Abandoned

I'd meant to keep this blog as a links to things I intended to read or refer to later ... but the time I take to annotate these links is time not spent actually catching up on my reading.

So for now, I'm stepping away. Maybe I'll take it up again later.

Decloseting Innovation

Harrry West writes:

Successful ideas are not born in secret: they emerge from open and vigorous dialog around new information, and then they are actively pulled into the market by a commercialization team rather than being pushed by an ideation team. In the intensity of the innovation process, it's easy to divide into a world of "us" and "them." But to innovate well, teams must be permeable, inviting the outside in and engaging the broader community to transform an idea on a napkin into a new product or service in the marketplace.

The Case Against Privacy

Mat Honan writes:

Picture this scenario. You are about to leave San Francisco to drive to Lake Tahoe for a weekend of skiing, so you fire up your Android handset and ask it "what's the best restaurant between here and Lake Tahoe?"

It's an incredibly complex and subjective query. But Google wants to be able to answer it anyway. (This was an actual example given to me by Google.) To provide one, it needs to know things about you. A lot of things. A staggering number of things.

To start with, it needs to know where you are. Then there is the question of your route—are you taking 80 up to the north side of the lake, or will you take 50 and the southern route? It needs to know what you like. So it will look to the restaurants you've frequented in the past and what you've thought of them. It may want to know who is in the car with you—your vegan roommates?—and see their dining and review history as well. It would be helpful to see what kind of restaurants you've sought out before. It may look at your Web browsing habits to see what kind of sites you frequent. It wants to know which places your wider circle of friends have recommended. But of course, similar tastes may not mean similar budgets, so it could need to take a look at your spending history. It may look to the types of instructional cooking videos you've viewed or the recipes found in your browsing history.

It wants to look at every possible signal it can find, and deliver a highly relevant answer ... There is only one path to that answer, and it goes straight through your privacy.