Will 3D Printing Transform The World -- Or Just Fill It With Non-Biodegradable Personalized Junk?

from the what-a-load-of-rubbish dept

It's clear that 3D printing has moved well beyond the breathless novelty stage, and is entering the breathless hype phase, with everyone declaring that it's the next big thing, and that it will transform the world etc. etc. etc. There's no denying it's a powerful technology with great possibilities. But against a background of uncritical boosterism, it's good to come across an article in the Architectural Review that points out some of the problems we will need to address to realize its full potential. Here's one:

We could start by properly critiquing the impacts of this technology beginning with a much deeper analysis of the materials used, the energy and resource requirements, and the supply chains that result in printed objects. Fully characterising the current production systems may help us to understand how they could be developed into ecosystems of exchange where the coveted objects can be meaningfully recycled by our biosphere.

It's all very well being able to print objects on demand, but unless the ecological implications -- both in terms of the raw materials used and the energy required -- are considered, it may well be that 3D printing is actually a step backwards when it comes to environmental impact. The ability to re-cycle 3D-printed objects needs to be built in from the start.

Another problem is more subtle:

If 3-D printing does not fully take on this responsibility then the sustainability of our current highly 'customised' objects is likely to be under scrutiny, as the unit cost of printers falls and hobbyists make legions of white elephants out of toxic plastics and when our landfills are chock-a-block with yesterday's badly made fashionable shapes. And while some -- such as ultrasound embryo portraits -- may have enduring sentimental value, it is likely that most will simply clutter up our rubbish dumps and precipitate our plastic marine continents as indestructible rubbish icebergs.

As this points out, if we are not careful, the personal manufacturing revolution may become the 3D equivalent of Geocities: a huge flood of badly-designed, useless pieces of junk that are soon abandoned by their embarrassed creators.

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Filed Under: 3d printing, innovation, waste

Xbox One Sales Lag PS4 As Microsoft Slowly Figures Out You Can't Tell Gamers What They're Supposed To Want

from the It's-innovative-because-I-say-so dept

Microsoft's Xbox One console (now affectionately referred to as the "Xbone") obviously had a rocky start, with the company having to back away from some of their more obnoxious DRM ambitions (and admittedly a smattering of actually interesting ideas) in response to user backlash. That effectively gave them public perception issues right out of the gate as the next-generation console wars got underway. That allowed Sony to enjoy a stretch of great press simply for giving consumers what they actually wanted and they had assumed was baseline functionality (like oh, the ability to still rent games).

Unsurprisingly, the latest data from the NPD Group suggests Microsoft's stumbles have contributed to Sony selling twice as many PlayStation 4 consoles during the month of January. That's despite some PS4 supply constraints in North America, and the fact that Sony's console has yet to even launch in their home country of Japan. As any good fanboy worth their salt will tell you, it's far too early to read too much into these results. Still, there's numerous obvious lessons here that still somehow haven't penetrated the somewhat thick, public perception shell known to ensconce the Redmond giant.

Microsoft could probably obliterate much of Sony's lead by simply cutting the price by $100 to match the $400 PS4. That, however, would require lopping off the gimmicky head known as their Kinect motion-sensing attachment, something Microsoft seems insistent on believing everybody still finds immensely innovative. Except the lion's share of gamers (there's always exceptions) grew bored with the concept of full-body game controls somewhere in late 2010 (or about two days after it was released). There's also the fact that the new-but-still-gimmicky Kinect 2.0 still just doesn't work very well for many people:

"The Kinect for the Xbox One is a sophisticated, expensive piece of equipment that adds very little to the act of playing games. I'm able to get voice commands to work around 80 percent of the time, but my wife and children have much worse luck...The system is still new, but every Xbox One owner now has a peripheral that has little reason to exist, aids their gaming in very few real ways and costs them a significant amount of money."

You can assume Microsoft will figure this out and offer an Xbox One without a bundled Kinect -- about seventy meetings, four-thousand internal e-mails, and one year from now.

