Savvy Avi

Is Quora going to make it? They have got a good chance. Many Silicon Valley executives think they will. Is Quora going to contribute to the body of global knowledge? I am doubtful. Like Wikipedia, Quora is a crowd sourcing platform that leverages users to do the work. Unlike Wikipedia, Quora is for profit. Its users work, not for the benefit of human knowledge but for the benefit of Benchmark Capital . It has a smart business model. Users answer questions to promote their online reputation as experts on a topic (guilty as charged, I do it too). Users also write questions because it is an easier way to show online presence than answering, it only takes a sentence or two. People write questions to join the online clatter; usually they are not looking for answers. Also, in other search and answer websites like Answer.com or ehow.com the questions are simple, like “What is the best way to get from Philadelphia to NY?” Google “How”, “Philadelphia”, “NY”, and “travel” and you are likel...

Piles of business and policy books are published every year. While almost any book has something worthwhile in it, only a small fraction are good. And for every profound idea there is a load of simplifications, unbiased assertions, after the fact reasoning and hype. When considering what to read I know what to avoid. For starters, I’d avoid anything with a title similar to this blog title – anything with a number in it: “365 days of success”, “8 new roles of money” (from the Kiyosaki who brought us rich dad poor dad) or “101 ways to turn your business around”. I also avoid biographies and autobiographies. They tend to present a simplified view where the fortunes of companies and nations are over attributed to one person. This view is misleading and even dangerous when people start believing in saviors and messiahs . Autobiographies have all the flaws of biographies and they are also biased and are too often just pure narcissism. Finally, I won’t read a book about a company written f...

Engineering System D ivision (ESD) at MIT hosted a talk this Tuesday about the financial crises with Charles Ferguson, director of Insider Job . Ferguson identified the securitization chain as a major cause of the 2008 meltdown. A while back, the issuer of a loan held it to maturity and bore the risk. More recently, risk bearing moved downstream from the issuer to the investment bank and on to investors and insurers. Faculty members in ESD deal more with fighter jets and supply chains than finance. However, system thinking and system engineering methods are great tools for investigating financial systems. The securitization chain acts like a physical supply chain and the meltdown happens to be a bullwhip effect just like in any supply chain. Using System Dynamics is also a powerful tool. Risk assessments of mortgage backed securities were faulty because the risk models had narrowly-defined boundaries. Cash incentives for short term gains, deregulation, shorting on one’s ...

TNS, a market research firm, conducted an extensive research on the use of mobile, internet applications and social media around the world. What's really cool about it, more than the findings themselves, is the way the findings are presented. Sometimes, visualization is what matters most. http://discoverdigitallife.com/

It seems that agile is the predominant methodology in software development, especially in shrink-wrap software and web. It certainly stands behind some mammoth success stories of late. However, agile is not a fit-all method, in many software domains it just won’t work well. More than that, agile seems more like a philosophy, a way of thinking, than a complete methodology. Software is a new field and it is going through some phases. Agile is one of those. Let’s look at the language used in new wave development methodologies. Programmers are action figures; they are “cowboys” or “ninjas” or simply “heroes”. Programming is a dangerous, masculine, activity like rugby (scrum) or an extreme sport (extreme programming). Planning is a poker game, specifications are paper in an electronic paperless world and all we need is dialog (agile manifesto). Could it be that this juvenile lingo is a product of an engineering field that is in its adolescence? When considering what methodology to use...

AA stands for Attention Allocation not Alcoholic Anonymous. Sorry for the deceiving eye catcher. PTT presentation is work I did in 2005 in the purely abstract edges of Operation Research. I uploaded a PPT presentation. The presentation is lighter and more colorful than the actual article. Warning you have to be a bit of a geek to press the link above. For the super geeks I put a link to the full article. It’s called “Attention Allocation to Partially Observable Heterogeneous Customers – with Imperfect Treatment”, Catchy? Full AA Problem article

Another System Design and Management certificate program started this summer. The event ended with a robot design challenge which I managed along with Hamid and Kandarp. With just three organizers there was lots of work but it was a rewarding experience. This is a part of an article that appeared in the SDM alumni newsletter: “Certificate students spent the last two days of the workshop completing the Design Challenge (DC) Competition. SDM Fellows - Kandarp Bhatt, Avi Latner, and Hamid Salim - designed this challenge using the latest LEGO Mindstorm NXT kit with several stages of events having increasing difficulty. A primary premise of this particular exercise was that the events stressed different (sometimes conflicting) performance requirements, forcing teams to perform critical design tradeoffs. This year's teams exhibited outstanding inter-team collaboration during the long hours of the DC process. First place Design Challenge winners were: Nick Biersdorf, Brad Hitchler, ...