Founded 201 to help owner-managers of creative businesses to build and release value in their businesses.

Ideas Businesses: what is an ideas business? Are ‘ideas businesses’ special?

Fueling the knowledge economy: money. Take money and stick it into research, and you get science. If you want to make mondy, you have to innovate with the science and turn it into products and services. You can also take money and turn it into culture, which you then have to run through creative industry and turn it into products and services. The products and services of course turn back into money.

There’s a continuum from science to art, and many of the most exciting developments now are smack in the middle of the continuum.

Get the right vehicle for the journey. Do you have a bike and a car? Oftentimes entrepreneurs want to realize all their ideas through one vehicle.

Businesses are vehicles for ambition. Urge 1: Do great work (cultural wealth, work focus). Urge 2: Build a better world (social wealth, workplace focus). Urge 3: Make money (economic wealth, market focus, perhaps 5% of SMEs).

Most businesses don’t grow.

The challenge of growth: most companies scrabble around at a small level. In between there is an uncomfortable journey. He showed a chart with a model of business growth: freelancers –> artisans –> clubs –> value creators –> value growers –> value realisors –> acquirers –> public companies.

One of the things Pembridge does is help people make the transition between these stages.

Foundations for growth: a team. Every business needs: a finder, a minder and a grinder.

When you put a presentation in front of an investor, think about what the structure of the team is.

Great quote: “Don’t let the creative be the chief executive!”

I went to a community solstice festival tonight, and when I wandered over the the garbage bins to toss my empty punch cup, the most delightful thing happened. A man in an orange vest jumped in front of me, hand outstretched in the universal symbol of “Halt, you!”

“What are you throwing away?” he asked me. “A coffee cup? We don’t throw coffee cups away. They go in the coffee cup recycling bin. We cut out the bottoms of the cups, and use them to grow seedlings. Lyttelton,” he informed me proudly, “will be a zero waste community by 2008.”

Green is the new black these days, and the trend may be reaching critical mass. I already touched on Earthle, whose reason for existence is to reduce the emissions caused by accessing Google; the search behemoth itself is aiming for carbon neutrality by the end of the year.

That’s not their only planet-friendly initiative. The Foreign Policy blog reported today on two other greenGoogle programs:

First, Google Earth is teaming up with a Brazilian Indian tribe with the aim of countering deforestation in the Amazon. The project aims to capture vivid images that could deter loggers and miners from cutting down trees and digging for gold in the tribe’s reservation. It hopes to help police the reservation site and provide evidence to authorities if and when destruction occurs. Second, Google has just launched what the Financial Times calls its “first significant philanthropic initiative”: an $11 million contribution to speed the development of the plug-in hybrid electric car, though this isn’t the first time Google has expressed an interest in alternative energy.

Alternative search engines are picking up the ball, too. Gigablast is looking to use software engineering to reduce the server space needed for search indexing by a factor of a thousand. Google, Earthle and Gigablast are all a step behind Picsearch, which claims to be the world’s first carbon-neutral search engine.

The sustainability movement is nothing new, and certainly there are those visionaries like the Durst Organization in New York who have been making it a cornerstone of their commercial philosophy for years. I can’t help but notice, though, how regularly green thinking has been coming up recently: in the news, in conversation, in emails, and in blogs like Celsias, which is in the top 10,000 on Technorati.

I think our societal transformation is gaining momentum. Are you seeing the same thing? Do you think we might be reaching the hundredth monkey?

I’ve put up a few posts about the controversial semantic web or ‘Web 3.0′. Most people have a gut reaction that the concept is buzzword-heavy and lacking in practicality, or even a clear definition. Dr Riza C. Berkan summed up the issues today with intellectual rigor in a ReadWriteWeb post:

The two basic views of a semantic search are identified by the location of the semantic resources to be implanted. The first view is to embed the semantic resources in the Web pages themselves. It is called the “Semantic Web”. Why not compose Web pages in a structure that is semantics friendly?

