economics

Where Teachers Hold an Equity Position

by Dan Robles on October 19, 2011

Teachers are “threatened” with layoffs. In some cases, the profession is openly mocked. Meanwhile, corporations are staring blankly at the knowledge gap in their industries.  The older generation is retiring, moving on, and taking their knowledge with them.  Teacher’s unions are busted and disappearing. Apprenticeships are a thing of the past.  Everyone is asking “where are the jobs – there is plenty of work to do”

Education is obviously a financial instrument.  Think about that for a minute – it is an investment like any other investment. Wall Street has an arbitrage instrument for every market anomaly – why not education?

What would happen if teachers were given an equity position in their students?  Isn’t this what families do to prepare their kids to take over the family business?  Isn’t this what happens in corporations where executives pick proteges?  Isn’t this what happens in politics where knowledge is traded among a closed group?

A school like Harvard University or MIT certainly hold and equity position in their students. What if every community viewed every child as an asset instead of a liability?

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Virtual Hub And Spoke System

by Dan Robles on July 26, 2011

The Hub and Spoke system is a time honored formation of commercial aviation. People accept hub and spoke as the most rational way to organize people and planes much like they accept the corporation as the best way to organize production of goods and service.

Meanwhile, social media is challenging every assumption that we hold dear to our hearts as new applications role out which steadily increase the ability for people to organize their selves.

The newest applications such as Google + show us that people are the hub and their various forms of social networks are their spokes. A person has a group for their family, one for their friends, their colleagues, their schoolmates, etc.  While G+ fatigue may wear in as people get tired of classifying their casual contacts, the real value of G+ may arise in the intentional Organization of people for social and financial efficiency.

The similarity between the airport and G+ Hub and Spoke is not a casual coincidence.  There is a very real and physical connection between the way people organize themselves in social media and the way they organize themselves in corporate production and the way their organize themselves in air transportation systems.

Suppose we make the analogy that the person in the center is the customer, the circle that they belong to is the market, and the person in the market is a client.  The analogy hold when we try to “preserve college friendships”.  College is the social market and the friend is the mutual client relationship where the currency is a social currency.

The analogy is still very young, but it is truly profound.  This way of thinking will drive a form of social organization that may rival corporations, government, and even international boundaries.  It is also no coincidence that Social Flights has been modeling this analogy for the 2 years since we first started developing our business plan.

Today, Social Flights is working on some important concepts for defining Travel Tribe Leader functions.  The objective is to duplicate the function of a “concrete” hub and spoke system denominated in dollars with a virtual hub and spoke system denominated in social currency.

Network Characteristics of Travel Tribe leaders:

  • Each Travel Tribe Leader is responsible for 10-20 city pairs from their own location.
  • Two travel tribe leaders for each city pair (one located at each point)
  • Travel Tribe Leader creates revenue by matching people and places
  • Builds tribal/shared knowledge
  • Redundant, opportunistic, and fault tolerant
  • Ideally suited for Twitter, Google + and Facebook Distribution Channels

Conclusion:  The organization of people it figuratively (with G+) and literally (with corporations) is the exact same thing.  This will become obvious when people discover the necessity to organize their selves into productive communities in the absence of corporations and government.  But why wait – we can, and we will use social media to form a new system of social organization.

Citationhttp://www.slideshare.net/padday/the-real-life-social-network-v2

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The Game and The Counter-Game

July 7, 2011
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The Value Game does not kill the Financial Game, rather, it challenges, corrects, and improves it. The Value game has reached a critical milestone – it has been funded in dollars by investors.

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Symbionomics And The Space Between Things

November 18, 2010
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Each stage of economic development in human history was derived from the prior stage by integrating the tools developed in that prior stage; The agrarian era, the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the information era, the knowledge economy all followed this pattern.

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The Social Credit Score

October 27, 2010
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a new type of search engine must be developed that can process the knowledge inventory and statistically match most worthy surplus of knowledge asset with most worthy deficit of knowledge asset given a set of business objectives. Then and only then can holistic transactions take place which can redefine human economics in social currencies, i.e., where knowledge really is an asset.

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Outsourcing Fail

September 28, 2010
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If you take away one of the components, the others become worthless. If you destroy one component, the entire structure could fail.

