Ideal Home Network Topology

After recently getting a second wireless access point, I was finally able to set up my preferred home network configuration. This topology consists of both an open access point and a closed (password-protected) access point. I wanted to have our network fileserver and PCs on a closed network, but I wanted to have an open access point to make it easier to connect smartphones and other network devices (printers, netflix device), as well as to allow guests to our home to connect to the network, and to serve as an emergency backup internet connection for neighbors.

It was easy to set up, and the only cost was for a second access point, which I was purchasing anyway because I needed gigabit ethernet between my PC and network fileserver. 

SXSW Interactive 2010 Summary

SXSW Interactive Summary 2010

#SXSWi #SXSW2010

This was the third time I’ve attended SXSW Interactive. The first time was in 2004, then 2009, and finally 2010. Each time, SXSW Interactive has grown by leaps and bounds. 

First, the good stuff:

I still saw some great presentations. Two highlights were the sessions on human brain computer interface and Punk Rock APIs. They both happened to be slightly smaller sessions. 

I met great people everywhere. Sitting next to me in panels. Via twitter. At bars. And because I work at a pretty big company, I met coworkers that I’ve worked with for years, but never met in person. 

Next, a few concerns:

The first time I attend in 2004, there was nary a corporate type to be seen. (I remember one person from IBM who stuck out wherever they went.) This year there many corporate attendees, but for the moment, small company, creative types still seem to outweigh the really big companies. I think this is important to track, because I think one of the key things that has always set SXSW apart from other conferences has been the predominant bias towards small companies, startups, creative types. To borrow a phrase from the Flamethrower session, SXSW has always represented to me the primordial soup of internet creativity. If the bias goes too far to the mainstream, then I think SXSW Interactive participants might consider going elsewhere.

Other key changes I noticed this year included the addition of a lunchtime slot for panels. This meant that most days I didn’t get to have lunch, which was a bummer both for missed lunchtime conversation as well as creating low-energy levels. The huge coffee lines meant you had to either leave one panel early or get to the next panel late. 

While I saw some great presentations, I didn’t see any awe inspiring presentations. There were some simply amazing presentations in past years. Kathy Sierra on Achieving Breakthroughs,  Derek Powazek on Designing for Wisdom of the Crowds are two that come to mind. 

I think SXSW Interactive is still really good, and probably has too much inertia to fall apart, but I do think the festival organizers need to address these concerns, or the creative, innovative heart of the Interactive festival might just go elsewhere over time.

People and Technology

The conference participants come from backgrounds as varied as programmers, database gurus, system administrators, user experience designers, marketing, public relationships, web designers, web strategists, business consultants, non-profits, for-profits, governmental agencies, americans, non-americans, managers, investors, and so forth. There are people representing themselves, small companies, medium size companies, Fortune 50 companies, and so forth. Some of those small businesses are startups seeking to grow, and some are agencies happy with the sweet spot niche they are occupying.

However, even with that wide gamut, some things you notice: a preponderance of Apple MacBooks. Way more than indicated by their percentage of the computer market. Lots of netbooks. Only a handful of traditional Windows notebooks. Tons of smartphones. Last year it was mostly iPhones and some Blackberries, and this year it was iPhones and goodly amount of Motorola DROIDs. (I would love to know if anyone has stats for this... for example, for people using my.SXSW during the conference, what was the breakdown by OS and browser.) 

Lots of checkins using Gowalla and Four Square. These location based services let you know where your friends are, and what locations are trending (e.g. lots of people going to an event)

People are still using twitter, a lot. I saw a ton of activity on twitter. Every panel has a hashtag, so you can follow the panel in real time, participate in a discussion about what the panelists are saying, and followup afterwards. I was so excited to one panel still use IRC (internet relay chat). In 2004, that was the sole method.

I didn’t see many panels project the real time display (e.g. twitter feed) up on the screen. That’s too bad. I know it can be somewhat distracting, but I find it fascinating too. (Especially since I’m pretty active taking notes, and can’t follow the stream on my laptop.)

After SXSW Interactive

I know that I go through a sort of withdrawal after SXSWi. It’s so invigorating and so thought provoking. Everyone there “gets it”. When you come back to regular life, it can be hard to adapt.

Here’s a few tips:

• Make notes or read someone else’s notes: The insights that were so amazing while you were at the conference will fade unless you either write them down while they are fresh in your mind, or seek them out. You can usually search on Google or Twitter for #hashtag notes and find someone’s notes for the session.
• Share what you learned: Try to figure out why those insights were so relevant to you, your organization, your business, and share them with others. Not on Twitter, but in real life. Talk to people about what you learned.
• Find local social media / web meetups: Every city is bound to have some, so search Meetup. In Portland, you can find a thriving community of social media practitioners, designers, startups, and programmers on Calagator. (Although, if you are from Portland, you already know that.) If you can engage in the local community, you can recreate the SXSWi experience at least one night a month, if not more.
• Practice what you learned: If you had some amazing insight, some great idea, take action on it. Do it yourself, if you have to. Do it with others if you can. Don’t worry if you feel like you don’t have the expertise, you’ll learn it. That’s how everyone else up there did it.

