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 »