Business Quests in the Information Age

Blog Ad Network by Six Apart helps monetization of smaller blogs

Six Apart is one of the few companies of the so called web 2.0 wave whose focus on sustainable business models is a major strength. Using their position as a blogging platform to structure and manage an ad network is really a no-brainer from a business standpoint, while it is also in keeping with Six Apart's consistent policy of offering easy-to-use solutions to its customers. They are uniquely positioned to generate substantial business value from this initiative. I am very curious about their pricing mechanism and about the degree of visibility they will allow into their profit margins from this activity. And perhaps even more than those aspects of the scheme, I will be interested to understand their targeting philosophy (serving the relevant ads to each micro-audience) because that's one of the big battles of tomorrow's advertising.

clipped from www.marketingpilgrim.com Six Apart Launches Blog Ad Network, Blog Services clipped from www.marketingpilgrim.com Blog software company Six Apart acquired creative agency Apperceptive, a company that built blogs for sites such as The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BoingBoing, and iVillage. Now they’re launching an advertising network for blogs. They are also venturing into design, programming, and blog marketing services. As an ad network, Six Apart is competing with Federated Media Publishing, Glam, Blogads, and others. Here’s how it will work - they will get advertisers, bloggers put the ads up, and the two share revenue (not sure what the payouts are like, but I believe it’s typical to get 20-30%). Six Apart is working with Adify to provide back end support so bloggers can see their payouts and manage their account. they are targeting their services to the little guy The ad network is currently in invitation-only beta and it’s just for bloggers who use Six Apart’s Vox, TypePad, or LiveJournal.

Fret no more about Google

The decrease in paid clicks on Google's online advertising network has been one of the worrying news of the first quarter for modern day advertisers. The Economist has done a good little piece of analysis showing why the decrease may only be the result of Google's own aspiration for more relevance and better performance of ads. And I think it shows pretty well why Google is here to stay and very far from being already "over the hill" as some put it. It is perhaps the most telling testimony of the company's ambition to build a sustainable position in the elusive field of online advertising and beyond that narrow perspective an indication of the stringent demands the company has on itself.

So emails may be flying around showing how great a working environment Google is, but nobody should infer it's a corporate version of Club Med. And judging from their ambitious cooperation with SalesForce , these guys are going for a cut of every significant business transaction they facilitate. That is some business quest!

clipped from www.economist.com The case of the missing clicks What does it mean when people click on Google's ads less often? The scare started when comScore, a research firm, reported in late February that Google's “paid clicks” had decreased by 7% during January, and were flat compared with the same month a year earlier. the ratio of paid clicks to searches dropped even faster than the number of paid clicks: it was down by 16% in the month of January. eMarketer, another research firm, projects that online advertising in America will grow by 23% this year, economic troubles notwithstanding, because the measurability of the medium is too compelling for marketers to ignore. the likeliest explanation is instead that Google itself is to blame—by, paradoxically, increasing the quality of its ads this is what drove Google's revenue last year: it grew by 56% on the back of a 21% increase in revenue per paid click.

Thalys experiments: WiFi inside, idiot design?

Writing while in the train getting back to Brussels after a couple of days in Paris for Ad:Tech. Yes while in the train. That is really cool. What's less cool is the amount of over-engineering Thalys seems to have put in designing this service: resources like Gmail, Google documents, Network solutions webmail and Google Apps are simply not usable because some stupid piece of junkware that runs on the Thalys WiFi network considers those to be forbidden resources. Even the sites of Le Monde and CNN are not accessible. So what gives? Is Thalys developing a new concept of a hyperlocal web? Are they trying to revolutionize the web by severly limiting connectivity? Is this a censorship experiment for the Chinese government?
None of these exciting avenues I'm afraid. It only seems that somebody felt it important to implement an extremely stringent security policy, which, in the end, voids of most of its value the great promise of WiFi aboard high-speed trains. I'm sure they'll fix this someday, but what does it say about cost of opportunity in terms of revenue to the company? What untellable stories of wasted service design resources does this case convey? Is there anyone to doubt that product / service design will be a strategic competency for companies in the coming years?

In the end, it all boils down to common sense and a structured albeit flexible approach to product ownership. Something that does seem to be a common thread to methods like scrum, agile development, permanent beta, Toyota's continuous improvement through the kaizen approach or NLP... They all accept a degree of chaos that characterizes the real world. Realism, common sense, perseverance, patience, continuous and relentless improvement, continuous quest for evolution, no nonsense and a thirst for  feedback are some of the characteristics of approaches that work.

Now on the positive side of things the idiot design does not prevent Thalys travelers from accessing Wikipedia, Barack Obama's web site or the Business Quests blog :-) as you will see in the screen-shots.

Done!

Well, I guess it's done in the fullest sense of the word: the scrum master training is over and it's been an exciting couple of days with Jeff Sutherland and great participants. There was theory, there were facts (many) and there was also practice, where I got an opportunity to play with nice fun people like Nicolas and to benefit from the creative ideas of Denis, two team mates in a practice sequence that we blew away. One of the missions was to build a four story house of cards (that's where Denis creative use of post-its came in). Great fun. Here are the pictures.

The team's achievement (OK, the fourth level of the house is minimalistic, but on the other hand that was the description of the requirement in the story point, so why go beyond and take the risk of send everything crumbling down?) with Denis trying to hide behind a bottle of water ;-)

Nicolas, who's given us a great tip to properly achieve estimates: make sure you are absolutely clear about what "done" means... and that makes a world of difference both in terms of quality of estimates and in terms of making the interaction between team members really productive and uplifting:

The team's achievement with Laurent at the right hand side in the background. Laurent works for CRP Henri Tudor, Luxembourg's public research center, which means that Luxembourg had some serious proportion of the audience in this session of scrum master (there were 4 people from Vanksen Group, Laurent and myself - I count at least 50% from Luxembourg given the amount of time I spend there!).