Another stumble came because while Microsoft wanted the console to be the innovative heart of the television experience, the company lacked the courage or aptitude to make that actually happen. Fundamental technologies required by the audiophile set were oddly excluded, like HDMI 5.1 pass through. Microsoft also sacrificed functionality for control; omitting features available in the last generation of consoles like DLNA streaming and MP3 playback capabilities (one can only assume with the purpose of driving users away from piracy or competing services and toward Microsoft and Microsoft partner content). The Roku 3 does significantly more things on the video and music front arguably better, and it's around $90 and the size of a bloated hockey puck.

While many of these issues can be fixed or improved upon with software updates, Microsoft may not have the aptitude to course-correct their biggest stumble: the decision to hitch their shiny, sleek, new, black spacecraft to the innovatively-skittish donkey known as the traditional cable industry.

As with the Xbox 360, Microsoft seems intent on embracing the cable industry's "TV Everywhere" mentality, where the lion's share of your viewing options only work if you subscribe to a particular company's cable or broadband services (sometimes both are required). Cable executives and Microsoft think hamstringing a powerful game console into being a less functional cable box with a fractured viewing experience is the height of innovation. While Microsoft has been tinkering with original content, if the company was truly interested in embracing next-generation options they would have followed Roku's successful lead and embraced a much broader array of "channels" and services appealing to cord cutters -- like Plex.

The PlayStation 4 isn't exempt from criticism, given it too can't play MP3s and lacks DLNA streaming support also courtesy of anti-piracy myopia, but at least it's a console that appears to understand what it is, and Sony's intentions aren't buried under quite as many layers of assumptions and demands as to what consumers are supposed to desire. These consoles have an immensely-long life cycle and an ocean of updates will change them immeasurably over the next decade for better or worse; I have no doubt Microsoft can manage to keep the Xbox One in the contention if not beyond (competition is useful like that). But Microsoft would certainly take things a long way if they would stop telling consumers want they're supposed to want -- and actually deliver what consumers want.

Filed Under: kinect, playstation, ps4, xbox one
Companies: microsoft, sony

Please Stop Trying To Argue That Netflix Should Be More Like Traditional Cable TV

from the sometimes-change-hurts dept

Just a few years ago, more than a few analysts proudly proclaimed that Netflix had doomed itself with its one-two punch of dysfunction; namely the botched effort to split off their DVR rental and the immensely-disliked round of rate hikes. While both were indeed ugly, a few years later and most customers have long-since forgiven the company, with new users signing up in droves. Most of the analysts that predicted doom have been pretty quiet, though a few have been willing to admit they were wrong, and Netflix's international expansion and growing subscriber counts are pretty impressive considering where Netflix started not long ago.

But where does Netflix need to go from here to win consumer hearts and keep pushing the barriers of television? An article over at Wired claims that the biggest thing missing from the Netflix experience is the ability to channel surf. Or, as Wired suggests, some feature that effectively just lets you turn your brain off and soak up a rotating, automated selection of ambient TV noise -- like lonely people used to do in the olden days:

That's the central problem plaguing both set top boxes like Roku and Apple TV and content services like Netflix and Amazon Instant Video. Instead of letting you lean back and soak up content, these new challengers require decisions–a careful cost-benefit analysis of thousands of different options. If the traditional TV experience is about letting viewers surf channels, today's on-demand video is like giving them a speedboat and forcing them choose a destination before they can even get in the water.

If your biggest problem is that you're awash in too many choices, that really doesn't seem like much of a problem. Many people claim there's not enough content on Netflix, many of these "choices" being an over-abundance of C-grade dreck like Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, or Gor (which are fine, if laughing at horrible film is what you're in the mood for). If ambient, empty-headed noise filling the apartment is all you need, why not just turn on Gigli and read a book?

It doesn't seem like making Netflix more like traditional TV would be doing Netflix any favors. If you recall, more than a few people questioned Netflix's decision to release original series all at once, insisting that this killed the "water cooler" angle of program marketing, where people would gather and hype a program every Monday in the office. As the data came in, it became more and more clear that people really love to binge watch on their own schedule, and as Kevin Spacey himself ultimately pointed out, giving people what they want isn't a bad thing.

Some of the article's other complaints are more valid, like Netflix's continued inability master their own GUI (though the author's headline suggests the traditional cable UI is "quietly brilliant," making me wonder if they've used a Time Warner Cable cable box lately). Netflix also made a mistake with locking out companies who were doing a better job than they were at highlighting new content. But a lot of Netflix's problems, as you can watch the Wired author figure out toward the end of the piece, is that content industry licensing has hamstrung live TV efforts (see: Aereo), better content and real innovation before it starts.

