The one passage that really stuck out for me:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

Let us break this anecdote down a bit. Apple, like many companies, will “announce” a product weeks or months before it is actually available for sale. This is done to allow marketing departments to whip up customer anticipation for the product, allow reviewers to get their hands on the product prior to sale and so forth. The product announcement is made once final test-production prototypes are completed and internal testing makes sure the product is ready for full-scale mass production. All that is left to do is let the factory ramp up production so that inventories are prepared for the demand once the product actually hits store shelves.

But something happened in this case. Either through a mistake or via a last-minute product engineering “ah-ha moment” the screen specifications were changed on the cusp of the beginning of production — or even after production had started — necessitating the need for the above mentioned crash rejiggering of the the production line.

Therefore, according to Apple, production in China allows for the kind of flexibility (which can also be read as “ass covering” in some cases) and speed that is simply impossible in the United States. And that’s before we even start to consider the actual cost of making the things here due to the ridiculous labor cost differences between the U.S. and China. End of story, right?

Workers at the Foxlink factory in China catch a nap during lunch. Photo: Flickr user, dcmaster. Creative-Commons, non-commercial, attribution.

According to UK-based technology magazine, The Inquirer, the parts cost of an iPhone 4 (last year’s model), which costs approxmately $499 at full retail price, was about $187. Other anecdotal reports put the per-unit labor cost of an iPHone at between $7 and $20. The Inquirer article ignores the fact that all of the sub-components are manufactured in East Asia as well. Producing all of the components and the final product in a complete U.S. manufacturing ecosystem would, indeed probably result in a $1000 iPhone.

Instead, let’s imagine a world where Apple has decided to build a final iPhone assembly plant in the U.S. All the parts are still produced in East Asia, but Apple has decided to actually assemble the iPhone in a U.S. plant where the production can be closely monitored. And hey, it’s a P.R. win. The plant is located in a right-to-work state, let’s say, Tennessee. We’ll estimate that the increased transportation costs of the parts and labor costs amount to an cost increase of $65 per unit, between 3 and 9 times the cost in China.

The iPhone would either be that much more expensive or Apple could eat some or all of the difference and take a smaller net profit per phone. Apple is estimated to net between $180 and $220 per phone. In other words, it is certainly possible for Apple to produce the iPhone in the United States and still make a (albeit smaller) profit.

But, could Apple have pulled off its last-minute modification of the iPhone in an American factory?

In Tennessee, the word comes down from Cupertino. Engineers are flown in by corporate jet, managers wake up supervisors who roust employees. Employees would be then be paid LOTS of overtime to come in late, weekends, work double shifts, et cetera to pull it off. Sure, it would cost a small fortune in overtime and shipping and all the rest. Some employees would not be available or would refuse to work the crazy hours. It would be a logistical nightmare, but it could be done.

Or maybe not. Perhaps employee intransigence at the factory would make it impossible to summon the required manpower at the last minute. Perhaps a key shipper… Perhaps a Union shipper would not or could not get the new parts moved on the ridiculous timeline. In that case, marketing disaster. The on-sale date slips by days or weeks. The trade press is full of stories about “production problems,” and Apple’s glittering public perception gets a black eye. Some mid-level managers at Apple loose their jobs. There are hard questions from the Board of Directors and shareholders.

Or not. The marketing team could (also) be woken in the middle of the night and told to produce a new ad campaign: “Dear Apple Fans,

Love, Apple.”

But they don’t. Why? Because they don’t have to. The downside risk isn’t worth the effort. The “breathtaking speed and flexibility” that the anonymous source at Apple mentioned makes sure they don’t have to bother with that. Because the circumstances of workers in China are just a couple of notches above indentured servitude, there is a negligible cost for either planning mistakes or last-minute design changes. In any traditional, Western economy such things have the potential to cost a fortune and ruin companies and careers.

Because in China (and India, and all over the developing world) there are hundreds of millions of people who are so desperate to escape from the poverty that they will of their own accord subject themselves to utterly inhumane conditions with little or no ability to organize to better those conditions. It means that a nearly endless source of cheap, expendable human beings enables companies like Apple to make what we would consider a ridiculous expectation seem ordinary.

How ironic then that all of the high-technology products that are used to make what is left of industry and work in the West so much more efficient that fewer and fewer people can actually find work. How ironic that this high-tech system is totally reliant on the deployment of anonymous and utterly replaceable human beings on a scale that would make a Egyptian Pharaoh blush.

