To those who responded to my plea for help by leaving a comment or responding out-of-band, thank you very much. We’ve settled on a name for our application, purchased the corresponding domain names and filed a trade mark application.
Will keep you posted as things evolve further. But just to give you an idea, we’ve already iterated through several “alpha” versions and expect to have a public beta ready by the end of February. Stay tuned for an explanation of what the service actually does.
Valued readers, would you be so kind as to lend 15 seconds of your time completing the following task for me, your humble host. I ask that, from among the five names below (which, for various reasons, all begin with the word “cite”), you choose the one name that you believe sounds the best. The one that rolls off your tongue most easily. The one that you think is, well, coolest. Please do not bother yourself with trying to guess the meaning of the name, or the purpose of this exercise (though many of you will no doubt have a good idea). I am after your immediate gut feeling response. Please leave your response as a comment on this post.
I would be more than grateful if you could point your friends and colleagues at this blog entry, particularly if they are involved in writing research manuscripts.
Thank you!
Bill Gates has retired from Microsoft. This will be a turning point in the industry. Specifically, I think Apple will make huge inroads in the desktop market with Mac OS X to the detriment of Microsoft and Windows. Microsoft will eventually focus on the server side of the business. What do others think?
It’s probably time to come clean about my recent spate of posts on startups, Ruby, Python and so on. Well, there are a few things about peer review and publishing in the realm of academia that I think could be better, so I tried to figure out an alternative process that retains the benefits and overcomes some of the problems of the current system. We think we’ve done that, and it turns out that I wasn’t the only one who thought that things could be a lot better.
NICTA has provided pre-seed funding in the form of a couple of commercialisation grants to implement this new way of doing things. I’ve hired a top notch graduate software engineer (who’s been working with me as a student for the past year and a half on unrelated things) to help me deliver alpha and beta versions of this system over the next six months or so. For this project, we’ll be working in startup mode; I’ll be making every effort to provide a small company atmosphere for the engineer and others who join the project.
It turns out the solution to the problem can also be applied to (web) search, since it is essentially a nice way of ranking documents within communities. I can’t go into the details of the solution here, but I can list some of the things that I (and other researchers, as it happens) think could be better.
These are some of the problems that researchers say they can see with the current way of doing things. We think we can claim that our idea solves many of these problems. For example, under our system, which we are calling PubRes for the moment, citation collusion is futile. Under PubRes, you’d also be silly to lend support to a paper that you know isn’t very good (even if it is written by a colleague), and you’d be silly not to lend support to a good paper (even if it is written by a competing group of scientists or your worst enemy). There are some things we haven’t solved, like honorary authorship and ghost authorship, but these are problems I’d like to investigate in the future. Although I can’t reveal the details here, I can say that the underlying mechanics of PubRes are no more complicated than traditional peer review procedures (and probably much less complicated), but it is a major departure from how things are done now. I can also say that the feedback we’ve got from people we’ve explained it to has been overwhelmingly positive, which is the main reason I’m still pursuing this.
NICTA are making sure we do this properly, so some of the grant money is being spent on figuring out the structure of the academic publishing market. We already know that the top three academic publishers had combined 2007 revenues in excess of $US3 billion, but that doesn’t say much. We’re currently doing some much deeper market research to get a better understanding of the domain.
It’s important to note that what we’re doing is completely different to all known attempts to bring science to the web. PubRes is not another CiteULike or Connotea. It’s not another arXiv.org. It’s not like PLoS One or PubMed Central. It’s different to ResearchGATE and Science Commons. While our implementation may contain elements of these existing tools, PubRes is a fundamentally new way of getting your research published, and it’s a new, much fairer (we think), more direct way of rating scientists and the papers that they write. One of our aims is also to make the whole reviewing, publishing and reading cycle a lot more fun.
With any luck, a public beta will be available early next year. Oh, we think we’ve settled on Ruby and Ruby on Rails for the web tier, and no doubt there’ll be some AJAX stuff in there to pull off a few nifty browser side features we have in mind. Stay tuned.
Big companies will slowly suck the life out of you. That’s one way of summarising Paul Graham‘s latest essay. To maximise your freedom, he says, join a start-up or start one yourself. It’s a theory that I find very appealing.
I’m fascinated by the idea of ordinary football fans being able to own a football club and collaborating to decide on which players to buy and sell. This idea is very close to reality as MyFootballClub has agreed terms with Ebbsfleet United FC to buy a controlling share of that club. MyFootballClub members get a say in the running of the club, including picking the team from week to week. This takes Fantasy Football to a whole new level! At £35, it’s very tempting to buy my own share of the club…
One might imagine the idea of letting the fans pick the team could drive the manager crazy, but here’s the reaction from Ebbsfleet United’s manager, former Ireland international Liam Daish:
Everyone has worked wonders to get this club into the top half of the Conference. We all agree the club needs something extra to take it to the next step. As a football fan, I think the MyFootballClub idea is fantastic. And as the coach, I look forward to the challenge of working with thousands of members to produce a winning team. Alan Kimble and myself are 100% committed to making this work.