Keep in mind Netflix streaming is relatively young, and while there's a lot of things Netflix needs to do to improve, becoming more like the lowest-ranked industry in the history of customer satisfaction surveys probably isn't among them.

Filed Under: cable, innovation, streaming, television
Companies: netflix

Awesome Stuff: Hacking Your Car, Part II

from the obd-it dept

A few months ago, for our awesome stuff post looking at crowdfunding projects, we did one on hacking your car, highlighting a couple of projects involving OBD devices and software. It seems this market is exploding with other options, and a bunch of them have recently launched crowdfunding campaigns. To be honest, as with any such crowded market, the features of each start to blend together, and it's a bit difficult to tell how any of these are particularly different than the others (or previous ones that are already on the market).

• First up, we've got the OBDLink MX WiFi. These guys keep insisting their offering is better than everyone else's, especially on speed (they claim it's 4x faster than any other competitor) though it seems like you have to trust them that it's true. It uses WiFi, which isn't as common (many, though not all, competitors use bluetooth) and it certainly looks like they've put a lot of thought into making it just work, but it really does seem a bit difficult to distinguish from the competition. Of all the projects listed here today, these guys have (by far) the most traction, already raising over $170,000, well past their $35,000 goal, and they still have nearly a month left on the project. Having seen so many of these devices out there, they tend to gravitate around $100-$150, and the OBDLink guys have made sure that they have a ton of early bird offerings, including some that were as low as $49, though they're all sold out. There are still some $79 ones left, and after that the price jumps to $119.
• Next up, we've got Freematics, which plays up the fact that it's based on Arduino and the goal is to be as open source and flexible as possible on the hardware side. This one definitely seems designed more for those who would be a lot more interested in hacking their own OBD setup. By using Arduino and some built in sensors (accelerometer and gyro) there are definitely more opportunities to do different kinds of things with the Freematics device, though it's arguable how useful those things really are. Still, for someone who wants to dig a little deeper, it's an interesting option. This project is still way below it's $50,000 goal, hovering around $17,000 with about a month to go. It still might make it, but it's going to take a lot of effort. There are a range of prices depending on what hardware you're getting, so it's pretty customizable both for features and budget. However, loading it up with everything, definitely can be a lot pricier than most of the competition. While the basic versions run closer to $100, if you want to include GPS, microSD and various development kids, it goes all the way up to well over $300.
• Next up, we've got the Clickdrive. The marketing around this one is basically all about the apps and the "app market" it will have -- but that still seems to be very much in development, which makes it a tougher sell. Others advertise a variety of apps (including the OBDLink above), but for Clickdrive that seems to be the central selling point, whereas others don't promote their apps as much. The "current" apps really look like the same basic apps pretty much everyone else offers, so focusing so heavily on the apps seems a little strange. They are also promoting it as open platform for others to develop apps, but there's a chicken and egg problem there if no one's using the devices... These guys are asking for $100,000, which is a pretty high target, and they're only around 10% of that with a little over a month to go. And even though this is on Indiegogo, they chose the option to only get the funds if it hits the target, meaning this one has a decent chance of not getting funded. Of course, the fact that the Clickdrive appears to be a lot more expensive than OBD offerings already on the market, and the software isn't as developed, seems like a tough sell. The "earlybird" is $249 and they claim retail will be $359. But that's tough to square with the OBDLink one above being less than half the price with what appear to be more developed apps, or things like Automatic Link which is already on the market for $99.
• Finally, there's the Truvolo, which, again, looks an awful lot like many of the other offerings, making it difficult to find anything that stands out as particularly different. About the only "difference" they highlight is that they have a cloud solution that comes with it to store and sync data -- but we've seen that before with the Fuse project from last year as well -- and like the Fuse, Truvolo is looking to sell premium services at a monthly fee that utilize the cloud. Most of the other devices in the market promote their lack of monthly fees. If the cloud services are worth it, it could be interesting, but Truvolo even admits that they're still figuring those out. These guys are also looking for $100,000, and are only at about 30% with a little over two weeks to go. That means it's unlikely it will get funded, and again, Truvolo only gets the money if it hits the target. Unlike the Clickdrive above, however, at least these guys are more in line with the competition on pricing, offering early birds for $89 and setting the regular price at $99.

