Thursday, August 31, 2006

Career Limiting Moves - Leaking Your Employers Information

There's a great article over on the Blackberry Cool website about an anonymous tipster who calls himself "Boy Genius". Boy Genius has been leaking pictures and information to the press about Research In Motion's upcoming products.

According to the article, RIM knows the identity of the tipster but prefers to let him or her continue leaking news to a friendly list of bloggers and writers. While this might be savvy marketing, you have to wonder if Boy Genius is a RIM employee, he may find his "sell by" date arrives with the first negative press commentary.

Tuesday, August 29, 2006

Sony's Opportunity: Leapfrogging Spiral Frog

Universal Music today announced SpiralFrog, a web-based community of music fans that will permit people to download and enjoy, free of charge, many music items in the Universal catalog. This is a great step forward for the music industry. Given a legitimate, high quality source of music at a price competitive with piracy - free - this has a real chance of attracting passionate and responsible fans.

So far, SpiralFrog is a Universal product, but in this announcement lies a great opportunity for Sony. Sony has both a rich music catalog as well as a media device business and Sony's addition to the SpiralFrog environment could result in an even more attractive solution. Additionally, enabling users to put their free music on Sony devices could help drive a dramatic resurgence in Sony's weak consumer electronics business.

Music catalogs grow much stronger as the catalog size grows - appealing to more users - and so two major music companies working together should present a solution that is more than twice as attractive as two independent solutions. Additionally, where SpiralFrog today lacks any portable devices, Sony could make this appealing for those who might otherwise consider an iPod.

This is, however, a time limited opportunity. By all accounts, Apple profits most from the sale of iPods, not the sale online music. If Apple develops a competing free offering and lures in other partners or builds a relationship with Universal enabling an advertising driven sales model for content on the iPod, then Sony could find themselves out in the cold.

For Sony's part, integrating a free, advertising driven content service with portable devices, especially the wi-fi equipped Mylo, could prove to be a transformation play in the growing connection between content, connectivity, and consumer electronics.

Online Censorship - Who Are They Kidding?

The New York Times witheld an article from publication in the UK from online users yesterday. The article, about legal proceedings in the UK from the British terror case, was considered prejudicial.

The New York Times used the same IP-identification technology used to target ads in an attempt to prevent UK readers from seeing the article. UK users had to actually read the Cache in Google or find it some other way.

In my past experience, this is a technology that is remarkable easy to circumvent through caches, VPNs, and other tools. Is it really censorship in that case, or just an inconvenience for most users?


Monday, August 28, 2006

Thank You For The Tips

I don't quite know when it happened, but somewhere along the way I become a generous tipper. I've always that a job well done is it's own reward. Like a monkey with a drug problem, I've been self-administering perfectionism for the last 30 years of my life.

Despite this handicap, I still hand out tips generously, at hotels, restaurants, and in cabs. Strangely, however, one place I have resisted handing out tips is at self-service or quick-service restaurants - like Starbucks. But there is one chain where I always tip - PAX.

Several years ago, for reasons I do not recall, in a moment of weakness, I tipped the person at the counter at a PAX shop. "Thank you for the tips" she said. I was stunned. I had never been thanked for a tip before, the idea was novel and exciting. And, again, like a monkey with drug problem, I was hooked. Now, while Starbucks baristas may go without, no counter service person at PAX ever gets shorted.

Friday, August 25, 2006

Innovative Amazon.Com Web Services

Amazon.com announced a new web service yesterday - their utility computing service, which they have named "EC2". This service is priced at $0.10 per instance-hour, according to TechCrunch. That comes out to $72 per month for a server.

The server configuration is equivalent to a 1.7GHz Xeon processor, 1.75GB or Ram, and 160GB of disk space. This is more than enough for most enterprise applications and the costing is extremely competitive. Amazon is doing a great deal to commodities key pieces of infrastructure in the computing world - storage, CPU and also services through their Mechanical Turk marketplace.

Let's take a hypothetical case - a client that wants a 5 year hosting deal for an ERP solution. They will need servers, storage, and support.