I think “challenge” is the key word in that quote.
According to Vanity Fair’s 2007 ranking of the most powerful people on Earth, Steve Jobs comes in at number two, just behind Rupert Murdoch. That’s a big call, but not too far off the mark, I think. Apple has always been the company to beat in terms of style and innovation. The difference now is that their style and innovation is being converted into bigger bucks than before. The Google-meisters, Brin and Page, rank a joint third. I agree with Vanity Fair’s prediction that Apple will make the gadgets while Google processes the data; this partnership will blossom over the coming months and years.
Brisbane (and Australia, for that matter) needs more crazy rich people willing to invest in technology startups. Probably mindbogglingly obvious, but that’s the conclusion I’ve drawn after reading another of Paul Graham‘s insightful essays. Brisbane does not have nearly enough venture capitalists to create a critical mass of technology companies. This means that despite the existence of places like UniQuest and inQbator, any innovative ideas produced by universities, CRCs, NICTA and CSIRO (and I’ve seen a few of them) are released into a near vacuum, with the fruits of this labour dissipating according to the second law of thermodynamics. Only a critical mass of startups will have enough gravity to prevent this research fizzling away to nothing or leaping across the Pacific Ocean to the US, where the capital market is far more accommodating of crazy ideas. A critical mass of venture capitalists is required to gain a critical mass of startups, and once this is in place, a chain reaction is started whereby startups beget more startups. When this chain reaction gets going, that’s when we’ve created a sustainable, innovative technology industry.
So, what do we do to get the ball rolling? How do we get rich people to invest in our work? The first step might be to make them aware of what we do, which means inviting them to our workplaces, networking with them at dinner functions (hell, we the researchers should be organising these functions and not simply waiting for someone to do it for us) and marketing ourselves. While some of us might be doing this to some extent, we aren’t doing it nearly enough. It’s important to note that I’m not talking about targeting existing VCs – they’re already doing a fair enough job. I’m talking about attracting those rich people around Brisbane who aren’t currently part of the VC and angel investment scene. Think about all that cash hulled up in Hamilton, Ascot, Fig Tree Pocket and other leafy suburbs. It’s probably going into resource stocks, property and superannuation. The challenge is to convince these people to do something more exciting and potentially much more rewarding with their dollars. The goal is to enlarge the pool of funds available for investment in technology startups. Why will this work? Well, there’s a good chance it won’t. But I’m convinced the way to get more rich people involved in funding startups is not by trying to demonstrate the merits of any particular new idea, but by holding a conversation with them over the long term and getting them to buy into the big picture. Maybe this has been tried on numerous occasions before, but because it failed then doesn’t mean we should cease the conversation. Let’s organise a few functions with the help of organisations such as the AIC, scrape together the dosh to fly the Paul Graham’s and Guy Kawasaki‘s of the world to Brisbane and have them speak at the functions. These are small steps for sure, but they are steps that need to be taken if the Australian technology industry is to improve its position in the world. The other thing that might have to change is rates of taxation, but let’s do one thing at once!
I say it can be done.
Note: This article is covered by the standard disclaimer.
The excellent Paul Graham observes that the cost of getting a web startup off the ground is very low, and getting lower. Hence the proliferation of so-called Web 2.0 companies. He, like me, believes there’s still a lot of room for more web startups. Facebook, YouTube and company are only the beginning. Innovative minds will find ways to bring many more interesting things to the web. Some of them will be game-changing the way Google was. Some of them will change the web altogether.
What implications might this have for NICTA and other such places? It might just mean that these organisations shouldn’t be surprised if the next big web thing comes out of the suburban bedroom of a twenty-something year old rather than one of the universities or CRCs. Whether this turns out to be a threat or an opportunity partially depends on the way it is perceived by the general public, who might be inclined to ask “If a billion dollar technology company can emerge from some person’s bedroom, why do we need publicly funded ICT institutions again?” Of course, there are at least a few good reasons, like trying to ensure that the brightest computer scientists contribute to Australia’s GDP rather than that of another nation’s. And besides, one web startup, even a tremendously successful one, does not a Silicon Valley make. These institutions have an important part to play in spawning an innovative, self-perpetuating IT industry in this country, and from my point of view, it would be great if the hub of this industry was Brisbane. How to be Silicon Valley is the subject of another of Graham’s essays, and my next article.
Note: This article is covered by the standard disclaimer.
Here’s Scoble ratting out on Ballmer. This time it’s about Ballmer’s lack of understanding of social networks. Microsoft’s CEO seems like he’s from a different company to the one that could produce something as cool as Microsoft Surface.