That's it for this week. Drive smarter, everyone.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, cars, data, hacking cars, obd

Awesome Stuff: Toys

from the go-play dept

For this week's awesome stuff post concerning interesting crowdfunding projects, we decided to get a little more playful, and take a look at some toys.

• First up, is STRAWBEES, a simple connector system for straws or cardboard. There are tons of toys out there that let kids build things, but this is a neat, simple set of connector pieces that let you take ordinary straws or pieces of cardboard and build whatever you want with them. The fact that they have a Wes Anderson-like video doesn't hurt either. These guys are already well past their $20,000 goal already shooting past $50,000 with two and a half weeks to go. There are a bunch of different price points, so people can opt in at whatever level they want. They even have an "infinite kit" in which they give you the tool to make your own pieces, so you will never run out, no matter how many you need. Kind of a neat idea on its own.
• Next up, we've got Snaak, a funky "3D puzzle and shape maker tool." It's actually 64 cubes connected together that you can move around to form all different kinds of things. You can see how it works via the video, though I have to say it's one of the most annoying Kickstarter videos I've ever seen. We get it. The product is called Snaak -- you don't need to start every sentence by repeating the name. Also, I'm always at least a little wary of projects that highlight the fact that they're "patent pending." That has no impact at all on whether or not your product is good or useful. Your patent does nothing for me, other than make me wonder if you're going to become a patent troll at some point. There's just a few days left on this project, and it's already more than doubled its $20,000 goal, so this will definitely get funded.
• Finally, we've got Modarri Cars, which are some pretty cool toy cars, which tries to combine a few key features: cars that kids (of all ages) can really play with, with real suspensions, but which are also modular, allowing people to take them apart and change them around. My own kid loves to play with toy cars, and these are definitely a lot more advanced and look like a lot more fun than your standard toy cars. One side note: towards the end, the COO of the company claims they went to Kickstarter to get people to "invest" in the company. That's not a particularly wise thing to say, since investing means something very different than what's happening on Kickstarter (you're effectively donating/pre-buying) and there are some pretty serious laws that can get you in real trouble with the SEC if you offer to let people "invest" in your company without going through the official process (especially when what happens isn't really an investment). Clearly, he doesn't really mean invest, but I'm surprised anyone would allow that video to go out into the world like that. Just like the other two projects discussed today, these guys are seeking $20,000 (this is actually their second attempt, after a failed first attempt where they sought $80,000) and they're already well over that amount, pushing $40,000 with still nearly a month to go.

That's it for this week. Go out and play with some toys.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, modarri, snaak, strawbees, toys

Fair Use Is About Much More Than Remixing: It's About Allowing All Kinds Of Innovation

from the missing-out dept

On Tuesday, the House Judiciary Committee held yet another hearing concerning copyright and possible copyright reform, this time, focusing on fair use. As in the past, the Judiciary Committee continues to set up these hearings in a way that they think is "balanced" but which basically just guarantees people will disagree with each other. In this case, you had two people talking about the importance of fair use, and two people worried about the impact of fair use. There were moments that were both infuriating and enlightening during the panel (though, many more that were infuriating, generally because some of those both asking and answering the questions didn't seem to understand fair use at all). But, even more to the point, even when discussing the benefits of fair use, the hearing seemed to be focused on how fair use helped people write fan fiction or create remixes and mashups. That's all very important, but it almost downplays the real value of fair use.

Fair use is about so much more than that. Fair use has enabled a large part of the internet to thrive, and with it, tremendous opportunities for individuals to communicate. It has also been a key part of what has enabled the entertainment industry to thrive. When people treat fair use as this little "toy" that lets some people "play around" with writing fan fiction or remixing, it really underplays just how important fair use has been to the very core setup of the internet and culture. Without fair use, it would be almost impossible to build a search engine. Without fair use, blogging would be much more risky. Without fair use, a show like the Daily Show would be almost impossible. And yet, no one on the panel seemed to represent this aspect of fair use, focusing instead on just the creative side of things.

