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The New Economics of Quality Television

November 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The scheme worked. And it’s about to work again, this time in a way that nobody anticipated.

First time out, it was the early 1980s, and the new cable industry was winning a lot of franchises from municipal governments, and making a lot of promises. Among them: all sorts of new television channels. The scheme: customers pay a few dollars each month, and if enough households subscribe, there will be enough money for lots of new television programs. These days, over 100 million subscribers pay over $150 per month—that’s $150,000,000 x 12 months each year, enough money for Comcast to buy NBC and Universal Pictures.

Alpha House

Here comes the next scheme, the next game changer. You’ve probably heard about Amazon Prime’s entry into the television programming space. According to the NY Times, here’s how the process worked:

After an invitation by the company, some 5,000 scripts were submitted last year, and in the spring, 14 pilots were commissioned. Amazon then stood back and watched what 215 million active customers clicked on.

There are no commercials. There is a kind-of, sort-of subscription fee. Amazon is a company that sells a lot of products by mail. They compete with other companies that sell a lot of products by mail. One way to encourage Amazon customer loyalty is with a loyalty program that involves discounts. Amazon’s discount program is called Amazon Prime. You pay $79 per year, and you don’t have to pay for shopping. As an incentive, you can watch a growing number of television shows and movies. Some are free. Most are available pay-per-view for a few dollars.

In days past, television programs were produced to “sell soap.” The commercials paid the cost of operating the network and the cost of producing the program.

Now, television programs are being produced to “pay the shipping cost of the soap.” Somehow, this seems lower on the food chain. Will it work?

Amazon Prime offerYup. Why? Because Amazon, and Netflix, and to some extent Hulu, are not carrying 20th century baggage. They operate by analyze the actual viewing habits of real customers. It’s a good model and a not-so-good model. The good: their judgments will be right much more often than they are wrong. And that provides a solid foundation for a business. The not-so-good: gut instinct, loyalty, and softer judgments will ride a rougher road. In an extreme situation, where machines make all of the decisions, there would be no Seinfeld, no situation where an eager program convinced other executives to stick with a show despite its crumby ratings. In real world, that programmer’s ability to persuade will be blunted, not all of the time, but often, because the “data doesn’t lie.”

Of course, the arguments crumble when the actual process of making television programs enters the argument. Writers don’t much care about data, they care about story. As long as the distribution is reaching a large audience with sufficient promotion, and as long as they are paid a good fee, actors and directors don’t much care about the intricacies of new media distribution. Or do they? That’s the part where the game could change. The economics of Amazon and other data-based program services are vastly different from advertising and subscription models.

Why? Because data-based services do not solely rely upon the old-school revenue streams. Amazon’s game is global branding to drive mail order purchases for every available product in the world to every country in the world. If they need to pay John Goodman a dozen times what NBC would consider reasonable, that’s fine with Amazon. Their purpose changes the economics of the game. And because Amazon and its kin are working with data and  operating without the need to fill a 24/7 schedule, they can focus their resources on actual viewing habits, actual consumption patterns, and they can provide producers and writers and directors with moment-by-moment viewer data (when the viewer paused, when the viewer dumped out, how often the viewer re-watched the episode). When creative people learn to use this information in a productive way (imagine the creative battles before all of this settles down), the paradigm will shift, and no film student will graduate without a thorough understanding of data analysis in the creative process.

Armed with endless data, a global marketplace, (effectively) endless cash, and the ability to engage the biggest stars for whatever purpose Amazon deems necessary, the game change is about to begin.

BTW: I thought the Alpha House pilot was very good, entertaining, unpretentious, avoiding the nasty tedium that ultimately limited my fascination with House of Cards. Whether a computer made the judgement, or some clever program executives made it happen, I’ve gotta say “good job.” I look forward to watching the episodes in series, and discovering what else Amazon is unleashing.

Filed Under: Trends, TV & New Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Big Ideas Simply Explained

March 10, 2013 by 2 Comments

Three subjects that I can never seem to understand as completely as I would like:

  • Philosophy
  • Economics
  • Psychology

Whenever I read a book about any of these subjects, I feel like a student, which means, I am reading because duty requires me to complete the book. The subjects interest me, but too many of the books I have read on these subjects are dreary, slow-moving, too dense with ideas for any reasonable person to sort out and retain their valuable understanding. Pictures help, but many of the ideas held within these disciplines are difficult to illustrate with anything better than wordy diagrams.

