] Hayes says he doesn't have any big regrets.
]
] Every once in a while he runs into a former employee who
] wishes the company was still in business.
]
] "I tell them, 'Don't worry about that. Just be proud of
] what we accomplished because we changed the world.' "

An interesting article for any old sk001 BBS d00ds, but more interesting for anyone who's owned their own business.

Modem moguls' paths diverge

] Unquestionably, the solutions to many current problems,
] the treatments for many illnesses, and the pathways to
] new businesses have already been invented, but they are
] waiting on the sidelines.

...

] it's not only innovation that
] matters, it's the rate at which innovations are
] improved and brought to market. And this has declined
] precipitously since the bust. The result is a surplus of
] innovations, with vast numbers of potentially important
] advances being warehoused or shelved. This situation is
] alarming enough in itself, but even more worrisome is the
] fact that innovations don't have an unlimited shelf
] life: they are perishable and risk becoming unusable when
] the people associated with them move on to other
] endeavors. Another reason for concern is that warehoused
] innovations remain untested and deprived of the iterative
] improvements so critical to their journey from inception
] to implementation.

you have to register for this, but it's a great article on how innovation has accelerated but the conduit for commercializing it has essentially collapsed. This has validated my thinking on the subject, but changed my perceptions on it quite a bit. Upto now, I had considered it a purely supply-demand problem, but it is more complex than that as the system that transforms innovation into the mainstream has matured and atrophied to some degree. The system is irrevocably changing.

Our Innovation Backlog

] From on-board radar and Wi-Fi to electronic steering,
] amazing technologies already here or soon coming promise
] to create a new automotive era

More propaganda from Detroit and Stuttgart.

21st Century Cars Hit the Road

] The vast majority of the 2.7 million job losses since the
] 2001 recession began were the result of permanent changes
] in the U.S. economy and are not coming back, which means
] the labor market will not regain strength until new
] positions are created in novel and dynamic economic
] sectors, a Federal Reserve Bank of New York study has
] concluded.

Like I was saying...

Jobs cut since 2001 are gone for good, study says

] U.S. manufacturers shed another 44,000 workers in August
] -- their 37th consecutive month of job losses. Bush,
] expressing concern about the continued decline of
] manufacturing, said Monday that he planned to appoint a
] new assistant commerce secretary to help the troubled
] sector.

Forget it. The US has lost those jobs forever, and because of advances in technology, our productivity is higher than ever. We're basically screwing ourselves.

U.S. continues to shed jobs

I thought this was timely, given our discussion on Odlyzko's paper.

TVs Join The Wireless Grid

] In an era of double-digit percentage increases in health
] premiums and a general consumer backlash against
] insurers, it's a pitch that has been gaining traction in
] recent years. American Healthways manages the equivalent
] of approximately 850,000 health plan members, more than
] double what it did two years ago. The new business helped
] American Healthways nearly triple its earnings in 2002,
] and analysts expect profits to grow in excess of 50% this
] year. Annual revenues are expected to eclipse $160
] million.

American Healthways creating a buzz

So I've been crunching on this for months. Actually since Terrence first told me about what Tom was trying to do, and even more so since I saw Tom demo Memestreams at PhreakNIC in October of 02. We've had numerous discussions about the potential for reputation systems in general, and Memestreams specifically. But I could never figure out a model that a) made money unequivocably and b) didn't smack of dot.com funk. But now I think I've found one that fits.

I just recently started working at a healthcare company that is growing very rapidly and is becoming very successful. Yay! for me to not be unemployed anymore. But one of the tasks I have in front of me is looking at knowledge management (KM) systems and processes. Part of this is due to the rapid growth of the company, who's core product is 'knowledge' about how to treat a person who has serious chronic illness. The other part is related to some organizational development changes within the company.

I'm a big fan of KM. I've preached it for about a decade. It's definitely helped my career out. I've even tried applying it in one of my companies, to much intangible success. It's a Good Thing(tm) to use as our workforce populace becomes more and more comfortable with technology's pervasivness, and the importance of sharing information and expertise electronically.

One of the biggest challenges with implementing KM into an organization is getting people to utilize it. If you've never had any KM process or tools, then you probably think that you can live without them. Why change? Change is hard and painful and I'm doing my job just fine thank you cuz my performance eval from last quarter says so. Besides, we don't need no stinking message boards to talk to each other.

Typically, businesses will try and 'incentivize' (dot.com word) employees to utilize the systems in place. In some cases, they can get as Nazi as requiring you to put certain reports or follow a certain process. But this is hit or miss at best because as we all know, some managers will dismiss the KM process as 'fluff' and circumvent it. They won't require their reports to utilize it, and may even punish those that do. Another key challenge here is how do you incentivize it? You could say that the employee who contributes the most to the KM systems gets a bigger bonus than those who don't. But you could just keep ringing up posts of nonsense and still win that battle. And that got me thinking....

What's sorely needed in KM is reputation. And this could be the catalyst that incents utilization. If you had a reputation system in place, then it would be very easy to determine who was contributing the most USEFUL knowledge into the system, and bonuses and other incentives could be based on reputation capital. This could very easily motivate people to deposit info into the KM systems, and really motivate them to partake of that knowledge, because it would be required to increase one's reputation.

Of course the normal social network issues would apply, such as all your friends banding together to increase eachother's reputation capital regardless of quality. But I think there is adequate work in that area to minimize 'fixing' the system.

So the bottomline here is that Memestreams could easily plug into a lot of toolsets used in the KM universe (mailing lists, BBS's, content management, change management, etc) as a reputation engine to help drive up utilization. You get the benefit of working with a B2B market, in a very legitimate and hot sector, and you're solving a very real problem with adoption of that sector. Bling Bling!

] "Telecommuting and unions just don't mix."

Organizing Telecommuters

] Wilson says the entrepreneurs he wants to back now are
] people who come out of specific industries, and thus
] understand the problems and how customers would use the
] technology.

This article is hilarious. Basically it's the VCs saying that they are just now realizing that tech infrastructure business are now maturing and the real investments are in applying technology. DuH!

A Bubble-Era VC Is Itching to Get Started Again