Idiot's guide to the subprime mess

Last summer a new word entered my English vocabulary: subprime. Here's one of the best presentations on the topic. Studying the subprime mess (yes, "mess" seems to be the word most often associated with my new English word of last summer) I came to the conclusion that sophisticated financial constructs may require a number of "quant" eggheads, crazy scientists taken out of their natural environments and a fair share of arrogant financiers, but at the end of the day some of the stuff they do just does not pass the test of mere common sense. Financiers sometimes behave like those alchemists of old times who had not understood the symbolic dimension of their quest and kept trying to turn lead into gold, except that most financiers of our times pursue no quest whatsoever.

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The American spirit of rising to the challenges ahead

Being in NYC these days, I am spending quite some time observing the city and its people as well as watching those huge screens displaying TV programs on the avenues of the city that never sleeps. These are uncertain times for the US economy and one of the things I was looking for was how people would react to that. First of all, I see none of the gloom and doom even though people acknowledge the ride ahead may be quite bumpy for a while. Secondly, I am impressed with this very American way of seeing opportunity and rising to the challenge in troubled times. To illustrate this, I see quite a few people who are turning the current pressure some people feel into a business opportunity selling books and workshops on how to make real estate decisions or how to reduce debt. Some authors do that positioning themselves as experts while others occupy the "consumer activism" space defending customers from the nasty tactics of credit card companies and other providers of financial services. And this is quite intense.

So there's a big difference between US and Europe: the Americans are able to see opportunity in almost any trouble, while Europeans see trouble in many opportunities. For example, the way we handled the expansion of the EU to Eastern Europe is perhaps iconic of this: the French started complaining about Polish plumbers "invading" their market and no public figure, no political leader trumpeted the only message that was constructive back then (and perhaps now): "go East young man!"

Wishes for 2008

May 2008 bring health, happiness, harmony, peace, creativity, beauty, love, success and whatever is best for you and your loved ones. In particular my wishes go to companies and teams I care about in a special way: Weingut Jostock-Bülhoff, Technoport, CRP Henri Tudor, J-Way, Jamendo, Jilbee, Mocom, Airfield, Conostix, LegitiName, Vanksen, BuzzParadise, Vanksen Group, Triodos, van Hoorebeke Groep, Christoulis Building Company, Manex and of course to all my future customers ;-)

Season's greetings

Best wishes to all of you with something to make you smile, hoping that your experience of this theoretically quiet period will be at least marginally better.

Beautiful presentation by Lawrence Lessig at TED

With interesting examples extracted from his book "Free culture", Lessig makes a powerful case for the need to have a more flexible framework of managing intellectual property rights if we are to empower, not stiffle, creativity and innovation. His points are particularly important when one considers how scientific knowledge grew in the Ancient worlds (China, Mesopotamia, Phoenicians, Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans), in the Islamic Golden Age or after the Age of Enlightenment: innovation relied on the sharing and reuse (remixing Lessig would say) of previous advances.

Of course we must ackowledge the relevance of some form of protection of intellectual property acquired after substantial investment of time, money and energy. So it is essentially a matter of balance that I believe Lessig's beautiful creation (the Creative Commons system) provides. Quite clearly,

• the mass adoption of tools for producing, processing and distributing (sharing) digital content,
• the read / write or remix culture ,
• the empowerment of creative masses
• the challenge to established empires of content (organized as guilds whether they are called RIAA or MPAA or otherwise),

all have huge implications for the media industries and all the marketing, PR and communications models. Something that is definitely worth taking into account in businesses like Vanksen or BuzzParadise.

The challenge of sustainability of business quests

Blog Action Day is the initiative that leads me to posting a few thoughts based on the simple fact that business has been the main driver of environmental impacts we've been hearing about over the past decade or so. By business I mean the more and more systematic use of limited resources and innovation (technical and non-technical) to achieve commercial benefit.

The topic is huge and I do not have sufficient knowledge and time to tackle it in an exhaustive manner, but I've started putting some thoughts together as to what causes business to contribute negatively to the global environment because I believe that understanding that is a key to structuring business practices that can be both sustainable and competitive on the market. In essence, what I'm saying is the following:

1. today's situation is not something that happened overnight: it is the result of two centuries of industrial revolution
2. the current status is a by-product of economic and business processes as they were structured for the industrial age
3. some of those practices are at fault while other should be kept (i.e. let's not throw the baby with the bath water)

An the question is: can we use market mechanisms and financial vehicles similar to those that created the problem to solve it? In other words, if we could use existing assets (i.e. including good practices created with industrialisation) and resources to build successful businesses whose activity will have as a by-product solutions to the deteriorating environment, then we probably have a winner. And since it all starts with proper measurement of what is actually going on on the font of sustainability, I will mention a trend that is picking-up steam, as testified by posts like this one:

1. socially responsible investing, a global movement to which Triodos, one of my customers has been contributing for the past 25 years or so, another example being the Domini Fund
2. the creation and publication of sustainability indexes like the one recently launched by KLD. Their common ancestor is the Domini Social Index, whose companies seem pretty decent on their returns by several accounts.

I have started working on a mindmap of key areas and causes explaining the contribution of business to the deterioration of the global environment. It's still very much a draft. My goal is to examine the relevance of setting-up an investment vehicle dedicated to taking over a specific target group of European companies (allow me to keep that bit for me) in view of boosting their performance (in an integral sense, i.e. including environmental and human development aspects). After all, most companies are incorporated without an end date, so I guess it is in the nature of business to be seeking sustainability. The question being of course how to achieve sustainable consistent positive performance... Perhaps I'll have more on this within the next couple of months.