Google Glass has been very big on the news since 2012 and recently we've even seen venture capitalists claiming that its advent would create a new space for investment in start-ups. It's worth hearing how Sergey Brin presents that initiative and then consider things carefully from the standpoint of human behavior, not technology.
I found this very interesting quote today:
So, for good and for bad, I believe Blackberry is attached at the hip to Exchange. As Microsoft loses share to Google in the enterprise, something I believe is bound to happen, Blackberry will lose share to Android as well. Wil and I are cases in point.avc.com, A VC, Jan 2010
Aside from the fact that it does make a very valid point on the tight coupling between Exchange Server and Blackberry technologies, therefore about the likely evolution of RIM's market share as Google increases its share of the smartphone and mail server markets, this post reminded me of a thought I've had a number of times over the past few weeks. It deals with collateral damage. Collateral damage in technology products and their adoption that is.
In 2009 I decided to try Chrome as a browser. Initially it was just this: a trial. The point of fact is that 9 or 10 months later, I'm still browing the web on Chrome. For some reason, Google's browser was "sticky" enough for me to make it my main browser, even though for the first couple of weeks I missed some of the functionality provided by Firefox add-ons like Zotero, WiseStamp for HTML signatures with my email on Google Apps, ColorZilla, add-ons with web developer tools, enhanced analytics via a GreaseMonkey based add-on... and a couple of others. These add-ons are what I call collateral damage, because my intention was not to stop using them, but because they were tightly coupled with a platform product that I ditched for a better one, they went down the drain too and I adopted other ways of doing the things that these add-ons were designed to do. Collateral damage.
In practical terms, if you're in a role of product manager / product owner, this means that:
Exciting times! And by the way, do read all of Fred Wilson's post.
PS: I just love the way the Zemanta editor generates in-text links obviously doing some seriously good work in analyzing my babble. What I dislike is that Zemanta does not allow me to define the title of the post on my blog and does not support my defining categories for the re-blogging I'm doing.
Just saw Google's video on real-time search and there was a comment saying something like "As usual with Google: just a useless BS video , and not a tiny bit of information about how you are actually supposed to use this".
I must disagree with that because the video provides a fairly immersive experience and a good feel for what they mean by real-time search. My comment would be that there is so much Twitter in the video that one gets to wonder when will Google acquire Twitter...
The launch of Google Wave has generated various reviews and left many with a feeling of perplexity or outright rejection because what they saw seemed so little compared to what had been promised (a lesson for every marketer out there IMO). In fact people who've accessed the platform reported several important issues summarized here.
However GoogleWave is indeed completely revolutionary and could well transform the way we deal with information, interactions, collaboration and value creation... perhaps even transactions some day.
This wiki (kindly provided on Wave by my friend David Dossot) is proof of the revolutionary aspect of Wave as it deals with bots, each of which has a special function within the Wave ecosystem allowing it to connect and interact with other formats, platforms, logical spaces, communities and online properties. What's still very much unclear in what I've read so far (not nearly enough) is the security model and the degree to which bots can be configured with standard behaviors but if secure and with extensive ability to configure and string together (with some of these objects providing flexibility analogous to Yahoo Pipes), then Wave could well be the equivalent of the "one ring to rule them all" and probably also "an offer we can't refuse" as the Godfather would say.
On the even more interesting side of things, once adopted Wave becomes a real Complex Adaptive System with a greater potential for structure emergence than the open web because of the existence of rules and constraints that are neither too many (as in collaborative systems like blueKiwi or SharePoint) nor too few (as in the open web). The concept of wave being so open and so flexible provides for an ideal combination of rules and flexibility, which is necessary for CAS dynamics to really operate.
Now this is a first impression and I have not tested this stuff a lot, but if it is what I understand it to be and if it becomes what I imagine it can become, then this thing is not simply big, it's huge.
Experimentation is perhaps the most important attitude for understanding the ever changing landscape of a world constantly reshaped by infotech. From continuous experimentation hopefully comes some experience which can be used for execution of plans; we've got the 3Es of success and the cycle goes on and on.
In this post I'd like to share some thoughts about an experiment that started like all of BusinessQuests' experiments: with a weird question. Today's weird question: is there a way to find out how much carbon dioxide the "2.0" crowd of thinkers and star players is generating just by traveling the world to attend conferences, make speeches, shake hands and send those lovely "tweets" about the weather in Paris or the taste of vodka in Moscow?