On the Use of Paper

Last year at the end of SXSW, I wrote about The End of the Travel Print Packet. For years I had printed out boarding passes, plane and hotel reservations, maps, and restaurant reviews before going on a trip. Last year I hardly used my travel print packet because I had a smartphone with GPS, and could look up maps and restaurants and businesses on the fly. The entire thing might run anywhere from 10-30 pages, depending on where I was going and how long I was staying. 

This year I didn’t print one. I didn’t even print my boarding passes. I emailed them to my phone, and the TSA and airline agents just scanned the surface of my phone. (I think we should write a boarding pass bump application.) Not one page was printed in support of my trip. That’s amazing.

Panel Summaries

There were six sessions a day, and I was in Austin for a total of 21 session slots. In that time, I saw 17 sessions. Wow. That’s a lot crammed into 3 1/2 days. In no particular order, here they are. The links on the titles below are to my detailed, raw notes from the sessions. 

Neuroscience Marketing: The neuroscientists on this panel were absolutely fascinating. This was one of the three best sessions. Someone asked what are the big things we can learn from a neuroscience approach to marketing that we couldn’t just learn from behavioral studies.  They said that if you ask people what part of a 30 second commercial they liked, or which part of a piece of music was most emotionally provocative, they can’t tell you. But with neuroscience it can be measured exactly. 

Neuroscience won’t necessarily discover new principles, but will allow you to narrow in and focus on what is the most provocative. When eating chips and salsa, the most provocative moment is the moment between moments when you are lifting the chip with salsa on it to your mouth. Your brain goes crazy and lights up with activity: the anticipation of the salsa being in your mouth, the motor activity of balancing the salsa on the chip. To optimize this experience, the chip needs a certain strength to it, a certain curve to hold the salsa, the salsa needs a certain thickness and chunkiness. This may seem like a crazy amount of attention to pay to selling chips and salsa, but this attention to detail is exactly what Steve Jobs does with every aspect of Apple products.

To help inoculate children against marketing messages, don’t allow them to watch TV right before bed. When you are sleeping, the brain replays the activity of the day, with the most focus what happened just before bed. If a child watches TV before bed, then while sleeping the brain processes the memories of watching TV. If you have them do their homework before bed, then while sleeping the brain will process the memories of doing homework.

Brain Computer Interface: This presentation by Christie Nicholson covered technology developments that allow brains to communicate with computers. There are different types ranging from EEG, which is non-invasive (picture shower cap with electrodes) to introcortical electrodes, which are a 1mm chip implanted inside the brain. Christie showed examples of a quadrapalegic playing a video game using his brain, a rat with an artificial computer-chip hippocampus that replaced the mouse’s biological organic, and which can memorize mazes. This technology could one day be used to uploaded coded instructions to a soldier for flying an F-15. Another example showed using fiber optic cable to control a mouse, making it run in counter-clockwise circles, for example.

DARPA is a big fan, and is funding many projects in this area. One project is called Silent Talk: they want soldiers to be able to comunicate using EEGs to replace vocalized commands. Another DARPA project seems to simulate a one million neuron brain to control an ape-type robot. A third DARPA projects wants to understand how memories are encoded and transported around the brain (perhaps a way to extract memories from unwilling participants?)

Danah Boyd Keynote - Privacy and Publicity: Danah Boyd is a social media ethnographer who looks at how people use social media in their lives, and how social media transforms society. The topic of her keynote is how privacy and publicity intertwine. She said that privacy is not dead. People care about it. But what privacy means is not necessarily what people think. Privacy is having control over what information is shared. When people feel that they don’t have control over their environment, then they feel like their privacy has been violated. 

One of the biggest errors is when a company takes something public and makes it more public than intended. That’s publicizing, which is not necessarily what people want.

Danah talked quite a bit about teens. Teens want to be seen by their peers, but they don’t want to be seen by people who have power of them. 

In the real world, our environment gives us clues as to how public or private we are: in our bedroom, in a restaurant, up on stage. In a restaurant, you are in a public place, but there is a certain amount of anonymity, and you can have a reasonable expectation of who will show up. Online, the structure gives you far less clues. On Facebook, 65% of people made all their information public simply by accepting defaults they didn’t understand. Danah asked non-techies what their settings were, and then had them look at their actual settings, and not a single person had settings that matches what they thought.

Google’s mistake with Google Buzz was to integrate a public facing system inside one of the most private systems possible, Gmail. 

Socially Conscious Geeks: Led by Lief Utne and Lauren Bacon. This session looked at how folks could have more socially responsible jobs. The session was a mix of people who were at companies and wanted to go to non-profits, people who were at for-profit companies that weren’t socially responsible and wanted to go to a socially responsible for-profit, people who want to be socially responsible entrepreneurs.

The format of the session was discussion, so no one person was the expert. Several people commented on how they realized that profit was not inherently bad, if you were a socially responsible company hiring great people, then more profit meant you could hire more great people and do more good things. There is now a student loan forgiveness program, if you work at non-profits for 10 years, your student loans are forgiven. This can be a $30k/year benefit for someone with $300k in debt, which can help offset the potentially lower salary of a non-profit.