  • 20 CPUs
  • 1 Terabyte of Storage
  • 200 GB of Bandwidth consumption per month

Over 5 years, using Amazon's infrastructure, your cost will be approximately $100,000. This is going to be far, far less than any comparable quote you would receive from a traditional hosting service.

Other companies are providing similar pricing, such as prgmr.com. As this model takes off, traditional hosting companies could be under threat. This transformation may not be immediate, but it will happen.

Today, highly customized server environments are typical and don't lend themselves to this kind of virtualization. Companies are more often charged $2-4,000 per server per month for custom configurations. Given the choice between a custom configuration and using a standard one, we will see new installations quickly migrate towards this commodity model. At $2,000 per server per month, the cost for 5 years is $2.4 million for the same 20 CPU install instead of $100,000.

Amazon's web services are positioning themselves to become a key provider in this future environment. Storage and CPU power are key, but so is their online services marketplace - Mechanical Turk. With these three combined you can have a complete package for hosting that includes support services.

Thursday, August 24, 2006

Bandwidth = Storage = Processing Power - Call for Ideas

I work a lot with consumer electronics companies. One of the key challenges that these companies agonize over in the product design process is the finding the right mix between storage, bandwidth, and processing power.

In each circumstance, the surrounding constraints are different:
  • Home: Bandwidth (DSL) is cheap, and so is electrical power, so you you can heavy on both of those.
  • Car: Bandwidth is expensive (EVDO) but electrical power is cheap, so you have lots of storage and processing power, but perhaps not so much bandwidth
  • Hand: bandwidth is expensive, but mass storage can be either bulky or very expensive, and processing power will drain your limited battery life.
I have seen few products that deftly manage the mix between all three. Also, developers of components tend to be in one of the three areas, so they are more often looking for the optimal solution for themselves rather than to total optimal solution for the customer or situation.

The iPOD is a relatively elegant solution that uses bandwidth when it is cheap (at your home PC) and storage where it is cheap (on the handheld). Another product that has been slower to take off is Motorola's iRadio. iRadio mixed streaming content that was live - news, talk - with stored content that could be downloaded in advance - such as music.

Solutions to-date have typically traded off bandwidth and storage. What has not yet been part of the equation is processing power. I believe that in video games, processing power could be a substitute for bandwidth or storage capacity. Advanced processors can handle far more advanced codecs and fill-in more scenery in a video based on algorithms rather than stored video frames.

I'm actively trying to seek out more solutions where processing power, storage, and bandwidth can be used interchangeably and to develop a framework for automatically deciding where and how that substitution can be made based on what the end user is choosing to do.

Ideas?

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Sony's Smart Move

The New York times is reporting today that Sony corporation as acquired the video web site Grouper. Grouper, based in Sausalito, looks a lot like YouTube. Individuals can create, upload, and share videos and visitors to the site can easily search and view videos.

A glance through the site did have me wondering what exactly the difference was with YouTube and how Sony might make it highly competitive with YouTube. The Grouper acquisition will only be good for Sony if it becomes a serious rival to the wildly popular video site. Google, Yahoo, and others are have all recently piled into this space, making it fiercely competitive.

Assuming that it does, Sony can not only make money from the advertising and site traffic, but by starting to connect their consumer electronics into the internet, making it easy for anyone to create, upload, and share videos. This could give their consumer electronics some much needed differentiation in the market.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Robust, Reasonably Priced Online Backup – At Last

I have long been looking for safe, secure, simple and reasonably priced online backup. I have a lot of files, so offers of 1 or 5 free gigabytes of storage online have little interest to me. Indeed, to-date, many of the services I have tried have been unreasonably expensive or terribly unreliable. Many online storage rates, though falling, continue to be in the range of $1-2 per gigabyte per month. For me, that would mean an annual bill of around $300 for back-up storage. This is probably 2-3x the cost of buying a new external hard drive each year and above my budget.

Nonetheless, online storage is very attractive for me. I have never had the good fortune for my hard drive to fail just as I was coming home from a business trip. Invariably, crises can occur at any time and usually when you’re nowhere close to your back up drive. Additionally, I don’t want to lug around a physical back-up drive with me or wait until the weekend to do a back-up of my files.

