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Ok, so there's another social network, big whoop. But this isn't just a social network as any other, rather this is a knowledge network. Mygeni is a Cape-Town based startup that is built around the notion of user-generated knowledge and aims to predict the users' interests and desires.

Sure, there have been such networks in the past, but not quite like this. Mygeni uses a variety of factors and a proprietary algorithm to work out what you want to read and who you trust. There are no walls, games or hash tags on Mygeni, simply knowledge. The important aspect of Mygeni is really that all content is user-generated and the source of a content item is transparent. Users know where it came from and how Mygeni thought it would be interesting, rather than just seeing content from apparently random news websites as Google+ does it.

Mygeni is currently in public alpha, many things are changing, and in the interest of full disclosure I am working for them at the moment. The site has some bugs and usability is an issue but the team is working hard on fixing this with many interface changes coming up.

How it works

After registering one selects "interests" which, with the help of keywords, define, well... one's interests. Now Mygeni will show you a stream of relevant information posted in the public domain. Once you add friends and start commenting as well as sharing yourself Mygeni not only gives you a credibility rank but also starts calculating other user's credibility in relation to you and how their content interests you.

You have a content stream homepage on which you see two items from each of your interests. What's important is that this isn't a constantly changing wall like facebook's where you lose track if you don't check every few minutes. Mygeni allows you to view content whenever you want to not having to go scroll through thousands of days worth of posts to find that one story you were interested in.

Privacy

An issue often brought up in the context of social networks is privacy. Mygeni has a very interesting concept that could rival Google+'s Circles. Now, Mygeni has been around and in public alpha for a long time since before Google+ was launched, so don't think Mygeni stole Google+ Sparks and improved on it.

Mygeni allows users to define their friends in one of three categories: tight, close and social. Whenever a user shares content they can choose to target it only to their tight friends, their close firends (which includes the tight friends) or their social friends (which is all their friends) or of course public which allows anyone to view it.

Groups

The true party piece though is Mygeni Groups. This allows any user to create a group around an interest they choose, invite their friends and share specifically in that group. What's cool though is that companies can create groups for their brands and whitelabel these, allowing them to use Mygeni as a news and content platform of their own to interact with and engage their customers.

Revenue Sharing

Mygeni also has a revenue sharing scheme. It isn't operating yet as the site is still in alpha but once the app launches fully this will kick in. In the mean time though users can already accumulate Mygeni's virtual currency: Wishes.

In the future a wish will be cashable at a certain exchange rate via Paypal into a user's local currency. This is extremely interesting for existing news outlets that use Mygeni Groups to propagate their content as an additional platform as well as for home users that just enjoy sharing content and don't mind making a few extra bucks off it.

Conclusion

Mygeni is an exciting start-up, aiming to democratize knowledge by allowing people to be informed through users rather than large corporations. There are some bugs and flaws but the concept is solid and Mygeni looks like it could be a great ambassador for Cape innovation.

I suggest you go and try it out, share some content, whether it be an article, a location, a sound track or video. Tell your friends about it and keep an eye out for Mygeni's big launch.

At the moment Mygeni has been very under wraps. While the website is live they haven't approached any news outlets for coverages and flown under the radar on twitter and such. Slowly though as the service becomes more robust and everything comes together Mygeni will be coming out into the open.

Check it out.

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In Carr’s article “The End of Corporate Computing” the former executive editor of the Harvard Business Review outlines an industry-internal prophecy of the end of computing as it exists today.

Companies therefore had to buy expensive power production equipment, employ electrical engineers and maintain these internal plants, creating massive redundancies and overcapacities. But in the beginning of the 20th century Samuel Insull realized the potential for centralization, saving companies massive fixed costs and creating a new industry. He went to found the first large power utility, Commonwealth Edison, which would go on to provide electricity to large companies all over. This shift from electricity being an asset the company generated to a service it purchased meant power went from being a fixed cost to being a variable cost. Companies would now pay for what they used and no more.

Another advantage of this centralization was the economies of scale. With alternating current there was virtually no limit to the expansion of power utilities, as they could provide electricity over vast distances. The limit was purely their production and selling capacity.

What Carr is playing to in his reference to this paradigm shift in the electricity industry is the rising of a new industry in the computing world. Software as a service, cloud computing and worldwide high-speed telecommunications infrastructures are allowing for a possible future centralization of computing power.