Joi Ito Presentation - How to Save the World: Joi Ito is a great speaker, and it was unfortunate that this panel was not better attended. He said that social software hasn’t saved the world, but the ecosystem and framework (e.g. the internet) is the only we we’re going to solve the problems we have. Our world is fundamentally messed up, and the problems we have are messy and complex. We made technology to make things faster and more efficient. But more efficient doesn’t mean better. More efficient means things start to get brittle - and effects start to amplify: the system gets non-linear and complex (non-linear means drastic changes, rather than gradual). The way we deal with world hunger and terrorism is still via centralized planned effort, and they don’t work.

One example he talked about was a game called World Without Oil, about the future when peak oil has passed and oil has run out. In the forums you see stuff like a high school physics teacher, the hardware store guy, and the mom, who are figuring out how to lower their energy consumption. It’s backyard ingenuity.

He talked about an example from The Age of the Unthinkable. A kid with a cell phone and a laptop. If this kid was in Silicon Valley, he would go work for Google. But he was in Beirut. What are his options for where he will go? Pretty much limited to the Hezbollah, a terrorist/paramilitary organization. If we gave these kids entrepreneurship opportunities, they would do that instead of being terrorists.

Joi Ito said “I believe very strongly in the Internet. It’s my religion.” 

He gave examples of how the Internet resulted in an explosion of innovation. (For the sake of brevity, go read the notes if you want the details.) He said that now the cost of collaborating is so low, one of the remaining barriers is the legal costs. The legal fees and time costs can exceed the value of collaboration. Creative Commons eliminates some of that. Sharing can become even easier. 

The cost of failure is so low, you can try lots of things. Linus Torvalds said “I’m going to create an operating system”, and that was the birth of Linux. A company can spend millions of dollars thinking about whether to do something, millions more getting ready to do, millions more actually going it. They can never do something like Linux or Amazon or Google. Doplr went into a cabin and prototyped it over a weekend. There is no idea you shouldn’t be able to prototype in a week. It’s cheaper and easier to prototype something than it is to create a presentation and try to explain things. 

Then he gave examples of how these things (entrepreneurship, low cost of trying, technology) came together to make differences in the world: 

• Global Voices: network of bloggers, regional heads aggregate in each region. And then aggregate at higher levels. They do translation. The purpose is to give voice to each region, and enable a global conversation.
• Witness: gives resources to human rights organization to record and share video to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations
• Meetup: For profit. Thought of doing it as a non-profit. We think of non-profits as volunteer work, and for-profits as IPO work, but there is a whole range of in between. Meetup has a tremendous amount of social good, and the founder only cares about saving the world, and makes money to keep the company going.
• Architecture for humanity: get designs for building, license them under creative commons license. architecture is quite hard, so sharing it and opening it up is tremendously valuable. designs for hospitals and schools.
• The Girl Effect: the power social and economic change brought about when girls have the opportunity to participate.
• Lulan Artisans: teaches women and girls how to knit, dye fabric, make money. Founder wanted to stop human trafficking, and the way to do that was to enable the woman to make money. They make more money than the man. So instead of selling the women, they are more valuable in the family. Thing has done more to stopping human trafficking than almost anything else. 

Beyond LAMP - Scaling Websites Past MySQL: This super valuable session covered technology to bringing websites to high scale. If interested, just read the detailed notes.

One great question was why none of the folks present on the panel (Twitter, Facebook, TechCrunch, Reddit) used Oracle. There was consensus on the panel that they liked open source. The panelist from Twitter said that as they scale, they like to be able to peek under the hook and see what is going on. The panelist from Facebook said they like open source, they like the way open source products work well together, and they like to be nimble. The proprietary systems are not so nimble. Essentially, for maximum scaling, proprietary systems just aren’t good enough because they can’t be tweaked fast enough.

Coding For Pleasure: This panel was about developing applications not to make money, but just for fun, to scratch a personal itch. They talked about how all the beloved apps, twitter, flickr, facebook - they didn’t start as a plan to make a lot of money. They just filled a need for their founders. When you aren’t out to make money, you have less restrictions - you can just focus on the best possible user experience. There was a lot of interest from the audience on how to do this if you weren’t a coder - and the panelists said that with modern languages, frameworks, and APIs, you can go from zero to competent in six months or less. Just Google your programming question. They talked about the need to link of programmers and designers, something that can still be tricky to find the right person to work with. Sounds like an unmet need.

Valerie Casey Keynote Address - Designing A Movement - Integrating Sustainability Through Systems Thinking: Valerie said that the Interactive community would be critical going forward to the sustainability movement. She said that one of the big problems facing the sustainability movement is the use of Kafta-type narrative as the prevailing story for sustainability (reference: Kafka’s metamorphosis is an unhappy man turns into a cockroach.) Examples of these including child sitting in an e-waste dump in China, the   Great Pacific Garbage Patch (the area of plastic stuck floating in the North Pacific Gyre), polar ice caps melting which is destablizing earth’s plates, and burn pits in Iraq, which cause more deaths of U.S. soldiers than combat. Yet these stories cause burnout of sustainability activists, and have no positive, optimistic side to motivate sustained, passionate effort. She covered principles of systems thinking that could motivate more effective change: 

• a system is more than the sum of it’s parts
• feedback delays + bounded rationality = design traps
• creating the right measurement of success
• selecting the correct level for change
• enabling new models by recognizing the relationship between structure and behavior
• issue-attention cycle: degree of awareness is inversely correlated to the degree of productive action.

