The NFL, NBC and every Ad/PR firm on the face of the world is saying yes for all the reasons wall street loved credit default swaps. CA$H!

But would a public auction be more accurate? Steven Dubner from Freakonomics fame takes a deeper look.

If there is a way to get there — I would make the trip in a ping.

To my utter amazement Dr. Meehan was not at the World Trade Center or even in New York City on 9/11.  She watched events unfold from South Orange New Jersey, 15 miles away from The World Trade Center while working at Seton Hall University.

Dr. Meehan: An attempt to share your “compelling, first-hand experience” is an embarrassment for you and Alverno College.

Your address could have described how seemingly within seconds of Flight UA #175 impacting the South Tower, a human leg fell onto Liberty street in-front of the Deutsche Bank Building.  But you could not hear the screams from those standing near the severed limb from Seton Hall.  Your address could have described segments of UA#175 that were on the grounds on the WTC Complex.  But you could not see those from Seton Hall.  And you could have shared how the impact of UA #175 shook all that way down to the entrance of the Deutsche Bank Building.  But you could not feel that from Seton Hall.

If only you were standing in-front of the Deutsche Bank building at 130 Liberty Street adjacent to the South Tower when flight UA#175 struck at 9:03am.

Because in all that horror Dr. Meehan — regrettably — you would have stood next to my wife.

Proving that ‘tigers eat their young’ those same pundits are already calling Google+….the next GoogleWave.

Wave? Oh, how quickly did you forget about Google’s last B-L-U-N-D-E-R in social media?  Feels like yesterday Google was so slowly handing out Wave invites that it actually killed user adoption by the time they got around to “launching” the product.

Wave was so over-hyped by those same pundits who were also on twitter begging for a Wave invite.  I recall them wishing they could be part of the Wave hype….until the exact moment they logged into Wave they found out how complex the UI was presented. Boy did Google deserve one hard shot right to the groin for that social train wreck.

So those who consider themselves social media leaders (or innovators) are actually voicing their displeasure with Google+ after its been public for just 30 days?  Oh the irony.  I cannot help but relish that quote from earlier this year that puts all those social media so called leaders or innovators into context:

“99.5 Percent Of Social Media Experts Are Clowns”
-Gary Vayerchuk interview

I attended a social media briefing two weeks ago where the guest ‘innovator’ actually stated Google+ would “totally wipe out LinkedIn” but not kill Twitter.  Interesting since LinkedIn plays to the business hiring community. And with a mid-May IPO valuation of $4.3 billion (yes that’s B — as in Billion) I somehow think the hype got the better of them yet again.

Expectations regarding Google and social media are simply out of control.  It will never be what any of those pundits want. With today’s accepted fast user-adoption model it might be time to re-evaluate a “3 strikes and your out” policy.  Will it be strike-two and your out for Google?

I hope not especially since they have been upfront to keep business away for the moment from embracing Google+ as a replacement for corporate Facebook.  It helps when you generate AdSense revenue of $2.04 billion.

Here is one sales method Google successfully employed in the UK to secure Wave penetration into the Higher Education community: Tie Wave accounts to every University student, faculty, staff and alumni when the institution migrates costly legacy email services to Google Apps for Education.  Wave made inroads in UK Universities using that exact strategy.  If Google truly wants Plus to establish a social media juggernaut, then make Plus a standard component of the Google Apps for Education strategy.  And throw in Google Voice for good measure too.

If Wave was killed due to languishing in beta Plus has a chance. Today Google can scale more efficiently than it could just four years ago (Google server infographic) However even with their infrastructure in place they have stumbled a bit out of the gate regarding Plus.

But its not a killer after just 30 days people!

Remember – in the end its all about managing expectations.  Unfortunately social media pundits expect Google to scale Plus into the stratosphere where Facebook sits.  Even with all of Google’s servers they are still not engineered to take advantage of this type of roll-out strategy…..yet.

Clearly Congress was pitched a bill of goods manipulated by Wall Street. That simply bit them in the ass.  I was amused to see how they were asking for the government to bail them out when their house of cards folded in on them.  And yet I’m amused to read and listen to “specialists” or “experts in the field” in the financial marketplace or even the vast field of TV “analysts” who say the government is socialist for ”buying” the banks.

TARP was issued under W. Bush?  If the Treasury did not step in and bail out Wall Street we would be in the middle of a global revolution as I type.  Sure ignore it all and watch our entire economy totally collapse.