Over the last year, I have signed up with, and then cancelled just about all the different online back-up solutions and I think I have found one that I really like now: Mozy. It’s not perfect, but it’s is far and away the best and the best value of any solution I have tried to date.

Mozy is a pure back-up solution, not a file sharing solution or a collaboration or synchronization offering. The software runs in the background, tracking changed files and then updating them online when the computer is idle or at scheduled intervals. The first back-up, all 22 Gigs of it, took almost 10 days of night-time updates, but since then the back-ups have been up-to-date almost every day.






The system allows you to select files, folders, or types of files for backup and it also allows any combination of the two. Once you have configured the back-up options, Mozy handles the back-ups and deals with disconnections from the internet by patiently waiting until connectivity has been restored. If you go more than a week without a back-up, however, it can be set to give you a warning.

The price for Mozy is very competitive. The charge is $5/month for up to 30 gigabytes of storage. For me, this works out to about $0.23 per gigabyte used per month. The chart above shows how this compares to other storage providers, including Amzaon.com’s S3 service.

While I did test out Jungle Disk, a storage solution based on S3 with very low costs, the software did not enable any smooth back-up and did not work with my Tivoli Storage Manager back-up tool. I also found it somewhat unreliable and intolerant of connectivity interruptions.

One area where I did run into trouble, however, is the backing up of several very large files I have. Some applications, like Microsoft Outlook, create big files and modify them every day. My mail file is 600 megabytes and continuously backing it up is going to clog up any system. I would like to see an option for selecting certain specific files only for periodic back-up – e.g. once a week. This could cut down on unnecessary network traffic.

Overall, Mozy is the best backup solution I have tried and has the honor of being the first online storage service I won’t be canceling anytime soon.

Monday, August 21, 2006

You Tube: Nobody's Watching - From The Hardware Business, That Is



I love shopping mall ninjas as much as the next bored office worker. Ok, I don't really, but I'm constantly amazed at how much amateur schlock appears on YouTube. Still, from time to time, I find myself sitting and surfing YouTube for the latest videos. My personal favorites so far are, of course, Nobody's Watching, the sit-com pilot posted last month and the music video Chaiyya Chaiyya.





I also see, in YouTube, the future of the consumer electronics business. Content created consumers will increasingly constitute a tremendous portion of what goes around on the internet. Schlocky it may be, but there is an endless demand for it. Why is it, then, that there aren't many makers of consumer electronics that make it easy to instantly create and upload videos and images. Simple, seamless content creation could be a competitive advantage for companies, too bad none of the major CE manufacturers seem interested.

Sunday, August 20, 2006

Open Source Business: Open Source Beer


The
BBC is reporting on the creation of an open source beer - a unique consumer product where customers are participating in the creation and continuous improvement of the product that they will buy. Breweries are free to copy the recipe, as long as they agree to release a continuously updated version of the product.


This is one of first open source consumer products, it will be interesting to see if it is a success without the backing and big marketing budgets that come with other beers.

Saturday, August 19, 2006

Waste Your Time Effectively

As wonderful as YouTube is, there are so many options for wasting time at the office, it's hard to know what to watch or read. Dancing hamsters? Failed sitcoms? Fortunately, I've found a website where I can immediately review the top time-wasters online. The Internet TV Charts. Phew.

Friday, August 18, 2006

CIO Details His Disaster Recovery Plans


On Tuesday, I met the CIO of a large company to discuss business and IT strategy. At one point, our discussion turned to disaster recovery. He told me his disaster recovery plan is that he keeps his resume up-to-date. I loved that!

Thursday, August 17, 2006

Hooray For Mylo

Sony's new Mylo handheld device marks a significant divergence for Sony from their traditional approach to new electronics products. For the first time, Sony is demonstrating a hardware product that is tightly integrated to software and adheres, largely, to open standards.

Gizmodo has a terrific online video demo posted on YouTube. You can see the device in action, and while it's hard to tell if the UI is great, it certainly looks much better than Sony's past efforts at handheld communicators and PDAs. The device interacts seamlessly with Google Talk, Yahoo Messenger, and Skype, making it ideal for users in high density wi-fi environments like the home and university campuses.