Kick Ass Mashups - Punk Rock APIs: In this session Kent Brewster talking about using web site APIs to create mashups. Every website has an API, even if it is a poor one: the HTML can easily be scraped. If a company instead opens up an API, they can get pinpoint data about how it is being used.

Kent showed some amazing examples of using Yahoo Pipes and YQL to create mashups in a matter of hours. YQL is essentially a query language like SQL, the data is in the form of tables, the tables definition is creating by scraping a website or accessing the website API. It all becomes reusable. The examples Kent showed included improving the user experience of the my.SXSW scheduling website, mashing up Netflix movie data with a personal blog.

I thought it was one of the top sessions at SXSWi.

Gmail - Behind the Scenes: A cool session about Gmail and the innovations behind it. It was staffed with five Google employees from Gmail, representing engineering, engineering manager, product marketing manger, technical lead. Key insights about innovation: virtually every new feature starts life as one individual’s initiative. They prototype something, get others interested, and it moves forward. They value interaction over meetings: no regular staff meeting, instead everyone sits closely together in an open floor layout. One key feature (undo send) was implemented by an engineer in Japan, not even part of the core Gmail team - he just checked out the Gmail code, made the changes, released it to Google Labs. While the Gmail team had debated whether or not it was feasible for two years, this other engineer just did it. That’s not uncommon. Other good insights in the notes. 

What Corporate American Thinks of Enterprise 2.0 - Andrew McAfee: McAfee is a noted researcher and professor at Harvard with numerous HBR papers on enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 tools. I got to this well-attended talk 30 minutes late, so my notes only cover the last half. He talked about how to talk to management about technology, including tips such as using before and after comparisons instead of demos, presenting theories and frameworks instead of jargon, present case studies and narratives (but not about companies they may not be able to relate to such as Google or Amazon), anticipate and alley concerns, don’t treat business colleagues like geeks or dopes - very few are geeks, but no one likes to be talked down to, or treated as being part of the problem.

Scoring a Tech Book Deal: Lots of good advice for would-be writers from a successful writer, a development editor, an acquisitions editor, and a writer’s agent. One big theme: Publishers don’t want to receive a finished book: they want a proposal, a writing sample, and an explanation of why you are the right author for this project. 

A Brave New Future for Book Publishing: Given that this panel was pitched as a follow-up to the well-attended and controversial panel called New Think for Old Publishers in 2009, I expected more energy and excitement around this. (In particular, I keep hoping for The Pragmatic Bookshelf to be held out as an example of an outstanding publisher that blends the online and print worlds.) One of two big insights from this session was talk of the Espresso Book Machine, an office copier-sized machine that can churn out a trade soft cover book in five minutes. A vision was painted of the future where a bookstore is a coffee shop with a shelf full of staff picks, and the ability to print any book you want. The other big topic was the iPad, and it’s impact. The panelists thought that the iPad would be a game changer because it would introduce a new audience to e-readers: people who would not have purchased a dedicated e-reader, but will try out the e-reader capability when it comes with a device. Some discussion of books+video, books as the centerpiece of a community that includes discussions, video, and other content.

AI 2010 - Wall-e or Rise of the Machines: Like the human brain interface panel, seeing the state of the art in artificial intelligence was pretty awesome. Peter Stone talked about the value of challenge problems to stimulate progress. Good problems produce good science, examples of this include manned flight, the Apollo mission, and the Manhattan Project. Examples of current challenge problems include: “By the year 2050, a team of humanoid robots that can beat a championship team playing soccer.” Videos were shown of the progress over ten years in RoboCup. Another good challenge problem was the DARPA Grand Challenge (autonomous vehicles navigate offroad), DARPA Urban Challenge (autonomous vehicles navigate urban environment include other autonomous vehicles and human-driven vehicles.) Both successfully accomplished.

Customer Support in a 140 Character World: (A quick reminder: I work for HP, who was part of the panel, although I write for myself, and don’t represent HP.) This panel was about the use of Twitter for customer support. Opinions from the panelists varied as to whether it should be used to actually resolve issues for the customer versus connecting with them and following up by phone or email. Jeremiah Owyang said, “Customer support is PR. Customer’s don’t care what department you’re in, they just want their problem solved.” There were questions from the audience about the listening tools used (see notes for details), and the size and scope of the teams listening (~10 people for both Comcast and HP). 

What We Learned from Watching Kids with Flameworkers: This was an interesting session on the cultural value of long tail content to individuals, niche communities, and future cultural anthropologists. There are micro-genres of content (e.g. homemade flamethrowers) that might have a few thousand videos on the topic, with none having more than 10k-50k views. Yet these micro-genres make up the mass of the volume of YouTube. Amassing of collection of flamethrower videos would once have required an extension effort by a curator, yet now can be done in minutes or hours with YouTube. What future value does this hold - if a cultural anthropologist wants to look back on this time in 100 years, will those videos still exist? There are other examples of content disappearing en masse, such as GeoCities web pages, so we’re already losing our cultural history on the web less than 15 years into life on the web. Who decides what content stays around, who funds it, and how can we influence it? The flamethrower video was pretty dang great too. 

