Billion dollar opportunity for Pokemon Go?

Pokemon Go has officially taken over the physical world as the first augmented reality experience to reach mainstream success.

It led to an initial 32% increase in Nintendo's share price, probably more for proving the platform-agnostic value of Nintendo's powerful intellectual properties than the actual commercial potential.

But there is a great business model to explore here: monetising rare Pokemon spawns.

The Darwin Police in the Northern Territories of Australia have had to warn away visitors seeking a rare spawn, posting a message: "For those budding Pokemon Trainers out there using Pokemon Go — whilst the Darwin Police Station may feature as a Pokestop, please be advised that you don't actually have to step inside in order to gain the poke balls."

Fair game. A police station probably isn't the right place for it. But how many businesses would adore that kind of attention and those numbers of visitors?

Nintendo does not have the infrastructure to sell rare Pokemon spawns to businesses seeking real-world visitors. But there are plenty of companies out there with hyper-local sales teams (Yelp! comes to mind) which could provide exactly that in a strategic partnership.

I find it hard to imagine the current domination of global mindshare is there to stay long-term, but if Nintendo could move quickly enough with the right partner, there's surely a billion dollars to be made there.... and a tremendous experiment for new business models in augmented reality to be tested.

What LinkedIn Should Have Bought

The business press' attention today is on the $26B acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft. It makes a lot of sense on paper: LI adds a missing piece to the Office/Cloud strategy: an internet persona which many business users care about.

Hopefully it does not go the way of Skype or Nokia.

That being said, I've always been an advocate of three different acquisitions surrounding LinkedIn: it buying Quora.com, GlassDoor, and StackOverflow.

LinkedIn is really good at networking, essentially replacing the business card, and has a great set of recruitment tools, which it monetises to good effect.

But from my perspective as both an employer and (past) jobseeker, LinkedIn's Achilles heel is Reputation. Recommendations have tepid value while Skill Endorsements are worthless at best, and spammy at their worst.

GlassDoor addresses Employer reputation, while Quora and StackOverflow are a much more sensible approach to individual reputations than Recommendations. If I'm hiring a Director of Marketing tomorrow, I'd feel far more assured measuring a candidate for fit reading through a few dozen of their Quora posts about marketing topics than I would speaking to a candidate-nominated reference.

The Ethics of Driverless Cars

It’s starting to feel like the trajectory towards autonomous vehicles is becoming less possibility, more inevitability. 

It’s not just that Google and others with deep pockets are trying to crack this nut, but so are governments. The latter range from simply accepting the inevitability of sharing our roads with HAL 9000 all the way up to attempting to position their jurisdictions as a leading innovator. I've seldom seen legislative bodies so far ahead of the curve trying to anticipate an industry that doesn't exist yet.

An interesting narrative has come out of all this: what are the ethics of driverless cars? What's being widely discussed is how to programatically replace humanity's capability of making snap moral judgements. The thinking goes something like this:

• HAL knows a crash is inevitable. There's a group of children who have jumped in front of the car at a distance less than its maximum reduction in velocity per second (that's slamming the brakes to you luddites who still drive with a steering wheel). The only evasive manoeuvre is swerving, which would make roadkill of an 95-year-old with terminal cancer. What should HAL do? Or specifically, how should the guy who programs HAL approach this?

This is classic philosophy: straight up Jeremy Bentham versus Emmanuel Kant. And, also not the subject of this post.

The two dozen pieces I've read around the ethics all gravitate to variations of the above problem, and to an extent who pays when these problems wind up in a lawsuit.

Still, I feel there are some equally interesting problems which (I've not seen) enter the debate, which I've listed below. Some of these assume not just autonomous vehicles sharing the roads with us, but assume that the full road network has become a fully-automated ecosystem. Go watch any sci-fi movie, ever, of your choice if you don't get what I mean by that.

• Apple vs. FBI. No, not the iPhone. The FBI agents chasing the bad guy with a top-of-the-line iCar in a high-speed automated pursuit. Does law enforcement get to pull over HAL at will if they want? Should HAL auto shut-dow as a programmatic response to sirens (or the BlueTooth version of a Siren)?
• Bending the Rules of the Road. I've read stories about a car being pulled for speeding, to turn into a full police escort - for the lady on her way to the hospital to deliver. Or what about "driving with the flow of traffic", which in Southern California means Speed Limit +10. Should HAL make a judgement call here?
• Internet Road Neutrality. In a full-network of autonomous cars, should all cars be treated equally, by the same rules, or should road providers (like ISPs in today's debate) be able to charge for premium speeds and service? Is travelling 100 km/h a basic human right?
• Animal versus Car. Should HAL swerve to avoid a cute, furry animal at no risk to the car to avoid killing it, even if the car is not at risk by doing so? Probably. Should it do the same for a mosquito or a Poodle about to hit the windshield? Clearly not. Where is the line drawn? What animals will Noah the programmer of HAL favor?
• Overclocking & Modding. Back in the day, people used to own the hardware they bought, and could tinker with it as they saw fit. Should you be able to mod your car so, maybe, it favors saving you instead of saving others? As in, the car can choose between swerving off a cliff, or hitting a group of 100 nuns on their way to be canonised - and you have a personal preference for the latter?
• Banning Humans. If we can categorically prove (and I bet we will, soon) that driverless cars cause 90% less deaths and injuries from car accidents then humans do, should we ban humans from driving? That'd make the difference between HAL and a sober human far bigger than the difference between a sober human and a drunk one.

