Skype 5.0 Brings Facebook Integration, Improved Call Options To Windows

by Ray Willington

These days, people don”t “call each other.” They simply “Skype.” Skype is definitely making a mark in how people communicate, and with more and more people signing up for their VoIP services each and everyday, it”s becoming harder to ignore. The service just keeps getting better with each release, and today Skype version 5.0 is available for Windows users in order to bring them even more new extras.

Version 5.0 had previously been in beta, but now it”s fully out in the open and ready to integrate your Facebook friends. Integration is becoming the name of the game; with Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and countless other social networking sites, pulling them together in Skype 5.0 is making it easier than ever to dial up friends from all regions of life. The new build also pulls in Facebook”s news feed and phonebook, and there”s a revised user interface as well. Additionally, there”s a group video calling feature that”s available, but remains in beta.

For the first time Skype users can keep up-to-dateand interact with their Facebook News Feed, including posting status updates, commenting, and liking, directly from Skype. Even better, the Facebook Phonebook in Skype allows users to call and SMS their Facebook friends directly on their mobile phones and landlines with just a few clicks. If your Facebook friend is also a Skype contact, you can make a free Skype-to-Skype call. Furthermore, the new Skype introduces automatic call recovery, which helps users quickly reconnect calls that are interrupted due to Internet connection problems. Plus, a call quality manager gauges audio and video quality during calls, providing guidance on resolving problems and improving the call experience.

The new version is available now from skype.com for Windows users.

http://hothardware.com/News/Skype-50-Brings-Facebook-Integration-Improved-Call-Options-To-Windows/

Government uses social networking to infiltrate people''s lives

By David Gomez

As part of a lawsuit against half a dozen federal agencies, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)  has obtained chilling documents that reveal how the government routinely monitors people online.

According to an EFF blog post, government officials have been using surveillance of social networks to investigate citizenship petitions and the Department of Homeland Security established a “Social Networking Monitoring Cente” to collect and analyze online public communication during President Obama’s inauguration.

In the information the EFF received, there is a memo (dated May 2008) by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services entitled “Social Networking Sites and Their Importance to FDNS” (Office of Fraud Detection and National Security).

This memo is disturbing because of the assumptions the government makes about people who use social networking. The government uses deception to friend people with pending applications for citizenship in the US, and then they use social networking to gather information about that person’s life.

Their hope is to catch people engaged in lying to USCIS. They want to catch people whose relationships might not live up to the USCIS standard of a legitimate marriage. So while using social networking to expose people who scam the system isn’t an act of pure evil, it does make one suspicious of government monitoring of social networking.

This memo makes no mention of how solid the government’s information on a person has to be before surveillance is conducted. This makes is seem as if everyone who uses social networking is a potential target for spying. It also doesn’t say if the government officials who make friend requests to the people they want to spy on actually have to admit their connection to the government.

Based on the memo it would be easy for the government to use social networking to spy not only on individuals who have a citizenship application pending, but their friends and families also.

The EFF also received another bit of information in the form of some slides from a presentation about the Department of Homeland Security starting a Social Networking Monitoring Center. SNMC was created before President Obama’s inauguration to monitor social networking sites for so-called “items of interest.”

The slides describe the tremendous amount of information that DHS collected from social networking sites about people who have accounts. As you might have guessed, nearly every popular form of social networking is being watched.

SNMN goes a bit further than just profiling general social networking sites. They have also been targeting sites with a specific demographic as well. Sites like MiGente and BlackPlanet have been subjected to government profiling as well as political sites like DailyKos.

The slides released to the EFF suggest that the government was collecting information on social networking tied to political events and people’s political beliefs prior to and during the president’s inauguration.

And while the slides attempt to minimize the action of collecting of “Personally Identifiable Information,” it also says “openly divulged information excluding PII will be used for future corroboration purposes and trend analysis during the Inauguration period.”

So, yeah, it’s kind of hard to understand based on the contradictory language in the slides, when the government keeps and deletes certain personal information obtained from social networking.

While some people will gripe and defend the government’s recently revealed activities; the language in the government documents is too unclear to justify any kind of monitoring of social networks.

