Chris Brauer Media Project [BLOG]

When not working on finishing my PhD and teaching online journalism at City University I am kept very busy in my role as Director, Creative Industries for Clarity Capital. This involves recommending investments in the creative industries and developing web 1.0-2.0 strategies and sites for Clarity and investee companies. All of the design and development work is done through my company Smoothmedia. Clarity Capital has offices in Canada, Africa and the UK and a range of exciting and successful investments in diverse industries.

Working with Clarity Capital Executive Director Allan Dolan on the cutting edge of corporate web development we actively participate in the ongoing Internet revolution impacting operations, marketing and communications.

So far we have developed the following sites:

• Savannah Diamonds
• Saponin Inc
  
• Antech Laboratories
  

Labels: business, economics, internet

Caveat Emptor!! Let the buyer be very aware when they deal with the company Crucial. They are a big market player in portable media storage. I had heard pretty good things about them that led me to buy two Crucial Gizmo 2GB USB drives on the Web. Never again!! While one worked fine the other one came with a cap that wouldn't stay on. Contacted customer service and they insisted on sending a spare cap even though I told them that the cap from the other drive didn't stay on either despite it fitting fine on the other drive. Not surprisingly the new cap wouldn't stay on either. In contacting Crucial again I was informed that "Your cap issue is not covered by your warranty so we would not be able to replace this drive for you" and the fact that the goods arrived with a manufacturer defect in the plastic casing was not their responsibility.

In their words: "The warranty that you have with this module covers you for any drive defect that would stop the drive operating it does not cover any issue with the cap of the module." Oh OK. The manufacturer of the cap takes no responsibility for a defective cap. Genius. All this for a $20 USB drive. It's like this company has never heard of the Internet and that customers are not helpless in the face of gross injustice. Screw you Crucial. Hence this post.

Labels: business, computing

Long have doomsday soothsayers predicted a future end of civilization at the hands of machines. Little did they know that as soon as 2005 we humans would be working hard to accelerate the process.

A new service from Amazon, The Mechanical Turk, currently running in BETA, heralds the dawn of a new era when humans work for machines, completing Human Intelligence Tasks (HITS) on behalf of software and developers. Here's how it works.

While computers are very good at tasks like crunching algorithms and processing vast quantities of data in milliseconds, the limits of artificial intelligence are such that some very simple human tasks are nearly impossible for machines to complete. Like for example identifying if there is a school in a photograph, or if the business on the corner is a pizza joint or a strip club (all right that one can sometimes be hard for us as well). That's where we humans can help the machines out. We have the ability to quite easily identify contextual information in pictures and feed it to computers.

I signed up for the Mechanical Turk and it assigned me a number of HITS that included typing the album name of records by looking at pictures of the record sleeves and looking at some photos of streets in Nebraska to determine which one most accurately showed a particular business address. The tasks were extremely simple and monotonous, like stuffing envelopes. But by sending my findings back to the owners of those HITS I enabled them to complete tasks that would have been excessively costly and time consuming for computers to address.

Intriguingly the inspiration behind the name of the online service as quoted on the Amazon site is the invention in 1769 by Hungarian nobleman Wolfgang von Kempelen of a mechanical chess playing automaton that defeated nearly every opponent it faced (see also Ajeeb, Mephisto, El Ajedrecista, Deep Blue) :

"A life-sized wooden mannequin, adorned with a fur-trimmed robe and a turban, Kempelen's 'Turk' was seated behind a cabinet and toured Europe confounding such brilliant challengers as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte. To persuade skeptical audiences, Kempelen would slide open the cabinet's doors to reveal the intricate set of gears, cogs and springs that powered his invention. He convinced them that he had built a machine that made decisions using artificial intelligence. What they did not know was the secret behind the mechanical Turk: a chess master cleverly concealed inside."

So one can only guess that the analogy is that by humans completing the mundane tasks on the site for which they get paid between $0.02 and $0.03 per HIT we are the chessmasters and the software is the big hairy Turk. Only it seems the other way around. With us grunting and groaning in our furry suits as we repeat actions over and over again and the software chuckles from the controls, itself the chessmaster.

