The Media Supermarket

As part of Google’s series “Authors@Google”, the CEO Eric Schmidt has recorded an interview with Don Tapscott the coauthor of “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything”. They discuss the main points in the book and talk about the massive changes we are living with, because of technologies that allow a huge number of unrelated people to collaborate in interesting and highly useful ways to produce real economic value.
A great example discussed is about a Goldcorp, company that specialized in gold mining. In this industry, the main asset a company owns, is the data they collected regarding gold and its locations. This company committed the unimaginable “sin” of disclosing all its data to the public, by posting it on their website, and asking people for help in finding gold. They would give a prize of $500,000 for the top 3 submissions.
To everybody’s surprise, the company got several unrelated responses from unexpected fields. Chemists sharing chemical tests that help in finding gold, mathematicians and computer scientists contributing with algorithms that make things easier.
The company that was about to close down grew in value from $90M to $10B!
Another striking example is about the most difficult thing to manufacture: airplanes. Boeing took the concept to the extreme and manufactured a plane by creating an atmosphere of mass collaboration to create their new great product.

There is more about the book by Dan in his interview with Tompeters.com.

Can’t wait to get a copy of the book!