Have fun with that list. I'm no ethicist, but sure am excited to see how these turn out in the end.

Let's not confuse wounded and dead: the Personal Computer

New data is in: PC sales are down for the fifth straight quarter.

Observers jumping onto the "PC is dead" bandwagon is in full swing, needless to say.

There is no doubt that the desktop PC (and maybe even moreso the laptop) is wounded. Perhaps critically so, because there's a powerful self-fulfilling prophecy effect going on in an ecosystem like this. Hardware, application, and platform developers all need to fundamentally believe in a profitable future or they will stop investing.

My point is it doesn't have to be that way.

Granted - tablets and smartphones are already better for a whole bunch of situations where a user is primarily in media consumption mode. And consuming content on-the-move? Absolutely no contest.

But what about the other use case? What will give me the best possible user experience when I'm actually focused on on doing something with my device? As in, the anti- "I'm at Starbucks, sipping a latte, browsing the latest fashion on Instagram" use case?

Like playing a AAA video game. Or crunching on a 500-row Excel sheet. Or writing a book.

Crazy as it sounds, people still actually create stuff, make things, and entertain themselves without an insatiable appetite to be multitasking "on-the-go". We're OK just sitting on our ass, sometimes, and want that to be a really great experience.

Who should win the battle over that second use case?

1. Mobile/tablet/embedded computing developers who need to worry about battery life, tiny form-factors, high costs, closed ecosystems, and fidgety input schemas for these uses?

2. Or, the desktop/living room developers who have access to basically infinite processing power, high-rez big-format displays, and comfortable mouse/keyboard/controller inputs?

There should be two huge markets here solving two obviously distinct use cases. But instead we've got one going full-steam and the other gravely wounded.

Please, someone innovate and making sitting here at my desk a great experience again...

You're only as good as your last film.

So the Hollywood adage goes.

In the news today in the gaming world, Don Mattrick, who was in charge of the Xbox division is moving to Zynga to take over from Mark Pincus as CEO.

Not surprisingly, online commentary has been brutal. One of my favorites was Christopher Bowen, Editor in Chief of Gaming Bus, posting on gamesindustry.biz: "those two deserve each other". Ouch!

Both Mattrick and Zynga have struggled lately. Zynga has seen an exodus of executives, a plummeting share price, and doesn't seem to have clear strategy laid out to repeat their early success on Facebook. Mattrick failed pretty miserably at the Xbox One product launch & PR.

That said...

Here's a guy who helped build, very arguably, the single biggest gaming brand of the past decade.

And here's a company that as a start-up created a completely new category of gaming, introduced tens, if not hundreds, of millions of humans to video games, and set the gold standard for a variety of topics including data analytics and cross-platform promotion for the whole industry.

That's not too shabby. And I haven't seen either come up once in commentary about this move.

But, then again, we're back to that old Hollywood adage...

Sometimes prioritizing is not the key to being efficient.

Recently, I've mapped out my own time allocated each week to various important priorities. These might be marketing, operations, product development, and strategy. Or Project A, Project B, Project C. Or whatever occupies your world.

What I discovered when I really mapped it all out is that my pie chart looks a lot more like the one on the right than the one on the left:

The Grey Ring of Death is all inevitable "overhead" of working in a large team, especially in a large company.

I think this is true for most people:

There's a lot more to be efficiency to be gained from increasing the size of the pie (by cutting the crap) than there is from fine-tuning the correct allocation of time, resources, and energy within the pie you have.

This is important for your teams too. Could you get more out of them by micromanaging their priorities or by reducing overhead wastage through removing the bullshit from their day to day work?

Lack of Opportunities for Truly Incremental Income

You have an hour. You've got a set of skills that are in demand (you know this, because someone’s paying you a salary to put them to work). And you've got an internet connection. Can you make money?

This is a problem I've been thinking about for more than five years. I've heard variations of this many times: “It’s only $5. You could just work at McDonald’s for an hour to own it.”

The problem with that statement is that it’s bullshit: it’s not possible to get hired at McDonald’s, work, and get paid all within the span of an hour.

I've experimented in many different ways. I aggregated content from pub quizzes I've run in Singapore and published that as an eBook. Also I created a Squidoo lens about the economic fundamentals of building a Singapore dividend investment portfolio. There’s been numerous other failed attempts.

Besides the fact both took me more than an hour, neither worked because they were half-baked and no effort went into polish, marketing, or anything like that.

The closest I've come to getting it to work was on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Their idea is brilliant but suffers from several fatal problems:

1) It was clearly conceived by engineers. It’s hard to understand and even harder to explain to others.

2) There is a massive imbalance between demand (too much of this) relative to the supply of available tasks. So, while it does pass my “hour test” – you’re going to spend that hour being paid at best a quarter.

3) I want to use it on the supply-side, too. But the one time I did, I had to task an engineer for two weeks to build out a working prototype for me. It’s not accessible to people who need work done now, but can’t program or don’t have access to engineering resources.

I’m convinced this is a billion dollar or more market. But it’s a tough nut to crack: do you start horizontally building it as a generic platform like Mechanical Turk? Can this problem be solved in a scale-able way through verticals (e.g. like Stack Overflow is doing?) I want to figure this out.