I am happy to co-host the first DLD GLOBAL reception in Beijing. The DLD conference (Digital-Life-Design) is held every January in Munich before the World Economic Forum in Davos. Next year, in addition to Munich, DLD GLOBAL will launch in China.
The reception in Beijing will be on Sunday 12 Sep from 4pm to 7pm at 798 Art District. We already have some great participants to celebrate the launch decision. Please email me if you are interested in attending.

Invitation (pdf)

The Office of the Mayor of San Francisco and the City’s Chief Information Officer are hosting an event that will change the way you think about data:

How the Social Data Revolution Changes (almost) Everything

Why do people share, what do people share?
And how does this influence their behavior?

Speaker: Andreas Weigend (@aweigend)
Location: One South Van Ness, 2nd Floor Atrium
Date: Tuesday, August 10, 2010
Time: The speech begins at 4pm, and is followed by a reception at 5pm, sponsored by Open-First.

youtube.com/socialdatarevolution
facebook.com/socialdatarevolution
wikipedia.org/wiki/social_data_revolution

Andreas Weigend studies people and the data they create and share. He works with companies that are eager to develop strategies to realize the untapped power of data, including Alibaba, Best Buy, Lufthansa, Nokia, and Thomson Reuters, and fun startups including San Francisco-based MrTweet.com and Skout.com (Boy Ahoy).  Previously, as the Chief Scientist of Amazon.com, he helped build the customer-centric, measurement-focused culture central to Amazon’s success. As a partner with San Francisco-based Open-First, he helps organizations absorb a set of insights based on data, mobile and social technologies.

Andreas teaches at Stanford and shares his insights at top conferences, such as the World Innovation Forum. He received his PhD from Stanford in physics, and lives in San Francisco, Shanghai, on weigend.com, and on Facebook.

Here are a few related press mentions (Summer 2010):

• Fast Company: Who are the New Influencers?
• London Evening Standard: Are these Online Nobodies the New Somebodies?
• NPR Marketplace: Data Mining Pushes Marketing to a New Level
• Minnesota Public Radio: Privacy… Just a Blip in History? and How Recommendations Now Use Entirely New Data Types e.g., Gotta Hunch?.

Shanghai, China. Quite early, 3:30am local time. (Or maybe very late? Actually just only barely back to my condo from a relaxing foot massage.) My US mobile rings. Austin Carr calling  from New York. Austin Carr? Sounds like a superposition of two friends, Austin Ku who took me to see CHINGLISH by David Henry Hwang in New York last month, and Jeremy Carr, my Stanford TA who kept the class in shape last quarter. But we right away started having a fascinating conversation… which made it into Fast Company very fast (and served as starting point for a great article Are these Nobodies the New Somebodies? with the London-based Evening Standard)! Here you go:

Amazon’s Former Chief Scientist on Influence, Twitter’s Fake Audience, and iPad Sex Appeal

by AUSTIN CARR Wed Jul 14, 2010

Andreas Weigend knows how to influence people. As the former chief scientist at Amazon, Weigend helped implement a series of ingenious tools to help customers “make better decisions,” from recommended purchases and one-click checkouts, to wish lists and book-interest sharing. With our recent launch of the Influence Project, we spoke with Weigend about what “influence” means on the Web. Weigend, a professor at Stanford, approached the subject philosophically, picking apart the complicated concept of influence by each attribute and nuance. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, you can do four things with the speech I gave at the 2010 World Innovation Forum in New York:

1. Play or download the mp3 of the speech,

2. Leave your comments on the slides and see the annotations of others,

3. Leave your comments on the transcript and see the annotations of others, and

It was exciting to be part of the World Innovation Forum, an event packed with insights and a turnout of more than 800 thought leaders and a fantastic line-up of speakers. I had great company on stage, speaking between Chip Heath (who I went to grad school with) and Biz Stone (who co-founded Twitter).

I have put up the audio of my talk [mp3, 35 min, 32MB], the transcript [pdf | docx], and the slides [pdf | pptx]. And in terms of press commentary, check out what The Huffington Post, FastCompany, HSM, OnInnovation, and Steve Todd write about it, and please add your own thoughts via the comment box at the bottom of this post.

I am fortunate to present the insights on WIF2010 and the Social Data Revolution by two guest writers: Noah Burbank, a student in Stanford’s Social Data Revolution class this Spring, and Ted Shelton, the CEO of Open-First. And, as always, please do tell us what you think by leaving a comment below. Thanks!

WTF is WIF??

Read the rest of this entry »

This Thursday, May 20, 2010, Esther Dyson will share her social data revolution insights at Stanford.

Please post before Thursday noon as comment below or on facebook.com/socialdatarevolution one question you would like her to address. Be bold! Questions are at least as important as answers.

To come up with a question that has a good chance to be selected, just search the web for some good video interviews with Esther related to our topic (e.g., http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lheZeSoDgTA ), and/or some relevant posts (e.g, http://www.project-syndicate.org/series/net_world/description) , and/or listen to the mp3 of a conversation on Digital Exhibitionism two years ago.

by Chuanyang Chee, Ron Chung, and Andreas Weigend

Curious about the best response to the question from IDEAS PROJECT last week?

1. Ron Chung won the prize for the “best answer”.

Here is what Ron said about a “friend” in the era of the social data revolution:

There are two types of ‘friends’, (i) real ‘close-to-heart’ personal friendships, and (ii) online social friendships.