The purpose of the experiment was therefore to find out how close I could get to assessing the carbon dioxide emissions of people like Robert Scoble, Peter Kim, Gerd Leonhard, Bradley Horowitz, Joi Ito, Lawrence Lessig... using only public information that I gathered from the "social web". So this is about using "2.0" tools on the thought leaders and stars of the "2.0" crowd, all of whom are very connected and tend to travel a lot to speak and meet in real life during conferences, not all of them interesting it must be said.
There's more to this attempt to assess carbon emissions of prominent figures of today's web than the results per se. It goes deeper to the question of what uses can actually be made of public information that we publish very willingly as part of our being part of the global networked community of what Richard Florida dubbed the "creative class", what some call the community of the über-connected, the "2.0" bunch.
Whether the results are accurate to the gram of CO2 or not is not that relevant; the fact that the emissions can be estimated with published user data is much more relevant though because it means there is probably a way for people running private intelligence services or marketing organizations (sometimes a nuance without a difference) to do pretty accurate estimates of other dimensions in the lives of the connected crowd from revenues to groups supported to books bought to relationships and addresses... It's food for thought and that's not only for those of use who are active participants to social media and social platforms' permanent beta.
So here are the results (spreadsheets here), using just Google Docs and an amazing gadget called Panorama Analytics for creating pivot tables on Google Sheets. The chart gives average emissions of carbon dioxide for prominent "2.0" figures who were kind enough to allow open access to their travel information on social travel site Dopplr.
For convenience, given that the load time of the Panorama gadget may be long, there's an Excel version of the chart below:
The total distance traveled by each of the people listed here was
broken down into plane, train and car travel making three sets of
assumptions (called scenario 1, scenario 2 and scenario 3) about the
relative importance of each transportation means in the traveler's
total travel distance. The traveler's date of activation of the Dopplr
account was used to calculate the number of months over which the total
distance was traveled and the free carbon footprint calculator provided
by the website www.carbonify.com was used toestimate the carbon impact of each traveler for each of the three scenarios.
From people to industries to institutions, the ubiquitous network and network based applications are profoundly transforming the way things get done. For all the generous talk about the openness, creativity and sharing enabled by social media, the central issue of what public information says about each one of us is getting hotter and hotter even as people from different background converge to bring solutions to address "digital identity", "e-reputation", "brand protection", "buzz", "intelligence", "monitoring"...
Since the very availability of such information and the thought of how it could be used undoubtedly sends shivers down many spines, it follows very logically that the kind of information we processed in this experiment is also information that has real marketing value because it makes sense. It has meaning. Something that is not necessarily true of all the detailed metrics and analysis we get from sophisticated tools that measure visits, bounces, clics, actions, hits, views or deliveries. At the end of the day less may very well be more if that "less" goes more to the heart of behavior tying back to real life of real people with real dreams, hopes, fears, joys and aspirations. That is the real core challenge for marketers today.
Ellison's public rant about "cloud computing" is a sobering reminder that sometimes efforts to simplify the communication on technical topics actually blurs the picture, creates confusion and makes us less rigorous than we should be in our quest to understand what innovations are coming, as well as where the technology of business and the business of technology are headed.
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.
Got to Ad:Tech this morning. The usual suspects are around, but it's always interesting to keep tabs on how the market is evolving. One interesting surprise though: efficient frontier, an interesting SEM company. It's a company whose founder combined his experience with stock market systems (hence the name derived from modern financial theory) with his knowledge of how search engines work to create a platform helping advertisers optimize their marketing investments online. To them an AdWord is like a stock and the words an advertiser buys are very much like stocks in a portfolio. Thus provided one captures sufficient relevant information from search engines and can put them through an algorithmic process, it is conceivably possible to define the risk / return combination of each word and each possible combination of words, which in turn means that it is possible to define an optimal combination of words to be bought. Extremely interesting in my very humble opinion.