…The “Semantic Web” approach has been around for a long time now. Unfortunately, it is based on an unrealistic assumption that every Web author will abide by the complex rules of semantics - not to mention the education it requires - and place content in the correct buckets of mysteriously unified standards. Another form of this approach may be to design Web factories that crank out refined Web pages once fed by ordinary Web pages. Of course if there is more than one factory, you have the standards issue again. In this day and age of fast content production, the Semantic Web seems to be more idealism than realism.

Dr Berkan goes on to discuss the pros of focusing efforts to understand the user at the search stage:

Without relying on statistics, long-tail queries can be analyzed by semantic algorithms on the fly, and bring search results with the accurate context… a semantic approach is very effective in handling dynamic content and can unleash its full power the second the content is born.

The argument, highly valid, is that it is easier to make one search engine intelligent than billions of web pages.

Dr Berkan’s company, hakia, offers a semantic search engine, as do Cognition Search and Lexxe. Powerset is working on theirs.

VortexDNA shares Dr Berkan’s view—in fact, we’re taking one step further away from the content. The idea behind MyWebDNA is not to create a new search engine, but a universal measure of relevance that can be overlaid onto any search engine.

Our tactics are different: the means of determining relevance can be through context, meaning, or, in our case, the purpose and values of the user. But our fundamental approach is the same: create the right lens, and the results will come into focus.

Commenting on Google’s Universal Search press release last Thursday, Gord Hotchkiss tied in Google’s personalization efforts to their ability to connect different silos of information:

The key to universal search results is an on-the-fly algorithm that looks across all of Google’s information sources and prioritizes and ranks all the items coming from these disparate sources based on the user intent. Now, it’s in those last five words, “based on the user intent” that the really important piece of this comes out. Just a few weeks ago, I interviewed Marissa Mayer about the inclusion of Web history in the dataset to calculate personalized search results. This just gives Sep Kamvar and his personalization algorithm a lot more to chew on as they determine user intent.

Gord’s a wise guy. He realizes that if you’re trying to prioritize images and video in addition to text results, and base their ranking on what you think the user is looking for, you’ll have to have a pretty powerful mechanism for ‘disambiguating user intent.’

What a beautiful phrase, ‘disambiguating user intent’. If you love language as I do, you have to appreciate it, which is why I’ve repeated it three times so far. In addition to its beauty, though, it underlies the core premise of Google’s personalization technology: in order to be effective, you have to figure out what the user is trying to find.

This may sound like an obvious mandate for a search technology. But what if you could take the clues provided by search history and demographics, and overlay a deep understanding of the users themselves? MyWebDNA’s validated results came back showing a 14% increase in relevance of search results based on a user’s core purpose and values. Those results indicate that understanding the users could prove to be a powerful means of disambiguating their intent (couldn’t resist).

In other words, you can predict as much or more about someone’s behavior from understanding who they are as you can from understanding what they want.

This is pretty interesting from an algorithm approach, because what you want can change moment to moment, while who you are tends to shift over far longer periods of time. The two combined can result in relevance on a much deeper level.

If Google’s serious about users seeing more accurate results, more often, don’t you think this is something they should explore?

Check this out, you guys! This is really cool:

How long ago was it that you played Breakout? 20, 25 years ago? And here’s a crowd of people having the best time ever playing one of the oldest video games around.

What’s the difference? Well, there are some obvious physical ones—you are the joystick, for one, you and hundreds of people around you. And that simple thing can breathe life into a game that came out when 40Kb was still a lot of RAM.

But why would that make such a big difference? What is it about being the joystick instead of manipulating the joystick, being one of hundreds of controllers that collectively determine the fate of the game?

I propose that the answer is this: the more immersed we are in something, the more enjoyable it can be. The more engaged we are, the more we are the process, as opposed to observing the process. And when we reach that state of total immersion… well, there’s no greater feeling.

On a different level, that same concept could be why MyWebDNA is proving effective. It’s essentially total search immersion: you are the filter.

What do you think? Show of hands, please: who’s up for a game of Breakout?

Greetings, world. And salutations. Allow me to introduce myself: I’m Kaila, here to instigate and invigorate an interchange of ideas. We’ll primarily focus on Web 3.0, but who knows where our conversation may lead? Into the great depths of our humanity, I hope, and to a place where we’ll begin to question what we really care about. Welcome to the next generation.