Dig a little deeper, however, and you’ll find that it is anything but losing for Google. In fact,

In a talk at Stanford University, Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Products and User Experience, stated that her analysis showed that 50% of the new product launches originated from the 20% time. [wikipedia]

Some of their best products, such as Gmail and Adsense, originated from this revolutionary policy!

So what does an ordinary company get out of encouraging employees to dream up ways to do things better? Perhaps a day a week is a bit much for most enterprises, but this sort of out-of-the-box thinking can do wonders to spur new innovation or improve operations at any company. Traditionally, change follows a top-down approach: managers devise a new product, process or protocol and the employees implement the change according to instructions they receive. The communication is often one-way so feedback doesn’t effectively flow. The result is few sources of innovation and an inefficient system for improvement.

A better way is to “design” all aspects of the company culture so that any employee can have an input on key aspects of the company. Simply telling workers that “the boss’s door is always open” is insufficient, since it still requires a person to put themselves on the line. Mechanisms like encouraging employees to pursue their own ideas, setting up constant feedback and suggestion sessions (online is particularly good, since people may tend to be more honest), idea contests and frequent communication from management work far better and allow employees to feel that managers are listening and valuing their contributions.

Putting power in the hands of employees to suggest and improve their daily routines has several advantages. It allows the people who know the processes and systems the best to have a hand in improving them, instead of relying on higher-ups who may not be as well versed in the day-to-day. Furthermore, it makes employees feel like they have a chance to stand out in their company and contribute more than a 9-5 workday. The entrenched culture of many companies that exist today makes it difficult to establish such a culture, but the ones who do will find themselves amply rewarded.

So how is management engineering? A business, by nature, is a system. The parts are the inputs — employees, inventory, capital — and profit is the (hopefully steady) output. It’s popular for business managers these days to say that “the value of our business is our employees”, and that is certainly true, but the human nature of an employee means that they are inherently unreliable. Plans change, new jobs come along, retirement beckons — all of these things mean that the human element of the system needs to be designed to be fault-tolerant. An engineer understands this concept, and has a natural insight into ways of building efficiency and redundancy into the organization. A more streamlined process that reduces needless overlap while maintaining critical redundancies will maximize profit and ensure business continuity.

The sweet spot in management is a manager who can balance the vital “soft” aspects of motivation with the organizational awareness that an engineering background can provide. Either trait by itself can do an adequate job, but the combination creates a truly capable and effective motivator and manager.

No doubt, this is great. However, with smaller city newspapers failing across the country and even the venerable Times in trouble, the long-term sustainability of content providers is a serious question. Right now, Google News and YouTube news videos are fueled largely by professional journalism companies that make their money selling advertisements in print and video media. However, as Google steps in and uses the content without providing an adequate revenue stream back to the content creators, the prospects for professional journalism look dim.

Clearly journalism as a money-making endeavor will not go away. What will happen, on the other hand, is that news outlets will find ways to capitalize on what is actually an amazing opportunity to reach a huge audience with dramatically lower costs. As an example, I’ve never paid a dime for a newspaper, yet after getting an Amazon Kindle2 about 2 months ago, I now pay for subscriptions to two newspapers. The key for me was convenience and quality — the ability to have a full news source on my Kindle every morning on the train was well worth the $10-$15/month I pay for my subscription. A content delivery device that didn’t exist 2 years ago is what it took to get a 24-year-old guy to start paying for the paper.

What about the web? How can providers continue to afford to let Google assemble their content into dynamic newspapers and give it away free? The solution is micropayments. Want to read an article on Google Reader? Why not charge a nickel (or a penny!), the bulk of which goes directly back to the content provider? Of course, a few cents doesn’t sound like much, but obviously the key is making it on millions of users. Collect a nickel, and watch what happens to the web. The best content providers — professional and amateur — will now have a way to make money off of their work directly. News outlets will still exist, but there will also be plenty of semi-professional, independent authors and creators who will churn out material that will be just as good.

Undoubtedly, there are many stumbling blocks to charging people for what they’ve become accustomed to getting for free. Dan Ariely, the MIT behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational has found that the difference between even 1 cent and free is enormous from a psychological perspective. Things that are free just have a certain allure that even the cheapest alternatives do not. The way to overcome this stumbling block is to disassociate people with the money they’re actually spending. We could do this by allowing (but not necessarily requiring) people to prepay their nickels every month with their internet bill — perhaps include $2 worth of content in a “bank account” with the monthly internet. Alternatively, Google could pay these nickels for you — in this case they would simply be a structural mechanism to allow payment to flow back to the originators.

The internet has irreversibly changed traditional content distribution models, but so far, revenue models have largely stayed the same for content providers. The providers that push for and embrace new models will be the ones that generate incredible profits. Micropayments are the solution that will fix the content-revenue link on the web.