We can imagine how these types of services will impact the developing world where it may make economic sense to load up a room full of computers with workers making $1/day in virtual sweatshop environments, completing the virtual envelope stuffing for crafty and opportunistic slavemasters. Naturally the more HITS humans create accurately the more valuable their contributions become and pay rates nudge fractionally up. You can visit the site to create your own HITS as a developer or sign up to complete them and pay for your PhDs or whatever. Hmmm. If you complete 1,000 HITS a day that's $20. Too bad my tuition is $25,000/year. That's a lot of record covers and non-descript suburban streets. Maybe leave it to the sweatshops.

See also on the Chris Brauer Media Project:

• Introduction to Artificial Intelligence
• The sweatshops of our mind

Labels: business, internet

Good news for my future status as an alumni of Goldsmiths College, University of London where I am currently pursuing a PhD in sociology and computing science. For the third consecutive year Goldsmiths is one of the top five coolest brands in the UK according to a report by Superbrands, and produced by the Brand Council.

"The five rules of cool are originality, innovation, authenticity, a sense of style and being unique. Goldsmiths College is a leading cool brand that not only is cool in itself, but helps to shape the future of cool. With a really unique, strong and desirable reputation, the achievements of the College and its graduates speak for itself." - Stephen Cheliotis, Superbrands Brand Liaison Director.

The College is almost painfully trendy at the moment. In a recent edition of the UK version of The Apprentice the task was to sell art. One of the groups was frustrated by their inability to translate their corporate language into something attractive to the artists. Bitterly a member who looked decidedly Oxbridge mused: "So what if I didn't go to Goldsmiths fu**ing College!"

But based on my experiences in Spring Review Week, where PhD students from across the College come together to present the status of their research, Goldsmiths is a fascinating place that seems to attract extremely innovative and interdisciplinary thinkers. Now it is entirely possible that they all arrived there by a similar route to my own, by clumsy coincidence, but that might also be how it has maintained its reputation for cool. There is nothing so uncool as something or someone who can't stop acting as if they are cool. Now all I've got to hope is that the coolness doesn't rub off before I graduate in two years. There is also nothing so uncool as someone or something that used to be cool but still keeps pretending.

Labels: business, london

It really is a wonderful world in which we live. It seems that everything has a way of equaling itself out. Take Telus Communications Inc -- motto 'the future is friendly' -- for example. If you are a Canadian customer of this corporate giant you don't need to look far for the culprit behind annoying (friendly?) telemarketing calls to your home or business at anytime of day or night.

Telus repackages telephone directory listings (your white pages listing, or even unlisted contact details) into CD-ROMs and machine-readable-lists and sells them to telemarketers, charities, political parties, and basically anyone else who will pay cash for your info. It has always been a personal irritant of mine that Telus refuses to tell customers when they sign-up for services that this is what they intend to do with the information supplied. I suspect many customers remain unaware that Telus is the source of their telemarketing grief. This is wrong on all kinds of levels. It is an infringement of the privacy of Telus customers because they don't ask for consent and it is dirty economics when a company sells your information, making a profit that rightfully should go to the owner of this information, should he/she choose to trade some telephone harassment for dollars.

Well all that is about to change thanks to the noble and persistent efforts of Matthew Englander, a non-practicing Vancouver lawyer who is waging a one-man war against the telecommunications giant, and winning. A Canadian federal appeals tribunal ruled unanimously last week that Telus Communication Inc must go to greater lengths to get its customers' approval before reselling their personal information.

The telco now has 60 days to offer suggestions for revamping its policies to bring them into compliance with the privacy law. Predictably Telus is squirming in the face of responsibility, already insisting that the ruling should only apply to new customers and considering appealing to the Supreme Court of Canada.

Well we never expected that they would actually do the right thing but it is impressive that we have a system that rewards the just, even if it takes a little time, and even if the truant corporation refuses to recognize the error of their ways. And bravo to the brave Matthew Englander who stuck with his pursuit despite some early pessimism and setbacks and at considerable personal cost and risk. He is so good he has surpassed Jerry Seinfeld as the greatest defender of the public good against the evil telemarketing scourge.

Minutes after the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) was enacted on Jan 1, 2001, Englander became the first Canadian to lodge a formal complaint to the federal privacy commissioner under the new law. Almost four years later we've won the right to stand up and just say NO to the dirty information thieving buggers. What a wonderful world.

Labels: business, canada