched their service two weeks later as a full video sharing community.

Even though user growth was strong, Nico Nico Douga struggled to monetize its service. Instead of succumbing to indirect monetization efforts such as advertising…

Rather than alienating the community by interrupting people’s experience with ads, Nico Nico Douga launched a low-price “premium” membership (500 yen per month), with minimal benefits (e.g. a few high-definition videos and some extra fonts and colors to use on screen).

Even though virtually all content and function is available without upgrading, 200,000 of Nico Nico Douga’s members were motivated to sign up by their desire to ensure the community’s survival. The fees provide 60% of the company’s revenue.

The freemium model can work. I doubt the paying members pay just because they want to keep the community alive: anyone doubt there is a “badging effect”? Give people the opportunity to display their status and they will take it: and they’ll even pay for it if it helps differentiate themselves to their community.

Creators and viewers of videos can place links to Amazon Japan and other retailers under the videos – letting people buy items that are related to the videos Fans of a particular video are often the best judges of whether other fans would appreciate a link to buy figurines that look like the characters in the video or purchase the background music. Users can see how many sales were generated, but Nico Nico Douga keeps the affiliate revenues. The site’s executives say it would destroy the atmosphere of the community if people started to participate with the aim of earning affiliate revenue rather than for the sake of generating and sharing cool content. (emphasis added by me)

Again, incentives guide behavior.

Nico Nico Douga executives “trust their instinct rather than employ methodical research and design processes.” How?

• Hiring people who are its target audience.
• Having a culture that puts the fan base first.
• Relishing popularizing content created by the fan base.

For example, Nico Nico Douga’s target audience are “young slackers”, and they intentionally target employees with “High School of Junior High School” educations, eschewing university graduates. Not exactly normal in Japan. Unsurprisingly, they enjoy and are good at cultivating and supporting an audience that enjoys tweaking mainstream culture.

There are plenty of communities in other web cultures around the world with fantastic user bases: what can we learn from others’ experiences?

When will learn that monetizing eyeballs is not just about advertising?

When will we learn that advertising on social networks doesn’t work?

When will we realize that nobody really likes ads?

When will we learn to monetize intention, not attention?

Everyday we encounter a deluge of information: it’s still there even if you’re not listening.

Digging signals out of the noise is hard work.

We’re drowning in information (or at least I am).

We’re inundated with interaction.

Biases, viewpoints and advice abound: who (and what) should we trust?

We’re lost in a cacophony of disaggregated one-sided conversations.

Every day we create a maze of experiences, cross-referenced and tagged with the meta-information of our lives. But tags do not replace theories:

Malcolm Gladwell, Geek Pop Star (New York Magazine):

People are experience rich and theory poor. My role has been to give people ways of organizing experience.

We lack easy access to the underlying theories to understand and filter what we experience and see. We lack context.

The idea that context is important isn’t new (Justin Kistner: It’s the context):

In a 1994 article he wrote for Wired magazine, futurist Paul Saffo addresses the future of digital networks. He writes: “[An] avalanche of content will make context the scarce resource. Consumers will pay serious money for anything that helps them sift and sort and gather the pearls that satisfy their fickle media hungers. The future belongs to neither the conduit or content players, but those who control the filtering, searching and sense-making tools we will rely on to navigate through the banal expanses of cyberspace.”

Yes, context is king.

We understand why we need context: but we’re just starting to see how context can be so powerful. Umair Haque, (via Ethan Bauley):

…when interaction is cheap, the very economic rationale for orthodox brands actually begins to implode: information about expected costs and benefits doesn’t have to be compressed into logos, slogans, ad-spots or column-inches.

… instead, consumers can debate and discuss expected costs and benefits in incredibly rich detail.

But what are we going to do with all the discussions, debates and conversations?

Why is context scarce?

• Information is cheap to create and distribute. Granted, creating valuable information is still expensive. But at the same time we’ve created quick, easy and free tools and processes to automatically create, distribute and promote information.

  How many different sources are available for us to distribute our thoughts or ideas with the click of a button? How much information can we distribute automatically, passively, without marginal effort or time?

  Is making information available in as many channels as possible a positive or a negative?

• Interaction is cheap to create and distribute but costly to consume. We’re easier to reach than ever, caught in a culture that values constant availability and instant responses. We use a variety of methods and devices to interact, each with their particular benefits and costs.

