Friday, February 13, 2004

Contests as a way to speed up free markets  In many areas of the economy, the free market system is stuck.  The opportunity space for the development of new technologies that address specific problems is cloudy and deemed unworthy of serious investment.  Additionally, there is so much available technology on the shelf today, that many amazing technological advances are primarily combinatorial and do not require basic research. Conests may be one the best ways to get the market system going in these areas.  Simply, cash awards to organizations that engineer and demonstrate breakthrough technology that solves specific problems.  We have seen a few minor efforts in this direction recently.  NASA has launched their "Centennial Challenges" program with $20 m for key technological breakthroughs.  DARPA is even getting into the act with a $1 m "Grand Challenge" for an autonomous ground vehicle that can navigate between Los Angeles and Las Vegas.  These contests compliment the now famous privately funded X-Prize that will award $10 m to the first organization that can get 3 people to 100 km above the earth and back twice within two weeks.  What do you think about contests (or a sequence of increasingly difficult contests that build on each other) for the development of unmanned Mars missions (at much less expense than the $820 m spent on Spirit and Opportunity), extremely low cost hydrogen fuel cells, 20 hour laptop batteries that cost less than $100, and more?  In my view, a billion $$ spent this way over the next couple of years would prove true McLuhan's dictum that for every great problem there is someone that doesn't see it as a problem. BTW: there needs to be a lot of academic work done on how to make these contests effective. 3:47:46 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Jeremy reports that MyYahoo has added support for Atom (it already supports RSS).  Smart.  The only company that is consciously taking sides is Google (which is another blackmark on their IPO plans).  Unfortunately, it would have been easier to have a single standard, but we are now stuck with two.  Perhaps there will be a third?  Confusion is always a great sales point.  PS.  Dare brings up a good point.  There are probably going to be another dozen trailing implementations of Atom in the mix as we go forward (0.4, 0.5, etc.) as there is with RSS (0.92,0.93, etc).  So we will end up with dozens of syndication formats.  What a bloody mess. 9:44:17 AM    Comment_ Trackback []

George Colony (my former boss, co-author, and editor), the CEO of Forrester, slams an overhyped Google IPO.  My suggestion on Google:  take a chill pill before you invest.  My take: The only people that are going to make money on a $15 b Google IPO will be its employees, the investment bankers, and the VCs.  EVERYONE else will get jammed.  8:50:51 AM    Comment_ Trackback []