I was impressed with the book’s level of detail surrounding the relationships between W. Bush and Obama’s senior leadership (who transitioned to the Democratic White House) and their twisted histories with the major banks on Wall Street.  Its clear the amount of money funneling through Congress today provides Wall Street with a clear avenue to set policy — and even give away free money.  Well its not exactly free…the money handed to Wall Street to protect their horrible investment decisions on terms they could bargain for collectively.  And of course they all took it.

As Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase stated, somehow during the financial  collapse they managed to have the best year in the company’s history — and paid out billions in bonus compensation while most Americans who purchased their products lost everything:  jobs, mortgages and ultimately their future as a result of the recession that followed.

13 Bankers blog

Six month later Sorkin’s story of the financial meltdown and shocking background stories that stunned the world still resonate – due to news that Wall Street again is on shaky ground, especially with municipal bonds

Clearly the lack of oversight and Washington’s hands-off approach to Wall Street contributed, yet as Sorkin documents the big investment banks were playing with loose money, morals and an ego the size of Canis Majoris.

Its no wonder the rich get richer and the poor get poorer when you can lose the largest trade in the history of Wall Street and actually keep your job.

With companies like Bear Stearns, Morgan Stanley, Lehman, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, and AIG its no wonder George W. Bush was forced to step in and save the country from a nuclear meltdown.  I believe Hank Paulson’s book On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System tells the tale of the Bush Administration and made it to my top five list too.

With HBO’s recent commitment to make a movie from Sorkin’s book it ensures many more will be reading this in 2011.

Author’s website

Tags: Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, Bear Stearns, Wall Street, Morgan Stanley, Lehman, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, recession, AIG, trends

A combination of art performances including dance, music, visual arts and videography with commentary and discussion were integrated to create a compelling set of experiences.  The session included an overview of the multi-institutional activity involving students, faculty, and administrators. Classes of students from Florida State University, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Butler University, University of Calgary, University of Cincinnati and Indiana University Bloomington met in the months prior to the festival in order to plan and rehearse their respective performances online.

This session examined the presentation of telematic art to the general public via Internet2 at the downtown Indianapolis Public Library. This effort involved strategies to intermingle both high and low bandwidth venues into a seamless, integrated performance environment.

This Friday Wisconsin will introduce their initial CI Day event at UWMilwaukee with remote viewing supported around the State.  It was great to hear WiscNet’s Shaun Abshere at this session today in Q&A regarding Friday’s coming session and supported remote technologies that will be used.

UW CI Day event program at UW-Milwaukee.

The VideoServer component is able to transcoding media streaming that will be published online. This component is also responsible for working with flv, ogg and h264 formats. The MapManager controls and displays the interactive map of Arthron components. MapManager offers to users an overview of the geographical distributed locations of Arthron components.

Today’s panel session included representatives from network organizations and their new community partner discussing their experience and providing their perspective on the opportunities, challenges and lessons learned when building new communities.

David Reese CTO from CENIC (Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California) stated they have provided iPads to everyone with all mapping of fiber routes is now digital (Google Earth) and paper maps are simply being ignored.

Session link

“Amazon Windowshop is a top-to-bottom rewrite of Amazon.com — designed and built without compromise just for iPad,” said Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com.

Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler has written a very comprehensive book to describe conflicts between analog and digital data creators in society and how internet based technologies are changing society and commerce.

It’s a good read but hard to grasp due to a focus on economics. Don’t be fooled the by title if your looking at computer networks….he has written it into the binding that ties his arguments together.  It is truly worth the read.

Benkler shares how technology has merged the professional and the consumer into a ‘prosumer’ due to low cost and high performing computers and robust networks have made distribution of information cheap enough that community is now empowered to drive change.

Take a look at how the internet has evolved.  The Akami to YouTube migration showed how multimedia has found a free, reliable distribution center.  When you also migrate 1st generation complex, large scale websites to new blogs and content management systems under the open source business model Benkler states that data is now a “non-rival” product that has democratized the digital workflow of data from brick and mortar to community, peer-developed content solutions.

Benkler suggests modern computing drives new, strong and deep collaboration that can have a large impact on the global economy and society.  Benkler also suggests that as more consumers embrace technology collaboration, change to our culture is possible due to engines of free exchange (wikipedia, creative commons, open source and the blogosphere) could be more efficient (when shared) than current models that are restricted by copyright and patents because the ability to duplicate (or reproduce digital content) makes little or no impact on business.

Tags: The Wealth of Networks, Social Technologies, economy, society, Yochai Benkler, education, change, reading, trends

Click here to view the embedded video.

After reading Tom Friedman’s The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century book series on globalization and the breakthrough work by Jerry Wind and Victor & William Fung in Competing in a Flat World: Building Enterprises for a Borderless World.