One of the things that I most love about being a freelance professional is the freedom to choose how I go about upgrading my skills, the software that I have installed between my ears if you will. In fact, following trainings that can help me better coach and help my customers is a priority. That's one criterion for choosing and that's what led me to participate to a two-day training session organized by Xebia with Jeff Sutherland (who I find very impressive with his great combination of expertise, experience and common sense - highly recommended!) on scrum a method that he's helped invent. Scrum does seem to be the kind of methodology that truly binds agile practices of software development teams to agile product management, i.e.exactly what one needs to help customers in fast paced and high-growth business contexts. For more about Scrum this is a good link. No nonsense approach to projects, smart implementation of lessons from complex adaptive systems and action orientation are the characteristics I most appreciate in the approach. I will definitely be looking for projects and environments where to apply this stuff...
Linked In is evolving big time with the integration of social networking functionality of a new sort and with the extension of its services to cover company profiles, something I consider awesome. A few months back I wrote a piece stating why I did not believe in Facebook for business and how a combination between carefully chosen Facebook-like functionality and Linked In functionality would deliver major value. Now more than ever, Linked In is becoming a real custodian of professional identity, pretty much like Google will increasingly be the authority to ascertain the identity of individuals (in fact they already act as a trusted third party for customer details verification in e-commerce transactions).
Anyway, here's a nice little video of the product manager doing a demo of the new feature, which will help propel Linked In to a position its look-alike competitors will have hard time catching up with. And by the way, this is the sort of stuff I would love to see more product managers do for their products.
"Wisdom of crowds" is one of those fads especially online and I think there's a myth to dispel. Opinions, concepts, software, decisions and content may emerge and get build as a result of adding-up the individual inputs of many people, but that does not mean that where one identifies group phenomena there's necessarily intelligence, let alone wisdom. Since I think words are important, let me get back to the basics of what the word "wisdom" actually means, referring to a definition quoted from dictionary.com:
1. the
quality or state of being wise; knowledge of what is true or right
coupled with just judgment as to action; sagacity, discernment, or
insight.
2. scholarly knowledge or learning: the wisdom of the schools.
3. wise sayings or teachings; precepts.
4. a wise act or saying.
While there are cases in which the collective intelligence of many participants to a process of creation or evaluation may yield positive results, I believe there are conditions for that phenomenon of collective emergent intelligence to actually take place and I doubt it should be called "wisdom". And I doubt it's relevant to characterize any group behavior as "wisdom of crowds" as some people tend to do. Since there are a couple of business ideas out there that rely on the assumption that collective intelligence can be exploited by merely putting together a community of users, I think there are quite a few entrepreneurs who should think this through. Sometimes crowds are just dumb and there's nothing very wise about herd mentality as shown in this excellent story of Gaston Lagaffe (click to enlarge).
Nowadays a day seldom goes by without some piece of news regarding the sorry state and dismal prospects of the Earth's environment. These are the days of inconvenient truths. Opinions are numerous, conceptual ideas abound, more or less scientific and rigorous conclusions widely distributed and each person responds in their own way. Some will feel anxious, others don't know or pretend not to know (so they can drive an over-sized car with an engine that makes a noise that is music to their ears), others still feel a century is too long a time to worry and a few do what they can to help.
The point however is that we all seem to be like drivers or airplane pilots deprived of instruments, flying or driving blindly in the worrying knowledge that the wall we will hit is getting dangerously close. That's the key issue: we lack data about the impact of our daily micro-decisions on the environment even though there are all sorts of calculators of environmental impact out there. What we do not have is a means to measure what is going on as it's happening, which is really a pity in a world so connected. That's precisely one of the challenges OpenSpime, the self proclaimed "infrastructure company for an open internet of things", seems to be addressing with a pretty cool infrastructure that combines sensors, software, the Internet and mashups to deliver actual maps of carbon dioxide emissions. A good friend of mine is their CTO and I am impressed with what these guys are presenting in this video:
Here's a piece I think is a shining example of user generated content and a strong indication that open online platforms give real power and influence to the people. Now sure whether that validates Gladwell's tipping point, but it does show that the people can wield some influence. Now the question is whether this influence will be stronger than that of insiders of a system, in this case the US political establishment. Something interesting to watch for marketeers and communication pros.
Just got to the OnMedia conference and glad to be here for a new edition meeting friendly faces from previous events. Same posh location and already a couple of very striking facts for the marketing & communication industry or at least stuff I found quite interesting and worth commenting:
Interesting trends don't you think? Of course as a friend of mine keeps saying surveys can be twisted to convey the desired message, so they have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but nevertheless the field is ripe for some momentous changes, all of which may not necessarily be in favor of Google. For example I doubt AdWords will be successful in its current form in the long run... but that's for another post :-)
Attending a couple of interesting presentations yesterday I got some pretty good food for thought, which translates in a few questions:
This year's edition is reasonably well organized although sometimes I felt there is room for improvement in the content delivered by speakers and panelists.
