Communities Dominate Brands

Americans waking up to mobile data: already average 2 SMS sent per day

I picked this up from a posting at the Silicon Investor discussion board by "Slacker 711" (sorry, Slacker, I would have wanted to post a comment for you there as well, but as the site requires registration, was just too much a hassle for a one-time comment; I enjoyed your discussion there).

Anyway, onto the latest US numbers on SMS. Slacker 711 points out that a new Gartner study says Americans are picking up the SMS text messaging habit. This is good news (and it was about time, I've ranted and raved about SMS to North American audiences since 2000 ha-ha, so now I can finally say "I told you so" ha-ha).

The Garner study is summarized at considerable degree at their website. It reports that for 2007, Gartner estimates 189 billion mobile messages sent by US mobile phone subscribers. Gartner says this includes mobile email (ie Blackberry etc) and mobile IM Instant Messaging, but according to Gartner "but it's very small compared with the uptake of SMS"  So we can safely assume the vast majority of the 189 B messages are SMS text messages in America. This is a healthy level, it averages to about 2 SMS per subsriber per day. That is what Britain did in 2005 and Ireland for example was at 3 SMS per day already in 2004, so the US still lags Europeans, but they are starting to catch up. This is good.

Gartner attributes the rapid adoption of SMS by Americans to the big free buckets of SMS. Obviously still today, that is only arriving to about the world average of 2 SMS per day (Informa said 2.6 SMS per day; this Garner study said 2.1), and the UK today is at 6 SMS per day, Singapore at 12, Philippines at 15 SMS sent per subscriber per day.

But this is very good news for the mobile industry in America. Now Americans are starting to fall in love with SMS. They will learn like the more advanced markets, that SMS is a more appealing service than voice calls, and eventually will come to the same conclusion (as for example the Irish and British did already a year or two ago) that the primary service on a cellphone is no longer voice, it is SMS texting.

The Americans are still years behind the leading countries of the mobile world in the 20 areas, as I explained last week in my extensive review of this topic on the Motorola CEO search blog and its related comparison of US mobile/wireless telecoms market to the rest of the world. But on this one aspect - SMS usage - definitely this is good news. Now Americans can start to discover Reachability, and become addicted to the cellphone, and then - it becomes possible to offer them far more advanced services as wel. A good trend. Thank you Slacker 711 for mentioning the Gartner study.

PS - Slacker 711 - the one comment I would have liked to add to your posting, was that Americans actually have the highest monthly fees for their mobile phone services (and that buys them the worst phones on the worst networks in the world). Only the Japanese pay similar rates and have magnificent phones and perfect networks in exchange. The average US consumer pays 50 dollars per month. The average European pays barely half that on far superior networks. So your thought that American cellphone prices are somehow cheap - sorry, think again. Here in Hong Kong for example we get local cellphone rates from any network to any network at one quarter of one US cent per minute (ie 0.0025 dollars, 0.25 cents, four minutes for one US cent). In Finland you can get a monthly contract for a dollar a month. And so forth..  That idea that Americans have lowest cost mobile telecoms is a total myth, it is only "true" on one measure, totally fake accounting. Look at the monthly spend, America is consistently most expensive.. Sorry about that. It only serves to support my main theme, that American wireless telecoms needs to evolve still much more..

How to buy your competitor in the Connected Age: Case Sprint vs T-Mobile

Well, this is an interesting development in the new Connected Age. How to buy your rival who is twice your size? Wait for them to stumble in understanding digital communities, then when their stock price tumbles to half what it was, buy them.. Like we say here with Alan, you gotta understand digital communities to survive. That is what we wrote in the book, and it might well be that the biggest case study of the new era is being created right now, in that very style.