A year or so ago, I noticed a series of three books put together by Dorling Kindersley (DK)’s collaborative teams in the UK and India. They’ve got the formula right, and as a result, I have spent the last year happily browsing, and learning, from:

  • The Philosophy Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained
  • The Economics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained
  • The Psychology Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

A month or so ago, the same company released The Politics Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, and at some point, I’ll get to that one, too. Right now, I’m still working my way through the first three volumes (about 1,000 pages total).

Three DK BooksSo what’s so special?

First,there is no single author. The collaborative approach focuses on presentation, clarity and consistency. This is less the work of a brilliant psychology teacher, more like a good old fashioned browse through, say, The World Book Encyclopedia from days of old. The type treatments are bold. There are pull-out quotes. There is color. No single idea runs more than a few pages. Everything is presented in a logical flow. There are boxes filled with biographical details. There is a clear statement of predecessor ideas and influences for each idea, and there is an equally clear statement about those in the future who built upon each idea. There are color pictures and diagrams. It’s tidy, presented for smart adult readers but certainly suitable research material for any school report.

The Philosophy Book is written by four academics and two writers: Will Buckingham is a philosopher and novelist with a special interest in the interplay between philosophy and narrative storytelling. Marcus Weeks is a writer, and author. Clive Hill is an academic focused on intellectualism in the modern world. Douglas Burnham is a philosophy professor and prolific writer on the subject. Peter J. King is a doctor of Philosophy who lectures at Pembroke College, University of Oxford. John Marenborn is a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, UK, whose expertise is medieval philosophy. Taken as a group, they’ve got their philosophical bases covered (each of the books is put together by a team with similar skills). Marcus Weeks is the connection between all three books.

The bright yellow Philosophy book introduces the whole idea in comfortable language:

Philosophy is…a chance simply to wonder what life and the universe are all about…Philosophy is not so much about coming up with the answers to fundamental questions as it is about the process of trying to find out those answers, using reasoning rather than accepting…conventional views or conventional authority.”

So begins an introductory essay that introduces debate and dialogue, existence and knowledge, logic and language, morality, religion, and systems of thought and beliefs. A red color burst is the bridge into a timeline that begins the conversation in 624 B.C.E. And so, early on, we meet Pythagoras, who should be famous for more than his geometric theorem. In 428 B.C.E.–that’s about 2,500 years ago–Pythagorus developed a remarkable idea, that everything in the universe conforms to mathematical rules and ratios, and determined that this was true both of forms and ideas. Pythagorus was the leader of a religious cult, in which he was the Messiah, and his followers thought of his work as revelations. Here was a man for whom reasoning was the secret of the universe. He wrote, or said:

There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.”

And:

Reason is immortal. All else is mortal.”

SiddharthaTurn the page and there’s Siddhartha Gautama and Buddhism’s four noble truths, explained in terms that anybody can understand, followed by the Eightfold Path presented in the Dharma Wheel. Siddhartha is covered in four good pages, and then, it’s time for Confucius and his Five Conscious Relationships.

All three of these men–Pythagorus, Siddhartha and Confucius–lived and worked around 500 B.C.E. More or less, they were contemporaries. A century later, philosophy turns to what is later called science, as Democritus and Leucippus come with the idea of atoms and the emptiness of space. (Seemed very early to me, too!) At about the same time, this from Socrates:

The life which is unexamined is not worth living.”

Jumping ahead to the middle of the book, Britain’s David Hume is considering human nature in the mid-1700s, and, in particular, the ways we cobble together facts:

In our reasonings concerning fact, there are all imaginable degrees of assurance. A wise man therefore proportions his beliefs to the evidence.”

Thinking in the present day, Palestinian philosopher Edward Said criticizes imperialism, Australian Peter Singer advocates for animal rights, and Bulgarian-born French philosopher Julia Kristeva questions the relationship between feminism and power. It’s a large field, and with The Philosophy Book, it’s possible for the average person to navigate with greater confidence than before.

The other two books are equally good.

The Economics Book begins with an article about Thomas Aquinas’s thoughts on prices, markets, and morality; the provision of public goods with thoughts by David Hume, whose words from the 1700s certainly resonate today:

Where the riches are engrossed by a few, these must contribute very largely to the supplying of the public necessities.”