A curse of many such events is that panelists spend more time speaking about themselves than discussing the matter of focus and when they do discuss it ends up being a sort of cacophony of parallel monologues without much actual value... I wonder whether this is a matter of
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,
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.
A friend sent me a link to an interesting post about the risk of collapse of the Web 2.0. The article argues that users out there will become tired of playing around with platforms like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook as the "natural" human attribute of laziness becomes dominant as a driver of online beavior and that this will actually lead to a burst of the Web 2.0 bubble.
The point is valid in the sense that as the power of "new" fades, the motivation of individual users to spend time doing work for free will drop. However, there are still quite a few things happening out there which may be done without the people doing them getting paid and which bring at least indirect benefits to those people, such as for example public image or the opportunity to show how good they are at specific tasks or in given industries. In other words, in the vast mass of participants to phenomena like Facebook, there is a fraction of people who actually derive business value out of their participation to the platforms that are so characteristic of what has been called Web 2.0, like for example Wikipedia or targeted blogs like Culture Buzz.
The question then becomes: how does one actually measure the indirect benefits they get from participating to communities like LinkedIn or Facebook? By which means one can assess the relevance and value of platforms allowing users to host online applications is another question, that I think is particularly relevant in view of a comment made by my friend David on a recent post about Facebook.
I will also add that although I have no illusions as to the dark sides of the human psyche, I don't believe laziness to be inevitable or undesirable. Usually we humans face problems when we abandon ourselves to the extremes like complete passivity as resulting from extreme laziness or frantic activity as caused by workaholism... Bottom line: in order to identify value drivers for the web 2.0 space better skills in psychology may be needed.
When Jajah hit the market I became convinced that it would be here to stay and that it would make it possible to do some pretty interesting things. A clever implementation of IP enabled telephony using existing telecoms equipment, they have been able to assert themselves in a position from which to offer interesting services.
One of those interesting services is to make it possible for people and businesses that have at least a web page online to allow their visitors to call them. I think it's a great tool because at its simplest it allows some form of interactivity for otherwise "dumb" websites and for more evolved web sites it enables interactions through a channel that everybody on the planet is familiar with (the good old phone). Benefits are numerous and since the description provided by the company is very well written, I will simply quote it.
This is the first "personal, truly
global toll-free click-to-call service" (available in more than 120
countries). JAJAH Buttons realize free and seamless voice communication in
online communities and email. One-click calling out of e-mails, websites, blogs
or social network profiles.Initiating a call through a JAJAH
Button is as easy as entering your very own phone number and clicking
'Call' - all at absolutely no cost for the caller and complete privacy, your
phone number will never be revealed to the caller.
JAJAH
Buttons are completely customizable (size, color, style), you can you
set the time when you are free to accept phone calls and you can also protect
your privacy by rejecting or even blocking phone numbers. JAJAH Buttons are available as a Flash widget,
click-to-call buttons or a simple plain text link.
Distant
friends and family can now call you without any restrictions, obstacles or cost
considerations. You simply add your button to your email signature, send them
the email, they click on it and call you
- they don't have to be registered
and there is no local numbers play, JAJAH buttons work anytime by just typing in
your phone number.From a business perspective a JAJAH
Button is the quickest, cheapest way to a very own toll-free number.
Every SME can now afford to let their customers call them – from one or many
countries, or from all over the world.
What is going on with Jajah simply confirms me in my belief that the genius behind Jajah's business concept lies on the "simple" convergence between the web and traditional telephony. With their "call me" buttons they may well revolutionize direct marketing in addition to other commercial and non-commercial practices. So expect me to implement it on this blog pretty soon (as soon as I am done delivering on a project that is taking a lot of my time right now).
The following video is an open invitation to participate to a huge global conversation about the environment on 15-OCT-2007. If you have a blog, post relevant material in your area of focus. If you don't visit more or less prominent blogs and use the "Comments" features to participate. Wherever you are, save a quarter of an hour to take part and show you care about the world that this generation will leave to the next one... if there is to be a next one, because life will go on even without mankind.