Ed Black has a great article detailing much of this, which I'm confident that I can quote because of fair use:

For example, it may be hard to believe, but 30 years ago last week the Supreme Court came one vote from labeling home video a "pirate" technology. Were it not for Justice Stevens' foresight and the fair use doctrine, an entire industry and a generation of technological innovation would have been sacrificed on the altar of copyright protection. (Ironically, home video turned into Hollywood's cash cow less than a decade after movie studios had attempted to strangle it in the crib.)

The same fair use principle that saved home video has also served MP3 players, DVRs, smartphones and a considerable portion of modern Internet functionality, like cloud computing, that we depend upon today. In recent years, we've seen courts invoke fair use to validate a variety of transformative, socially valuable services, including online search engines, including image and book search; commercial-skipping and time-shifting with DVRs; and a service that compares students' papers against a database for plagiarism (who, understandably, might not want to authorize use of their papers to prevent cheating).

Of course, fair use benefits industries far beyond the technology sector. While fair use has always been recognized as protecting widely-enjoyed television programming like The Daily Show, The Colbert Report and Saturday Night Live, its significance extends far beyond parody. Just in the last year, the fair use doctrine came to the aid of movie studios, a Broadway musical, a rock band and the NFL, all of whom faced baseless piracy accusations. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris led to a lawsuit because the actor Owen Wilson quoted nine words from the author William Faulkner. (Yes, you read that right: nine words.) The musical Jersey Boys was sued for including seven seconds of a 1960s TV program. The NFL was sued because online footage from old football games showed brief glimpses of the original Baltimore Ravens logo -- a logo that had been ruled to infringe copyright after the season was played. In each case, courts sided with the defendants and threw out the case on the basis of fair use. That such lawsuits were brought in the first place is a sad commentary on the state of our intellectual property system, but at least judges were able to resort to the fair use doctrine to reject the most absurd claims.

I've talked for a while about how it's wrong to think of fair use as just an "exception or limitation" to copyright -- since it's actually the other way around. Fair use is the public's right. It's part of the right to free speech, where copyright is actually an "exception or limitation" on that right. But in many ways it goes further than that, since fair use has enabled so much great and powerful innovation as well. And yet, all too often, people think of fair use as just this little corner of the copyright world that lets people create mashups and write fan fiction. Those uses are important too -- the expression and culture that comes out of those areas are really quite impressive when you look closely. But it's important not to ignore just how fundamental fair use is to enabling both the tech industry and the entertainment industry to thrive over the years.

Filed Under: congress, copyright, fair use, fan fiction, innovation, internet, mashups, remixing

Innovation Asymmetry: Why The Copyright Industry Always Freaks Out About New Technologies

from the copyright-and-innovation dept

A few weeks ago, I was in Washington DC to moderate a panel concerning the intersection of innovation and copyright. One of the panelists, law professor Michael Carrier whose work we've mentioned before, talked about an interesting concept to explain why many people in the "copyright industries" freaked out about new innovations, rather than recognizing their opportunities. He referred to it as "innovation asymmetry" and he's now expanded on the idea over at the Disruptive Competition Project's blog.

I define the innovation asymmetry as an overemphasis on a technology’s infringing uses and insufficient appreciation of its noninfringing uses. Why is there such an asymmetry? Because infringing uses are immediately apparent, quantifiable, and advanced by motivated, well-financed copyright holders. Noninfringing uses, in contrast, are less tangible and less apparent at the onset of a technology.

The costs of infringing uses can be quantified. They roll off copyright owners’ tongues: $250 billion in losses to the U.S. economy each year from IP infringement. 750,000 jobs lost annually from infringement. It doesn’t matter if the figures are correct. For even if they are completely disproved, the mere articulation of numbers promises a precision that is difficult to dislodge from the audience’s consciousness.

On the flip side, the power of potential innovation is much harder to quantify.

In contrast, noninfringing uses are less tangible, less obvious at the onset of a technology, and not advanced by an army of motivated advocates. First, they are less tangible. Noninfringing uses are difficult to quantify. How do we put a dollar figure on the benefits of enhanced communication and interaction? Estimates of future noninfringing uses will be less powerful than the actual, hard-dollar figures presented by copyright owners.