This is now a possibility in America, with T-Mobile (the fourth and clearly smallest of the big 4 remaining nation-wide US mobile operators) and its 29 million subscribers, now looking hungrily at Sprint Nextel which is almost twice its size at 54 million subscribers and the third largest mobile operator in the USA. Combining the two would create America's biggest operator - and judging by the general satisfaction level and above-industry-average growth rates of T-Mobile, vs Sprint Nextel's disasterous year the past 12 months (following their idiotic "Sprint 1,000" marketing fiasco that resulted in the CEO, Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer being fired) - you could bet your farm that the new company would be named simply T-Mobile.. Oh, the Sprint Nextel stock price is well under half from its peak, that is why this is suddenly financially feasible. And T-Mobile's parent, Deutsche Telecom is a wealthy German operator, with lots of Euros in its cash reserves, which buy lots of dollars these days..

And then there is the issue of GSM vs CDMA. T-Mobile network is on the GSM standard. Sprint before the Nextel merger was on CDMA and Nextel was on iDEN - all three are incompatible. Sprint Nextel has been migrating customers to CDMA. But the global standard is now GSM, and CDMA is the losing proposition on the technology front, with more than a dozen mobile operators/carriers around the world migrating customers from CDMA to the GSM (and/or WCDMA/UMTS and/or HSDPA) evolution path. This is also being seriously considered at Verizon - in fact they have pondered it for years already, and many suggest it will happen (migration from CDMA to the GSM evolution path at Verizon). AT&T with its iPhone is already on the GSM standard. So what do you think T-Mobile would do?

This would be a quick way to become the biggest carrier/operator in America. T-Mobile would inherit a deeply unsatisfied customer base, but if they played their cards right - this is such a wounded animal, that almost any changes by T-Mobile would be seen as improvements. Lets see how this pans out. I would not be surprised..

Why is managing contacts and friends such a pain, or is it just me

I'm doing a day of catch-up work on email, blogs and also Linked In, Facebook and of course Forum Oxford.

And those darn invitations at Linked In (and even worse, Facebook) are such a PAIN to manage. (I don't mean that you should not connect with me, I do believe in, and want to support these virtual contacts, BUT) I don't want to accept every random connection-hog invitation by someone with 500+ links on Linked In, who sends me a standard invitation and clearly isn't even working in my industry. (Oh, anyone who links in with me and says they read the blog, is an automatic acceptance - of course, ha-ah)

But equally, there are the random contacts from someone who attended one of my workshops, who perhaps does not speak English very well, and is very shy about contacting me, and has perhaps 15 links and kind of is a newcomer to Linked In. Every time I have to click on the invitation, read the invite, then click on the person's page to see who they are and what their company does (and how many links they have, I am very skeptical of all contacts who have 500 or more links)... Oh, and Facebook is even worse. Once I leave the contact invitations page - there is no link back to it (that I've found). So its a hideous hassle to do serious consideration of Facebook link contacts.

Is this just me or is this way too much of a hassle to handle new invitations properly. Maybe I'm getting too old for this industry ha-ha..

Hollywood goes gaming

'Gaming is now a bigger industry than cinema' said Bobbie Johnson

And now we find one of Hollywoods finest Steven Speilberg creating a game for the Wii

On May 6 Steven Spielberg will release his first collaboration with game publisher Electronic Arts a clever, innovative Wii game called Boom Blox.

Boom Blox does what so many Wii titles wish they could, by splitting the difference between casual players and lifelong gamers. You can pass the Wiimote to your grandma or a 5-year-old and they'll have a ball with its clever mix of brainy puzzles and satisfying explosions. But hard-core players like me will find a surprising amount of depth to the gameplay and a satisfying, addictive challenge

.

we asked is Gaming the New Marketing?

Perhaps Guitar Hero fits into this camp too? I love the line unleash your inner Rock Legend.

On the Wiki page

The Guitar Hero series has made a significant cultural impact, becoming a "cultural phenomenon." The series' titles became very popular party games, which led to their being played in a variety of locales. Several bars in the United States are offering "Guitar Hero nights" as an alternative to karaoke; one New York City bar experienced triple the business on such nights

And then we have the intense interest around Grand Theft Auto 4

During Microsoft's 2006 E3 press conference on 9 May 2006, it was announced that Rockstar Games will offer exclusive episodic content via Xbox Live for the Xbox 360 version of the game. Peter Moore, the then head of Microsoft's Interactive Entertainment Business division announced that Rockstar Games is working on two GTA IV downloadable packs exclusively for the Xbox 360, which will be released after the full game.