The thin line between evil spying and government protection is getting erased by this type of activity. The EFF shouldn’t have to file a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit just to find out that the government is sitting around taking copious notes about Facebook and Twitter.

Why all the secrecy over the last few years?

http://www.tgdaily.com/opinion-features/52013-government-uses-social-networking-to-infiltrate-people%E2%80%99s-lives

Tracking social influence through Farmville

By John Timmer

Everything from ideas to communicable diseases spread through social networks, so understanding the processes that enable and influence this spread has immense practical value, even if the research involves… Facebook apps like Farmville.

In recent years, such studies have been revolutionized by the availability of data from computer networks, derived from games and social sites, that provide a far more complete picture of network effects. In the latest study of this sort, a pair of researchers analyzed the installation of Facebook applications in order to determine the point at which social influences start, and they came up with a remarkably specific answer: 55 downloads a day.

Facebook applications range from popular games to trivial decorations, and a number of them have become wildly popular, ending up with millions of installations. From the authors”” perspective, however, these are cultural goods that people choose to install based on their exposure to the apps—and, given that the apps generally aren””t advertised, most of that exposure comes purely through a user””s social network. During the period the study examines (summer of 2007), Facebook automatically sent application install announcements to a user””s network, which ensured that a user””s social network came into play.

Facebook””s public APIs also provided the researchers with an opportunity to get complete information on application installs. In the roughly two months they tracked users, the researchers tracked over a million app installs. Only a handful of applications were skipped due to data corruption issues, so the authors feel they””ve avoided the problem of selection bias that frequently afflict real-world studies.

To gauge the impact of social interactions, the authors turned to the field of fluctuation scaling. In the specific analysis they performed, adding a Facebook app was modeled as a coin flip-like process. At any point, a given user has a chance of deciding to install the app. If no social influences are at play, the analysis will spit out a probability that looks precisely like a coin-flip: 0.5. As social influences become increasingly important, that value will climb towards 1.0.

Below a certain level of download activity, social influences were minimal; the analysis returned a value of 0.55. The authors claim that, as far as they can tell, this distinct phase of non-social driven adoption had never been detected in any studies of network effects. They ascribe its previous invisibility to the fact that no other studies had complete access to all the relevant data; previously, these low-profile items were so hard to find, they didn””t end up getting included in earlier work.

At a very specific point, however, a transition takes place. Once an app becomes popular enough, social forces kick in and the correlations among user downloads rise to 0.85. The transition takes place at a remarkably specific point: 55 installs a day. Once social influences kick in, that 0.85 figure stays in effect over two orders of magnitude, until the rate of downloading starts to tail off. To the authors, this suggests that social influences act as a binary, all-or-nothing influence.

The impact of social networks was independent of whether the app itself included a social component. So, a game that allowed friends to play against each other displayed similar dynamics to one that (in the authors”” example) put a virtual lava lamp on your wall.

Not having seen anything like this before, the authors don””t appear to know what to make of it. The discussion simply suggests that it””s an inherent feature of social networks, and they don””t even try to explain it. Until we have either an explanation or replication in other systems, however, it seems premature to conclude that these dynamics are an inherent feature of these networks.

PNAS, 2010. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914572107 (About DOIs).

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2010/10/on-facebook-social-influences-are-all-or-nothing.ars

Social Games that Sway Behavior

To your health: Healthseeker, a Facebook game which launched this summer, encourages users to take on healthy “missions.” When players complete healthy actions, they are rewarded with points, virtual gifts, and approval from friends in their social networks.

With the rise of social networks, game designers are finding new paths to desired outcomes.

By Kristina Grifantini

Can your social network make you healthier? It”s a question that health organizations are asking more and more–as part of a wave of new gaming experiments that aim to persuade players to think and act differently while having fun.

In June, Vancouver game consulting company Ayogo launched a Facebook game called HealthSeeker that awards “life experience” points or virtual gifts when players with diabetes make small lifestyle changes. For example, it might assign a challenge such as not putting sugar in a single cup of coffee and then reward the player for completing the mission.