  But almost all of our interaction creates some deadweight loss, either in time, effort or money. Multi-tasking degrades our productivity non-linearly: we take extra time to bounce back from interruptions (anyone wonder why we hate advertising, i.e. interruptive corporate spam?).

  Passive interaction imposes less of a cost than active interaction; but we still spend inordinate amount of time and energy processing information and responding to unclear, unimportant requests. (Anyone like meetings?) We aren’t mind readers: we miss clues, fail to explain things, forget to mention key points.

  We’ve victims of our quests for access and availability.

• Context is expensive: hard to create, hard to learn, hard to distribute. At the intersection of information and interaction, context is a unruly mixture of variables, each with own level of situational impact. Content is expensive to filter: false positives add to the noise as we simultaneously mistakenly discard valuable signals. Strict rules-based systems for managing interaction can be expensive to manage. We have to listen to both sides to balance out the debate, to understand the biases, to pick out what people are actually saying. Education takes time.

  Transparency does not create context on its own: it increases the amount of available meta-information, but processing transparency and the intentions behind our biases and actions remains an art, not a science.

  Context takes people: it takes our time, energy and attention. The semantic web remains an unfulfilled promise. Finding the right information takes time: search engines aren’t perfect, recommendation sites are a mess and accessing our incomplete networks of outsourced knowledge takes time. Finding the right people through intelligent routing is a start, but it is still expensive to test, understand and evaluate people’s knowledge.

Expensive problems create enticing opportunities.

• Who is going to create context that we can trust?
• Who is going to tell the truth?
• Who is going to “use my intelligence as part of the network to replace” their advertising?
• When are going to stop trying to monetize conversations and start creating valuable context?
• Who is going to spend the time and money to make participation cheap?
• Who is going to realize that “in a low-attention economy, the scarce resource is time, effort, passion and attention”?
• Will “industrial media” ever be able to create great context?
• What companies will make managing context central to their product and brand?
• When will companies learn how to use email for awareness, engagement and marketing?
• How will companies be able to justify spending on media besides television?
• How are we going to empower people to shine through companies?
• Who is going to figure out how to manage our different mental models for our variety of communication tools?
• When will be able to stop telling people how we use our communication tools in order to truly leverage them?
• When are we going to understand and leverage the social layer behind blog comments?
• Will social media ever be much more than just social preening?
• Who is going to create the tools or processes to truly leverage the opportunity?

It’s not surprising that we have too much of what’s free but truly lack what’s expensive. We’re culturally obese and overleveraged, built to over-consume and store up things we don’t need in our mind, body and soul.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the mess. I like the free-for-all of the blogging world. I try to do my share to “import and export ideas” efficiently, but I still share the blame for creating a lot of noise.

We still do a lot of talking: we’re starting to listen, but it isn’t enough. We can figure out better ways to organize and understand what we create.

What information will we pay for? What interactions will we pay for? What context will we pay for?

—

I figured a post about context required a lot of links. Now have fun digging into the references…

Sunday’s unordered thoughts on context, incentives, intellectual honesty and the changing venture capital industry:

• Malcolm Gladwell, Geek Pop Star (New York Magazine):

  People are experience rich and theory poor. My role has been to give people ways of organizing experience.

  Gladwell has become more popular than the scientists that create the fundamental ideas that Gladwell understands and translates to a broader audience. Need more proof that context matters?

• Michael Lewis on Portfolio.com: The End of Wall Street’s Boom:
  

  I had no great agenda, apart from telling what I took to be a remarkable tale, but if you got a few drinks in me and then asked what effect I thought my book would have on the world, I might have said something like, “I hope that college students trying to figure out what to do with their lives will read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up and abandon their passions to become financiers.” I hope that some bright kid at, say, Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Morgan Stanley, and set out to sea.

  Somehow that message failed to come across. … I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.

  When John Gutfreund and the partners of Salomon Brothers converted Salomon Brothers from a private partnership into Wall Street’s first public corporation,

  … they transferred the ultimate financial risk from themselves to their shareholders.

  The moment Salomon Brothers demonstrated the potential gains to be had by the investment bank as a public corporation, the psychological foundations of Wall Street shifted from trust to blind faith.

  Need more proof that incentives matter?