This device represents a convergence of the two of the three elements I believe most critical for the future of consumer electronics:

  • Software Development
  • Connectivity

Now, if Sony can start to add some of the rich content the company has to the device, it will be hitting a home run.


Wednesday, August 16, 2006

PC - Phone Convergence: Good News for Consumers


The PC is now the "old man" of the tech world, at 25 years, but the model is no less dominant. Many have been predicting the death of the PC for some time now, because it is both very simple, lots of standardized parts, and quite complex, with lots of customized software. That simplicity has led to commoditization and the complexity has led to security problems, not all of which are caused my Microsoft.

Although mobile phone makers would like to think themselves different, a company in Norway,
Trolltech, is offering a "greenphone" and a related development environment. Based on Linux, everything on the phone can be customized by developers to create new uses and applications.

For phone makers, this could well mark the beginning of the end of being different from the PC. GSM/GPRS chipsets are highly commoditized and unlocked phones are becoming common even in the US market. A thriving market in standardized phones with open software environments could drive down prices and improve innovation - just like the PC did.

Tuesday, August 15, 2006

Why the airlines will keep the current ban on liquids

Right now, the major US airlines are probably starting to see the silver lining in last week's air travel cloud. After three trans-continental trips in the US, I can see it very clearly: the ban on liquids has dramatically reduced the level of carry-on luggage.

Although airlines will have to load and unload more bags, the upsides to this situation were evident immediately:

  • Faster boarding & disembarkation. Boarding, especially, went much faster, as there was no pushing and shoving around the limited bin space
  • Faster security clearing: fewer bags, fewer issues

While it's inconvenient for many passengers, airlines could see big benefits from trimming 10-15 minutes off each aircraft turn-around time. This morning's Wall Street Journal has an article that seems to confirm that, while the airlines will struggle with extra bags, those regulations are here to stay.

Monday, August 14, 2006

Thirsty Passenger Delays United 94


Dozing off in my seat last night on United 94 before departure, I woke to hear an argument in progress between a passenger, who had taken a bottle of water from the galley, and the flight crew who told him he could not have it.

After a few minutes of back and forth, the captain ordered the passenger off the plain and we departed a few minutes behind schedule. No mention was made of the now departed passenger or the cause of the delay.

Sunday, August 13, 2006

Consumer Electronics: Better Living Though Better Design


I admit, I like things that look beautiful. I can't afford most of them, but that doesn't stop me from talking and writing about them. If you want to hear go on and on about what it takes to make great consumer products, you can check out my published works on this space:

Podcast: Standing out from the consumer electronics crowd with first class design

Whitepaper: Product styling as a competitive differentiator (opens as a PDF)


The bottom line doesn't, however, take a whole white paper to summarize. It's quite simple:

  • As consumer electronics have become less expensive, a premium for good design has become much more affordable for consumers
  • As consumer electronics have become less and less differentiated from each other from a capability standpoint, design has emerged as a key differentiator

There's endless evidence of companies embracing good design principles. Most recently, even Microsoft has decided that good design might be a good idea.

Friday, August 11, 2006

Prepare for Take-off: How To Rocket Through Airport Security

As of 2:45pm Eastern on Friday, August 11, I was able to pass through airport security at JFK in about 3 minutes. That includes time spent waiting in line. Lines for check-in were long at British Airways, but the United Airlines lines were short as were the security lines.



I would have thought, with all the publicity, that folks would have removed all liquids from their carry-ons. Not so, I think I was the only person in line who wasn't having some kind of liquid taken away.

Once it was my turn, I was able to get through security quickly. I got through quickly because nobody wanted to do any additional searches on my bags. I believe I managed that by doing the following:


  • Removed all liquids and gels. I'm resigned to buying new deodorant and toothpaste in every city
  • Packaged all "clutter" - e.g. electronics, cables, MP3 players - into clear plastic bags and removed them from my briefcase and suitcase and put them in a separate tray for the x-ray. The security staffer on duty told me that this makes it easier to read the x-rays and to search luggage.
  • Removed all meta - belt buckle, watch, etc.
  • I was prepared for, but not asked to, switch on and show all my electronics.

