picture of the furniture ecosystem

picture of the furniture ecosystem
Originally uploaded by tintin5021

done by beam as a first pass. questions: who pays 24k for a report? how many of those customers? what's the downstream implication for lure? who pays for what at the high end? in what volume? what's the ad dollar total at the low end. what's the picture of the gap?
what's the place where we build new products? what are the latencies around cash, receivables? what are the big time and money problems? what are the problems like availability? around price, which maybe we solve? who knows availability? where is that information housed in the ecosystem?

What blogs are

Blogs are a good place for teams to communicate and report to each other on the parts of the project that are linear or follow a story arc. oh, i've solved this that we started on working on back there. they can mark milestones in real time. they need to be linked, when they do that, with structured data, a database that also captures relationship data between entities and people.

For capturing a narrative on a project, a story arc, a set of milestones set against a larger framework blogs are better than email. blogs as a communications tool for a team. the right tool for a certain part of the process. the fact that xigi got stuck in the blog is not a surprise. but the blog does need to be separated from structured data. both should be connected to higher level mapping.

Blogs don't do large framework; they are a serial archive of a journey; they reveal process but are not the map).

Hunting and selling

Building a business has a lot of characteristics that are like stalking an animal. In bird language training, where you learn to get close to a bird without startling it, I learned to make my disturbance smaller than my awareness. That's a great market entry strategy, building out from market discovery. Discovery leads to entry. Getting close without provoking a reaction you don't want is the best way to do it. don't sell a product before you have qualified a customer, for example. dont' pitch a solution until you have figured out what they really want solved. what will they pay the most the money for at the highest sustainable margin with the greatest satisfaction? You use bird language techniques to get close in order to find out. then you parse it down to wants and needs. Your debutante knows what you want, says Dylan in a song, but I know what you NEED. we sell to needs by finding the deepest needs and satisfying those. and we get paid the most and people are happiest.

What blogs are not

Blogs are not strategic media. one great way to use a collaborative blog is to talk to one partner on an aspect of the project, then post three sentences in a blog that are the words you'd say to explain to a colleague what just happened. I said this. he said this, then we got to here, and concluded this, or wondered about that... and that turns the process into intellectual property that is shareable and a medium for reflection and data mining at the appropriate time. it's a quick clarifying process that enables you to go on to the next thing with a clear head. AND it builds a business while creating a good process of cognitive ergonomics; the tasks we're given don't hurt our heads and actually help us think by the way they are designed. Bruce Boston told me about his work on that.

a mark & linda meeting

So there are some consistent occasions now when linda and I are able to meet in a physical place and work together. things are always different and more rich when you are meeeting in a physical space sharing the immediate rich material space and invoking it as you work.

Example: Walking through downtown Manhattan Beach for dinner we stumbled upon "Design Within Reach" a furnishing store that had already surfaced in our research for our Lure Project. Even though the store was closed for the evening, there laying on the sidewalk was their catalogue filled with designer created products and statements about them. We walked further to a hotel called Shade, an upscale 40 room designer hotel where we were able to talk to one of the investor/owners about their project and the designer they hired on staff to create their very contemporary feel. Not surprisingly our research was enriched dramatically.

We discussed Linda's great "work stream" encapsulation of our work with xigiBiz and Ricoh. And we talked about adding market sizing to a preliminary map I made of the Furniture Industry (for Lure). We talked a great deal about how to capture the work processes of Collective Intelligence so that we can better produce, articulate and surface the value of transparent, cooperative nests of intelligence. And we talked about the value of crop circles. As soon as I get back to Oaxaca with my new scanner I am going to start incorporating crop circle images into my lexicon of mapping icons.

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mark's bio

dicovering a format for our bios...

mark beam

I grew up with tornadoes in the Midwest. Swirling, naturally forming chaotic swarms intrigue me. From swarms of bees to the buzz of new trends and world events to social networks like Facebook, an embedded collective intelligence can be found that nests itself oh so subtly. At CI we both study and create these nests around which intelligent phenomenon attract. In an age of accelerating change where everything becomes miscellaneous, these “knowledge networks” become crucial to understanding the new laws of natural attraction whether forming organizations, building movements or simply deciphering ecosystems.

My first immersion into this realm was on Wall Street where I spent eleven years working on trading floors making markets and then covering some of the largest portfolio managers in the country including Morgan Bank, Putnam, Western Asset Management and BGI (Bill Gates Investments). I launched beaming, llc. (1995), a new media venture consulting firm in San Francisco, advising technology and telecommunication companies like NTT in Japan on the acquisition of media properties during the swarm commonly referred to as the dot com era. I also produced a critically acclaimed lecture and performance series focused on the impact of technology called New Minds that led to the formation of an art, science and technology network called Creative Disturbance (1999), one of the early web-empowered social networks.

I co-founded Collective Intelligence in 2001 and xigi.net in 2005 to help catalyze the emerging capital market for good and now act as an advisor to Good Capital a new private equity fund for the social capital market. I work closely with artists and designers through artbeam, my gateway to understanding insight intelligence revealed through creative expression. Perhaps not surprisingly, I found myself living in Oaxaca Mexico where a grassroots social revolution arose and a tornado of events often compared to the Paris Commune of 1871. I still live there with my two kids Weston and Sky.

Prediction market beats Wall Street analysts

From the prediction markets list
"Perhaps you'll remember that a couple weeks ago Bet2Give started featuring a stock about whether or not Boeing would meet its May 2008 delivery target for the new 787 aircraft. Yesterday, The company announced that despite its recent vows to meet the deadline, it was delaying delivery by at least 6 months! From the start, the Bet2Give stock has been trading way below 50%, mostly between 20-30%... Obviously, traders did not take the company at its word. link

"The funny thing is that Wall Street acted all surprised at Boeing's announcement. Boeing's stock fell 2.73%. Here's a funny quote from a NYT article: "Analysts said the postponement of 787 deliveries was surprising, given Boeing's insistence as recently as September that despite the test flight delays, it would be able to meet a May 2008 delivery target.".

If analysts are really so gullible that they'll habitually take a company's word for it, that presents a huge opportunity for prediction markets," says Emile Servan Schreiber who set up bet2give as a way to get attention to his core business.

They're only beginning to figure out how to use prediction markets as a tool, where to apply them, where it needs something else to make it work, etc. when it grows up, it could be an Asimovian Foundation kind of device.