I remember reading a story from Paolo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” that essentially gave the message – don’t rip people off, because that is somewhat like stealing. I don’t have the book at hand because I gave all of my copies away, but I remember the moral to the story. Essentially, it was a story about doing fair deals, and making sure you are creating enough value from trade for both parties to profit.
For some companies, I think it eludes them that their core objective – create value; and that driver of growth is creating value for their customer. More benefit, lower cost.
There is one sure fire way of making sure that the equilibrium of the cost to the benefit is found, balancing the price and the value to a prospective customer – that is by using auctions. I’ve always believed that this was a way to find economic justice, but until now it hasn’t necessarily always been practical.
However, Google is showing us the way, as is evident in this article from Stephen Levy @ Wired.
As we move to a more efficient future (since that is where the quick wins are) - expect this trend to continue
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I recently had an interesting discussion with Darren following his cry “Collaboration is a myth” as he tried to find real world examples of collaboration. he framed the question in an interesting way, “What motivates people on Wikipedia to do stuff in concert like that. What is the essence of what we call collaboration?”
At first I thought it came down to two things, user stake in the objective, and user effort required for contribution. These must be balanced against each other. the lower the effort for contribution, the less that needs to be at stake for collaboration participation.
Darren then mused if you could achieve collaboration for business processes, where the user stake in a larger company can be exceptionally minimal.
“Can the gap be bridged purely by technology? - a technology which truly brought collaboration to the workplace”
At first, I thought no, if effort is required and user stake largely removed, can technology bridge the gap to achieve any kind of collaborative work. But then I remembered a great talk from TED,
that showed us that in fact there are times when we will very willingly do something for nothing. that is when we are at play.
there are actually already examples of this type of collaboration in the real world – here are two:
http://images.google.com/imagelabeler/
and
Play Pumps
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dataThe correct place for manufacturer information is on the GS1 database, right next to the barcode. GS1 does a great job of providing a global standard to uniquely identify products, but the reality is that the richness of this information, and ease of access to it is extremely limited.
The incentives of product manufacturers is to sell as much product as possible, and there is overwhelming amounts of evidence to suggest that more information help conversion. Yet, when a manufacturer goes to do this there are a multitude of channels that they need to do it – many of which are competing with each other and benefit from making it harder for the other guy to have access to this information. All the while, the manufacturer and the consumer lose because of middle men.
The obvious solution to this is to have an API to access the GS1 database – I envisaged a product wiki in the absence of any progress from GS1. It seems we have a better database of uniquely identified people accessible to all developers through Facebook Connect, than we do of products.
A massive amount of services would benefit from this, including Lasoo and all its competitors, but the real winners would be manufacturers and consumers.
Kudos to Shopsavvy for their pressure, pointing in the right direction.