The New York Times is running a story online that seems to confirm my experience. I am now recovering from my ordeal and rehydrating at the United Airlines Red Carpet Club at JFK.

SIP This: How To Put A Proper SIP Address In Your Signature

I am a big fan of VOIP and itnernet calling, along with instant messaging. It's already having a dramatic impact on the telecommunications industry. However, many VOIP systems are incompatible or at least seem that way. Skype, for example, does not support SIP, which is generally "uncool" in the land of open standards.

I love skype, but my love of Open Standards forces me to use Gizmo alongside Skype. I recently figured out how to find my SIP URI - it's a way of accurately describing your SIP number such that any proper SIP client should be able to reach you.

My SIP URI is
sip:17476274816:@proxy01.sipphone.com

A very good description of how to figure out your SIP URI is on the Gizmo website (
here).

Thursday, August 10, 2006

Wage War on International Roaming Charges

I travel internationally, not as much as I'd like, but a few times a year. The toughest thing for me about being parts foreign to the great US of A is that my cell phone is suddenly transformed into a pocket-size mugger. $2.25 a minute in India for a local call - are you freaking kidding me?

My solution? Skype In + Skype Out and a disposable cell-phone. Here's how it works:

1. Buy unlocked mobile phone (MobilePlanet is a good source)
2. Buy a pre-paid SIM card on arrival
3. Forward your cellphone to your Skype In number
4. Forward your Skype calls to your disposable cell-phone SIM card

You'll pay three times here, Skype In (annual fee), Skye Out (per minute) and disposable SIM card (per minute). It still comes to about $0.30 per minute to receive a call in India, a fraction of Cingular's roaming charges.

You can do also the exact same thing with the Gizmo Project, a properly SIP-compatible VOIP application.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Can Wikipedia Save Itself And Become A Model For Enterprises?

Is the famously collaborative business model at Wikipedia running out of gas? It may seem a strange question to ask at a time when scientific journals have favorably compared Wikipedia to Encyclopedia Britannica, but there is some evidence that its highly transparent and collaborative operating model is suffering from diseconomies of scale.


A recent article in the New Yorker discussed how the web site and its governance model have evolved over the past few years. The site has had to deal with numerous challenges as a result of its growth, including bitter disputes over articles on scientology and politics and, more recently, a prank organized by television personality Steven Colbert. In particular, three features of the site’s struggle with growth stand out:



  • Slowing growth & declining quality: what was a small community is now a very large network. The sense of pride and glory from writing great articles and being well known has been harder to create in new contributors. The productivity of volunteers and the quality of their output has suffered accordingly.
  • Rising bureaucracy: research done by the IBM team cited in the New Yorker article showed that Wikipedia’s bureaucratic content – process and controls – was the fastest growing part of the site, taking up almost 30% of all articles. This is encyclopedic equivalent of SG&A – administrative overhead to manage an increasingly complex environment.

  • Rise of “metric optimizers”: as metrics have replaced networks of personal trust, some contributors have started correcting grammatical errors and misspellings to drive up their edit count – the measure of how many articles to which they have contributed. Such selfish behavior devalues that acclaim that should be going to genuine contributors.

If all this seems familiar, there’s a reason for that- I believe that Wikipedia is a microcosm of the large and fast growing enterprise. As enterprises grow, it becomes harder to keep a sense of community and personal network. The result: quality suffers, bureaucracy grows, and sales people fight over who owns territories and accounts instead of closing new deals. It doesn’t matter that they’re unpaid, the volunteers at Wikipedia care about glory as much as any executive cares about his underwater stock options.







From The New Yorker: Wikipedia has become a regulatory thicket, complete with an elaborate hierarchy of users and policies about policies. Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B Viegas, two researchers at I.B.M. who have studied the site using computerized visual models called “history flows,” found that the talk pages and “meta pages”—those dealing with coördination and administration—have experienced the greatest growth. Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, “People are talking about governance, not working on content.”




