Commercial Intelligence – Page 178 – Public Intelligence Blog

This post is highlighting content areas for The Future of Facebook project, a six-part video series exploring the impacts of social networking technologies on our lives and business.

Social networks are a tool for activism and civic engagement, as well as a means of control, manipulation, and surveillance.

What is the role Facebook will play in local and global political processes?

As futurist Chris Arkenberg put it, “Facebook really represents a battleground for ideas. It’s becoming an area for propaganda, for influence, for memetics, for advertising, for marketing. It is like any other public square: highly diverse and opinionated, potentially volatile and easily influenced by third parties.”

In an aspirational future scenario, we can imagine Facebook as a place that would encourage political transparency as well as civic engagement.

Continue reading “Venessa Miemis: Facebook — Liberation or Control Tool?”

2011/07/102011/07/10

DefDog: US Army Blows Intelligence Computing (Again)…

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, IO Impotency, Military

I suppose a lack of integrity makes it impossible to learn….

US Army's $2.7bn Intel-sharing computer still not up-to-speed at work

Afghanistan Sun

Saturday 9th July, 2011 (ANI)

The Distributed Common Ground System, the US Army's 2.7 billion dollars computing system that was designed to share intelligence with troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, has proved to be a bit of a dud because ‘it doesn't work' properly, analysts have said.

. . . .

However, analysts believe that the DCGS-A was unable to perform simple analytical tasks in the past, and complained that its search tool made finding the information difficult. They also said that the software that is used to map the information was not compatible with the search software.

. . . . .

They also detailed problems with the hardware, insisting that the system is vulnerable because it is prone to crashes and faces dangers of going off-line frequently.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: This is the norm for all acquisition now. Apart from needing integrity in all matters, the information paradigm must change, as so many outlined from 1988 onwards.

2011/07/09

Geo-Engineering: Be Very Afraid — Atrocities Advance

07 Other Atrocities, Commercial Intelligence, Communities of Practice, Corruption, Earth Intelligence, IO Impotency, Key Players, Policies, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Power Behind-the-Scenes/Special Interests, Real Time, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Geo-engineering: green versus greed in the race to cool the planet

Critics fear that manipulating weather patterns could have a calamitous effect on poorer countries

John Vidal

The Observer, Sunday 10 July 2011

Phi Beta Iota: This really excellent article is highly recommended along with a look at the only book in English out just now, Geo-Engineering Climate Change: Environmental Necessity or Pandora's Box?. The fragmentation of knowledge, the corruption of governments and industry, and the abuse of secrecy to conceal the real dimensions of earthquake and tsunami creating technologies–High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program or HAARP being one set–all suggest that precautionary science has been set aside, and catastrophic initiatives are being undertaken on a foundation of very inadequate understanding. This is the kind of global challenge and response that should be within the purview of a Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2) Centre that can be relied upon to produce “The Virgin Truth.”

Safety Copy Below the Line

Continue reading “Geo-Engineering: Be Very Afraid — Atrocities Advance”

2011/07/09

Michael Schrage: Google’s Massive Failure

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, IO Impotency

What Google's Quiet Failure Says About Its Innovation Health

11:39 AM Friday July 8, 2011

EXTRACT

Rarely do the post-industrial stars align so well for an entrepreneurial enterprise hellbent on market revolution. Between the ongoing digitalization, consumerization, and personalization of health care delivery, Google was supremely well-positioned to have as big an innovative impact on medical informatics as it's had on mass media. Admittedly, Google Health's original conception and execution as a ‘personal health records' portal wasn't particularly sexy or exciting. But then, that's what many naysayers had said about search and maps. Google had the skills and resources to iterate its way greater impact. Everyone understood that organizing the world's health care information was a worthy business ambition squarely in Google's innovation sweet spot.

The market reality proved sour. Nothing much happened. Barely three years after the service launched, Google announced its demise. Health officially dies in January; all whimper, no bang. By virtually every metric that matters, it's been a stunning disappointment. The service may not have lost Google much money but, relative to opportunities and expectations, Google Health transformed nothing. No paradigms were nicked or even nudged. Genuinely talented people with top management support and technological brilliance don't even have the satisfaction of a successful failure. (Google Wave, for example, may have been a market failure but even its critics acknowledged its innovation chops.) One of the world's most innovative companies didn't just fail to innovate as a business, it dramatically underachieved even as a technical innovator in one of the world's biggest, most dynamic, and most important industries. What happened?