Hume is among the few whose ideas appear in more than one of these volumes. And–I just noticed–The Philosophy Book tends to be stories about the people behind the ideas, The Economics Book tends more toward the ideas with less frequent stories about the people behind them (often because economic ideas are credited to multiple sources, I suppose). Making our way through The Age of Reason (“man is a cold, rational calculator;” “the invisible hand of the market brings order”);  on to economic bubbles (beginning with tulip mania in 1640); game theory and John (A Beautiful Mind) Nash; market uncertainty, Asian Tiger economies, the intersection of GDPs and women’s issues, inequality and economic growth, and more. Great book, but a bit slower going than Philosophy.

Psych Book SpreadThird in the trilogy is the bright red volume, The Psychology Book. As early as the year 190 in the current era, Galen of Pergamon (in today’s Turkey) is writing about the four temperaments of personality–melancholic, phlegmatic, choleric, and sanguine. Rene Descartes bridges all three topics–Philosophy, Economics and Psychology overlap with one another–with his thinking on the role of the body and the role of the mind as wholly separate entities. We know the name Binet (Alfred Binet) from the world of standardized testing, but the core of his thinking has nothing whatsoever to do with standardized thinking. Instead, he believed that intelligence and ability change over time. In his early testing, Binet intended to capture a helpful snapshot of one specific moment in a person’s development. And so the tour through human (and animal) behavior continues with Pavlov and his dogs, John B. Watson and his use of research to build the fundamentals of advertising, B.F. Skinner’s birds, Solomon Asch’s experiments to uncover the weirdness of social conformity, Stanley Milgram’s creepy experiments in which people inflict pain on others, Jean Piaget on child development, and work on autism by Simon Baron-Cohen (he’s Sacha Baron Cohen’s cousin).

When I was in high school and college,  I was exposed to all of this stuff, but only a small amount remained in my mind. Perhaps that was because I was also trying to read the complete works of Shakespeare, a book a week of modern utopian fiction, The Canterbury Tales, and studying geology at the same time. In high school and college, these topics were just more stuff to plough through. No context, no life experience, no connection to most of the material. Now, as an adult, it’s different. Like everyone I know, and everyone you know, I’m still juggling way too much in an average week, but I can now read this material with a real hope of understanding and retaining the material. Cover to cover, times three, these books will take you a year or two, but… without a test the next morning, you’ll be surprised how interesting philosophy, psychology and economics turn out to be. Just read them in your spare time, and behold (great word, “behold”) the ways in which humans have put it all together over several millennia. It’s a terrific story!

Filed Under: Books & Print, Creative, International, Learning, Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Digital Hollywood (in NYC)

March 6, 2013 by 1 Comment

Summit300x250Digital Hollywood is an ongoing series of media industry conferences held, mostly, in Los Angeles, New York, and Las Vegas. Generally, the conferences focus on media, advertising, programming, consumer behavior, financing of new media, technical platforms and marketing. I have spoken at several of these conferences. This week, in Manhattan, I attended the 2013 Media Summit (their tenth anniversary, by the way). I listened to perhaps a dozen panels populated by industry insiders. And learned.

OreoI learned about the relationship between Oreo cookies and social networking. As ridiculous conversations go, this is sublime. The argument in favor of social networking for cookies goes back to the old arguments about the ultimate value of brand awareness, which remains exceedingly difficult to measure. Still, the hipster panel insisted that there is a new of thinking required here (suspend disbelief). The terminology has revolved, but the arguments echo dot.com marketing strategies circa 1999. Still, the idea of an entire brand team approving Tweets in real time at, say, the Super Bowl, is an image worth remembering. Why? Because marketing teams are no so complicated, and for large brands, so scattered among specialist agencies and specialized departments within larger agencies, with so many complicated political games, consensus has become difficult to achieve. In the brand marketing universe, there is great importance placed on 21st century marketing, doing incredibly cool stuff, and keeping/gaining clients through innovation. Ask the average person whether any of this affected their decision to buy a pack of Oreos, or to eat an Oreo, and it’s unlikely that they would make a connection between the cookie and any of these campaigns.

At another session, I learned about the industry’s high hopes for the new MPEG-DASH format.

The term KPI (Key Performance Indicators) was probably most-often-uttered. In a consumer marketing environment whose changes are both difficult to measure (too much data, too many variables), agencies and corporate marketers are trying to figure out which indicators actually matter. CPM (Cost per Thousand, a long-standing audience measure that is common currency among agencies and media) is losing favor. One might measure brand impact, but there is little agreement about how this can or should be done with any degree of standardization. Nielsen is not well respected; there was consensus that this method of sampling was silly. If I correctly recall, a comparison was drawn as follows: instead of using supermarket cash register data to measure the store’s activity, the Nielsen approach is more similar to asking one in twelve individual shoppers what they purchased.