Henry Jenkins on Why Grand Theft Auto Should Be Taught in Schools?

David Cushman has great White Paper on role of Communities for Business Organization

Our very good friend David Cushman of Bauer (who bought up his employer Emap) is a prolific blogger in the digitally converging media space at Faster Future, one of our fave blogsites to read regularly. He wrote a White Paper recently about the role of digital communities to corporate enterprises, not as customers, but as forms of organizational structure. The theme is rather obvious from the title of the document "Communities of Purpose are the Business Units of the 21st Century". Its very good, and available for free of course. Here is a bit of a sampler. David writes:

"Example after example is showing the world is moving toward it – we want to join in the production process, we want to customise, we want to shape and select. The creation generation insists on it. In this world our global focus group can now disintermediate the companies they were once feeding back to. Now they can become the producer, their own board of directors. Now consider how companies function. If they could connect their own dots perhaps they’d start the process of catching up with the reorganisation of the disaggregated skill sets that is already happening on a global scale through blogs and social networks.

Timescale: Short to mid-term requirement for change in companies, mid-longterm change in how we will organise ourselves."

Very good stuff as always from David. You can read the full White Paper here (or download it) at Scribd.

Of TMT industries: America is IT centric; Asia is Entertainment centric; Europe is Telecoms Centric

I was thinking about that blog last week about the Moto-CEO, and the 20 changes that the blog outlined where each of the given changes in mobile telecoms was first observed and when that change arrived to American shores. My mind was still tossing those issues around this weekend and I decided to do a kind of follow up.. Not about Moto or about mobile, but more about that big picture convergence story, telecoms, IT and media (TMT, Telecoms, Media and Tech, as some call it).

Regular readers of our blog know that the our book Communities Dominate Brands discussed the digital convergence of media, telecoms and IT to a good degree, and in my latest book Digital Korea, I've already outlined the next stages of digital convergence, beyond these three industries, to add banking and advertising (and more bizarre industries such as robotics, telematics and virtual worlds).

But that looks into the future. Over the weekend my mind was pre-occupied with some thoughts about where we stand today. So I took a look at the Fortune Global 500 edition from last August, and wanted to see if my gut feeling was on the right track. Its quite fascinating what I found.

Lets look at today, the giant corporations of today. They of course reflect sound management decisions and bold strategies for the past decade or more, the successful business enterprise execution of the "right" strategies to become one of the 500 biggest businesses of today. The Global 500 companies listed by Fortune acount for a combined 20.9 Trillion dollars (20,900 Billion) of revenues or about 51% of the world's total GDP. These are the 500 companies that pretty much define the world economy.

I did a quick analysis adding up the Telecoms sector (Telecommunications and Networking Equpment) and the Tech or IT sector (Computers, Computer Services, Semiconductors, and Wholesale Computers); and the Media sector (Electronics and Entertainment). I did some quick tabulations and analysis and my gut feelings were quite clearly validated.

I then did a more thorough comparison for our purposes. I considered each company that Fortune had listed, and in a few cases re-allocated them - Cisco, for example, can well be counted in Networking (as Fortune does), but when I want to delineate between telecoms and IT, Cisco does not fit that well into telecoms, they belong more in the tech sector (computer and internet networking, rather than telecoms networking). And I also allocated a quick-and-dirty attribution of one third of total revenues of selected major players form one industry to another - such as Motorola being yes majority in Telecoms (where Fortune lists them), but they also are a major supplier of seminconductors; Samsung is yes an electronics company, but the world's second largest handset maker is obviously also in telecoms. And many companies in random other industries do have a significant telecoms presence, such as Hutchison Whampoa out of Hong Kong (listed for its main business under Specialized Retail) which owns one of the world's largest groups of mobile telecoms providers under the "Three" brand in a dozen countries from the UK to Australia, or SK out of South Korea (listed under Petroleum) which owns South Korea's largest mobile operator SK Telecom, etc. I went through the 500 companies, made the detail adjustments and then tabulated my findings.