The speed of China’s development both economically and in its social sphere means that this situation is not really sustainable. Already, big Chinese companies are under pressure to pay higher wages and take more extreme measures to maintain their ridiculous labor cost advantages. Chinese workers are getting uppity and starting to demand some tangible benefits in exchange for all their sacrifices. Within this coming decade, China’s labor-cost advantages in manufacturing will start to erode significantly as China’s leaders trade off workforce costs in exchange for social stability.

But not to worry. Although there is only one China, there is still all of Africa.

The speech itself [Transcript here. ] is about 30 minutes with about 20 minutes of Q&A. And if you can’t bring yourself to watch the entirety, I’ll recap it here.

I want to be clear here. Neither I, nor Cory Doctorow or any other responsible person advocating for sensible copyright and electronic liberty is condoning theft. What we are against are two things really. One, the idea that just because a corporation has made a profit in a certain way, with a certain business model for a number of years, the legislature or the courts are responsible for guaranteeing those profits in the future regardless of changes in the underlying economy or technologies. Two, is the making of outright stupid laws that would break the Internet.

Now, while there is certainly some amount of outright theft of intellectual property on the Internet it has been shown again and again that Big Content regularly inflates its “estimates” for losses due to piracy. More and more what we are seeing is a desperate rear-guard action by the entertainment industries to hold back the tide of change. A really good overview of how all this affects culture (and how this is just the same old story) is this TED Talk by Lawrence Lessig.

Cory Doctorow Photo: Jonathan Worth

And on the network side, attempts to make a network that can’t be used for copyright infringement always converges with the surveillance measures that we know from repressive governments. So, SOPA, the U.S. Stop Online Piracy Act, bans tools like DNSSec because they can be used to defeat DNS blocking measures. And it blocks tools like Tor, because they can be used to circumvent IP blocking measures. In fact, the proponents of SOPA, the Motion Picture Association of America, circulated a memo, citing research that SOPA would probably work, because it uses the same measures as are used in Syria, China, and Uzbekistan, and they argued that these measures are effective in those countries, and so they would work in America, too!

He makes an excellent analogy for why this is just stupid. Wheels and bank robbers.

If I wanted Congress to write, or Parliament to write, or the E.U. to regulate a wheel, it’s unlikely I’d succeed. If I turned up and said “well, everyone knows that wheels are good and right, but have you noticed that every single bank robber has four wheels on his car when he drives away from the bank robbery? Can’t we do something about this?”, the answer would of course be “no”. Because we don’t know how to make a wheel that is still generally useful for legitimate wheel applications but useless to bad guys. And we can all see that the general benefits of wheels are so profound that we’d be foolish to risk them in a foolish errand to stop bank robberies by changing wheels. Even if there were an epidemic of bank robberies, even if society were on the verge of collapse thanks to bank robberies, no-one would think that wheels were the right place to start solving our problems.

So, that’s what’s wrong with things like SOPA, the crazy legislation currently making its way through Congress despite the fact that practically every business (except the content producers) involved in the Internet (Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Dell, Google…) and everyone who ever had a hand in designing the Internet is basically yelling, “Are you nuts?!”

But even if we dodge the SOPA bullet and whatever else comes down the pike from Corporate Content, we still have the problem of the fact that all of these content producers are more and more joined at the hip to the hardware and software industries. Think of the relationship between Sony (Entertainment conglomerate) and well… Sony (hardware manufacturer, producer of game systems, TV’s and PC’s).

So today we have marketing departments who say things like “we don’t need computers, we need… appliances. Make me a computer that doesn’t run every program, just a program that does this specialized task, like streaming audio, or routing packets, or playing Xbox games, and make sure it doesn’t run programs that I haven’t authorized that might undermine our profits”. And on the surface, this seems like a reasonable idea — just a program that does one specialized task — after all, we can put an electric motor in a blender, and we can install a motor in a dishwasher, and we don’t worry if it’s still possible to run a dishwashing program in a blender. But that’s not what we do when we turn a computer into an appliance. We’re not making a computer that runs only the “appliance” app; we’re making a computer that can run every program, but which uses some combination of rootkits, spyware, and code-signing to prevent the user from knowing which processes are running, from installing her own software, and from terminating processes that she doesn’t want. In other words, an appliance is not a stripped-down computer — it is a fully functional computer with spyware on it out of the box.

And finally, this entire shitstorm about copying games, movies and music? Hacking your car’s computer? Totally penny-ante stuff. Because looming on the horizon are technologies like 3D manufacturing and genome manipulation on the desktop.