Missed it?

If you missed SXSW this year, and you're now banging your head against your desk saying "why, why, why", then attend WebVisions 2010 in Portland, which is another great, organic Interactive/Web conference.

Other Great Summaries:

• Matt Browne: Why I Go, What I Take Away

If you find or have written other worthwhile summaries, please link to them to the comments below.

Notes from What We Learned from Watching Kids with Flamethrowers at SXSWi

What We Learned Watching Kids with Homemade Flamethrowers

#homemadeflamethrowers

#flamethrowr

Mega secret homemade flamethrower music video on YouTube

Hwang (founder ROFLCon, @timhwang, tim at timhwang.com, brosephstalin.com)

Jacobs (@underwaterpeeps, sawyer at underwaterpeoples.com, underwaterpeoples.com)

• Micro-genres: bodies of content that are specific yet enormous - they just haven’t been seen by anyone
• A cluster of related work, the majority of which receives less than 50,000 views
• Examples: slap the bag (drink an entire bag of wine, then slap the bag), dance the whip (2,850 videos), fire in the hole (10,000 videos), kids doing drugs (13,700 of salvia alone)
• Flamethrowers (1,500 videos: 25.2 hours of video)
• Kids are building stuff to shoot flames onto other stuff
• Mostly kids, mostly amateur -- yet the flamerthrowers get huge. Enormous flames.
• Outside in the backyard, outside on the patio, in a forest, indoors, out the window of a car
• Team Bonesaw: lighting a cigarette with a flamethrower
• We’re not seeing a community here (because the same questions get asked over and over again)... just a lot of independent interactions.
• So What?
• the flamethrower example is the dark matter of youtube. 
• 100,000,000 videos on youtube
• what is actually going on inside the long tail of content? Who really looks at it?
• micro-genres are the primordial soup of internet culture
• ambient, historical archive on our time: continually capturing ourselves in a very genuine, amateur way for the foreseeable future. 
• How valuable would it have been for researchers to have ambient, historical archive of videos of human behavior for the last 200 years?
• And yet... Under Threat
• What’s the threat?
• Who pours the money into support platforms like YouTube?
• The Platforms themselves. They provide the supply space for micro-genres.
• Brands and Businesses: they use the platforms to spread their message. This is the demand element that supports the aggregators.
• Platforms
• We’re increasingly surrounded by devices to capture, collect, and put online data. It’s easier to transfer it, can be done at a higher rate (2G -> 3G -> 4G). This is causing an exponential growth in content
• The monetizable content is growing an a linear rate, while all the rest of the content is growing at an exponential rate.
• It takes a lot of resources and time to generate the monetizable content. It’s easier and easier to get the other content.
• Brands and Business
• Internet Celebrities
• brands and businesses are moving into this long tail content
• Enter the micro-genre
• Some of it just can’t be monetized. Some is dangerous (no one wants to sponsor flamethrowers), or illegal (same for drugs), and some of it is just nothing (kids hanging out and eating McDonalds)
• The stuff that is most culturally interested is the hardest to monetize.
• But is there a limit?
• Brands and businesses can sponsor down to a certain point. But somewhere there is a hard stop.
• And the cost keeps rising.
• There’s no love for the micro-genre. Business doesn’t sponsor based on cultural value.
• There are potentially profitable content, and non-profitable material
• The two live together now in places like YouTube
• The non-profitable side is going to grow much faster
• At a certain side, the profitable side is going to stop subsidizing the non-profitable at a certain size
• We will lose the historical archive, the social enhancement, the primordial soup of internet culture
• We’ll end up with something like TV
• The profitable realm will dominate
• Making This Stuff Culturally Sustainable
• What is least valuable in the business realm has the most value in the cultural realm
• So if we’re concerned about depending that space, about keeping that value, we have to do something
• But what?
• Create “Flamethrower Studies” - convert from a cultural curiosity to cultural study
• Infrastructure - create infrastructure specific to it
• Cultural Sustainability - make the case for the value so that business will accept the additional cost
• Conservation - users of the web, as users, can make efforts to direct the web where they want it to go, influence for conservation of the resources they care about.
• Questions
• What about the questionable nature of the content? Don’t videos about doing drugs promote drugs?
• The costs of going through and deciding what fits and what doesn’t fit, exceeds the costs of not allowing this content.
• The cultural value of the open medium exceeds the cultural value of filtering out some content
• Do we need to retain everything? Is that just an assumption from our imperial past? We need to retain every species, we need to retain every video of eating mcdonalds? Isn’t some of this just useless stuff we should just let it die?
• It’s an over statement to say that web would die if this content goes away... It’s hard to quantify the value of any one item going away. (Will: it’s especially hard to know the future value.)
• Sometimes the value is the community that forms: the red headed kid who made a video about being persecuted because of being a redhead, but then he found a community of supporters through followers.
• What are the specific threats out there? net neutrality? FCC?
• Specific case recently... chatroulette... mass media said that it was the worst thing ever, full of perverts and predators. We did some studies... Only about 8% had explicit content, which compared to the internet as a whole is really not very much at all.
• Are there really significant marginal costs to supply and distribution? Is there any evidence to support this?
• It’s difficult to collect data on it. (Will: no evidence)
• The real issue may be the human bandwidth to process it... how much is coming in versus how much we process it.
• As a teenager who did these activities, even without the internet, we still had these kinds of pranks... they just spread person to person. “How did you make that flamethrower?”
• The main value of these videos is not that they propagate the activity, it’s that they are a snapshot in time of human behavior.
• These things just happen... at a certain age you want to blow things up. The value is that you can capture. To compile the 25.2 hours of flamethrower video in VHS would take some serious curation. To do the same on YouTube is trivial. 
• Any thoughts on the future of the infrastructure?
• Holden camera has a huge community around it, even though it is a weirdly defective product. When you search on Google, you want to get the one thing you want.
• There are good products that always do you want, bad products that never do what you want, and weird products that sometimes do what you want. 
• If there was a random way for people to occasional be exposed to flamethrower videos, this might be useful. (Will: And this is what Rebecca Blood has been saying for years... http://www.rebeccablood.net. It’s the newspaper reading experience. You are exposed to articles you didn’t know you were interested in.)
• Businesses always want niches. Someday “Bob’s Burn Cream” will find out about these flamethrower videos and want to advertise on them.
• At a certain point, once the behavior is more accepted, then the advertising might be more OK. Things that are Taboo may become less taboo.
• Why not have some disgusting snack food sponsor videos of kids getting stoned.
• But at a certain point, do the costs of going even further niche with advertising outweight the benefit you can get. How many niches can McDonalds support or target with advertising?