Verizon Media Server. For more, click on the pic to go to The Verge.

Verizon Media Server. For more, click on the pic to go to The Verge.

I found conversations about large tech companies and their platform strategies to be especially interesting. Verizon’s panelist complained about their high costs of set top boxes, and told attendees about a new Verizon Media Server that would serve all sorts of client devices throughout the house. If I understand this strategy correctly, Verizon wants to charge a monthly fee for Internet and program services, for the connection between home and outside network, and for a single box in each subscriber household. Microsoft claims that half of XBox use is non-videogame, so it is now thinking in terms of program service subscriptions (not unlike Verizon), and producing its own programming (like Netflx and Amazon). Much smaller Boxee is thinking in terms of a cloud-based DVR not only for television programs, but for all types of audio-video media.

One fascinating idea: will consumers control their own data? For example, when I use E-ZPass, or when you browse Amazon or search Google, or watch a VOD or DVR file, where does this data go, where is it stored, and what permission is required for access? Maybe I want all of my data stored by, say, the American Red Cross, which may, in some wildly imaginative future, repackage and resell the donated data in accordance with personal donor’s wishes?

Another: the role of intellectual propery attorneys who must, due to the nature of their profession, remain in a 20th century approach that transforms copyrights into cash, and blocks unauthorized access or use with vigorous enforcement. I mentioned the phrase Creative Commons as part of a question, and only one person in the room of one hundred seemed to understand what was meant by the forward-thinking term. Still, the attorney panel was brilliant in their discussion of negotiation strategies:

  • Start with a phone conversation, do not rely upon emails. Establish a personal relationship based upon humor, warmth, personal connections.
  • Today, there are so many people, projects, companies – slow down, think about partners, need to educate the other side, develop an understanding of everybody’s strengths.
  • Take ego out of the equation.
  • Do not hold grudges, and do not allow yourself to assume anything resembling a victim mentality.
  • Do not make it personal.
  • In television and Internet video, the buyer’s creative team establishes deliverables based upon their own set of standards, but these people do not negotiate the deals. Instead, this work is done by a business affairs team that is closely aligned with the finance department. Be careful about allowing business affairs or finance to control the conversation. If they push too hard–as they often do because they are paid to control their company’s interests–then the creative team will not get the project they ordered, and the producer will, inevitably, be blamed. if the conversation shifts into an unacceptable zine, do not hesitate to suggest that the business affairs staff bring in the creative staff to reset expectations, and, perhaps better yet, off to do so yourself. often, the business affairs response to this awkward request will be: “no, we will deal with this internally,” and then, well, every situation is different.
  • Be very careful about “this is a deal breaker” or drawing a line in the sand.
  • No two deals are ever the same, even if the same people are involved.
  • Moving to yet another panel, I liked the term “Selective Consumption.” Roughly, it seems to mean a a presorted, highly personalized, behavior-based list of currently aailable media assets that miraculously (digitally, enabled by artificial intelligence and algorithms) anticipates each individual consumer need of the nanosecond.

Other interesting ideas and notes:

  • When designing a multi platform, transmedia approach, it’s easy to develop a visual identity on your own platforms but quite difficult to manage this level of control over third party platforms (because each has its own unique technical and design standards and its own strategic agenda).
  • The industry has made something of a mess in the consumer household where multiple boxes, screen interfaces, access codes, remote controls, and a lack of standardization now results in considerable frustration and “we’re not responsible, go talk to those people over there” interoperability problems. Not much progress in this area; in fact, things will probably get a lot worse before the industry gets ahead of the problem.
  • An interesting discussion about “who is the voice of the brand?” Is it the Chief Marketing Officer, the senior agency account person, or the twenty something with her hand on the Twitter keyboard? Plans are made months in advance and approve queues are common practice, but real time communication via social networks seems to subvert these plans. Lots of damage can be done, and so quickly! Then again, there is the urgency of timely messages about (or by) Oreo cookies.
  • About 30 percent of Verizon FiOS use is non-TV. People are shifting, rapidly, to tablets and away from TV for their PRIMARY video viewing experience. That seems significant.
Filed Under: Mobile, Trends, TV & New Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Big Data, Bigger Ideas

March 2, 2013 by 1 Comment

face pic human face

Every animate and inanimate object on earth will soon be generating data, including our homes, our cars, and yes, even our bodies”— Anthony D. Williams on the back of a big book entitled The Human Face of Big Data

From the dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated give exabytes of data. Now, we produce five exabytes every two days.” — Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman, Google

The average person today processes more data in a single day than a person in the 1500s did in an entire lifetime.