As I have discussed in my own essay, written in 2008, “The Future of Personal Computing”, a worldwide shift to centralized computing is indisputable.  We are facing an industry of computing suppliers. Since Carr’s publication in 2005 Amazon has introduced it’s cloud storage solution, Google has introduced Google Apps, allowing the use of word processing, presentation and spreadsheet software on the web and is also developing an open-source operating system based solely on web-based services (Chrome OS).

Carr predicts that computing “utilities” will own huge data centres which will run virtualized processes for their clients, who access these from pure terminals. All that will be necessary to access are the basic input devices, a screen, keyboard and mouse, while all the actual processing hardware will be based in the remote data centres. This allows for the distribution and maximization of processing power, elimination of redundant data and capacities, as well as huge cost savings on behalf of the companies, who will no longer be required to buy desktop units, servers, employ maintenance staff and constantly upgrade this infrastructure. The “utility” will own the terminals, which will be leased by the company. Utility engineers will resolve most issues remotely or alternatively an engineer will visit the company to resolve hardware issues with the terminals or communications infrastructure.  For companies computing will no longer be an asset and painful distraction from daily business but a service purchased similar to electricity. They will henceforth only be paying for actually used capacity

I largely agree with this prognosis but actually go a step further as to predict a world in which we will face unified terminals available everywhere from which we log onto our online presences, completely sidelining existing operating system manufacturers such as Microsoft, Apple, Cannonicle, etc. Of course the data centres we run our entire computing world of will be running on operating systems and there will undoubtedly be various “utilities” providing these services. As Carr mentions possible candidates as leading centralized computing suppliers are Google, IBM, Microsoft and Amazon, amongst others. Personally I see Google and Microsoft as the ideal candidates as a market leader, but there will be many competitors once the trend begins, including many new startups.

For this centralization the new “utility” will require massive capacities: large state-of-the-art data centres, huge software engineering departments, hardware production and distribution infrastructure, as well as high-speed connectivity to internet backbones. These prerequisites basically put existing, established Software as a Service (SaS) and Cloud Computing providers in optimal positions to put up shop as the future computing providers. These are precisely Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

Another issue to consider is what impact all this will have on private computing and especially high-end computing needs, such as video editing, games and other processor-heavy tasks. Will cloud computing solutions be able to offer intensive graphics and processing power for these uses and just as importantly will the infrastructure be able to support these data streams?

Every sign in the industry is indicating ventures in the direction of massive centralized computing. Likely large companies will take the lead by beginning to outsource their computing as described by Carr, paying as they go for the resources used and eliminating fixed costs. Eventually small to medium enterprises (SMEs) will follow and then private users. But until Windows, Mac OS, Ubunutu and all the other operating systems will disappear, until hard drives, motherboards, CPUs and graphics cards become completely discarded from offices and homes another decade or more is likely to pass. Not only are we (South Africans) currently missing the necessary infrastructure to support the connection uptime and stability, as well as the bandwidth required, but the public mindset is not set for such a massive shift. People will not be able to comprehend the elimination of desktop computing overnight, nor will companies be able to implement this. As we stand at the moment no solution is in sight that can service all the needs as Carr describes.

Carr does not outline a timeframe for his vision, but it is certain that while many requirements must still be met this is the future of computing.

References:

1. Nicholas G. Carr: “The End of Corporate Computing” (MIT Sloan Management Review, 2005).
2. Michael Hubbard: “The Future of Personal Computing” (http://mikehub.net/show.php?id=82, written 2008, published April 2010).

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• NOW overwrite the placeholder with the index and BOOM! you're live.

• As you know we are incorporated in the Republic of South Africa now (as PanzaTrax (Pty) Ltd, as we used a shelf company, we are in the process of changing the name).
• We have been operational as such for a month and a half and just completed our financial year ended 28 February with very good results, appropriate to our new beginning
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• We are planning to diversify our services: We offer, apart from webdesign and development, full hosting as a retail product (servers in Germany or South Africa) and intend to build our social media marketing front, in the form of blogging and tweeting. More specifically to blog and tweet in proxy for a company, i.e. run the services for them, freeing their capacity.
  
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