Every once in a while, I catch a glimpse of some changing trend in technology that I think would be truly important to someone who understood the underlying dynamics of the business.  On rare occasion, that person is me.  However, my record in this respect is worse than mixed– its decidedly poor.

Check the evidence:  1)  I strongly advised a buddy who was at Goldman Sachs not to join some internet goods exchange start-up (who is going to buy anything online?  We all love to walk the aisles of a store, right??) and instead attend either Stanford Bus or HBS (he got into both).  He decided against me and became one of the first employees and very successful at Ebay, then going on to become an executive at Skype, and then Paypal (sad EDIT 3/26/12; just heard that Eric was hit by a train and died on 3/9/12: articles here and here).  2)  I had another buddy who dropped out of everything to start something called Internet Radio (Spinner.com).  I told him he was crazy– why would I use my computer to listen to “tinny” radio when I have a perfectly good boom box??   AOL disagreed with me and bought his company for $550M a year later.  3)  As a young analyst at Putnam, I saw the future:  Interactive TV!  Not only could you watch programs when they were broadcast, you could also watch them whenever you wanted to– on demand– not to mention get traffic and weather reports.  Two years later Yahoo was incepted and “The Internet” became a household phrase.  Both your TV and cable company were about to become irrelevant, and so was “Interactive TV” technology.  (Although, to be fair– 20 years later the internet and our living room TV are combining to become the ultimate Interactive TV, so maybe not completely wrong…)

So with those examples as caveat, it hit me as quite clear and plain yesterday:  we are on the cusp of a large groundswell change in technology deployment– we are de-institutionalizing it.  Wait, what do you mean, Scaf?  Well, dear reader, I mean that the power dynamic is shifting– you and I can now solve an expensive problem for a fraction of the cost of a large institution, we can find and train people to work for our company that otherwise have no relevant skills and we would have no way of finding anyway, and give me a month, and I could develop a video game on youtube that would bring in 200,000 people, maybe more.  We no longer need the middlemen.  Or apparently even their skills.

Here are 3 things I Discovered recently:

1) Computer gamers solve problem in AIDS research that puzzled scientists for years
2) Code Hero is a game that teaches you how to make games with a code gun that shoots Javascript in Unity 3D!
3) Dark Room: A choose-your-own-adventure game for YouTube

I find Discovery 1) quite interesting:  It is a program that reframes fiendish scientific challenges as a competitive multiplayer computer game. It taps into the collective problem solving skills of tens of thousands of people, most of whom have little or no background in science.  And its best players can outperform professionally designed Scientific software designed to do the same job.  To me that is amazing– a real-life decade-long problem cloaked in a video game for casual gamers was able to be solved in 3 weeks, at what could be a fraction of the cost.  Problem solving is taking a backdoor to proper problem framing– think about this application as you hear about discovery 2) below– actually building a game isn’t prohibitive if you have genius problem framing skills.

Discovery 2) was equally interesting:   Instead of games where you run around shooting soldiers or monsters, how about a game where you shoot enemies to win computer code snippets that you can then use to shape the reality around you? The idea behind Code Hero is twofold; to have a game that’s fun to play while also showing how to write video games that don’t fall into the trap of “educational games” that bore you silly.  In the game, you control a gun that lets you copy and paste code in your virtual environment.  You then use the code you capture to build structures and manipulate the world around you with the overall aim of creating your ideal game and recruiting an army of coders to save the world from Null, the rogue AI baddy. If you discover an interesting code idea, you can copy the code to a Java editor and try using it in your own environment.  The developers at Code Hero worked on pledges to get $100,000 in 60 days to actually build the game.  So far, they have $121,500 from 5,271 backers with 36 hours to go.  The New World Mantra: Coding is Literacy.  Hack the Planet!

So you have a major world problem that needs solving, and you’ve converted it into a video game– what about getting it out there?  Discovery 3) gets us into the mode of distribution.  John Robertson, an Australian comedian, has come up with a slightly creepy but still fun and amusing interactive choose-your-own-adventure game for Youtube.  The first video clip begins with Robertson exclaiming, “You awake to find yourself in a dark room!” You are then presented with four different options that you can click on to advance the story, and each one leads to another chapter of the story.  In Robertson’s game, this is actually more comedic than video game as most options leave you berated by John (“Looook for the lightswitch??  How to you propose to do that?  You are in a Dark Room!!”) or being electrocuted by your own tears or blood on the lightswitch.  As of today, only 709 of the 202,000 people to play in the two weeks the game has been posted have found the “good ending” (including yours truly) but only 224 have found the “ending credits” (bloody difficult to find).  He also occasionally updates with “Easter Eggs” (like a Valentine’s Day Poem) to ensure that there will be some replays…  While this style game may be considered a fad, it would not surprise me to see a lot more of it, along with the necessary hardware upgrades from 10’s of thousands of game masters uploading 100’s of larger HD video snippets for each game…

I would think that before long we’ll have a hybrid Youtube, actual animated video game, choose your own adventure game out there.  Heck, even I was talking about making one of these last summer in text form here on the Scafverse as a fun project to bring back the old art form–didn’t we all just love those books!  (although, now I know how I’d actually be able to go about doing it for the visual generation– and it really wouldn’t be a big deal from a production or cost point of view– providing one can come up with a good coherent plot and decent sub-story lines).

While I’m on the subject of creating easy web-based entertainment, it has come to my attention that more and more of today’s younger people either do not have, or do not use their TV. With major networks showing at a minimum 5 of the latest episodes of all their TV shows online, along with Netflix and Amazon streaming movie and television series content live, apparently they have enough content to watch. Or maybe not. A newer medium has been making steady progress into the computers of these “de-cabled” younger people: the Webseries.  A Webseries is a series of episodes released on the Internet or also by mobile or cellular phone, and part of the newly emerging medium called Web Television.  And with barriers to entry so low, you have wildly successful shows like “The Guild” (an independent sitcom web series about a group of online gamers), which survived on fan donations via Paypal for the first season, but then became underwritten by Xbox Live, Microsoft and Sprint, going head to head with shows like “Phenomologic” (seven, 10 minute scripts about an advanced Research Class) created by a group of students from Point Park, and filmed on weekends.  A more recent tension is “Inspector Spacetime” a clear Webseries spin-off from a “Dr. Who” parody TV show on NBC and Sony’s “Community” (airs on real TV)– which I’m sure will be challenging which specifics of a parody can be copyrighted (While a spoof follows the copyright laws of fair use to parody the character, the spoof itself was created by the “Community” writers.)  Even that seems a little Dr.Who-ish…

Finally, it seems to me that Apple gets this.  They are clearly getting away from the device itself being the center of your world, and moving toward Apple as the source of the content (think Tron!) you get from and store with them (read: iCloud, iTunes and Apps)– the device itself is generic (notice now a lower-case “d”) and is just one of the ways to access that info.

So, someone with the skills of a Dungeon Master will mash all these concepts together, and a choose your own adventure to solve a problem through the course of a Webseries looks to coming to a browser via iCloud near you, soon.

P.S.  Oh, and look for Amazon, not Apple, to be the big winner here– aside from books, Amazon is known for having the best set of massive web storage, the Simple Storage Service… (they even power SmugMug’s media storage for photos and videos).