My bet, however, is that Wikipedia will save itself, because even though the problems look similar, the approach that the organization is taking to solve them is radically different. Instead of changing bosses and decreeing new policies, Wikipedia is engaged an intense and completely open debate about transformation. New policies are going into effect, such as a new revision control and editing process for articles, and they are likely to be successful because they have been subjected to intense scrutiny before being put into practice.


Large enterprises, by contrast, tend to take very different approaches to organizational and process change. Small teams of strategists often operate in environments of high secrecy, planning business changes and presenting transformation strategies to executives for approval long before the vast majority of employees are aware change is being planned. More often than not these radical plans fail to produce lasting change.


Environments of extreme transparency, like Wikipedia, have significant strategic advantages over more opaque business models and may be much better positioned to navigate the challenges of genuine transformation. While it’s true that secrecy provides some companies with a valuable element of surprise, it also gives cover for self-dealing, political infighting, and “metric optimization” instead of real innovation. The benefits of transparency are compelling:



  • Trust: If every employee and shareholder can view every single transaction in the general ledger, it makes it hard to conceal back-dated stock options. If everyone could read the CEO’s expense reports, it would be hard to buy a $25,000 shower curtain. This effect doesn’t just apply to expenses; it applies to products as well. In the open-source world, the fact that every line of code in Linux can be examined has made it more trusted than Microsoft’s opaque approach, not less so.

  • Excellence. In a completely open environment, where everyone can see everyone else’s work product, it’s hard to steal credit or conceal poor work. Like successful sellers on eBay, people who consistently produce great work will rise to the top over thousands of work products and many years.

  • Innovation. Innovation is a team sport and organizations that share knowledge are organizations that innovate. The beauty of the Wikipedia concept was that anyone could write or edit an article. In the transparent and open company, why shouldn’t field service engineers be able to read and edit the draft specifications for the next generation product? It’s quite possible nobody else in the company has a better idea of what customers need.

The opponents of transparency cite a litany of seemingly reasonable ideas as to why secrecy is important. First and foremost, executives say we must protect our trade secrets. You only have to look at the open source model embraced by Linux to see the error in that logic. Every line of code in Linux is open to the public and any Microsoft employee could go in a review it (and don’t think they haven’t taken a look).


Despite such access to the competition, Microsoft has been unable to fix its perennial security problems and has been losing market share to a product and an organization made up of unpaid volunteers and without any secrets. The strength of the collaborative and transparent process embraced by Linux and Wikipedia is far more valuable than the risk that any one secret will get out, or probably even all of them, for that matter.



Another common argument against too much openness is that decisions by committee give low quality results and complete openness is like inviting everyone into the committee. Transparency, however, doesn’t mean that everyone is involved in every decision. What it does mean is that everyone who is passionate about something can find out about it and participate. Passion and energy are what will drive productivity and excellence. Recent academic research also suggests that committees, far from being ineffective, are in fact better decision-makers than individuals in many cases.


Lastly, it is argued that transparency is the incompatible with legal requirements for privacy and confidentiality. Reasonable people can agree that some information should be kept confidential and that people are due some standard of privacy. The benefit of complete transparency is a rigorous debate can be conducted about such needs for privacy and confidentiality and, when an agreement is reached; compliance is likely to be exceptionally high.


Many elements of what we see in the Wikipedia business model have been tried in other settings. Open source software has many similarities with Wikipedia and enterprises have elements of collaboration and discussion forums. What is new in the Wikipedia environment is the exceptional ease of use and unrestricted access that is the default setting for all information sharing. In most enterprises, data is considered a secret until people are added to access control lists, in Wikipedia, it is just the reverse: data is locked up only after a clear demonstration that complete openness has not been effective.



I cannot think of any companies that have embraced a high level of transparency internally. If the success of Wikipedia is any guide, however, then it shows har far most enterprises have to go. From expense reports to strategy discussions to sales contracts, I believe that enterprises should make their default complete openness inside our firewall.



I believe taking such radical action will do wonders to rebuilding the trust between employees and executives and unleash a much wider level of creativity and innovation inside these large enterprises.


Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Hide Your Ignorance Behind Pretty Pictures

I love The Generator Blog, a fantastic collection of image generation tools. It's like having a whole graphics department at your disposal to create custom images for your presentations. You can create everything from fake record covers to church signs and download the images on to your PC.


Monday, August 07, 2006

Visual Guilt & Evils of Corporate Travel Policies

A recent article in the Wall Street Journal described the phenomenon of "Visual Guilt". This is where business travelers select the lower fares when they see all the options themselves. (Read more about it here, registration & $$ required).

I book my travel myself, and I agree that the effect certainly works on me. I don't necessarily book the cheapest hotels, but I am careful about how much of a premium I will pay for a nicer hotel. I think it's worth my employer (or client) money to spend $20 for a good gym or a closer location, after all, they're paying for my time, but not $100 a night extra for a nice brand name.

One area where I do think it's worth consisently paying more is on nonstop flights. You can save 2-3 hours - and that's time that is valuable. Valuable to employees and valuable to employers. Sadly, many online travel systems don't assign any value to employee time. Instead, you're encouraged to take long lay-oversaw and extra stops.

To fix this, I think these travel systems should employ a formula that puts a value on employee time. Say $50/hour, for example. A trip that involves 3 extra hours of travel time should cost at leads $150 less each way than the comparable nonstop.

An interesting side effect of a policy like this might be to encourage the airlines to start putting more flights back on nonstop instead of building and maintaining "mega hubs".

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Open Mouth, Insert Foot: What Enterprises Can Learn From Mel Gibson

It's Sunday, so that means in internet time Mel Gibson's arrest and foot-in-mouth outbreak over the weekend is already ancient history and my thoughts on it are very late. Nonetheless, I had a few ideas about what enterprises can learn his experience:

1. Bad News Cannot Be Hidden. Mel Gibson is a controversial actor. Big businesses are also controversial - doing things like off-shoring and building nuclear powerplants. As a result, we can expect that somewhere there's an activist or politician who disagrees with you and, should the opportunity emerge, will pounce. It also means that if you're a large company with a valuable brand, there's probably a market for bad news about your company - and where there's demand, supply usually follows.

2. Bad News Travels Faster Than Ever. I mean really, really fast. The whole thing came and went in a flash. Gibson was arrested on Saturday night and his arrest report was public in a matter of hours and the commentary started immediately. If bad news breaks at 1am on Sunday, will anyone notice? Can your company assemble a team of executives and PR staff at 3am on a Sunday to draft a press release?

3. Apologize Fast & Apologize Frequently. Given what had happened, Mel Gibson did a great job, in my opinion. Not just one but two fulsome and public apologies. He was heavy on saying he was sorry and very light on excuses.

4. Don't just say something, do something. Another smart thing, Mel Gibson did was going beyond just saying he was sorry. He asked leaders of the Jewish community to help him figure out what was wrong and expressed a willingness to change. Enterprises should be ready to do the same - not just apologize, but openly solicit ideas from the public. IBM just had big event called Innovation Jam which invited customers and employees to develop new ideas. If a big oil company had an oil spill, would they have the courage to host a "Clean-Up Jam" and invite the public to suggest better ways to prevent and clean up accidents?

You don't have to like Mel Gibson to learn from his experience. With billions in revenues and hundreds of thousands of employees, every large company will, sooner or later, be handling a situation like this.

Saturday, August 05, 2006

ScreenJot: Perfect For Capturing Snippets


ScreenJot is a nifty program I discovered recently. A memory resident little helper, it will allow you to capture just a small portion of your screen and saves it in a file. The result allows you to quickly send information screen captures to your colleagues without all the memory-hogging e-mail file-size-killing of a full screen shot. Free and easy, I highly recommend it.

Thursday, August 03, 2006

New Scientific Research Says: Sales People Actually Innovate

File in: Who'd-a-thunk it: In a recent new economics paper, Amar Bhide of Columbia University argues that it takes more than just scientists to innovate. In his paper, he argues that, in fact, innovation is a team sport. The recipe for real innovation and the reason why the US achieves consistently superior productivity is growth is not just that many of the world's best and brightest scientists are here, but also that world's most talented marketers and adventuresome consumers are as well.




