Monday, September 19, 2011

Reputation Systems



A talk presented by Randy Farmer, co-author of the O'Reilly book Web Reputation Systems. I highly recommend the book and this video, from a Google Tech Talk seminar, is an excellent introduction.

Randy Farmer explains the pitfalls behind creating reputation systems. At issue is how people interact on-line; how they become "known" and rated as "trustworthy." In a very short time reputation and privacy will be considered two sides of the same coin. Anonymity has its use, but of greater value would be to have anonymity AND reputation. This way people will be able to communicate w/o fear of retribution AND be able to separate the troll from the avatar.

We can see that a future world, where people are better known by their avatars, may lead to problems. I can't begin to foresee those issues - that will be discussed and analyzed a decade from now.

Cheap, functional, reliable things unleash the creativity of people who then build stuff that you could not imagine. There’s no way of predicting the Internet based on the first transistor.”

George Whitesides: Toward a Science of Simplicity

Friday, September 9, 2011

QR Codes - Time For Apps to be Built

I think there is a huge demand for QR Codes. 14 million people in the US selected a QR Code in June, over 6% of the total mobile audience. That is a HUGE amount considering that as of yet there is little to no utility for the end user. As soon as utility improves QR Code usage will skyrocket. As of now it's simply a toy whose main appeal are to gadget lovers.

The study also found that these scanners were more likely to be men (60.5% of scanners) and aged 18 to 34 (53.4%) and have a household income of $100,000 or above (36.1%).
14m Americans scanned QR and bar codes with their mobiles in June 2011

It's been two plus years since they've hit the market - the only question that exists is: how long before QR Codes EXPLODE on the market?