The challenge of this kind of game isn”t to convince people of something but to get them to act. “People are already emotionally committed to their health,” says Michael Fergusson, the founder and CEO of Ayogo. “They know they need to eat better and exercise.” But approaching that challenge all at once can seem overwhelming and thankless. “We pay them to take healthy actions,” says Fergusson. Reinforcing those small actions could turn them into habits that add up to better health.

“The game is an ongoing exploration for each player,” adds Manny Hernandez, cofounder and president of the Diabetes Hand Foundation, a nonprofit social-media group that worked with Ayogo and the Joslin Diabetes Center to develop the game. “We hope that through that it can become a very strong source of support for the player,” he says. So far, more than 3,000 people have signed up.

Businesses see value in the concept. “We were really trying to utilize the game players” own online social network as a source of inspiration and support,” says Susan Holz, a public affairs and communications representative at the German pharmaceutical company Boehringer Ingelheim, which funded the project as part of an initiative to encourage creative online games related to diabetes.

The real power of the game lies in the principle of reciprocity, the tendency to do something positive for someone who did something positive for you. Game designers take advantage of reciprocity by making it easy for users to send gifts to friends (“You just accepted this pig” in Farmville, or “Thank Don by sending a free mystery bag back!” in Mafia Wars). Even if users know that the cost of a gift is minimal–often no more than a mouse click–“in general we found people will value the thing they receive,” says Fergusson.

In HealthSeeker, a user can send a “Kudo”–a virtual gift designed to be interesting or amusing–to reward friends for completing a task such as going a day without chocolate. When they receive a Kudo, users feel rewarded and acknowledged for doing something difficult, Fergusson explains. They will also feel a subtle but powerful obligation to return the favor, he says: “That obligation drives the loop of social games.”

The game also draws on the power of social networks in other ways. Users can accept challenges from friends, which Fergusson says make them more likely to take on the recommended mission (the average player is working on two active missions; players who have accepted a friend”s challenge average four). What”s more, users tend to return to the game more frequently when their friends are also playing.

While it”s too early for HealthSeeker to have more than anecdotal evidence of the success of the game, other games have shown conclusively that they can alter behavior–even more than expected at times. MovieSet is a website that chronicles movie production to generate advance buzz for largely unknown films before promos hit TV or radio. When it launched a behind-the-scenes Web show last year, it initially attracted few viewers. The prerelease excitement that MovieSet craved wasn”t there.

Article Continues -> http://www.technologyreview.com/business/26413/?p1=A5

Why Twitter Is the Future of News

This “retweet tree analysis” shows instances of retweeting. When a message is retweeted just a few times it reaches a huge number of users. Credit: Kwak et al.

An unprecedented analysis reveals that the micro-blogging service is remarkably effective at spreading “important” information.

By Christopher Mims

It’s basically impossible for a journalist who relies on Twitter to find stories, stalk editors, rack up “whuffie” and beef with rap stars to be objective about the service.

Fortunately, I don’t have to be, because four researchers from the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology have performed a multi-part analysis of Twitter. They conclude that it’s a surprisingly interconnected network and an effective way to filter quality information.

In a move unprecedented in the history of academic research on Demi Moore’s chosen medium for feuding with Kim Kardashian, Kwak et al. built an array of 20 PCs to slurp down the entire contents of Twitter over the course of a month. If you were on Twitter in July 2009, you participated in their experiment.

Four Degrees of Separation

The ideas behind Stanley Milgram’s original “six degrees of separation” experiment, which suggested that any two people on earth could be connected by at most six hops from one acquaintance to the next, have been widely applied to online social networks.

On the MSN messenger network of 180 million users, for example, the median degree of separtaion is 6. On Twitter, Kwak et al. hypothesized that because only 22.1% of links are reciprocal (that is, I follow you, and you follow me as well) the number of degrees separating users would be longer. In fact, the average path length on Twitter is 4.12.

What’s more, because 94% of the users on Twitter are fewer than five degrees of separation from one another, it’s likely that the distance between any random Joe or Jane and say, Bill Gates, is even shorter on Twitter than in real life.