• Mike Speiser at Laserlike:
  

  I believe that the biggest advantage a startup has over a big competitor is intellectual honesty. Most of the entrepreneurs I know start their own companies or join startups in order to do what they wanted to do at their larger [previous] employers — to do something worthwhile. Then they finally reach the conclusion that the only way to avoid cargo cult management is to start from the ground up. This is particularly true of technical professionals who view intellectual honesty as core to their job. How often to you hear business people poke holes in their own arguments the way engineers do?

• Fred Wilson: A Slightly Different Perspective:

  The venture capital business is changing if you look closely. Many of the biggest and best firms are slowly but surely turning their attention from information technology to energy technology (ET). Not all of them will be good ET investors and the firms that don’t navigate that transition well will struggle. Firms that continue to focus on IT have largely turned their attention to the web where capital requirements are lower and technology and IP barriers are non-existent. Many firms are struggling with these realities and they may decide to throw in the towel on IT.

  … the reality that money is harder to come by and may stay that way for years will likely force the venture industry to get smaller not bigger.

  But be careful what you wish for. We will get a better, more efficient venture capital industry that produces better returns for investors from all these changes. But we may also get less capital for entrepreneurs. Just like there aren’t thousands of great VCs, there aren’t thousands of great venture capital investment opportunities. When the industry is flush with cash, entrepreneurs are the beneficiary. When it is not flush with cash, entrepreneurs will feel it too.

  My comment:

  The interesting thing is that there are a lot of different reasons being proposed and promoted about “why VC is broken”. As usual, some are misguided, incorrect or just wrong: but some offer a chance for some reflection as to ways VC could change or grow.

  VC evolved to solve a need: why should that need always exist in the same way forever?

  I think most of the people claiming “VC is broken” are entrepreneurs looking for capital…

  To be clear, I don’t think “VC is broken”. But I think there is an opportunity to adapt to better address a new economic reality.

Look at the people you work for (i.e. bosses and clients): do you aspire to be like them? What examples are they setting? What lessons are you learning from them?

How about the people working for you (i.e. employees, vendors, suppliers): what can you learn from them? What lessons are they learning from you?

What are you learning from your interactions with your partners, consultants and advisers?

Are you learning the right lessons from the people you work with?

Finding the right employees and partners is a core competence for any viable, sustainable business: and at the same time, finding the right people to work with is a core competence for any successful person.

To Find Good, Underrated People, De-Emphasize Popular Filters:

If you want to find a smart person who has time to be your friend, try to find a bad self-promoter. The popular filter, at least in business, is in favor of charismatic personalities and clever marketers. Find the brilliant mind who’s a so-so marketer and revel in her availability.

Be careful of who you work for:

Your boss and your job determine not only what you do all day, but what you learn and who you interact with.

… If you want to become the kind of person that any company would kill to have as an employee, you need to be the kind of employee that’s really picky about who you align with.

Why You Need To Hire Employees With Strong Personal Brands:

The problem with many organizations is that they don’t value personal brand builders enough.

… In the future, the brands that succeed will be the ones who employ the people who have the most social capital. Your next hire should be someone who not only has the right skills, but also a rapidly growing personal brand. The success your business can have in the social media era may depend on it.

Even more important than finding the right people, though, is learning how to work with them. Navigating our web of personal and professional relationships will quickly become a core competence in an economy based on a more personal, collaborative and distributed system of value creation.

Basically:

• Get very good at picking the right people to work with
• Get very good at working passively and actively with a large number of people on a variety of distributed tasks.

Instead of building a company, build an ecosystem.

Forrester Research: Who still loves ads? (Subscription required)

Amid the increasing consumer disdain for advertising, there is one glimmer of light: 6% of US adults — a group Forrester calls Ad Affirmers — like advertising and are valuable marketer targets. Not only do these consumers trust ads, but they also give and receive product recommendations, pay for convenience, and buy products based on ad content. Smart marketers will: 1) leverage Ad Affirmers to help spread the word about their products, and 2) at last embrace a conversational approach to marketing that involves listening, supporting, and embracing consumers.

My burning question: Is it really worth the effort, time and money to identify, segment, target and capture that specific sliver of the US population that “wants ads”?