Second, they are more fully developed over time. When a new technology is introduced, no one, including the inventor, knows all of the beneficial uses to which it will eventually be put. The path of history is replete with inventions for which nobody foresaw the eventual popular and revolutionary use.

He then lists out a whole series of inventions where the inventor was completely wrong in how their invention would be used. In some ways, this is a modified form of loss aversion. People often strongly prefer avoiding losses to acquiring gains. But it goes a bit further than that, because Carrier correctly notes that you can look at what's around and try to "quantify" those losses, making them feel more "real" even if they're not. But the opportunities and advancements that these innovations almost always enable are things that are less obvious, even to the inventors, even if they always show up eventually.

So you have a classic form of "information asymmetry" in that you can believe you have real information about the potential losses, but not have the information on the very large gains, leading many to simply focus on the losses rather than the gains. That leads to misguided attacks on the technology, moral panics and the like. Carrier hopes that by explaining this concept, more will begin to actually be aware of it, rather than automatically be swayed by the fear mongering.

When policymakers and courts consider copyright law, they must take into account the innovation asymmetry. For if they do not, innovation will suffer. And we will not even know what we have lost.

Filed Under: copyright, innovation, innovation asymmetry, michael carrier

Awesome Stuff: Nixie Tube And Oscilloscope Clocks

from the retro-steam-punk dept

Okay, so the idea of Nixie tube clocks is hardly a new idea. Nixie tubes have been around for decades, of course, and a good friend of mine has had a Nixie tube clock for years, but new variations keep popping up on crowdfunding sites, so for this week's awesome stuff blog post (in which we look at interesting crowdfunding projects), I thought I'd look at some Nixie tube projects -- and one non-Nixie tube project, but which feels like it fits right in.

• First up, we've got Blub, which is a pretty standard Nixie tube clock, but with some modern styling to the base. Not just a clock, it can also display the date and the temperature, and has a few nice features, like an alarm clock and a night time shut off. These suckers are not cheap, running between $369 and $399 Australian (~$321 to $348 US), but they seem to be selling well enough (the special limited edition black one (which does look the nicest) has already sold out. Either way, the Blub is well past its $5,000 goal, and is already well over $20,000 with three weeks to go on the campaign.
• Nixie tubes scream out retro, so of course there would be a Steampunk Nixie Tube Clock, with some astounding steampunk designs from Kyle Miller, someone who has a long history of designing amazing Steampunk pieces, though traditionally just doing custom pieces. This is his first attempt to create a line of steampunk offerings. Something like this requires a fair bit of work to make each one, so it's no surprise that they cost a bit more, running $599 Canadian (about $540 US). The project only has 10 backers so far, raising about $3,500 of the $6,000 goal, but there's nearly a month left in the project, making it likely it will hit the target (and then some).
• Okay, so that last one involved someone doing an elaborate design for you. But what if you're more the DIY kind of person? Well, then there's the Smart Nixie Tube offering, which is an expandable Nixie tube display module, with built-in Arduino Uno compatible hardware, allowing you to basically build whatever you want with Nixie tubes fairly easily. You can build your own clock, or whatever else you might want to display. The pricing here depends on how many digits you want, and if you want it assembled. But, for the most part, it's $100 per digit assembled, but for $50, you can get the basic device sans Nixie tube, or $60, you can get it with a Nixie tube that you'll need to solder into place. Looking over the current backers, it seems that $60 self-assembly model is the one that's selling. This project is right near its target of $5,000 (by the time you read this it'll probably be over it) with three and a half weeks to go.
• Finally, this last one isn't a Nixie tube clock, but rather an oscilloscope clock kit that certainly fits right in to the general feeling of the Nixie clocks. The video presentation is pretty terrible, unfortunately. Given how many examples there are of good Kickstarter videos, I'm always amazed at projects who don't seem to put any effort at all (this video is just someone just doing a video moving around the clock, with no voiceover or explanation). This one ranges in price from $145 to $345, depending on how much of the assembly you're willing to do yourself. Of course, there's only a few days left on the project, and it's sitting at only about a third of its $10,975 target, meaning it's unlikely to get funded. There may be many reasons for that, but, again, not putting any effort into making a compelling a video can't help. Too bad, as it looks like a cool project.