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: Hugely important observations applicable to Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, etcetera. They are all in the Industrial Era pattern of fringe innovation and doing the wrong things righter, confusing money with insight. Stephen E. Arnold has been saying similar things in more depth (see his Google Trilogy) for years. No large organization with deep human and capital resources appears ready to create the World Brain & Global Game.

2011/07/09

Cheery Waves: Quote on Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer

03 Economy, 11 Society, Advanced Cyber/IO, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, InfoOps (IO)

All that money, and no far future strategy….

A former Microsoft exec, who has experienced C-level meetings with CEO Steve Ballmer, said he doesn't think Microsoft would have bought Skype to help Facebook compete with Google. “Steve is one of the smartest people you'll meet, processing-power smart,” he said. “But he's not a complex multivariate thinker, meaning he doesn't think 15 chess moves out. So that's why I don't think anything more complex went into the decision, other than they thought the company would make a strong asset.”

Source

2011/07/092011/07/09

Chuck Spinney: Perpetual War is a Protection Racket

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Government, Military

Null Hypothesis: Perpetual War protects the MICC against the buildup of political plaque threatening to clog its money pipes.

Proof: The alternative hypothesis has been rejected by a sample of 336 vs. 87, and with the sample being the total population, the Null Hypothesis is accepted at the 100% confidence level.

House boosts military budget in time of austerity

By DONNA CASSATA, Associated Press

Fri Jul 8, 4:47 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Money for the Pentagon and the nation's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is proving largely immune from the budget-cutting that's slamming other government agencies in the rush to bring down the deficit.

On a 336-87 vote Friday, the Republican-controlled House overwhelmingly backed a $649 billion defense spending bill that boosts the Defense Department budget by $17 billion. The strong bipartisan embrace of the measure came as White House and congressional negotiators face an Aug. 2 deadline on agreeing to trillions of dollars in federal spending cuts and raising the borrowing limit so the U.S. does not default on debt payments.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: The lack of intelligence and integrity in Washington is bad for business, bad for the economy, bad for society. The US Chamber of Commerce would do well to realize that as long as they are silent, a small segment of industry will continue to undermine the economy–the Military Industrial Congressional Complex (MICC) is long over-due for being shut-down.

2011/07/082011/07/08

Winslow Wheeler: Congressional Fraud As Usual

Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

WinslowWheeler Cropped — Winslow Wheeler

Weekend Edition
July 8 – 10, 2011

Pork, Dodges and Gimmickry

The Pentagon Remains Immune

By WINSLOW T. WHEELER, Counterpunch

The House of Representatives will soon be debating the new Department of Defense (DoD) appropriations bill. It's expensive – $649 billion, close to another post-World War II high. The bill covers almost all of DoD's expenses for fiscal year 2012 – both routine expenses, such as basic payroll, training and weapons acquisition (known as the “base” budget), and war spending – for Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.

Pretending reform and frugality, members of the House Appropriations Committee – Democrats and Republicans alike – packed the bill with pork and gimmicks.

The bill would spend $17 billion more than last year. But House appropriators are calling this increase a cut because it's less than the original defense budget request President Obama sent to Congress in February. That request was made irrelevant by the president's subsequent decision to reduce long-term security spending by $400 billion.

In addition to pretending frugality, the committee apes reform. It explicitly denies the existence of earmarks in the bill, saying in its own committee report, “Neither the bill nor the report contains any congressional earmarks, limited tax benefits, or limited tariff benefits as defined in clause 9 of rule XXI.”

I found many earmarks.

Read full article….

Phi Beta Iota: There is nothing wrong with the US Government–or the economy–that could not be corrected quickly if the public-private sector partnership restored integrity as a non-negotiable starting point. This is what woke George Soros up–he finally realized that the degree of legalized corruption negated all reasonable operating assumptions for doing business.