(i) In real personal friendships you more carefully screen and maintain that relationships.  In these situations, you provide more physical and emotional attention compared to online relationships.

(ii) Online social friendships form to maintain touchpoints with people we interact with (sort of like a large addressbook). In the context of consumer internet and social networks/media, an online ‘friend’ is someone you form a weak connection through some form of engagement. This engagement can occur through real world meeting or simply an online exchange (e.g. blog comments, Twitter message, etc).

Also, in these online friendships, there is ambiguity around bilateral versus unilateral ‘friendships’.  For example, Twitter uses ‘followers’ & Facebook uses ‘fans’ to represent unidirection relationships and Facebook uses ‘friends’ to denote bilateral friendships.  However, some Facebook ‘friendships’ are not truly bilateral. They are simply ways for one side to collect ‘friends’ for the sake of amassing a large audience. All of this points to a desire for people maintain touchpoints with people through online medium should they ever want to re-engage them.

In the end, online social friendships give us ambient awareness of what is going on with people, giving us a type of “reality-TV news” channel.

2. A few thoughts by Andreas Weigend:

Daphna Oyserman suggested:

• Someone whose happiness makes me happy and with whom I feel eager to share my own happiness (knowing that the feeling is mutual).

My favorite one-liner came from Jason Wei in my Stanford class:

• Someone I’m comfortable being myself with.

My own points (to the degree anyone can have their own points after reading through hundreds of responses) would be, that a friend to me is:

• Someone whose eyes I want to see the world through.
• Someone who can make me laugh until tears run down my cheeks.
• Someone who brings the best out of me, accepting me the way I am (or want to be).
• Someone who manages to pull me out of a (real or imagined) bad situation.

Please use the comment box below for your comments. Thanks!

3. Finally, Chuanyang Chee shares his insights on the longer SDR survey.

This survey on the Social Data Revolution was developed by Chuanyang and Andreas and taken by Spring 2010 students at Stanford’s The Social Data Revolution, and Tsinghua’s The Digital Networked Economy.

Finding that long-lost best friend from elementary school has become trivial ever since Facebook hit a total subscription of 400 million active users. But having not kept in touch for a couple of years or decades, what is the point of connecting now? Does he even still consider me a friend? Remember me? Read the rest of this entry »

by Adrian Chan and Andreas Weigend

This post has been translated into German (GDI Impuls 2/2010),
Spanish, and Chinese (simplified).

The social data revolution

We live in an age in which social data has become the air we live and breathe. As individuals, our actions, preferences, habits, and even friendships, leave behind a wake of data. Not only data about us, but data that captures our communication and connections. Even our conversations are now data. Conversations that can be captured, stored, and re-distributed as data. Data that connects to us, and is shared with companies and brands with whom we have relationships. Like it or not, the social data revolution is the new business environment. Smart analysis of this social data demands a new mindset.

Business in this new environment has already been profoundly affected by the new datascape. Adaptation is an imperative. But for those who will do more than survive and actually thrive in this environment, the question is not one of adaptation. It is a matter of how best to respond to the world of social data,  how to metabolize it, and incorporate it as if it belonged to the very company DNA. Read the rest of this entry »

We are excited that Ashvin Kumar, CEO of Blippy, will join the Social Data Revolution class this Thursday May 6, 2010. In preparation to what I expect to be a great discussion on the future of creating and sharing purchasing data, Dan Goodwin, Rob Cosgriff , and I created a 17-min mp3 with our thoughts on the game changing nature of the service. Please leave your comments here or on our facebook.com/socialdatarevolution page before class.

And here, added right after class, is the unedited 1h17min mp3 (72MB) of the lively discussion on broadcasting your finances and other taboos with Ashvin Kumar, ending with the longest applause this quarter so far.

PS: Somewhat related, I am giving a talk at the Intuit Innovation conference on May 3, and have put up pdf, pptx, and slideshare. If someone has good experiences liking the audio to the slides afterwards, please let me know.

On April 20, 2010, the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab held the event The Real Time Web: Imperative or Insanity? that I moderated. The packed, standing room only auditorium participated enthusiastically in the lively discussion of the panelists:

• Kevin Burton, CEO and founder, spinn3r
• Todd Levy, Head of Product and Engineering and co-founder, bit.ly
• Jan Pedersen, Chief Scientist for Core Search, Microsoft
• George Zachary, Partner, Charles River Ventures

For those who could not attend, Jeremy Carr (course assistant for MS&E237, Social Data Revolution) and I recorded a 12-minute audio summary of the key points of the event. I also posted my 3-page outline of the kick-off speech.

Please tell us what you think! Leave a comment below or on facebook.com/socialdatarevolution.

Thanks!

Read the rest of this entry »

Listen to the Conversation with Kai Ryssdal (Marketplace) on the Social Data Revolution: Companies get smart on Digital Data. Produced by American Public Media. Broadcast by NPR and Public Radio International on November 18, 200.

• Play (publicradio.org)
• Download (weigend.com, mp3, 2MB)

And please share what you think… Comment (via Facebook Connect) below!

Transcript (from http://bit.ly/dataNPR)

KAI RYSSDAL: The data trail that we create every day is only growing. Every time we go online, every time we use our cell phones, companies log our preferences. They make suggestions, and they remember what we do. Even though a lot of consumers have gotten used to that, a lot of businesses are still trying to figure out how to use our data to the best effect. One of the first companies to realize the social potential of consumer data was Amazon.com. And Andreas Weigend used to be the chief scientist there. Welcome to the program. Read the rest of this entry »