I found chapters in Corporate Agility a fit perfectly to the above works.  Corporate Agility supports business case studies throughout the book that span a wide range of industries with lessons for all who are seeking new models for business in the 21st globalized century.

The strongest chapter is early in the book surrounding the shift in company buildings and the move to a mobile workforce that permits companies to break expensive building leases and create smaller ‘offices’ with limited administrative staff and resources.

I have experienced these efforts directly in working with clients who have been forced to trim staff and yet end up in an dry office complex with over 50% of their office cubes empty.

Actually I’m reminded of a PR company who hired temporary workers to “work” in all their empty cubes while a potential client made an office visit.  Needless to say they did not understand the basics of a company’s need for agility as described in the book.

I feel the early chapters of Corporate Agility is an expansion of The World Is Flat while the book’s case studies just touch the surface that is presented in detail by Competing in a Flat World.

Corporate Agility’s book website

Tags: Corporate Agility, Flat World, Case Study, China, India, globalization, education, Supply Chain, offshoring, Multinationals, manufacturing, technology, reading, trends

Only 13 percent of the professors surveyed said they used blogs in teaching; 12 percent had tried videoconferencing; and 13 percent gave interactive quizzes using “clickers,” or TV-remotelike devices that let students respond and get feedback instantaneously. The one technology that most teachers use regularly—course-management systems—focuses mostly on housekeeping tasks like handing out assignments or keeping track of student grades.

The survey, answered by 4,600 professors nationwide and did not ask about PowerPoint, which anecdotal evidence suggests is ubiquitous as a replacement for overhead and slide projectors.

Emerging Technologies for Online Learning Symposium, held in San Jose, by the Sloan Consortium.

There seems to be a lesson for all those technology enthusiasts and “leaders” in k12 education:  Regardless of forcing faculty to utilize LMS, they are simply not using technology.

So is the technology investment paying off?  Universities have been investing millions into classrooms and lecture halls. With very tight budgets today I wonder if there is going to be a call for institutional reviews of technology spending.  Clearly the mantra of “build it and they will come” does not apply.

Outside of the mandatory use of LMS solutions (indicated above) faculty have clearly pushed back against technology while their students (paying customers) are eager to embrace the latest consumer electronic releases across the board.  This must be frustrating for IT, Academic affairs and the CFO’s office.

The Numerati is a great read regarding the impact of advanced analytics across the board.  I was impressed with mathematicians Baker interviews and the surprising number who eventually work for IBM or the NSA.  Baker has written a book about how the best mathematicians are changing the way we live by processing amazingly vast amounts of data and simply detecting patterns.  The data comes via mouse-clicks, cell phone calls and credit card purchases just to name a few.

It sounds simple.  On the surface with today’s high performance computing and powerful consumer technologies.  But Baker shows how mathematicians are working to draw upon extremely high levels of computational power to deliver products and solutions that will dramatically impact our lives.

At the same time some of the projects mentioned seems more ‘wonderland’ in design. Yet consider the amount of data created by the Large Hadron Collider for example, the emerging world of Big Science is just starting to take off.

Chapters tackle different subjects (mentioned above) and as others. Many have indicated the shopping chapter is the best of the book. It was very enjoyable to read.  Some of the ideas and inventions about health were interesting, some ideas a bit hard to wrap around your brain – like the ability of a floor tile to detect if your elderly father has a change in an existing medical condition.  Another example, how a computer can analyze a sequence of video (over time) and determine in your are prone to suffering Parkinson’s disease.

We do however live in a world today with amazing powers in biology, science and engineering.  Once dreams of having a Dick Tracy watch in the 1930s has been eclipsed by some revolutionary ideas mathematicians are working with today.  Baker also acknowledges how mathematicians are working to help detect terrorists in a very interesting chapter on safety.  His ending conversation with Google’s top SEO expert also reveals something about mathematicians, they ultimately analyze the numbers they are presented.  Baker lasting image for the reader is to help mathematicians focus on looking at the most accurate numbers for accurate analytics.
A great book that shows you the potential for good….and the opportunity for harm.

Book Website

Tags: Steven Baker, The Numerati, mathematicians, High Performance Computing, future, analytics, trends, reading

Click here to view the embedded video.

Maz is one of my favorite comedians. Found him on the The Axis of Evil Comedy Tour (iTunes Link) tour and have purchased his performances on iTunes (iTunes Link). So glad to see him perform at a TED event.