Notes from Customer Support in a 140 Character World at SXSWi

Disclosure: I work for HP.

140 character customer support

Caroline McCarthy - covering social media for CNET news

Frank Eliason - Comcast Frank @comcastcares

Toby Richards - Microsoft. Everything that’s not phone support

Lois Townsend - @ltownsend, HP’s Social Media Strategy

Jeremiah Owyang - altimeter

• Recently in the news Kevin Smith, getting kicked off the Southwest plane. He twittered about it.
• Is twitter really the best place for this?
• Frank: It’s the customer’s platform. They can use it to affect policy.
• Lois: It’s a way to connect with the customer, but not necessarily converse. Ideally you would reach them before they get so angry (like with Kevin). Our goal is to get a hold of them and get them to help. Like a virtual concierge. 
• Frank: I disagree. It is a place for a dialogue. Kevin Smith’s problem could have gotten resolved right at the airport over twitter. But we don’t want to do different things just because someone is being loud. That isn’t customer service, that is just PR.
• Everyone would like their cable to be free. But we can’t do that. But we can have a discussion about why it is what it is. We can become more transparent.
• Does your PR department or your customer service department manage your twitter connection? How much should they be communicating?
• Jeremiah: They should be wearing the same shoes. Customer support is PR. Customer’s don’t care what department you’re in, they just want their problem solved.
• Is anyone from other parts of the company watching over you, telling you what you can and can’t say? (directed first at Toby)
• Well, I was just part of the panel on “don’t be sued”. The attitude we have now is to be as transparent as possible. It doesn’t always mean saying yes to the customer. There’s no oversight on how we engage in customer support in the public domain. But there are core principles, and there is a conversation. You can create a harmonious working relationship with the different departments.
• What happens if you get Kevin Smith’ed? He’s got millions of followers, and even fanboys. He can motivate a lot of people.
• Frank: We’ve had it happen. We have some people who are very loud about it. But the biggest hit to the Comcast brand are two videos on YouTube that still show up first. They didn’t come from 1M+ followers, just regular people.
• Frank: We had an issue with nudity during the super bowl. But we were talking about it and telling people what we knew in real time. It quickly become boring, which diffused it.
• Toby: We’ve had lots of people come to forums with issues. One big issue, we were able to respond quickly, get a patch out, tell people about it, and issue was resolved in a week.
• Lois: We had one, where our product appeared to be racist (referral to the webcam face detection), we responded quickly, we explained the limitations of the technology. Many of our things are pretty boring... People were frustrated by lack of drivers, we explained what goes into getting a driver released and why it took time.
• Q: What are the listening tools?
• Toby: We use blue ocean. We have an internal process for escalation. We have call monitoring, community forum monitoring. We have a process to get an issue to the right person fast. Some issues are really hot and require immediate respond, some are more systemic issues that we drive over time.
• Lois: The listening tools make our jobs so exciting. We can get this information from our customers, and bring it to our colleagues, and it is extremely compelling to be able to bring customer words. HP, Microsoft, we’re big companies, and there’s tons of metrics and reports, but they are dry compared to customer words.
• Frank: We use radiance. But you can start with twitter search, google mob search.
• Jeremiah: We just published a report on social CRM tools. Social media is not scalable. Frank has how many managers... (10 community managers)... You can’t scale in real time.
• Frank disagreed: it can be scaled. not all 25M customers are saying comcast, comcast, comcast all day. If so, phones wouldn’t scale either. At one time Legal said it wouldn’t scale, but Legal doesn’t review everything that goes out.
• Q: How large are your teams? Are they spread out or in one location? How do you manage expectations of responsiveness?
• Lois: my direct reports are very small. 11 people. But beyond that, there is an incredible virtual network... we call it the HP Ambassador problem... We have about 75 employees who are very active in responding to customer problems. It ranges from a dozen to up to a 100 people, depending on how you count.
• Frank: We have 10 people, plus a manager. We review about 10,000 blog posts a day, about 2,000 twitter posts a day, about 200 facebook posts, about 600 forum posts a day. The bulk of the word my team is to put an email address in forums, and we get about 6,000 emails a month, and that is the bulk of what we do is refer.