Entertainment is an Asia-dominated Industry

Lets start the media and home entertainment part. (Electronics and Entertainment). Fortune listed 22 companies in this space. After my adjustments, I had 25 companies with whole, majority, or significant minority of revenues from this sector. The 25 companies had total (adjusted) revenues of 868 Billion dollars. A big industry sector yes, ruled by home electronics giants like Sony, Matsushita (ie Panasonic) and Samsung. The interesting part is that of the 8 countries represented, 55% of the total Fortune Global 500 company revenues were earned by companies based in Asia. The USA is far smaller in total revenues of the giant media and entertainment companies, with 37%; and Europe is a tiny player whose couple of Fortune Global 500 companies in this sector accounted only for 7% of the revenues. Yes, the home electronics and media industry is governed by the Asians. And perhaps a good metaphor for this sector is the plasma screen TV - perhaps a Toshiba or LG.

IT is an US-dominated Industry

So then the technology sector (Computers, Computer Services, Semiconductors and Wholesalers of Computers). Of the three, like in real life, also among the biggest global companies making the Global Fortune 500, this is the smallest sector, worth "only" 690 Billion dollars. The sector included 21 companies after my adjustments. This sector is in the hands of companies based in only 5 countries. And North America, USA and Canada, accounted for 73% of the earnings of the Global Fortune 500 in technology/IT. Europeans have no representatives here. Asians account for the remaining 27%. A good metaphor for the IT industry is a laptop computer, by Apple or Dell.

Telecoms is a Europe-dominated Industry

So then telecoms (Networking Equipment and Telecommunications). This is the biggest sector of the three TNT sectors, worth 1.2 Trillion dollars (1,200 Billion). The Fortune Global 500 mimics the real world again as telecoms is the biggest of the three even in the global economy. So where are they? I had 33 companies from 17 different countries, and nearly half, 45% from Europe. Asians account for 30% and USA and Canada 20% of the earnings of the Global Fortune 500 telecoms sector companies. (The last 5% are in other countries.). Note that where the IT industry is very compressed, in 5 countries in total, only in North America and Asia, and three fourths in North America, now in telecoms there are companies all over the place. This is a difficult industry to track if you have to follow companies from Australia to Italy to Mexico to China. And yes, telecoms is led by the Europeans, and the metaphor here is a mobile phone by Nokia.

We can also look at the regional emphasis-points for the three regions. Considering the above, this is quite predictable and consistent

Europe is telecoms-obsessed.

In Europe the TNT sector has the smallest overall size at only 589 Billion, and 88% of that is telecoms. The only small additional industry is media of the remaining 12%. Europe has no tech/IT companies in the Global Fortune 500. So Europeans seem to think only in telecoms terms. And that the Nokia phones have added many more entertainment features rather than copying PDA functions suggests this telecoms-to-media focus. The same is true of the various initiatives of the European mobile operators moving into the media space, such as France Telcom/Orange investing in movies.

Asia is home electronics focused

The Asians are more balanced. The TMT sector is almost twice that of Europe, at 1.05 Trillion (1,053 Billion) dollars. It is led by home electronics and entertainment at 46%, followed by telecoms 37% and IT/tech last at 17%. Asians think entertainment and home gadgets first but understand telecoms well, computers less well. So LG the electronics giant launching as a telecoms operator in South Korea is perfect illustration of this spread of interest. Sony relaunching its Walkman and Cybershot onto high end smartphones, is another indication of this interest expanding from entertainment to telecoms.

America is tech focused.

The North Americans are also similarly balanced to the Asians and the three-industry TMT sector in North America is almost identical size to Asia at 1.07 Trillion (1,072 Billion) dollars. North America is led by the IT/tech industry accounting for 47%, followed by media/electronics at 30% and having telecoms last at 23%. The Americans clearly think IT first, and media second - ie Apple going iPod and iTunes makes perfect sense in this context, before thinking of the iPhone. Same for Microsoft going for the gaming market with the Xbox.

Now, for anyone looking to find numbers on the related industries, please remember, that the numbers in this blog posting are severely less than the global numbers, because these are only the totals of adding up the related Fortune Global 500 company revenues which only reflect half of the world GDP. The real industry global numbers probably twice these reported.