Tags: SUPERFreakonomics, Stephen Dubner, Steven Levitt, Economics, datasets, innovation, energy, population, poverty, technology, Sudir Venkatesh, terrorist, trends

Missed reading this when it was originally released?  Consider the following accolades for his writing:

A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
A Businessweek Best Business Book of the Year
A Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year
A Business Week Best Business Book of the Year
A Christian Science Monitor Best Book of the Year
A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book of the Year
A Booklist Editors’ Choice Best Book of the Year
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize

Yet as of late I have been reading so much about Wall Street’s clusterf*ck that I missed his update Hot, Flat, and Crowded 2.0: Why We Need a Green Revolution–and How It Can Renew America.

An overview to the version 2.0 release:

Friedman explains how global warming, rapidly growing populations, and the astonishing expansion of the world’s middle class through globalization have produced a planet that is “hot, flat, and crowded.”  In this Release 2.0 edition, he also shows how the very habits that led us to ravage the natural world led to the meltdown of the financial markets and the Great Recession.  The challenge of a sustainable way of life presents the United States with an opportunity not only to rebuild its economy, but to lead the world in radically innovating toward cleaner energy.  And it could inspire Americans to something we haven’t seen in a long time—nation-building—by summoning the intelligence, creativity, and concern for the common good that are our greatest national resources.

In vivid, entertaining chapters, Friedman makes it clear that the green revolution the world needs is like no revolution before. It will be the biggest innovation project in American history; it will be hard, not easy; and it will change everything from what you put into your car to what you see on your electric bill. This is a great challenge, Friedman explains, but also a great opportunity, and one that America cannot afford to miss. Not only is American leadership the key to the healing of the earth; it is also our best strategy for the renewal of America.

Tags: Tom Friedman, Hot, Flat and Crowded, environment, globalization, Green revolution, First Solar, Toledo, education, Germany, population, offshoring, outsourcing, India, coal, manufacturing, technology, reading, trends

This is a great follow-up to his first book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.  Shirky is right on target with engaging, connecting stories to share his ideas about our new ability today to share collective knowledge.

Over 1 trillion hours of TV is watched per year. Imagine what can happen when people turn TV off and begin contributing.  And Shirky elegantly shares the shifting nature of professionals vs. amateurs in the age of the internet.  Pretty amazing reading.

I believe there have been attempts to move in the direction he outlines but a tipping point has been the mass availability of consumer devices at very affordable price points.  I recall Peter Gabriel‘s interview on the Today Show in 1988 talking about the efforts of Amnesty International and their attempts to videotape human rights abuses with large, analog cameras.
Today we know all to well from the murder of Oscar Grant that cameraphones have made their efforts real.

The Napster thing
IMHO Clay’s single oversight in the book surrounds Napster.  I think he was trying to communicate a holistic answer to why people (not just Gen Xers) were stealing music.  He called it sharing — it was stealing plain and simple.
He overlooked the availability of cheap recordable media (external hard drives and blank CDs) along with fast networks.  Clay addressed Napster’s explosive growth and outlined the reasons for its huge success:

1. digital data is infinitely and perfectly copyable at zero marginal cost.
2. people will share if sharing is simple enough; and we generally resist being spiteful under the same conditions
3. Fanning designed a system to link 1 to 2 via the right incentives.

“That’s is. That’s what turned the recording industry upside down.”

He simply overlooked the physical requirement that brought the solution to everyone’s computer. If a storage solution (blank CDs or Hard Drives) did not exist at very affordable price points people would not be sharing so much music….because they would have no abiliy to store all the files they were downloading.  Today with terabyte drives under $100 we forget the considerably higher costs for consumer electronics before Napster arrived in 1999.

Consider Napster’s timeframe in the summer of 1999.  You could download mp3 files from Usenet newsgroups like alt.binary.music but had no affordable solution to store the vast amounts of music available.  Apple’s original 5GB iPod was introduced a month after 9/11. Smaller mp3 players were shipping at the time but most did not offer significant storage or an iTunes experience to easily library the music for your iPod.  And Rio’s 1998 MP3player was just a measly 32 megabytes — yes megabytes.  The “iPod effect” had yet to taken hold a chokehold on the mp3 player marketplace.  So users had to store their music on their computer, blank CDs or an external drive.

Shirky also overlooked the key transit issue.  As Gen Xers connected to robust campus networks, they connected (and shared) globally compared to their home or High School dial-up, DSL or Cable services.  And here lies the true key – bandwidth made it worth their time and effort to steal music. Can you image running Napster on a 9200 baud modem?  With a bigger pipe on campus Gen Xers could steal music and burn more blank CDs.  And it only accelerated when traditional music stores were charging $20 for the same CD Napster was making available for free. It was a perfect storm for ripping off the music industry.

