Crowds estimate better than the individual - as long as their members trust themselves or the best

Andrew J King, Lawrence Cheng, Sandra D Starke and Julia P Myatt of the Structure and Motion Laboratory / Royal Veterinary College, University of London, did some interesting research regarding swarm intelligence. Here is the abstract of their publication "Is the true 'wisdom of the crowd' to copy successful individuals?":

• "Diversity of expertise at an individual level can increase intelligence at a collective level-a type of swarm intelligence (SI) popularly known as the 'wisdom of the crowd'. However, this requires independent estimates (rare in the real world owing to the availability of public information) and contradicts people's bias for copying successful individuals. 

• To explain these inconsistencies, 429 people took part in a 'guess the number of sweets' exercise. Guesses made with no public information were diverse, resulting in highly accurate SI. Individuals with access to the previous guess, mean guess or a randomly chosen guess, tended to over-estimate the number of sweets and this undermined SI. 

• However, when people were provided with the current best guess, this prevented very large (inaccurate) guesses, resulting in convergence of guesses towards the true value and accurate SI across a range of group sizes. 

• Thus, contrary to previous work, we show that social influence need not undermine SI, especially where individual decisions are made sequentially and then aggregated.

• Furthermore, we offer an explanation for why people have a bias to recruit and follow experts in team settings: copying successful individuals can enable accuracy at both the individual and group level, even at small group sizes."

Here a link to a related article (in german): "Gemeinsam sind wir schlauer"

latershare is a tool to efficiently collect individual input (and aggregate it) while social influence is excluded. In situations where social influence can not be excluded, it is best to follow experts - not hierarchy.

Technologies for Empowered Employees

CMSWire wrote an interesting article about the "Top 16 Technologies for Empowered Employees" that were featured by forrester and placed in their famous hype cycle.

latershare is too young ans mall yet to be listed there, but it can play a role as a tool in five of these listed technology fields:

• Business collaboration: With latershare you can solve certain business communication situations better than by sequential communication.
• File (synching and) sharing - You can attach files to latershare requests and share them with your participants group.
• Infrastructure-as-a-service - latershare runs as a web service, so you can use it without installing it on your own server.
• Innovation management/ideation platforms - Innovation / idea development is one of more than a dozen possible use cases for latershare communication.
• Productivity - Improving productivity by saving time & costs, securing originality & improving fairness is core to latershare.

All these technologies are on the rise, according to Forrester:

The first round of press coverage

The most relevant german startup sites and other publications wrote good articles about latershare:

• Article on deutsche-startups.de - "latershare: Authentische Feedbacks durch zeitversetztes Sichtbarmachen":
  http://www.deutsche-startups.de/2011/11/10/latershare-feedbacks/
• Interview on Gründerszene - "Zehn Fragen an die Macher von Latershare":
  http://www.gruenderszene.de/allgemein/latershare-interview
• Article on netzwertig - "latershare will typische Kommunikations-Probleme lösen":
  http://www.foerderland.de/digitale-wirtschaft/netzwertig/news/artikel/feedbackrunden-mit-zeitversetztem-veroffentlichen-latershare-will-typische-kommunikations-probleme-l/
• Article on telepolis (heise online) - "Schlankes Tool gegen Dünnbrettbohren":
  http://www.heise.de/tp/blogs/4/150715

Listings

• latershare in the crunchbase database:
  http://www.crunchbase.com/company/latershare

ZEITmagazin: The end of e-mail

In the current ZEITmagazin the article "Das Ende von @was" ("The end of something") (german; online: http://www.zeit.de/2011/45/E-Mail) predicts the end of e-mail: "The e-mail just now suffers the same fate as the letter: it is abolished."

Definitely interesting are some statistics:

"According to a study by U.S. market researcher ComScore the e-mail use in the U.S. has decreased by eight percent in 2010. In the group of 12- to 17-year-olds the exodus of 49 percent was strongest, but even the 45- to 54-year-olds emailed twelve percent less."

In times of real-time communication (e.g. voice chats or video conferences), communication in social networks and other online tools e-mail is not needed as much as before.

Representing the office use Atos CEO Thierry Breton is cited: "Our managers spend 5-20 hours per week reading and writing e-mails." E-mail is endangered and should not be considered the "best way to work and exchange".

We think that also latershare will help to reduce the number of unnecessary e-mails. For certain communication situations latershares are simply better suited. We are pleased that a prestigious publication like DIE ZEIT creates awareness for change - away from e-mail, to new forms of communication.

Update: More on Atos Email Banning on Business Insider

Today is our official latershare beta launch

After some testing with friends & family users we are proud to launch our service officially today. We welcome all new users who come via linking blogs, media websites or startup directories. We already prepared some blog messages in the last weeks to give you some background information and some ideas how we were inspired. The beginning is the most important part of the work, said Plato, among others. And starting is done.

So have a look around and enjoy the new communication possibilities that this service offers. We are glad to have you here.

The logo design contest winner

We have accomplished a logo contest on the designer platform 99designs.com and got 195 logo designs, including a few dozen really good designs.
It was not easy to choose a winning logo entry. Now we can introduce the winning logo from the designer Sky Juice:

The logo icon has several meanings:

• A speech bubble - people say something, they communicate content via latershare
• An envelope - the contents are stored in sealed envelopes
• A clock - the contents are made available delayed, at a certain time
• Distribution arrows - The content is made available simultaneously to all participants

We hope you like the new logo as well as us. Now we can start with PR and other actions.

A Meetings Ad - "Meetings - The Practical Alternative To Work"

Not new, but often true: About Meetings (found here and here):



Thanks to Alex Scrivener & Mario Sixtus for this hint via Google+.
Stig Carlsson added even more "benefits": "Practise herd mentality", "Master obstruction techniques", "Dominate your co-workers" and "Practise group indecision".