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Showing posts from September, 2009

Social Networking & Dunbar's Number

My Facebook friends list has reached close to 140 (give or take 3 pending requests). One of persistent thought I have been having for past few days is the fact that the number of people in my social network is close to Dunbar’s number (148 appx) – my neocortex limit for maintaining stable relationship Dunbar's number (also known as the Dunbar number or the Monkeysphere) is a value significant in sociology and anthropology. Proposed by British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, it measures the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships". Dunbar theorizes that "this limit is a direct function of relative neocortex size, and that this in turn limits group size ... the limit imposed by neocortical processing capacity is simply on the number of individuals with whom a stable inter-personal relationship can be maintained." You could read more about Dunbar’s number at (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_nu

Will the real ‘early adopter’ of technology, please stand up?

The best thing about my generation is the fact - we have seen much more technological advances and innovations than any generations before. The introduction of Video Cassette Recorder, Colour Televisions, Personal Computers, Internet, WWWs, Pagers, Mobile Phones, DVRs, Ipods, MP3s, etc, etc, etc… One thing I notice, in my job, is that most of the companies (especially into technology – software/hardware) believes that their primary audience as ‘early adopters’ are the youth… and most of the marketing managers definition of youth happens to be people between the age group of 18- 24… well is this true that the youth will drive the technological product innovation?? By market definition – Early Adopters are those who closely follow the footsteps of Innovators… Early Adopters are usually identified as the one’s that are curious, open to new ideas, integrated into local social system, etc But, we all know that humans are most inquisitive when they are kids. A child of 5 year is most curious