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The Investment Banker Vs. The Innovation Banker

September 22, 2010
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Together with the financial banking, these two system engage in the dance of the virtuous circle of innovation enterprise. Apart, they collapse into the swirling cesspool of eternal debt and infinite interest (pun intended).

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An Economic Paradigm Breaks Down

September 2, 2010

Land, labor, and capital are no longer effective proxies for human productivity, creativity and intellect – end of story. We need to stop talking about social media as if Monetization is some kind of mystery.

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Intellectual Property In the Cloud

August 31, 2010

Wall Street is quite happy collecting the royalties of the creative people in America – those people who actually produce something real and tangible. Social media is a social contract and Intellectual Property is our tangible currency.

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The Last Mile: Social Media Battleground

August 24, 2010

Nothing “Economic” can happen is Social Media until real people get together to build things. Sure, Marketers are trying their hardest to penetrate the last mile, but communities are trying to defend it too.

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The Knowledge Inventory: You Can’t Make A Bet Without Odds

July 22, 2010

The knowledge inventory is the most important part of Social Capitalism. It is also the only piece that will require everyone to think substantially differently about how we are organized in communities. Once we can get over that hurdle – it’s smooth sailing into the next economic paradigm.

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What is Social Capitalism?

July 19, 2010

Social Capitalism is where factors of production in an economy are purely human and technological and less structural:. Specifically, social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital deployed outside the construct of the prevailing corporations or governments.

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Cluster Funk

June 10, 2010

The term “Innovation Clusters” makes for a good soundbite for politicians because it fits on a banner they can stand in front of (thumbs up) and waving the “I’m for Jobs” banner for the next election cycle. It keeps funds flowing to organizations to publish studies that conclude that more studies are needed. Maybe these “summits” ought to be renamed, Cluster Funks because that is all that they actually promote.

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Enterprise Prediction Markets Summit

May 17, 2010

I’ll be speaking at the following event on June 4th. If you are in the area or blogging issues in this genre of ideas, let me know and drop by. Look up the other speakers and you’ll find an extraordinary group of visionaries preparing to make this PM Cluster Summit a truly enlightening event.

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Trading Money in for Value

May 14, 2010

Money is a convenient way to store and exchange value. Unless the world enters into a free trade agreement with Martians, Earth is the physical boundary of all existing value.

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To Accelerate Serendipity, The Whuffie Factor

May 13, 2010

In Tara’s book, Whuffie is roughly synonymous with ‘new’ social capital – a hugely complex financial instrument that is currently emerging before the eyes of all practitioners of social media. In 2010, almost everyone still struggles to articulate social capital with a 1999 vocabulary of new conversations living in old financial markets

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Facebook Derivatives

May 5, 2010

It seems ironic that people are using Facebook to urge others to quit Facebook. If they take their own advice, they would no longer be able to give their golden advice to others. If we took their advice, we would not be able to heed the advice of others in this matter. Is Facebook too [...]

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Innovation Suicide

April 9, 2010

Any definition is supposed to give the reader enough information to duplicate, recognize, and identify instances of the subject – Preferably before the event has ended. Think about it – if the definition for Innovation were clear, nobody would be asking this question.

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The Brain-Picking Economy

April 8, 2010

[People who ask to pick your brain are either asking you to work for free or they are trying to bypass the very hard work required to build a social network by asking for your referrals].

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Is Anonymity an Asset or a Liability?

April 7, 2010

If Facebook is not careful, a huge opportunity awaits a competitor to disrupt the Facebook parade with high value, high segmentation, and high anonymity – and still monetize.

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Criminals Steal Social Agreements

April 1, 2010

A criminal can steal your time, labor, intellect and possessions, or they can just steal your social agreements and replace them with a social disagreements.

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Are Airline Pricing Schemes Antisocial?

March 31, 2010

“People shop airline tickets by base price but by the time all of the [mandatory] options are factored in, there is not much of a discount after all”.

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Culture: When Engagement Is Not Optional

March 26, 2010

Today we see Social Media duplicating many of the functions of earlier society by storing community wisdom, applying social vetting, and deploying social currencies.

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Reality is Simple: Money is Time

March 25, 2010

Whoever said “Time Is Money” got it backwards. Anyone who still believes this is now moving backwards in economic time. Reality is simple: Money is time.

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