But global media, telecoms and IT numbers broken down by sector and region, for current global data, are hard to come by from any one (free) source, so this look into the Global Fortune 500 is a reasonable proxy for a comprehensive global comparison between the three industries, and certainly about where their leading companies are based.

So, I think it does well validate the "prejudices" that we find when consulting or giving seminars to audiences in Asia, Europe and North America. I had definitely noticed the difference in dealing with executives from North America vs those from Europe, on say the PDA functionalities in thinking about smartphones etc. But I hadn't picked up on the "Asian dimension" until now, as I am reminded vividly that often here in Asia the executives will use the Sony PSP (PlayStation Portable) as a typical gadget of reference, the pocket media device. Yes, interesting how our regional focus areas will influence how we think and see the world outside.

So - a final point contrasting the three. The tech/IT industry is the smallest of the three, and growing at sluggish rates. The media and electronics business is very much a hits and misses industry, quite volatile, and growing only at about the average for the world economy. But the telecoms industry - is the biggest of the three, and growing the fastest. Which one did you want to focus on? Of telecoms, the losing proposition is the fixed landline telecoms business, and all the growth, revenues, customers, traffic and profits, are on the mobile telecoms side. Its a very challenging business, but if you get it right, the rewards can be enormous. This is the business to be in..

IDG is moving to mobile screen and 7th Mass Media

Spotted a nice story by Colin Crawford at his blog Colin's Corner, about IDG's move from being a print publisher to embracing the digital media - including mobile (he kindly links to our 7th Mass Media blog posting). Colin explains about IDG's exection into digital using the example of their publication Infoworld:

"There's a lot to this story but one of the most important issues is that by being unburdened by print allowed the team at Infoworld the opportunity to focus on the changing needs of their customers and to develop online , event and mobile products. It's changed the culture of that brand. The philosophy of listening to customers and really understanding your marketplace has been installed in the organization."

But the personally most pleasing part was to read what IDG now use to train their internal staff. Colin writes:

Next is mobile. While, mobile marketing initiatives are still modest and the consumption of mobile content is still in its infancy, things are going to change rapidly over the next several years. I subscribe to the belief that we're seeing the dawn of a new mass media. The mobile opportunities and the move to the 7th Mass Media are well articulated by Tomi Ahonen and Alan Moore. While the monoculture of South Korea is much different to Western cultures, they are at the epicenter of the convergence of the Internet, Telecommunications and Broadcast TV. Not everything that works within the South Korean culture will necessarily translate but publishers around the world ignore the rapid developments in this country at their peril. To get a glimpse of the digital culture of South Korea read Digital Korea I handed out a copy to all the students at our internal training course last week.

Thank you very much Colin (also on behalf of my co-author Jim O'Reilly and our publisher Futuretext) !! Good luck to all at IDG on the journey to the digital media age and a warm welcome to the 7th Mass Media landscape. Let us know when IDG launches initiatives into this space, I am sure you have lots of talent eager to explore this brave new world.

Thank you Xen for Carnival of Mobilists Post of the Week for 7th Mass Media

We have supported the Carnival of the Mobilists from the start and have even hosted it twice, and often recommend our readers and friends to read the Carnival for the weekly collection of the best blog postings about mobile telecoms. This week the Carnival is hosted by Xen Mendelsohn over at Xellular Identity, and features again a great collection of blogs about mobile. And this time we had our 7th Mass Media story selected as the best post of the week. Thank you Xen!

Thinking Like an Economist Undermines Community

Says Stephen A Marglin

Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state.

Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback--say the barn burned down--neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations.

Writes the Harvard University Press

Interesting. A review of the book says that Marglin

sees in the behavioural approach a missed opportunity for a "trenchant critique" of the "assumptions about people that form the core of economics".

