I always love to read articles like this one.  It reminds me of the level of R&D going on in the world today.  In the area of man/machine ionterfaces, we are making great strides … for all sorts of possible uses.

This particular article touches on the details of insect/machine interfaces.  We are now funding projects to create cyborg moths that could one day be used for spy missions, and maybe even weapons targeting.  Imagine as we get the ability to remote control these moths, and also ustilize embedded cameras and sensors to see what is around them.

We are quickly moving into interesting times.

KurzweilAI.net: Can cyborg moths bring down terrorists?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency DARPA is growing moths around a computer chip implanted when the creature was still in the cocoon, meaning that the moths entire nervous system can be controlled remotely. Rodney Brooks, director of…

My one company HumanXtensions provides outsourced staffing in India and the Philippines. We offer software developers, testing, data entry, transcription, and several other services. I am completely convinced of the value of outsourcing, and got into the business when I started to use global resources for my own start-up businesses.

I do know that there is a lot of controversy about outsourcing from the numerous sales conversations that I have been in. There are a lot of people who see outsourcing as a threat to American jobs, and some people voice this to me very loudly. 🙂

I wanted to offer a few suggestions about an alternative way to look at outsourcing. If for a moment people can step back from the conversation, and look at things objectively, I believe they will see both a value, and an inevitability.

Specifically related to the software industry, I believe that our schools and higher-education curriculum are doing a huge disservice to Computer Science students. For some reason we are stuck in a model of teaching programming which seems to promote the software developer building applications completely from the ground up. Although we teach “object oriented programming”, we also teach the students to create all of the objects themselves!

There is almost no other industry that follows this model. If you were to look at the automobile industry, this would be like suggesting that the car manufacturers build all of their own nuts and bolts, windshields, gas tanks, wheels, tires, and floor mats. But that is not how it is done. Likewise, in the construction industry what contractor is out there cutting his own lumber, making doors, windows, toilets, and door knobs? None!

These industries, and I’ll argue almost all others, have evolved to understand the value of leveraging the value of other companies who can focus on the creation of components that can be used in their business. Automobile companies can focus on the core designs, and customer experience. Contractors can focus on constructing homes.

So why is it in the software industry that we want to pay our best and brightest software developers to sit around creating the “nuts and bolts” of software? Why are they spending their time – and your money – working on creating foundation elements of a software project that could be created elsewhere much more cost effectively?

I believe that the value of outsourcing is that we can leverage our own developers talents, and also leverage the cost-effective talents of a global resource pool. Our schools, in my opinion, would be educating CS students better if they were teaching courses on how to leverage outsource resources to create software. Not how to build every single object and component themselves, but how to define the specifications and manage remote developers. This would allow them to focus on the bigger problems, the overall architecture, and the core business that the software will target.

I can almost see the day that when I am reviewing resumes for software developers and I am looking for their experience working with outsourced resources. I would want to see information about the number of remote developers they utilized, and the tools they used to manage the distributed project.

In fact, I can see a day when I review a resume of a software developer, and he/she includes the details about the outsourced team they will bring with them if I hire them. I believe that the real future of being a software developer will be to become someone who understands how to leverage the value of the growing global pool of software developers. They are not going to go away …

I often talk with fiends about the “blinders” that we develop in the tech industry.  Those who participate in the “blogosphere” often fail to realize that this is a very small, minority group of people.  Most of the rest of the world has no clue about the goings on in the tech world … let alone the “Web 2.0” world.

This is further back up by articles like this one:  Pew Research:  ‘Web 2.0’ Crowd a Small Minority

The best quote in this article is:

“Yet those online and deeply engaged in “Web 2.0” activities represent a distinct minority of the population. Interestingly, there was a fairly high degree of ambivalence about technology reflected in the data, even among “middle of the road” users (i.e., “Connected but Hassled”).”

One of the worst things that you can do in business is to be so entrenched in your own world, that you fail to remember that the rest of the world has not caught up yet!

Almost two years ago I began to formulate a new theory of the web.  For a long time it has been all about getting users to your site.  I started to see trends that this is evolving during 2005 when I started to think about blogs, and then the emerging social networking sites.  What I began to focus on is the growing trend of “homesteading” (websteading?) on other companies web sites!  To me, the valuation of these new companies – the websteaders – would be based on UVPs … User Viewable Pixels … that they are able to secure on OPW … other people’s websites.  What I mean by this is how many widgets, of what size, can they get users to place on how many pages.  The more widgets,  of larger sizes, on more pages provides more UVPs.
On most of the current day social networking sites – MySpace being the leader – users are able to embed “widgets” from outside sources.  If you are watching the news, then you see the current onslaught of widgets from people like Slide.com, and Photobucket.  Today the news about PhotoBucket didn’t catch me by surprise at all.  I have to imagine that on MySpace, their current UVP count is huge!

When I was working at mediaFORGE (I’m no longer there!  Once again I’m available for consulting in this area of technology!) I drove the creation of a video player that provided playlist capabilities, and it quickly gained UVPs on numerous websites, including MySpace.  At one time, the valuation play was “user” based … how many users can you get.  As this quote from the Photobucket new article alludes, I really believe that the model is shifting to UVPs.

“What does the deal mean for other startups which have piggybacked on Myspace? On the one hand, it’s heartening. For a venture so dependent upon it, Myspace paid a hefty multiple. But Photobucket is the largest of the “widget” makers, ventures which depend on a share of the real estate of larger sites, rather than drawing visitors to their own properties.”

What is interesting to watch is that the big sites are now able to create a controlled sandbox for developers and other start-ups to play in.  They can watch as the new start-ups iterate, and experiment.  They can watch their user base and, with the right instrumentation and analytics, determine which widgets are really showing promise.  Of course, due to their position and control they are able to slap down the start-ups who abuse the opportunity … like we’ve seen MySpace do in the past.

We’ll get to see who has the social networking sites that continue to grow explosively.  Sites like Facebook do not appear to allow this type of open development on their site, instead keeping strict control of content and features.  This is the “lock-in” of software of the past.  With the next generations of embedded technologies – like the Microsoft SilverLight project – I believe that we are now going to see even more of the decentralized web … and more sites that open their doors to outside widgets.  With this new model, the valuation and investment models are going to shift accordingly.  I know that I am continuing to pursue and develop in this direction … the direction of the new websteaders.