And it doesn’t take a science fiction writer to understand why regulators might be nervous about the user-modifiable firmware on self-driving cars, or limiting interoperability for aviation controllers, or the kind of thing you could do with bio-scale assemblers and sequencers. Imagine what will happen the day that Monsanto determines that it’s really… really… important to make sure that computers can’t execute programs that cause specialized peripherals to output organisms that eat their lunch… literally. Regardless of whether you think these are real problems or merely hysterical fears, they are nevertheless the province of lobbies and interest groups that are far more influential than Hollywood and big content are on their best days, and every one of them will arrive at the same place — “can’t you just make us a general purpose computer that runs all the programs, except the ones that scare and anger us? Can’t you just make us an Internet that transmits any message over any protocol between any two points, unless it upsets us?”

During the past decade, MSFT returned exactly zero to investors, including dividends. They are a bloated, bureaucracy run by bloated, bureaucratic CEO. The paradigm has shifted, and they have failed to make the turn. They missed literally every major new technology, every innovation, every great idea from search to social to handhelds to tablets over that period.

The Kinnect is certainly a hit, but its not the sort of product that moves the needle for a $234 billion company. X Box is also a consumer winner, but the firm spent billions to grab the franchise from Sony — with far less ROI than such a massive investment would should ever warrant. Everything else from Online to Search to Social to portable music to even their well reviewed but 5 years too late cell phone — has been a bust. Their bread and butter franchises — Office, Windows and even SQL — are under assault from completely new product categories to which they have no response.

If you want to trade Mister Softee, go right ahead. But this is no widows & orphans stock, no buy & hold investment. They are in the process of turning into Maytag, a boring producer of appliances, with a modest dividend and not a whole lot of growth ahead of them.

(Emphasis is the original author’s.)

Microsoft 10 year stock chart. (Source: Google Finance, 2012/1/11)

He does a great job of explaining for security professionals some of the “core truths” about the Internet and society. The speech in full is on his website. A couple of highlights:

Ten years ago, your verdict about the meal in front of us could only have been shared with a few – your neighbours, your friends, your partner. The only opinion that mattered, that would have travelled, would be the professional critic’s, distributed in print.

The same goes for theatre, or television, music, or our views on the Prime Minister. Now, of course, there is a place to review everything.

We assume that every meal we eat, every hotel bed we sleep in, every piece of culture we consume, is something we can have an opinion on, and have it be given the same importance as an opinion from anyone else. There are rating sites online for you to rate just about anything, legal or not, and the sheer weight of amateur reviews outdoes the professionals for authority most of the time.

It’s another example of a network beating a hierachy, and it’s all pervasive in the national discourse. We are used to having our opinions matter, and so now, at the one end, politics is more shrill – more rabble-like – and at the other end, we have rioting.

Indeed, a small part of the trigger for the London riots can be understood as the gap between the respect given to peoples’s opinions by the internet, and the complete disrespect given by the government and the ruling elites.

He also makes what I think is a critical point about how 9/11 changed our perception of threats and our reaction to “security warnings.” There are numerous academic studies that show that people react to repeated security warnings that come to nothing by basically tuning them out. And by warning people about the wrong things, we become less able to decide which security warnings are actually important.

The government, and the security industry, in this country and elsewhere, have spent the past ten years really blowing it. Time and time again there has been a demonstration of security theatre, or overreaction, or overstatement of the risks in hand. From liquids in airports to invading Iraq, no one believes this stuff any more.

While there is no doubt that religious extremism, whatever the religion, has presented a risk to life, that threat has been so overstated as to render any other warnings, on any other subject – including the one in hand today – completely impotent.

A world where Al-Qaeda can be described by the government as an existential threat to the UK, when it is patently not, is a world where warnings about updating your virus scanner because of Chinese cyberwarriors or Russian mafia will be ignored as yet more paranoid security bullshit.

Despite the fact that it probably isn’t.

What’s worse, is that the phrase “security precautions” has become a synonym for “pointless annoying thing to do because politicians are either stupid or oppresive”.

This is bad. But it’s a very common belief. The speeches given after the London riots, about closing social networks down in times of national emergency were triply stupid in this respect.

1. They disregarded the centrality of those services in people’s lives, which made people look out of touch with modernity.
2. They were technically dubious (which pretty much everyone who would have been affected well knew),
3. They reinforced the impression you get when you go through an airport, that this is all self-justification.

In total it both makes one both feel less secure, and be less secure.