Information as Outbreak

“…No matter how many followers a user has, the tweet is likely to reach [an audience of a certain size] once the user’s tweet starts spreading via retweets,” says Kwak et al. “That is, the mechanism of retweet has given every user the power to spread information broadly […] Individual users have the power to dictate which information is important and should spread by the form of retweet […] In a way we are witnessing the emergence of collective intelligence.”

If this reminds of you early 90’s hyperbole about the then-new world wide web, it should! Back then the web was a raucous, disorganized, largely volunteer-led effort full of surprisingly informative Geocities pages and equally uninformative corporate websites.

These days we have to contend with the creeping power of what can only notionally be defined as media “content”–produced purely to appear at the top of search results. But it appears that the (so far) still entirely human-filtered paradise of Twitter may come to the rescue. Owing to the short path length between any two users, news travels fast in the tweet-o-sphere.

Earlier work suggested that the best way to get noticed on Twitter was to tweet at certain times of day, and Kwak et al.’s paper sheds some light on why this is the case: “Half of retweeting occurs within an hour, and 75% under a day.” And it’s those initial re-tweets that make all the difference: “What is interesting is from the second hop and on is that the retweets two hops or more away from the source are much more responsive and basically occur back to back up to 5 hops away.”

There Are a Lot of Lonely People on Twitter

Clashing with the service’s interconnectivity, Kwak et al.’s analysis also suggests that there are a lot of lonely people on Twitter, and not just the ones who are tweeting angry political screeds at 8 pm on a Saturday night. “67.6% of users are not followed by any of their followings in Twitter,” they report. “We conjecture that for these users Twitter is rather a source of information than a social networking site.”

Another possibility, left unexplored by Kwak and his colleagues, is simply that on Twitter, like real life, some people are much more popular than others.

Aside from its monkey + keyboard simplicity, the fact that links on Twitter do not have to be reciprocal may be its ultimate genius. To that end, I urge all of you to follow Technology Review on Twitter. I must warn you that, as an enormously influential inanimate object, it has no empathy or conscience, so don’t take it personally when it doesn’t follow you back.

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/guest/25128/?a=f

NJ Principal Asks Parents to Pull the Plug on Social Networking

by Paul Lilly

Former rapper Will Smith had it completely wrong when he waxed poetic about how parents just don’t understand. It’s the principal who has it all backwards, or at least that’s what you’ll hear if you talk to the students of Benjamin Franklin Middle School in Ridgewood, New Jersey.

So what is it that has students in an uproar? In an email to parents earlier this week, Anthony Orsini, the school principal, pleaded with parents to turn their children away from social networking and to more closely monitor their text messaging. Here’s part of what he wrote:

Please do the following: sit down with your child (and they are just children still) and tell them that they are not allowed to be a member of any social networking site. Today!

Let them know that you will at some point every week be checking their text messages online! You have the ability to do this through your cell phone provider.

Let them know that you will be installing Parental Control Software so you can tell every place they have visited online, and everything they have instant messaged or written to a friend. Don’t install it behind their back, but install it!

It is time for every single member of the BF Community to take a stand! There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site!

Let me repeat that – there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None.

Parents, of course, are under no obligation to take Orsini’s advice and cut their children off from Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking portals, but what’s so surprising is the tone in which he adamantly lashes out against such sites.

Part of what has Orsini’s feathers so ruffled is the often anonymous practice of cyber bullying. More than just a buzzword, the school’s guidance counselor, Meredith Wearly, claims she spends about 75 percent of her day diffusing social networking issues that arise among students.

The problem extends beyond Benjamin Franklin Middle School. Recent research found that out of about 4,000 students between the ages of 12 and 18 representing 41 different schools, 20 percent of them admitted to cyber bullying others in their lifetime. In this case, “cyber bullying is when someone repeatedly harasses, mistreats, or makes fun of another person online or while using cell phones or other electronics devices.” And it would appear that adolescent girls are more susceptible to this behavior than other demographics, with 25.8 percent claiming to have been the victim of cyber bullying at least once in their lifetime, versus 16 percent of adolescent males.

And what of the email Orsini sent out? According to the principal, the reaction so far has been mostly positive, though some students have obviously taken issue with his suggestion.