Here are my steps to getting pictures into the “system”. Basically,

1. Save pictures to some folder on the desktop of whatever computer I happen to be using. Remove the obvious “bad” photos.
2. Add the library to my Gallery2 library that’s hosted by Dreamhost. Gallery2 is one of the best online photo-view apps I’ve found, and since it’s hosted on my Dreamhost account, I have unlimited space to put pictures (unlike Picasa Web Albums which caps you out 1GB)
3. However, Dreamhost is by no means a secure backup location (they don’t claim to be, and they recently lost a bunch of user data), so I don’t feel very safe having my photos only stored there. Therefore, after my photos are uploaded to Dreamhost, I rsync the photo directory onto Dropbox. Dropbox is a great online storage and file-syncing utility, so it doesn’t matter which computer I’m using — the Dropbox folder is always the same on all of them. When I rsync to my Dropbox folder, the files are automatically backed up online and synced to the other computers that have Dropbox installed. If you’re curious, here is the rsync command I use:
   
rsync --verbose --progress --stats \
--compress --rsh=/usr/bin/ssh \
--recursive --times --perms --links \
/source/directory ~/Dropbox/Photos/.

   Note: That’s a space between /source/directory [space] ~/Dropbox/Photos

   From here, all of my computers have Picasa installed (since it works on Linux, OSX and Windows), and the Dropbox photo directory is set as a “watched” directory. This means that as new pictures are synced to the Dropbox folders on other computers, Picasa on that computer picks it up and adds it automatically.

4. The final, and probably unnecessary step is rsyncing the files to Amazon S3 via Jungledisk. This doesn’t really offer anything in the way of additional backup security, since Dropbox is S3 based on the backend anyways (so if anything happens to S3, both will go down). The reason I do this is because I look at S3 as my long-term “vault” and Dropbox as a shorter-term, more convenient storage place. The rsync itself is the same command as above, but replace the Dropbox destination directory with your Jungledisk directory.

If you’re on Windows, you can replace the rsync steps with a straight copy — you’ll still get most of the functionality. Rsync works fine on OSX and Linux.

Clearly, it’s an involved process when I add pictures. However, it’s not too bad — a bulk upload onto Dreamhost and then running 2 commands from the command line to get the photos onto Dropbox and Amazon. You can even remove the Amazon step if you want. Last time I checked there was no way to add photos to Gallery2 using a script, but if and when that becomes available, this whole process can be turned into a quick script to run in the background.

Follow these steps, and you’ll have secure, accessible and useful photos on all of your computers.

• One number that rings all your phones
• The ability to direct certain callers to certain phones
• The ability to add and remove phone numbers from the list
• Advanced voicemail capabilities like transcription-to-email and web access
• Different greetings based on caller
• Switch phones on the fly, mid call
• Record and store calls
• …etc

What struck me about this post wasn’t anything about Google Voice specifically, since I’ve heard all those features discussed ad nauseum. It was the last line:

This is the kind of stuff our telephone companies (land and wireless) should have been doing for us already.

Let’s think about this for a minute. Who are the major losers of the last decade? To name a few: the recording industry (RIAA), newspaper publishers (NYT, Tribute, etc), telcos, radio broadcasters. Why are they failing? Do people no longer listen to music, read news, call on the phone, or listen to broadcasts in their car?

In every one of these cases, these companies have seen their delivery mechanism fundamentally change. Who has taken their place? Technology companies. Apple/Amazon on the music front, Google News, blogs and other online sources on the newspaper front, IM/email/Facebook on the communications front, and podcasting/satellite radio on the broadcasting front. The content itself is basically the same, but these providers are getting crushed because they have failed to innovate.

Google is taking over the world because they are amazing with technology. They might not know a thing about news or phones, but they are miles ahead on the innovation front — its not even a fair fight. Google sees where technology is going — better, faster, cheaper, and has a proven record of jumping on it.

What the entrenched businesses need to do is to stop looking backwards — forget about CDs, let go of paper news, and figure out how you can deliver your content faster, better, and cheaper to the consumer. Reduce the size of your legal department, and build up an “innovation” department to figure out ways to change your business with technology. Experiment — try giving stuff away free, charging, micropayments, ad-supported — there are business models that will work on the internet that haven’t been invented yet. Find them.

Because if you don’t, Google will.

Cities like New York currently have ineffective systems in place to clean litter, which consists mainly of spent cigarettes. The way it works now is that workers walk along the sidewalks with brooms and dustpans and sweep stray bits of trash into the dustpans. It works to some degree, but there is no incentive for the worker to make sure to get every single item. By instituting the deposit system of cigarettes, cities would reduce the need for these workers, and replace them by an army of “freelancers”. Within a week, the streets and gutters could be free of all remnants of cigarettes.

I can foresee a few criticisms of this plan. It’s unsanitary and could spread disease. While questionably true, I would argue that a homeless person who collects 200 cigarette butts and then buys a sandwich at a deli is going to be far healthier than one who eats a sandwich or other food from the trash. Cigarettes already have enough taxes added on to them. While I am not in favor of taxing, part of the deposit could be offset by the reduced cleaning costs to the city. The other portion could be written into part of an environmental-type budget. It’s difficult to accurately count the cigarette butts. While there is no machine that currently exists to count them, I guarantee that such a system could quickly be built given some economic incentive. I picture basically a two-stage device — the first stage would be a rough filter that would allow items the size of cigarette butts though, and the second stage some sort of device that measures the volume of material.

What are we waiting for? Enacting this simple solution will reduce litter, give basic jobs to hundreds of people, and provide a (admittedly small, but still existent) boost to the economies of cities.