• Toby: (missed some of the data...) we have about 200 people in low-cost labor markets that are present in various online communities. We connect with people in social media... the community influencers. We can get scale, and reach by working with these community influencers.
• Q: How do you bridge the gap between the online world and the real world (e.g. with Kevin Smith - on twitter, Kevin had received a response, but the gate agent didn’t know about.)
• Lois: sometimes the front-line person doesn’t have the same knowledge of what can be done for a customer. We had a customer who was in Spain... our twitter person was able to get him an agent who could help him in English, in his motor home, in Spain, with his English product.
• Frank: but have you changed your process for your Spanish speaking agents, so that they have a process for getting an English agent for a customer that needs it.
• Lois: agreed, you solve the immediate problem, but you need to use that feedback to make improvements.
• Q: What about using social CRM?
• Jeremiah: We need social CRM to be able to tie customer records to these social interactions, so that we can track,
• Frank: it’s about changing the company culture to be customer service centered
• Problem: Are you rewarding your customers that the best way to get support is to yell at your friends?
• Frank: the customer was already doing this before we ever showed up. They were choosing to yell. But by responding, you change these people into advocates when you help them.
• Frank: regarding spam, we’ll look at it once, and ask if they need help, but we won’t go on forever. We can agree to disagree, and be nice throughout the whole thing. You will have sometimes people that are very personal, hurtful, and angry. You have to have thick skin in this place.
• Toby: Agree. We have a lot of customers, those customers don’t have access to Microsoft people, they don’t see us as people. But if we can engage, that changes things.
• Lois: You’re not being measured on the cost of the phone call in this case, so you do have the ability to carry on more of a conversation. We can learn about what happens when customers have relatively unique configurations, and then share those lessons with other customers.
• Lois: We are, to an extent, a minor part of the community. 95% of interactions are among the community, without HP being involved. Those community interactions are really rich. People are helping each other.
• Q: Do you have policies about employees doing social media? Do you have a social media style guide about what those interactions should look like.
• Frank: We do have a policy. it’s simple: don’t release proprietary information that isn’t available to the public, be nice, be honest, be truthful about who you are. But we don’t center it in one style... Person should be themselves.
• Toby: The people who are working for you to work in the community become part of the community, they are recognized as individuals. We tell people to let the marketing team make the value proposition for new products, not to tell people what they think.
• Q: First, when you introduced social media customer support, how did you leverage traditional channels? How did you get them integrated? Second, in a global environment, how does this play out in other countries where you might have support? Third, from a b-to-2, what kind of social channels are you planning for that?
• Jeremiah: tell people on phone hold about your community, show it on your website. on the website, it shows that there is a thriving community.
• Lois: We did forums early, but they were very agent focused. Not much of a true community, just a different kind of agent support. When we relaunched, we worked hard to foster the community.
• Toby: When we start a new community or venture, we have a dedicated team at first, and after the kinks are worked out, then we diffuse it into the rest of the organization. We believe in having a center of excellence, in making sure we have the skills to engage with customers online.
• Lois: We started with English, then did six additional languages. Now we’re focused on improving those forums. When you do language localization for official support, it has to be perfect. When people communicate in forums, they are very forgiving of 2nd, 3rd levels - it just has to be helpful, it doesn’t have to be perfect.
• Q: How to deal with dissonance of excellent customer service via twitter versus torturous customer service by phone.
• Frank: we have to put it in the face of executives to show it. We’re measuring on the number of customers we help, not how many emails we send. So we work to do something with the feedback we get. Not overnight, but we are changing. Comcast’s credo is now centered on best customer experience. 

Notes from AI 2010: Wall-e or Rise of the Machines from SXSWi

AI 2010: Wall-e or Rise of the Machines?