My regular job, the one that pays the bills, has had me very busy lately and I expect it to remain so for some time, so sadly, posting will remain erratic. And between work and all the crazy stuff happening in the world, it really has been kind of hard to gather one’s thoughts as it seems the globe lurches from crisis to crisis.

Last week I gave a presentation to a gathering of health care executives about the impact of social media on marketing and brand management. I started it off with this amazing video by Dan Pink and the premise, “In times of profound change you need to re-examine your assumptions about how the world works.”

Certainly the first three months of 2011 make it seem like all the subtle changes in our economies and societies that have been slowly happening underfoot have suddenly let go, just like the pressure along a fault line can release decades of pressure in a few minutes. But despite all of this, I’m feeling optimistic. I’ll get to why in a minute, but first let’s review some news.

Let’s start close by in Wisconsin. Anyone who has been involved in GOP politics for any length of time knows that one of the great goals of the party is to destroy the labor movement in America. Not only is organized labor one of the only organizational and financial counterbalances to the moneyed corporate interests that support the GOP, but labor also stands in the way of turning the clock back on worker’s rights, a cherished goal of those same corporate interests. These goals are rarely stated out loud outside of the confined of the most rarefied party leadership meetings however. If they were widely expressed it would, as they say, “scare the straights,” and make non-partisan voters understandably a bit jittery.

But last month, emboldened by huge electoral victories that installed majorities in both legislative houses and put a Tea Party favorite in the Governor’s Mansion, Republicans indulged in a little wish-fulfillment. We got to see what happens when a political party fueled with a religious-like righteous sureness of cause completely unmoors itself from reality, reason and scruples. The result is exactly as , the tyranny of the majority:

Unmoored from reality as they were, the GOP perhaps had convinced itself that these policies would be supported by the majority of the population, or at least a workable electoral majority. The counterbalance to this wild-eyed overreach by the GOP in Wisconsin, Ohio and elsewhere was mobilization of the people to oppose this. And lurking behind that organization effort, as it is lurking behind almost every one of the major events occurring today, are networks, social media and the movement towards radical transparency.

It has been everywhere, the punking of Governor Walker and subsequent release of the tape on the Internet; the mobilization of his opposition; the central position of social networks in the revolutions in the Middle East; the use of Twitter in getting updates out of Japan; and everywhere WikiLeaks and those damned diplomatic cables.

There are the cables cables foreshadowing Egypt’s revolution, a cable outlining the dangers posed to Japan by older nuclear reactors in an eqarthquake as well as the Japanese nuclear regulatory agency’s lax attitude. And even today, the US Ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual’s has been forced to resign after his criticisms of the Mexican government’s war on drugs cause a rift with President Calderon.

Meanwhile, Bradley Manning, the US Army private who is charged — only charged mind you — continues to be held degrading and inhumane conditions in the brig months after his arrest. The State Department Chief Spokesman, P. J. Crowley was forced to resign last week after suggesting that Pvt. Manning’s treatment was wrong.

It is because of all this that I am feeling a bit optimistic in spite of all the apparent chaos. This is because what is emerging out of all of this chaos is the light of knowledge. We are now seeing exposed to the light of truth so much that used to happen in the shadows. From the shabby motivations and loyalties of a fake prairie populist to the rather astute observations of the professional foreign service employees of the United States, the previously only suspected (and even then with a sense that is might all be “just conspiracy talk”) is confirmed to be real.

But the truth does nobody any good if it remains an orphan, un-loved and un-embraced. If the arc of history is indeed, as Gandhi said, to “bend in the direction of justice,” then we need to start embracing these dirty little truths and acting on them.

So, this dude, Reid Gower, decided that NASA does a pretty poor job of promoting itself and took it upon himself to school the geeks over there on how to, you know, make space exploration sexy again. Very simple really, take the voice of the late, beloved Carl Sagan from his Cosmos TV series and mash it up with some of the better video of recent decades. Done.

Carl Sagan of course is known universally to Americans of a certain age who were either depending on your outlook at the time forced or allowed to watch Cosmos in school in the early 1980′s. Cosmos is available to watch for free online at Hulu and Netflix. If you have children in the 12-16 year age range do yourself and them a favor and sit down with them – bind them to the couch and prop their eyes open Clockwork Orange style if you must – and watch this with them. It is probably the best eight hours you will ever spend with them in terms of making them smart people.

Gower has since made a second video in the same series. Check them out on Facebook.