…Big Data is much more than big data. It’s also the ability to extract meaning: to sort through masses of numbers and find the hidden pattern, the unexpected correlation, th surprising connection. That ability is growing at astonishing speed, it won’t be long before Amazon’s ability to dazzle customers by suggesting just the right book will seem as quaint as our ancestors’s amazement at horseless carriages.– Dan Gardner, from the book’s introduction

human face big dataClearly, big data is a massive idea. Let’s see if we can’t break it down, if not by components, then, at least, by illustrations of classes and contexts.

The connection between data collection and pattern recognition is not new. In fact, we know the earliest example, which still exists, in book form, in a small, private Library of Human Imagination in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The book is called Bills of Mortality, and it records the weekly causes of death for London in 1664. This data was used to study the geographic (block-by-block) growth of the plague, and to take measures to prevent its future growth.

Two hundred gigabytes per day may not seem like much data, not in the days when you can buy a terabyte drive from Staples for a hundred bucks or so, but collect that much data day and day out, for a few years, and the warehouse becomes a busy place. That’s what MIT Media Lab’s Seb Roy did to learn how his newborn son learned language. The work was done at home with eleven cameras and fourteen microphones recording the child’s every move, every sound. The recording part of the project is over–their son is now seven years old–but analysis of “unexpected connections between the routines of everyday life and how one child learned his first words” continues as a research project.

On the other end of the age scale, there’s Magic Carpet, now in prototype. The carpet contains sensors and accelerometers. When installed in the home of, say, a senior, the carpet observes, records, and learns the person’s typical routine, which it uses as a baseline for further analysis. Then, “the system checks constantly for sudden (or gradual) abnormalities. If Mom is moving more slowly than usual, or it’s 11 a.m., And her bedroom door still hasn’t opened, the system sends an alert to a family member or physician.”

Often, big data intersects with some sort of mapping project. Camden, New Jersey’s Doctor Jeffrey Brenner “built a map linking hospital claims to patient addresses. He analyzed patterns of data, and the result took him by complete surprise: just one percent of patients, about 1,000 people, accounted for 30 percent of hospital bills because these patients were showing up in the hospital time after time…a microcosm for what’s going on in the whole country (in) emergency room visits and hospital admissions…” Subsequently, he established the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers to help address this “costly dysfunction.” He collected the data, analyzed it, then brought out meaningful change at a local level.

One of the many superb photographs depicting the intersection between human life and technology use. The book was put together by Rick Smolan, an extraordinary photographer, curator and compiler whose past work includes A Day in the The Life of America and other books in that series.

One of the many superb photographs depicting the intersection between human life and technology use. The book was put together by Rick Smolan, an extraordinary photographer, curator and compiler whose past work includes A Day in the The Life of America and other books in that series.

Yes, there’s a very scary dark side. Bad people could turn off 60,000 pacemakers via their Internet connections. A real time, technology enabled 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai killed 172 people and injured 300 more thanks to Blackberries, night vision goggles, satellite phones and other devices.

If you control the code, you control the world. There has not been an operating system or a technology that has not been hacked.

Fortunately, the good guys have tools on their side, too. The $40 million Domain Awareness System in Manhattan includes “an array of 3,000 cameras known as ‘The Ring of Steel” that monitor lower and midtown Manhattan as well as license plate readers, radiation detectors, relevant 911 calls, arrest records, related crimes, and vast files on characteristics such as tattoos, body marks, teeth, and even limps. They can also track a suspicious vehicle through time to the many locations where it has been over previous days and weeks.”

Google’s self-driving car is safer than a human-controlled vehicle because the digital car can access and process far more information more quickly than today’s humans.

By 2020, China will complete Compass/Beidou-2. This advanced navigation system will outperform the current (and decades old) GPS system. Greater precision will be used for public safety (emergency response, for example), commercial use (fishing, automotive), and, inevitably, for far more productive war.