#ai2010

PRESENTERS

 Mason Hale

 Doug Lenat

 Bart Selman

 Natasha Vita-More

 Peter Stone

• Presentation started with history of AI from the Mechanical Turk through Vernor Vinge writings, from Deep Blue in 1997 through Ray Kurzweil’s Technological Singularity in 2029.
• Doug Lenat
• founder of two AI companies
• Whatever Happened to AI? (title of an article he wrote, came out about a year ago)
• You can’t get answers to simple questions from a search engine: is the space needle taller than the eiffel tower? who was president when obama was born?
• You can get hits, and read those hits.
• essentially a gloried dog fetching the newspaper
• understanding natural language, speed, images... requires lots of general knowledge
• Mary and Sue are sisters. (are they each other’s sisters? or just sisters of other people?)
• There is no free lunch... we have to prime the pump: thousands of years of knowledge had to be communicated with the machine
• At odds with sci-fi, evolution, academia
• But there has been one mega-engineering effort: Cyc
• http://cyc.com
• Build millions of years of common sense into an expert system
• Today: experts which are not idiots savant
• 2015*: question answering -> semantic search -> syntactic search
• answer the question if you can, if you can’t, fall back to meaning search, if you can’t, fall back to today’s syntactic search
• 2020*: cradle->to->grave mental prosthesis
• * assumes a 2013 crowdsourced knowledge acquisition
• it’s a web based game that asks questions like “i believe that clenching one’s fists expresses frustration: true or false”
• Peter Stone
• Progress in artificial intelligence: the challenge problem approach
• Non-verbal AI. 
• A Goal of AI: Robust, fully autonomous agents that exist in the real world
• Good problems produce good science
• Manned flight
• Apollo mission
• Manhattan project
• Goal: by the year 2050, a team of humanoid robots that can beat a championship team playing soccer
• RoboCup 1997-1998: early robots. complete system of vision, movement, and decision.
• RoboCup 2005-2006: robots are individually better, playing as a team. Robots are fully autonomous.
• Many Advances due to RoboCup
• they are seeing the world, figuring out where they are, working together.
• Other good AI challenges
• Trading Agents
• Autonomous vehicles
• Multiagent reasoning
• Darpa Grand Challenge
• Urban Challenge continues in the right direction - moves the competition into driving in traffic
• It is now technically feasible to have cars that can drive themselves
• Awesome example of a traffic intersection with all robot drivers: they use a reservation system for driving through the intersection. No need for traffic lights, just work out an optimal pattern for all cars to make it through the intersection.
• Natasha Vita-More
• consultant to singularity university. looks at impact of technology on society and culture
• Immersion: the fusion of life and interactivity
• We see a synthesis of technologies that are converging, including nanotechnology and AI
• We are not going to be 100% biological humans in the coming decades
• Augmentation
• 3 complex issues
• Enhancement: what is human enhancement and what are its media?
• Normality: what is normal and will there be new criteria for normal?
• Behavior: will they be familiar or feaful?
• Enhancement
• therapeutic enablement
• selective enhancement
• radical transformation
• Creating multiple bio-synthetic personas
• species issue: life and death
• social issue: human and non-human rights 
• individual issues: identity
• Addressing design bioethics
• life as a network of information gathering, retrieving, storing, exchanging...
• Showed pictures of different design/art looking at future humans
• AI Metabrain: What would it be like if our intelligence could increase? How far could that go? If we could add augmentation to our metacortex.
• Future prosthetic, attached physically or virtually
• Would be combination of cognitive science, neuroscience, nanotechnology
• What will normal be? Will an unaugumented person be considered disabled? How will human thought merge with artificial intelligence? Lots of questions...
• Bart Selman
• AAAI Presidential Panel on Long Term AI Futures
• One example is how to keep humans in the loop. Example, when you have military drones, who should decide to fire? One line of reasoning says humans make the final decision. But there is substantial pressure to take humans out to speed up reaction time, because it is far faster to have the machine make a judgement call than a human.
• On plane autopilots:
• “Current pilots are less able to fly the plane than a few years ago because they rely on the autopilot so much”
• When pilots turn off the autopilot, they (the human pilot) then tends to make mistakes - usually because the autopilot was in a complex situation it couldn’t figure out, but the human is not any better at figuring it out.
• Questions
• There are now examples of human+machine playing chess against human+machine. (uh, this is not a question.)
• Can AI be good at predicting and/or generating beautiful artistic outputs?
• There is some example of an algorithm doing paintings.
• Art and human is in the eye of the beholder. 
• Are we going about it the wrong way - trying to create AI that copies human intelligence, rather than just something unique (will: i think this was the question)
• With Deep Blue, Kasparov said that he saw the machine play creative moves.
• Humans are a wonderful existance proof that something human sized can be intelligence, but at a certain point it’s like trying to build a flying machine using a bird as a model. The bird proves it is possible, but a plane is very different than a bird.
• Bill Joy wrote that science needs to slow down, because it is going faster than we can manage it. What do you think?
• We’re not, by default, building ethical behavior into robots. But that is something we need to be doing.
• You give the robot ten dollars and tell it to get the car washed. It comes back several hours later, and the car isn’t washed. You ask what happened. It says that it donated the money to hunger relief. 
• It’s hard to figure out ethics. You could say that it is ethically better to donate the money to hunger relief than to get a car washed. That has to be weighed against the ethic of doing what it was told to do. How do you judge, prioritize, balance these ethical issues?
• ...
• One idea is that you can download your conscious onto a computer, and then run it there. What is the feasibility of that?
• it’s called brain emulation
• it’s in theory possible, but not in the next 50 years
• there’s a question that intelligence/consciousness might not exist without being embodied.
• besides, is it even ethical to spawn another intelligence, and then expect it to do what you want to do? 
• How can you tell the difference, looking at the RoboCup competition, how can you tell whether behavior you are witnessing is a bug or a breakthrough?
• It’s a breakthrough if they are doing well, and a bug if they are not. It’s easier in the context of RoboCup because the criteria for success are well defined.