Marglin argues that to think about people as always rationally calculating their self-interest is at odds with the way non-economists think about people. Non-economists know that people can sometimes be virtuously motivated to do things that benefit others. But mainstream economics applies what Hume, nearly 300 years ago, called the "knaves principle", according to which "every man ought to be supposed a knave, and to have no other end in all his actions than private interest". And you don't have to agree with Marglin that the way of life of the Amish people of Pennsylvania is the best counter-example to that to think there's something drastically wrong with it.

Eric Beinhocker also wrote an interesting book called the Origin of Wealth According to Beinhocker, economics is in the midst of a revolution – its biggest in over a century – and recent work by economists and other scientists provides us with a radically new perspective on the workings of the economy. “Complexity Economics,” as Beinhocker calls the new paradigm, views the economy as a highly dynamic, constantly evolving system, more akin to the brain, the Internet, or an ecosystem than to the static, equilibrium picture presented by traditional theory.

And this is of importance when we consider we are in a world where communities dominate brands, where we are busy building the network society - I suggest we are having a big collective discussion about society, culture and economics.

Marglin asks

what is lost in ... economic development ... when markets become a sphere unto themselves

What we lose is community. Why? In large part, Marglin says, because economists and calculators have told us that greed is good. says the Times Higher Education Review

He realises, as many of his allies on the Left do not, that just now, in 2008, the ability of ordinary people (well, Chinese and Indian people, but there are quite a lot of those) to get the food and housing and education they want is increasing faster than at any time in world history. A few more decades like this and we all, from Mumbai to Manchester, will have gas barbecues and degrees in Eng Lit and life expectancies into the eighties.

But in the already rich countries, Marglin asserts, "we've had enough"

And I agree we have reached a crisis in consumerism - and our western industrialised world is exhausted in its mission.

Marglin's belief that the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle fits uneasily with his criticism of lack of community. When will we cease from strife? Marglin's philosophical criticism of economists is that since Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and especially since Paul Samuelson (born in 1915) they have worshipped "algorithmic knowledge" such as the man Max U who populates economics. Strife rules.

But "experiential knowledge", called "tacit knowledge" by Michael Polanyi - michael polanyi and tacit knowledge Marglin argues, bulks more in our lives.

And that's true. It takes a community to raise a child to be more than a three-year-old, and it takes stories and metaphors told in communities to make a social science.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus in the World of Participatory Culture

Clay Shirky writes a very philosophical piece about culture/media and participation

I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she's going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn't what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, "What you doing?" And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, "Looking for the mouse."

Professor Henry Jenkins of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT articulates a world in which young people have a very different relationship with media consumption. This is the migration from consumption as an individual practice to consumption as a networked practice - which I might add is voluntary. Convergence Jenkins argues is also a culture phenomenon rather than a technological one

Culture Jenkins argues is today Participatory. We create, we share, we collaborate, we consume, we discuss. Henry Jenkins on Obama and the "We" Generation

When people consume and produce media together, when they pool their insights and information, mobilise to promote common interests, and function as grassroots intermediaries – rather than talking about personal media, perhaps we should be talking about communal media or social commerce that becomes part of our lives as members of communities, whether experienced face-to-face at the most local level or over the Net.

This is an engaged, motivated and self-selected audience. If we accept Jenkins world view, this has profound implications on how we reach out and attract our customers, talk to our suppliers and how we create value. It was Jonathan Schwartz that said our 1000 bloggers at Sun have done more for this company than a $1bn ad campaign could have ever done. This is participatory culture at the coalface. Or we could reference wikipedia, World of Warcraft, Pop Idol, the Matrix, citizen journalism or social commerce platforms like ebay, MyNuMo or Spreadshirt.

Shirky also observes

The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.

And it wasn't until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders--a lot of things we like--didn't happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.

It wasn't until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society

Shirky says we have been on a bit of a bender recently and are just waking up to the reality that we posses a cognitive surplus - Wikipedia represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought.

And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that's 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus.

Back to Shirky's 4 year old

Here's something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here's something four-year-olds know: Media that's targeted at you but doesn't include you may not be worth sitting still for

An ancient Chinese proverb says: "Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.” I like to say "People embrace what they create."

If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen? And I'm betting the answer is yes.

Maybe the answer looks like this? or this or indeed this