I'mABigNerd

Hello. I am Scott Asher - self-titled nerd, friend to animals.

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The Second Screen

Yesterday I attended a panel at #smwnyc called "The Interplay of Sports, Business, and Social Media."   The panel was great and highlighted how are the sports business is of the need to interact with fans via social media.  One thing that really stuck out to me was how teams are using various analytics tools (e.g. SproutSocial) to determine WHICH fans to engage more directly, i.e the influencers.  I am impressed that the usually slow-moving sports industry is keeping up.  What I want to discuss here, however, is one element I thought missing from the panel -- and this is partially because the participants were not on the content/production side of the business -- a discussion of all of the innovative things being done to target the "second screen."  

The term "second screen" can refer to several things -- if you're at a live game, it can refer to your phone, for example -- but mostly it refers to watching a game at home on TV while using another device (smartphone, tablet, laptop) at the same time to access information about the game/event/sport/team/etc. It's an area the industry is clearly thinking about, but I have been consistently disappointed with the innovation here and I actually think that the established players are thinking in a kind of ossified way about this problem.  For example, when asked about social-tv-watching (a second screen analog), one of the panel participants yesterday brought up GetGlue, the popular social-tv service.  He described GetGlue's future as a kind of "recommendation engine", a sort of futuristic TV Guide.  While I think this comparison/link is a reasonable one, I don't understand why we must be so quick to pigeonhole new technologies and services into the roles that old technologies and services filled.  Sure, the best analog among established services for what GetGlue is right now is a "recommendation engine", but that doesn't have to be the extent of it.  Can't we dream up something cooler? 

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Find a Co-Founder

One of my main concerns with respect to networking and networking events is related to that famous Groucho Marx quotation:

I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member

Specifically, I find myself interested in "Find A Co-Founder" events, but am always wondering -- won't the best people have found their co-founders more organically?  I know that networking is a skill I am improving in, and so I can rationalize why these sorts of events are helpful for me, but given that I am looking for a polished marketing, business/product co-founder, will they really be at these events?

If you have a story to tell related to finding your co-founder(s) at networking events, please let me know!

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On Facebook's New Identity

@FredWilson wrote an interesting piece this morning about dispersion in social media.  I don't want to over-summarize, so please go read his article, but he basically says that social media will not have a "winner-takes-all" outcome, but more likely a "best-tool-for-each-particular-job" outcome.  In other words you will use GetGlue as your "entertainment-social-media tool", but Path as your "sharing-stuff-with-close-friends" tool, rather than use one dominant tool for everything.  Sure, a well-done Swiss army knife social site can handle sharing all of this stuff and do it in unique ways based on the particular stuff you're sharing or whom you're sharing it with (a la Google Circles), but in the end it's hard for one company to get all of the types of sharing exactly right.  In other words, I mostly agree with @FredWilson's thesis, but wanted to think about its implications for Facebook in particular.

We've often thought about Facebook as the probable winner in the "winner-takes-all" social media sweepstakes, but that actually doesn't seem like it's going to be the case.  Facebook has basically taken on the role of "cruft-accumulator" precisely because it is so popular.  The site is becoming less and less enjoyable to use for actual active sharing while other, usually more specific-interest-oriented tools like Pinterest become the soup-du-jour.  It's still too early to say "Facebook is definitively this" or "Facebook is definitively that", and recent projects like Timeline are certainly intended to breathe new life into active sharing on Facebook.  And Facebook continues to dominate as the "social-gaming-active-sharing" tool of choice through its quasi-partnership with Zynga (and others).  Nonetheless, it's increasingly clear that  Facebook 's main contribution and value is as the keeper-of-identities and linker-of-those-identities across the web.  

Just today @JoshConstine has a piece on TechCrunch about the fact that Facebook is quietly rolling out the beta of its ad program which targets ads based on your OpenGraph actions.  This is not Facebook creating value because of content actively shared on the site, this is Facebook creating value because of its role as the main identity keeper on the internet.   The value of the data  Facebook has collected and continues to college is enormous and the company sits pretty singularly as the one company with enough data to reasonably provide a universal internet identity.  Facebook is in a pretty enviable position.

Viewed differently, it is also a somewhat precarious position.  When stuff gets shared on other sites, even if those sites link that sharing to Facebook through OpenGraph, Facebook loses its monopoly on sharing data.  When Path becomes the "actual-friends"-sharing tool, Facebook loses a bit of sheen on its brand.  This is not a fatal problem for Facebook  -- in fact one might call it the inevitable maturing of the company as it prioritizes Facebook-as-platform over Facebook-as-hit-website.  But it's still something to consider -- what does your vision of the internet in 10 years look like?  Does it still have Facebook in it?  

To be perfectly honest, mine doesn't.  

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Voter Profiling

Great article on detailed voter profile selling by @sissenberg: 

http://slate.me/wFo9lq

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Regarding the Middle Class Generation Problem

There has been a good deal of justified noise surrounding the New York Times' great feature on  How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work (which case is really used as a metaphor for how the U.S. is losing out on next generation manufacturing jobs).  It's a long, really great piece and well-worth the read.  You should read it.   I won't do it justice by summarizing it quickly, but I need a summary to respond to here, so basically: 

Lack of workers rights/benefits means it's possible to (cheaply) do a lot of things that would be impossible to do in the U.S. (e.g. bring up/down a huge supply chain in less than 100 hours) 

We cost too much

We don't have enough people trained with the kind of mid-level technology manufacturing needed for this work

Government subsidies in the China exacerbate the problem

There is a lot to be said on this topic and I am no expert, but I did want to make a couple of quick points.

Government subsidies are a complicated question.  I haven't read a great discussion yet of modern mercantilism (state capitalism) vs. modern capitalism, though I know the The Economist has some great pieces this week on related topics.  My gut feeling is the standard capitalist feeling: it's impossible for subsidies to be as efficient as the market in deploying capital*

* - with the exception being the creation, if possible, of international monopolies. 

The "human rights/our wages too high" arguments (1,2 above) get solved by the development of the Chinese middle class.  Part of growth of a capitalist society is the empowerment of the middle class.  As middle class citizens get more (tvs, cars, homes), they demand more (wages, basic rights).  The basic cycle is that growth breeds success.  Success means more people are employed at slightly higher wage earning jobs (or they wouldn't have taken them over their former agricultural jobs).   These jobs allow them to buy consumer products.  Consumer products keep them informed.  Being informed means wanting even more.  Wanting even more means eventually being dissatisfied with no rights and demanding more.  This process is well under way in China, where, for example, people are watching more and more TV and becoming more and more disenchanted with censorship.  I cannot predict how long it will take, but I can say with near certainty that at some point the Chinese labor advantage will just about go away on its own.

That leaves the "training" issue (3).  Knowing little about the long-run statistics of social policy on education, training, and employment, I feel ill-equipped to really know how (3) will resolve itself.  I do have faith that America is one of the freest, and most integrative societies on the planet and that those qualities (freedom and willingness to integrate) are the most important for a modern society.  

The one issue I do not feel comfortable about in the near future is the fact that whatever my long-term optimism, I have nothing to offer people who are in their late middle ages and finding themselves displaced, their skills useless, their lives unproductive.  I think we all realize the generational issue here and wish our politicians would concentrate on that.

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