I have spent twenty years on multiple campus networks.  Honestly when I spoke to students about Napster….they were all about stealing.  The term “sharing” is the spin word. College kids are not wealthy. They invest in books, cars and beer.  Students heading out for class would leave their music drives connected on their dorm’s network allowing anyone connected to hijack as much as they wanted.  At some point it became more than just having a folder of your favorite band’s complete discography.  It became about stealing a complete music library from the six major labels (in the early to mid 90s).  And it was not just music.  There remains to this day P2P tools that share software, ebooks and full length movies.  Many universities shut down access to Napster and sent memorable emails to their university community describing Napster’s primary use: digital theft of copyrighted music.

Napster’s explosive growth is not just Shirky’s 2 steps (above) but rather the following:

A. Devices to store digital data (CDs and external drives) were finally affordable to consumers.
B. Robust digital networks (non-modem) became available at universities.
C. Music was shared on the campus network all day long.
D. People swapped discs/drives of music for friends off campus.
E. Napster peaked in February 2001 and the iPod was introduced 45 days after 9/11

If you think Napster is dead then your not aware of torrents.  Beleive it or not YouTube is even a more popular way to steal copyrighted music.  Today there are free recording applications that permit users to capture high quality audio playing from a computer.  Search YouTube for a popular artist and odds are you will find a ‘video’ of a song that has a static picture instead of a video clip.  Anyone can hit the record button on the audio software and then click YouTube’s play button, and (drum roll) they have stolen a new song and probably copied it onto their iPod.  Think that’s clever? Search for an artist and add ‘torrent’ to the search string (U2 torrent) and look at whats available to everyone today.  Take a look at how U2′s business manager tried to stop ISPs from permitting music piracy.
/end Napster rant

Overall Shirky’s stories of how the modern internet, creative minds and the opportunity for citizens to kill their television and contribute is a great introduction to social networking.

Tags: Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus, kill your television, Social Networking, Creative, Sharing, trends, reading

The device is rumored to be even thinner an updated refresh screen and enhanced imaging. The new Kindle will remain greyscale and will not support a touch screen….but may include apps.

Tags: Amazon, Kindle, ebook, price war, ebook sales, reading, trends

Steve Eisman, Michael Burry, and Howie Hubler all have interesting roles in the credit swap and collapse (among others) that combine to document how greed, pure greed and outright criminal theft led to the economic collapse of financial giants and ruined our country.

Steve Eisman was blunt — to say the least when insulting financial CEOs but he was right all along about the coming collapse.

Why didn’t others listen to him?  Maybe its how the game is stacked to reward the few and control the governing agencies.  Wall Street views S&P and Moody’s as the guys unable to survive at a brokerage so they work outside the real game.  Lewis has much more to show how the game is stacked for the wealthy and against middle America and especially the poor.

Maybe the best part was his explanation of how Wall Street actually pays S&P and Moody’s for their credit ratings….

Hubler made the worst trade in the history of Wall Street. He lost $9 Billion on a single trade for Morgan Stanley.  And yet he was permitted to leave with a $100 million bonus.  $9 B I L L I O N and he walks unscathed?  Lewis briefly touches on how his actions were covered up by Morgan Stanley and buried from the light of day.

Whats worse? A farm worker in California earning $14,000 is approved a subprime to purchase a house for $768,000.  A stripper in Vegas and full time baby sitter in Manhattan have been manipulated to hold multiple six-figure properties that neither could ever hope to pay off.  But their financial institutions pushed them down the rabbit hole with stories of easy, affordable financing…

While going through Stanford medical school Michael Burry discovered he had a better talent for bond market research. More importantly he understood how to bet against risky consumers suckered into “teaser rates” on subprime loans.  He dropped out of medical school and started his own investment company.  He just had to advise his clients to hold onto investments for more over two years as those subprime mortgage adjustments expired and skyrocketed Americans into default.  In betting against the success of them he won big….really big.

Maybe the best example of how criminal Wall Street is was how Goldman Sachs had someone selling credit default swaps to a company and then actually betting against that company’s ability to repay the swap back to Goldman.  He walked with a personal bonus of 1 BILLION dollars:

I’m impressed with Lewis’ storyline: Wall Street sold bullshit products to screw poor people – plain and simple.  Cannot see anyone reading this book actually taking a stand that Wall Street does NOT need serious reform.  Criminal insanity with a slice of reality over a ton of F-bombs.