A couple of quick things on our domestic space program, ’cause this is a politics and policy blog after all. The entirety of the NASA budget for FY 2009 was $17.3 billion. Yes that sounds like and it IS a lot of money. However, this is sixth-tenths of one percent (.6 %) of the Federal Budget and is less than one tenth of the Defense Department budget and barely one fifth of the amount spent on agricultural crop subsidies. This budget includes the manned space program as well as a goodly amount of support for Department of Defense space operations.

As for manned space exploration, the difficulties of placing and sustaining people in space are huge. It turns out that people, while perfectly suited to walk around naked on most of their home planet, die within seconds above about 45,000 feet unless supported by 10,000 years’ worth of technological progress and millions of dollars worth of equipment. This kind of thing is probably something that should mostly be done away with on the individual nation-state level. We are no longer in any kind of space race and in tough economic times, we can’t really afford that kind of nationalistic chest-thumping. This kind of space program should be shared with like-minded nations (Japan, the Europeans, Russians, Indians and Brazillians to name just a few) in order to spread the cost. It would also be quite beneficial from a brotherhood-of-man, were-all-one-planet standpoint.

As for unmanned exploration, there can be no question that the billions that have been expended on Earth imaging and communications satellites has been money well-spent. And the robotic probes at a few million a pop? Well, I’ll leave you with these and you decide for yourself.

This enhanced color image of Saturn eclipsing the Sun was taken by the Cassini Probe. Earth is visible as a tiny dot between the outer ring and the inner ring in the upper left. Source: Jet Propulsion Laboratory

This scene was recorded on the surfance of Saturn's moon, Titan, by ESA's Huygens probe after a 2 1/2 hour descent through a thick atmosphere of nitrogen laced with methane. Bathed in an eerie orange light at ground level, rocks strewn about the scene could well be composed of water and hydrocarbons frozen solid at an inhospitable temperature of - 179 degrees C (-290 F). Scientists hypothesize that the early Earth had an atmosphere of a similar composition, albeit much warmer. At 832 million miles from Earth, Titan is the most distant object that humans have ever landed upon and imaged. Source: European Space Agency.

William Gibson at the Scylla bookstore in Paris, France. Source: Wikipedia.

Gibson is important even for non SF readers because his seminal cyberpunk of the early nineties envisioned the modern Internet. Gibson coined the term “cyberspace.”

Two gems:

Asymmetric warfare, when you’ve got a little guy and a big guy. [There are] a lot of strategies that the little guy uses to go after the big guy, and a lot of them are branding strategies. The little guy needs a brand because that’s basically all he’s got. He’s got very little manpower, very little money compared to the big guy. The big guy’s got a ton of manpower and a ton of money. So this small coterie of plotters decides to go after a nation-state. If they don’t have a strong brand, nothing’s going to happen. From the first atrocity on, the little guy is building his brand. And that’s why somebody phones in after every bomb and says, “It was us, the Situationist Liberation Army. We blew up that mall.” That’s branding. By the same token, you get these other, surreal moments where they call up and say, “We didn’t do that one.” That’s branding. That’s all it is. A terrorist without a brand is like a fish without a bicycle. It’s just not going anywhere.

…

No one imagines that we’d wind up with a world that looks like this on the basis of the technology that’s emerged in the last hundred years. Emergent technology is the most powerful single driver of change in the world, and it has been forever. Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion. It just does. And that’s why we are where we are now. It seems so self-evident to me that I can never go to that Technology: threat or menace? position. Okay, well, if we don’t do this, what are we going to do? This is not only what we do, it’s literally who we are as a species. We’ve become something other than what our ancestors were.

Julian Assange on the Cover of Time Magazine

All your secrets are belong to us. Philandering politicians, lawmakers on the take, Saudi royalty willing to “fight Iran to the last American.” There is nowhere for you to hide any more. The question is no longer whether people will find you out, it is when. And will they care? Fundamentaly, we are now living in a much more transparent society whether we want to or not. From the recent graduate with some sordid Facebook entries who finds it hard to get a job, to the 19th Century tyrant trying to keep his people in the dark in the 21st Century, the effects will be felt at all levels of society. This has the potential to be a promising development. There is much less propensity to dissemble if you know you will be caught. So, perhaps we will get a society and politics that is more truth-based. For example, the Republican party isn’t making any effort to hide its bottom line strategy any more: They are not bothering to issue patently lame policy proposals with regards to deficit reduction, economic growth or jobs. No, their goal is simply to make Obama a one term president. You gotta say, such a revelation of their bald-faced politics-for-its-own-sake position is sort of refreshing in a very depressing sort of way.

