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.