Umair Haque / Bubblegeneration

Saturday, June 30, 2007

Next Big Things

The Economist wants to build a community to massively amplify the institutional capacity of, well, the entire Third World.

Awesome. Finally, some real ambition beyond doing things like massively slashing the search costs for pimply hipsters to discover achingly ironic Transformers underwear from their shiny new iPhones.

In 2007, making consumption and production marginally more liquid is easy. The real challenges are in reshaping the economic institutions that (mis)govern our lives.

The problem is that I'm not sure this is going to be a true community (or network, or market).

Getting this fundamental decision right is important because each taps a very different kind of collective intelligence.

The vision is killer - but let's see if the Economist really gets next-gen econ or not :)

-- umair // 12:12 AM // 2 comments

Comments:

Thanks for the great write up and you're spot on with your analysis of what the issues we're facing are. It is clearly a case of getting the execution spot on, and making sure that social features really work. The work starts now.

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Tom // 3:04 PM

I think the Economist may be onto something. However, their challenge will be to get people to donate their time. And of course, "time" is a precious resource and most people want to get paid. The recent news release gets it right, when the community begins to explore more "complex problems". The strategy may require tweaking a bit over time, which will allow the team to get the right combination and a winning economic model.

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Spangy's Official Community Blog // 7:15 PM