Does it matter if they’re “extremely receptive to advertising” if you can’t find them? While the outlook towards ads between Ad Affirmers and Ad Detractors are very different, the demographic, technology usage or behavioral characteristics are not substantially different, other than the simple fact that they pay attention to a lot more ads across all marketing channels.

How are you going to target them? How efficient is it to spend to reach 40-80% of the US population in order to find that 6%?

Isn’t direct marketing dead?

What can you learn from peoples’ stories of startup and entrepreneurial success and failure?

A lot.

But listen carefully.

Encased in anyone’s story, lesson or example of success and failure is the bias created by their own experiences: what they noticed and learned, the choices they made, the insights they gleaned and the conclusions they drew.

But that’s just a part of the story:

• What did they neglect to notice?
• How much of the results can be attributed to their decisions, strategy and tactics and how much is due to just their environment? (i.e. were they lucky or good?)
• What lessons did they not not pick up? What conclusions did they fail to draw?
• What “unknown unknowns” stayed unknown?
• What special insights or attributes did they bring that you won’t be able to match?
• What could you have done better if you were in their shoes?
• How can you separate the strategies they adopted from the tactics they used?

Entrepreneurs, just like everyone else, develop biases based on their experiences. And our biases are an important part of our messages…

Perhaps it’s the viewpoint and knowledge, the sum of the experiences and wisdom that forms the bias, that contains the most valuable part of the message.

… but they have to be used carefully. Our knowledge, education and experiences form how we create solutions. We develop biases and frames of reference to help us understand new situations and solve new questions.

But we tend to use the tools we know. If I’ve got a hammer, I’ll probably use a hammer. But what if I need a wrench? What if the answer is really a flute? What if the solution is really a tool I’ve never heard of?

The point is not to get rid of our biases: our biases can be incredibly valuable if we recognize where they exist, how they were formed and how they shape us.

—

Friends and colleagues have asked me if I could create a repeatable “blueprint” or process for evaluating and executing a startup idea: a strategic framework and decision-making process resulting in a template business plan, financial model and investor pitch deck.

Yes, I could, and I’ve started doing that (download XLS template financial model) but it’s only valuable as a starting point, not as the end result.

There’s a bit of art to the science of creating a business plan and a financial model: the value is created not by the output but through the process.

Creating new ideas depends on people, not the process. The value is in the process of questioning, analyzing, evaluating and breaking down a business into its core: assumptions, variables, drivers, equations, relationships, bets, risks and mysteries. And this process depends on people sharing their ideas, bases of knowledge, biases and frames of reference, not from using a template “fill-in-the-blank” business plan.

The bigger value is in being able to step past our narrow spheres of knowledge and connect to broader ideas and experiences. Instead of adhering to our biases, bring them together to clash and create. A template doesn’t do that: people do.

That’s what I do. But it also takes you.

In the absence of more complete thoughts, unordered links:

• Obama’s Seven Lessons for Radical Innovators:

  In the 21st century, there is nothing more asymmetrical – more disruptive, more revolutionary, or more innovative — than the world-changing power of an ideal.

  Also: Hugh MacLeod: “The market for something to believe in is infinite.”

• Social search product Aardvark: Yahoo Answers meets Twitter — but better. Aardvark is a great way to get access to a large network of real people to get answers from real people in near real-time. With the amount of content and context we create every-day, finding the right filters to find the right answers is getting tougher: and Aardvark is a step in the right direction.
• Great listening and thinking for a Sunday morning: Google’s view on the future of business: An interview with CEO Eric Schmidt. A couple points: network effects, increasing rate of change, generational differences in the ability to deal with speed, the rule of power laws, “you better have a head”, “free is a better price than cheap”, porous companies, the need for dissent, innovation comes when you’re not under the gun, the nature of technology is for increased variants, innovation comes from small teams, get teams talking to each other, “the next war is never like the last war.”

  (via Ethan Bauley)

• On another note, Ballmer on his understanding of Google’s Android strategy:
  

  “I don’t really understand their strategy … if I went to my shareholder meetings and my analyst meeting and said, ‘Hey, we just launched a new product that has no revenue model – yeah, cheer for me’ I’m not sure my investors would take that very well, but that’s what Google’s telling their investors about Android.”

  I’m betting Ballmer understands the model, but talking down Android shows a lack of confidence in his own product.

  (via The Bank Channel)