“I’m not going to do anything bad, so why should I get rid of it?,” argues Ali Feniberg, and eighth grade student.

Read the email in its entirely here (scroll down), and then be sure to became a fan of HotHardware’s Facebook page and follow us on Twitter. Parents, students, and even principals are welcome.

http://hothardware.com/News/NJ-Principal-Asks-Parents-to-Pull-the-Plug-on-Social-Networking/



FollowCost – Tool for Twitter

FollowCost – With hundreds of people following you every day, it is easy to just start following them back. However, many people later realize that a specific user wasn’t worth following. FollowCost is a new tool that lets you see how annoying a Twitter user would be before you start following them.

Once you enter the username of somebody on Twitter, FollowCost will calculate the average number of daily tweets by that user and their last 100 updates. The tool also compares the average tweets to number of average tweets by Robert Scoble. You can also see what percentage of the tweets are replies and what percentage are 140 characters long.

It is a fun tool to get an overview of a user’s Twitter activity at a glance.

http://www.makeuseof.com/dir/followcost-annoying-twitter-users

How to get your photos out of Flickr, Picasa Web Albums

By Jacqui Cheng

Photo sharing services are no longer used by a select few—for some Internet users, Flickr and Picasa Web Albums are the place to store and organize photos. But what happens if you decide to just pick up and go to another service? Perhaps Flickr’s terms of service got on your last nerve, or Picasa’s feature set just isn’t enough for you. Or, what if you’ve experienced a catastrophic crash at home and you have lost the locally stored copies of all your photos?

Backup lecture aside, there are numerous reasons for you to want to pull your photos down from the cloud. Some services make this task easier than others, but after finding out on Twitter that numerous readers of ours have wanted to get a mass download of their photos stored online, we figured it would be useful to give a brief how-to for Picasa and Flickr, two of the most popular photo sharing services.

Picasa Web Albums

Thanks to Google’s Data Liberation Front, getting a big dump of your photos out of Picasa Web Albums is a laughably easy task. If you use Picasa software on the desktop, just pull down the File menu to Import from Picasa Web Albums, and in the words of Steve Jobs: boom.

You can still access those photos through the Web, though, either individually or on a per-album basis. But if you want to download them an album at a time, you’ll still need Picasa on the desktop (go to the Download menu from your album and choose Download to Picasa).

Flickr

For the six years I have been a member of Flickr, I have been under the impression that paying users (that is, subscribers to Flickr Pro) were able to download all of their own photos from the service in case of an emergency. That is apparently not the case and has never been.

Of course, if you’re logged into Flicker on the Web, you can always download your photos one by one by clicking on the “All Sizes” button above each photo and downloading the high-res version to your desktop. Although we would really like for Flickr to offer a more consolidated way to do this, there are still a handful of third-party options that make life easier.

Order a backup CD

Flickr has a partnership with a company called Qoop that allows you to import your Flickr photos and create a number of photo-printed products, from greeting cards to mugs to wrapping paper. One of those products, though, actually has value to people besides your grandparents: the backup CD or DVD.

For either $14.99 or $19.99 per disc respectively, you can get a backup CD or DVD of your entire Flickr collection (though it should be noted that Qoop only backs up your photos, not videos or anything else you’ve uploaded to Flickr). Sure, it costs money, but if your wedding photos are stuck on Flickr with no backup, it could be worth the $20.

Flickery

Flickery is a Mac OS X application ($19.20 or 15-day free trial) that lets you do all manner of things with Flickr from your desktop. Once you authenticate Flickr to be used with Flickery, you can interact directly with your Flickr photos, sets, groups, and more without having to mess with things in iPhoto and re-sync.

One of the features of Flickery is that you can download your photos from Flickr to a folder on your desktop, iPhoto, or Aperture. You can do this one by one or en masse, making this a more preferable option than doing so one-by-one on the Web.

The downside is that you still can’t get one giant dump of all your photos at once, but we found that going from photo set to photo set was almost as good, if not a bit tedious. In a pinch, you can do this without having to pay (just use the free trial), but it turns out to Flickery is a decent enough application that we would consider keeping it around.