Technology is in the driver’s seat, not WikiLieaks. In the long run, Julian Assange’s future — most likely arrest when his UK visa expires in early 2011 — or WikiLeaks’ ability to maintain an online presence — difficult but possible — are irrelevant. The enabling technologies are what matters. WikiLeaks could be snuffed out tomorrow by the Russians or Chinese should the whislteblowing organization pose anything like a threat to those two countries’ leaders. But it wouldn’t matter. The WikiLeaks archive is now mirrored on hundreds of servers both open and hidden. Another organization would rise to take its place. The evolutionary process of technology adaptation being what it is, “WikiLeaks 2.0″ would probably be more resistant to attack and more sophisticated in its approach. The technology that allows for anonymous whistle-blowers to provide content and for distributed organizations to host the material means that this new era of radical transparency is here to stay.

Read the rest at The Des Moines Register.

The wife was recently hit by the Facebook Deactivation Bug. Long backstory short, she went through the proper channels and was asked to verify her identity with an actual scan of her Driver’s Licence. Despite this she shortly received a form e-mail saying her account had been permanently deleted for TOS violation (multiple accounts); no avenue for appeal, no human-moderated return address, final decision.

A week or so later she attempted to log in again just for giggles and, voila! her account was restored, all settings and posts in place but with no explanation/apology whatsoever.

Long kitchen discussion ensued the sailient points of which were:
1) Facebook is run by assholes.
2) Facebook, by virtue of its installed base, is the most important social networking platform (first mover advantage, market share, etc.)
3) Social network platforms are critical to innovative, new social/economic models e.g. Metacurrency/EaaS.
4) Facebook is probably not the platform for this (closed source, non-transparent, dictatorial management) but it’s overall ease-of-use and robust feature set is a good start.

During the discussion I touched on a recent WNYC RadioLab podcast surrounding books by Steven Johnson and Kevin Kelly, “What Does Technology Want?”

Kelly’s thesis is that technology has its own process of evolution. That new innovations, once the precursor technologies have been solved, are pretty much inevitable, i.e. the telephone once the telegraph was sufficiently developed and basic audio wave theories discovered. Multiple people working the problem, Bell just got there first. “Discovery” though was nearly simultaneous as the next step was rather self-evident. Ditto the “discovery” of the double-helix and decoding of human DNA sequence.

It appears that many of the constituent applications of a metacurrency/EaaS ecosystem are already in place:
1) Facebook-like technologies for communication, social networking, aggregation of groups, etc. For example, still very rough, but promising is the open-source social networking platform, Diaspora.
2) Kickstarter and other crowd and microfinancing platforms are in place for raising capital. (Existing currencies or future metacurrencies)
3) Development and collaboration platforms in abundance. (Google docs, CSV systems, CRM etc.) Very mature tech here.

Therefore, to me, the final barrier to setting up an working EaaS/metacurrency ecosystem are the technological underpinnings of reliable identity- , reputation- and work-unit management systems that bolt onto a hybrid system that incorporates the elements above.

Key Issues in Metacurrency/EaaS Development:

Currency of any type is all about trust. In order for you to accept payment from me for any kind of exchange of good or services you have to trust that my money will be able to buy you something. First we need to trust each other, then we need to trust that the money is worth something.

The two primary technological issues to be addressed by a metacurrency/EaaS system are:

Indentity management. A person must have at least one verifiable identity. Must be robust enough to prevent trivial attempts to create sock-puppets, and gaming of reputation/rewards system. Examples: OpenID for portable, single-sign on technology and cryptographic Web of Trust.

Reputation/Metacurrency management. The mathematical basis and logical rules for the system must be open (public) and simple. Openess facilitates participants to build trust in the system and to also verify that their remuneration tracks with their contributions (the perceived utility of their labor). Simplicity in important so that a new participant can easily grasp how it works (again, fostering trust) and thus, be encouraged to enter into the community.

Note the inclusion of “reputation” in the last issue above. There is currency (money) and currency (reputation). There is the tangible, money aspect — what you get paid in exchange for goods or services rendered to me that needs to be transferable for other goods and services on your part. The more fuzzy and intangible reputation cannot necessarily be directly transferred into cash, but it has a currency of its within the community of EaaS communities. Do you do good work? Do you play well with others? What skills do you have and how advanced are they? A positive balance of reputation will enable the user to move between EaaS communities and ventures without having to start from a clean slate.