That's it for this week...

Filed Under: awesome stuff, crowdfunding, nixie tube clocks, nixie tubes, oscilloscope clock

New Research Shows That Copycats Lead To More Innovation

from the that's-how-it-works dept

We've been arguing this for many years, but a new research report (sent in by a bunch of you!) has provided some empirical support to the argument that you get more innovation from having copycats rather than just a bunch of folks inventing from scratch.

"We thought at first it would be better to have innovators around you," said IU cognitive scientist Robert Goldstone, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences at IU Bloomington. "But in our experiments, if people are surrounded by imitators, they actually do better."

The reasons that the research found, also agree with what we've been saying for many, many years: innovation is an ongoing process of improvements, and it's the "copycats" who usually make the surprising, but necessary changes to make innovations really valuable.

The reason, said co-author Thomas Wisdom, is that "imitators often make their own improvements to the original solution, and these can, in turn, be adopted and improved upon by the originator and others."

The report's authors note that it appears that having a lot of imitators around is often most useful in areas such as medicine and software development -- which are two areas where such copycat innovation is least allowed thanks to overaggressive patenting. The researchers point out that part of the reason why imitators and copycats are so important is because it's basically impossible for one person (or a small team) to think through all the possibilities. Opening things up so lots of others can add their input or (better yet) try their own variation, leads to much greater diversity in finding innovations that are truly useful. And that's actually better for everyone.

"You can't possibly explore an entire problem search space on your own, but if you recruit other people, it's to your advantage. They help you survey that area. You benefit when other people imitate you because they help you explore multiple variations around your solution that you couldn't possibly pursue on your own."

This has been true for years in the tech field, where many people realized that if the "big challenges" were achieved, it would open up vast new markets, and everyone could compete in those markets. But the way to get over those hurdles is to have lots of different people with different viewpoints working on those challenges.

Filed Under: copycats, follow on innovation, innovation, innovation as process

Netflix Says It'll Be Fine Without Net Neutrality Rules; But What About The Next Netflix?

from the different-scenarios dept

A few folks are covering the news that Netflix has talked about the recent ruling tossing out the FCC's net neutrality rules, saying in a letter to investors that it's really no big deal. The key message is, basically, that Netflix will be watching closely to see if anyone violates net neutrality, either by seeking payment for preferential treatment or degrading other traffic, and will then alert its millions of members to scream loudly about how so-and-so broadband provider is a jerk:

Unfortunately, Verizon successfully challenged the U.S. net neutrality rules. In principle, a domestic ISP now can legally impede the video streams that members request from Netflix, degrading the experience we jointly provide. The motivation could be to get Netflix to pay fees to stop this degradation. Were this draconian scenario to unfold with some ISP, we would vigorously protest and encourage our members to demand the open Internet they are paying their ISP to deliver.

The most likely case, however, is that ISPs will avoid this consumer-unfriendly path of discrimination. ISPs are generally aware of the broad public support for net neutrality and don’t want to galvanize government action.

There is, in fact, something to this. And it's part of the reason why we were nervous about the FCC's rules in the first place. We still think the real answer is more competition.

Still, there are some issues with Netflix's claims. First, if certain providers feel confident that there isn't significant and credible competition, it may decide to weather the storm of user anger. It's not like broadband providers are currently particularly well-liked. In fact, they're not. They're almost universally hated. If there's no real competition, they might not care enough to stop.

But, really, the bigger issue is that if there is a real net neutrality violation, it's not going to impact the big internet companies so much. Netflx, Google, Amazon -- those guys are fine. The issue is the new upstarts and innovators. The companies who can't unleash tens of millions of angry customers to scream out about how ridiculous a new block or degraded traffic is. Worst case, Netflix can pay up. The next guy? Might not be so easy. Even worse... that next guy might not even try, because the "cost of entry" will be too high.

Netflix has always been a good player on this issue, and hopefully they do stick to their word and promise to protest and alert others to protest. But the real concern needs to be not just about how Netflix deals with this issue, but what it means for the next Netflix.

Filed Under: innovation, net neutrality, public awareness
Companies: netflix