FlickrDown

Similarly, FlickrDown is a free application that runs under Windows (requires .NET 2.0) and that allows you to download photos to your desktop. Though it doesn’t look like it has been updated in a couple years, numerous Twitter followers of ours swear by FlickrDown as a reliable way to grab photos from the wWb in an emergency.

As you can see from the screenshot, users can choose from specific photo sets on Flickr or just select all photos in your stream (assuming they are public), including those that aren’t in a set, for downloading. Just choose a folder on your desktop for the dump and go grab a cup of coffee.

What solutions do you have?

Some readers have told us that they’ve written their own scripts to grab their photos from online, but we were wondering if any of you have employed other solutions that we could recommend.

http://arstechnica.com/software/guides/2010/04/how-to-get-your-photos-out-of-flickr-picasa-web-albums.ars

Google: U.S. Demanded User Info 3,500 Times in Six Months

By Ryan Singel

For years, search engines and ISPs have refused to tell the public how many times the cops and feds have forced them to turn over information on users.

But on Tuesday, Google broke that unwritten code of silence, unveiling a Government Requests Tool that shows the public how often individual goverments around the world have asked for user information, and how often they’ve asked Google to remove content from their sites or search index for reasons other than copyright violation.

The answer for U.S. users is 3,580 total requests for information over a six month period from July 2009 to December 2009. That number comes to about 20 a day, and includes subpoenas and search warrants from state, local and federal law enforcement officials. Brazil just edges out the U.S. in the number of requests for data about users, with 3,663 over that  six months. That’s due to the continuing Brazilian popularity of Google’s social networking site, Orkut.

Google Vice President David Drummond announced the tool in a blog post Tuesday, casting it as a tool to cut down on censorship — not surprising given that Google says it’s been censored by 25 of the 100 countries it operates in.

[G]overnment censorship of the web is growing rapidly: from the outright blocking and filtering of sites, to court orders limiting access to information and legislation forcing companies to self-censor content.

So it’s no surprise that Google, like other technology and telecommunications companies, regularly receives demands from government agencies to remove content from our services. Of course many of these requests are entirely legitimate, such as requests for the removal of child pornography. We also regularly receive requests from law enforcement agencies to hand over private user data. Again, the vast majority of these requests are valid and the information needed is for legitimate criminal investigations. However, data about these activities historically has not been broadly available. We believe that greater transparency will lead to less censorship.

Google is also releasing information about the number of times governments ask the company to take down content or remove links. These include requests to take down defamatory videos, such as the one that led to prosecution of Google executives in Italy. The statistics do not include requests based on copyright or from reports of child pornography, since Google automatically takes down the latter whenever it detects it.

Google has long pledged its allegiance to transparency and believes this announcement will add to the long-running debate about how much power law enforcement and governments should have to see what citizens do online.

A broad consortium of tech companies and privacy groups recently announced a push to modernize the nation’s privacy laws so that data stored by third parties, especially by so-called cloud computing services like Gmail, are treated just like data stored on citizens’ home computers. Currently, e-mails stored online lose much of their legal protection after 6 months, and the Justice Department recently tried to get at unopened mail online without having to get a proper search warrant.

The numbers reflect only criminal investigations, and do not include national security investigation powers such as National Security Lettters or FISA warrants, which companies are often not legally allowed to disclose.

The numbers also do not include the number of people named in the requests, whether Google fought the request or which products the requests apply to. The company says it plans to release that information after out it figures out how to create meaningful statistics, since a single request can apply to mulitple people using multiple products, or conversely, Google can receive multiple requests concerning the same person.

ISPs and large tech companies have long used the excuse that they don’t publish this information because no one else does.

Now that Google has taken the first step, that argument no longer works. And we are looking at you, Yahoo, Microsoft, Amazon and AT&T, when we say that.