The formula for success? Technology, sales, marketing, and the customer.

Bhide disputes the idea that share of graduates in science and technology or the proportion of Nobel prizes are leading indicators. Indeed, while US share in those areas has declined relative to Europe and Japan, our GDP per capita has not, suggesting that wealth creation has not been impacted. Instead of pure science, Bhide argues that it is the combination of technology with marketers ability to package products and consumers willingness to try new technologies that is the truly powerful combination.

This certainly fits with my own experience. America is full of early adopters, hobbyists, and technology enthusiasts of every kind. These early adopters form a powerful feedback loop with companies, adapting products and improving them in a rapid, iterative process. It's most visible in the consumer electronics space, where despite the dominance of big enterprises in Asia, many of the most game-changing innovations have been done in the US (think iPod and Tivo). I believe it is also true at the enterprise level, where many big trends in enterprise software have started here, including advanced planning and scheduling in manufacturing.

So what? For starters, if Bhide is right, it means that while you can ship specific development functions offshore, while you can import technological ideas, that does not mean that US companies will lose their competitive edge. Practically speaking, it means that large companies should be wary about conducting the kind of off-shoring that results in disconnection of research or development from marketing and sales. Innovation is a team sport. Teaming can be successful across continents and time zones, but it takes work.

For myself, this is a great day. As a lowly consultant with a mere economics degree, I have always felt a little intimidated by degree-wielding engineers. Now, not only can I claim that I am just as much an innovator as any engineer (with fancy academic proof to back it up) but also that my next ludicrously expensive electronic toy is not for fun, I'm just doing my patriotic duty.

*There is a very well written article about the paper and article about it in this week's Economist. (Registration & subscription required).



Software Still Key Flaw in Consumer Electronics


In this morning's Wall Street Journal, Walt Mossborg reviews Verizon's new Chocolate Phone from LG Group. While he praises the style and some aspects of the physical design, he was generally negative on the phone due primarily to issues with the phone's software that make it difficult to use.

The LG phone does get some software / UI things right - including having dedicated buttons for the media player and camera. However, software problems prevented Mossberg from correctly transferring or playing music in some cases. He makes a very unflattering comparison between Samsung and Apple in the software skills department.

In my experience and while working on the book "Irresistible Electronics" we concluded that software is indeed one of the key drivers of usability for consumer electronics. I decided to do a somewhat unscientific test and see if that is the case for Walt Mossberg's reviews of consumer electronics over the last couple of years. A quick check showed that, roughly, where there were negative reviews, there were driven by software flaws more often than any other single cause, but that was not an overwhelming majority.

LG Chocolate Phone: Generally negative reviews, key issue was software
Nokia 770: Generally positive review, but key issues with software
UMPC: Strongly negative review, did not mention software
MacMini: Very positive on both hardware and software
Kodak Dual Lens Cameras: Very positive, did not mention software
Nuvi GPS: Negative based on price and accuracy
Kodak WiFi Camera: Negative, much of that related to software
Samsung i730 Phone: Neutral, no comments on software
Portable Media Centers: Negative due to lack of content

Of the 5 negative reviews given out, two were related to software, though perhaps if the UMPCs and portable media centers had overcome their other problems, they might have received a shellacked for their poor software as well, in my opinion.

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Big Hits, The Long Tail, & Cable Television

This morning's Wall Street Journal has an excellent article on the Long Tail by Lee Gomes in his Portals column. Lee points out that for many companies, big hits still drive a very high percentage of total revenue and that despite the current fascination with the "long tail", companies should focus making their big hits even bigger.

I think that reasoning is a great breath of fresh air into the discussion about the Long Tail. The analogy I might draw is between network and cable television. Twenty years ago, Networks had a very dominant share of TV, more than 75%, but today that is down to under 50% (I believe, don't quote me on the exact numbers). Similarly, I think we will see the same slow growth for the Long Tail in online media. Twenty years from now, a web generation may still be hit driven, but the share those hits have of the total pie, while the largest overall, may have declined substantially.