Data can mean the difference between life death when the weather turns ugly. Thousands of lives are saved each year by weather earnings in wealthier countries. Yet thousands of lives are lost in poor ones when monsoons, tornadoes and other storms strike with little public warning, an intensifying threat as the planet warms,,,

If you’ve ever wondered what Amazon’s true business is, or why it uses the name of a gigantic river, the answer is big data. Ultimately, Amazon intends to become a public utility for computing services. Take a careful look at Amazon Prime and you will see a prototype. The streaming side of PBS and Netflix are among the enterprises enabled by Amazon’s big data operations.

For FedEx, “the information about the package is as important as the package itself.”

human face big data movementsWhether its eliminating malaria or making art, text messaging for blood donors or tracking asteroids, the future will be defined by the collection, analysis and use of big data. It will shape our individual knowledge about our own bodies, our children’s growth and our parents’ health, our collective tendencies for public good, safety, and bad behavior. It will be embedded in robots and intelligent systems that may, soon, control aspects of life that we once considered wholly human endeavors. It is a change of epic proportions and yet, most of us are unaware of its importance.

The book, The Human Face of Big Data, along with its related website and app, provide a useful gateway into this brave new world.

Filed Under: Books & Print, International, Learning, Photography & Videography, Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Amazon: Any Thing, Any Where, Any Time

February 20, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Amazon-HiddenEmpireFaberNovel is a website filled with interesting, well, I’m not sure what to call these packages of visual information. They’re kinda sorta PowerPoint presentations, but they feel more like a new kind of business book.

Originally, I was going to tell you that there’s a good (updated 2013) story of how Amazon is taking over the world. The presentation, above, tells a compelling tale about how the e-commerce giant has grown, offering considerable detail on the business side, and lots of insight about Amazon’s likely future.

As I went through the 84 slides, I became curious about who was telling the story, and became interested in FaberNovel, the publisher who offers this material under a Creative Commons license. As I browsed, I found an All About Google FaberNovel, too. And another about Google, Facebook, HTML5, the list is both impressive and multi-lingual (that is, presentations are available in multiple languages).

The stories are well-told, simply illustrated, and rely upon diagrams and other simple PowerPoint graphic techniques (nobody will be impressed by the visuals, but the stories are good; Edward Tufte’s magic wand would greatly benefit this material).

I’d start with the Amazon story because it contains so many “oh, that’s why!” or “that’s how, that’s a really good idea” or “what an awesome story of business strategy.” moments. Some of it is likely to be familiar, but it’s unlikely that most people have connected the dots. Sure, 84 pages may seem like a lot, but it’s not more than a half-hour of your life, unless you’re a serious student of e-commerce business.

Interesting discovery.

Filed Under: Books & Print, International, Learning, Mobile, Trends, TV & New Media Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Unreasonable

December 27, 2012 by Leave a Comment

As the year winds down, a call-out to some unreasonable people.

One is called The Unreasonable Institute.

Why We Exist: To create a world in which no one is limited by their circumstances.
Our Mission: To unlock entrepreneurial potential to overcome our world’s greatest challenges.

Three recent college graduates decided to take on the world’s biggest problems–no shortage of idealism here–by causing interactions between promising entrepreneurs with big ideas, mentors, and funders. They do all of this–quite reasonably, I might add–by having everybody work and live together in a big house for several weeks. I’m not sure that “institute” (their term) is the ideal description, but this combination networking fest and dorm experience makes a lot of sense. There are lots of informal interactions between smart, interested, connected people who want to make things happen. I love this idea, and I suspect you will, too.

The second is called Charity: Water.

charity: water is a non-profit organization bringing clean and safe drinking water to people in developing nations.

Two simple ideas here. One is clean water for everyone, everywhere in the world. That’s a tremendous challenge, one that can be solved only on a local level, well-by-well, source-by-source. It’s also a transformative idea: clean water means healthier people, far less time each day caring for the ill; empowerment of women (who, in many places in the world, expend an enormous amount of time at the well or other source, and carrying water home).

20121227-172439.jpg

To play the video, please click on the image.

Both are mentioned here are examples of a new way of thinking about the world’s problems: a small entrepreneurial group with big ideas, unique approaches to management, operations and funding, plenty of attention to details, and, far less reliance upon large organizations to provide solutions. And one more thing: the internet is central to the success of these new conceptions. Be sure to explore Charity: Water’s use of internet mapping for every project, a solid example of things to come.

BTW: while searching for a link, I ran into a Huffington Post story that explains the trend in more detail. It’s definitely worth reading, especially at a time of year when we’re all trying to figure out how to do it even better next week.

Filed Under: Creative, International, Trends Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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