See Also:

• Google Talks Transparency, But Hides Surveillance Stats
• Google’s Half-Hearted Commitment to Transparency
• Google, Microsoft Push Feds to Fix Privacy Laws

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/04/google-warrants-transparency

In the Next Industrial Revolution, Atoms Are the New Bits

In an age of open source, custom-fabricated, DIY product design, all you need to conquer the world is a brilliant idea. Photo: Dan Winters

By Chris Anderson

The door of a dry-cleaner-size storefront in an industrial park in Wareham, Massachusetts, an hour south of Boston, might not look like a portal to the future of American manufacturing, but it is. This is the headquarters of Local Motors, the first open source car company to reach production. Step inside and the office reveals itself as a mind-blowing example of the power of micro-factories.

In June, Local Motors will officially release the Rally Fighter, a $50,000 off-road (but street-legal) racer. The design was crowdsourced, as was the selection of mostly off-the-shelf components, and the final assembly will be done by the customers themselves in local assembly centers as part of a “build experience.” Several more designs are in the pipeline, and the company says it can take a new vehicle from sketch to market in 18 months, about the time it takes Detroit to change the specs on some door trim. Each design is released under a share-friendly Creative Commons license, and customers are encouraged to enhance the designs and produce their own components that they can sell to their peers.

The Rally Fighter was prototyped in the workshop at the back of the Wareham office, but manufacturing muscle also came from Factory Five Racing, a kit-car company and Local Motors investor located just down the road. Of course, the kit-car business has been around for decades, standing as a proof of concept for how small manufacturing can work in the car industry. Kit cars combine hand-welded steel tube chassis and fiberglass bodies with stock engines and accessories. Amateurs assemble the cars at their homes, which exempts the vehicles from many regulatory restrictions (similar to home-built experimental aircraft). Factory Five has sold about 8,000 kits to date.

One problem with the kit-car business, though, is that the vehicles are typically modeled after famous racing and sports cars, making lawsuits and license fees a constant burden. This makes it hard to profit and limits the industry’s growth, even in the face of the DIY boom.

Jay Rogers, CEO of Local Motors, saw a way around this. His company opted for totally original designs: They don’t evoke classic cars but rather reimagine what a car can be. The Rally Fighter’s body was designed by Local Motors’ community of volunteers and puts the lie to the notion that you can’t create anything good by committee (so long as the community is well managed, well led, and well equipped with tools like 3-D design software and photorealistic rendering technology). The result is a car that puts Detroit to shame.

It is, first of all, incredibly cool-looking — a cross between a Baja racer and a P-51 Mustang fighter plane. Given its community provenance, one might have expected something more like a platypus. But this process was no politburo. Instead, it was a competition. The winner was Sangho Kim, a 30-year-old graphic artist and student at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. When Local Motors asked its community to submit ideas for next-gen vehicles, Kim’s sketches and renderings captivated the crowd. There wasn’t supposed to be a prize, but the company gave Kim $10,000 anyway. As the community coalesced around his Rally Fighter, members competed to develop secondary parts, from the side vents to the light bar. Some were designers, some engineers, and others just car hobbyists. But what they had in common was a refusal to design just another car, compromised by mass-market needs and convention. They wanted to make something original — a fantasy car come to life.

While the community crafted the exterior, Local Motors designed or selected the chassis, engine, and transmission thanks to relationships with companies like Penske Automotive Group, which helped the firm source everything from dashboard dials to the new BMW clean diesel engine the Rally Fighter will use. This combination — have the pros handle the elements that are critical to performance, safety, and manufacturability while the community designs the parts that give the car its shape and style — allows crowdsourcing to work even for a product whose use has life-and-death implications.

Local Motors plans to release between 500 and 2,000 units of each model. It’s a niche vehicle; it won’t compete with the major automakers but rather fill in the gaps in the marketplace for unique designs. Rogers uses the analogy of a jar of marbles, each of which represents a vehicle from a major automaker. In between the marbles is empty space, space that can be filled with grains of sand — and those grains are Local Motors cars.

Local Motors has just 10 full-time employees (that number will grow to more than 50 as it opens build centers, the first of which will be in Phoenix), holds almost no inventory, and purchases components and prepares kits only after buyers have made a down payment and reserved a build date.

In Depth article Continues -> http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution

Local Motors CEO Jay Rogers combined the power of crowd sourced design and professional experience to develop the Rally Fighter.  Photo: Adrian Gaut