Welcome to JeffreyVeffer.com

Demo-Tuesday Morning Sessions

Posted by Jeffrey on Jan 29, 2008

The day is broken up into groupings and the first one is entitled:

“We’re Not Just Conference Producers, We’re Customers”Every product we select for DEMO is intrinsically valuable. Each will find customers, from enterprise IT professionals at work to families and friends at home. Yet, in every screening cycle, we find a handful of products that we want or need for ourselves. Here are a few from this year’s crop.Demonstrations by:

TimeTrade Systems, Inc.	Easy scheduling to market. Schedule Now button in an email gives opportunity for easy response to meeting requests. Web interface to make it easier. For the enterprise mkt. It is a Leading scheduler company with corporations like Schwab usingNeed to update web cal and integrates with Google Cal and Outlook, so you can see existing calendar options
Iterasi, Inc.	These days, can’t save pages which are dynamically created- “Notarize” but couldn’t one of the other app creators (or IE of FF) do this? How do they make money? Has search function as well. Can schedule a regular grab
LiquidPlanner, Inc.	Project management- capture and manage uncertainty on schedules. Can manage at product and the portfolio with prioritization. Has document and collaboration management and workforce management
Citiport, Inc.	Local (travel ) info, can interact and share info with locals. Not sure of the monetization or the competitive market for these services.
LeapFrog Enterprises, Inc.	Tag Reading System- get kids 4-8 reading. Portable reader kids can use, download books and upload child use data. Works with real books. Tiny camera and can read print in books. can read along by scanning with the device, even works on the pictures. At retail buy the books and then go online and manage from a dashboard. Can upload data and see the learning path. Good demo and looks like fun (at least for parents!) http://Leapfrog.com/tag
Skyfire	Web-browser for mobile. Mobile on the phone is “so 1995″ [What about the iPhone? What about flashlight?] It apparently brings the web version (not mobile version) to the phone. Supports JavaScript and all flash. Is it only Windows-based touchscreen phones?
Fabrik, Inc.	New apps on Adobe Air platform. Need for storage (40M ext hds shipped). How do I find my information? Provide a central location to see stuff, but leave it where it is. “Jaggle:” It virtualizes the location of your content; as well as ability to share stuff. Drag and drop from wherever the images are including music etc. Could provide a new way of thinking about peoples files; no more need to think of what PC or website its located on.
SpeakLike, LLC	Translation in chat window. Uses automated and human translators. Over time gets smarter and faster. Can do multi-lingual simultaneous translation. Pretty neat but question is with most of these hybrid services is how does it scale?
STEP Labs	Voice optimization for auto systems. Noise cancellation technology, but the demo didn’t completely work. Needs a bit more work as the audio wasn’t completely intelligible.
NotchUp, Inc.	Helps companies cost-effectively recruit. The best people currently have jobs, but they are not actively seeking new jobs. Lets recruits set an ‘interview price’ How do you get the word out to recruiters to use this? Can import LinkedIn profile. Probably pretty good for the tech crowd in the Bay area, but maybe limited appeal in other areas.
Education.com	Schoolfinder helps parents research schools. “Trustworthy” vetted answers to those questions
800 PBX, Inc.	Personalized telephony service. With access to applications like weather and Yahoo. Speech recognition a bit like Jott?

Commercial break with a Heinz commercial (Message in a bottle), which segues nicely into the next topic area called:

Message in a Bottle“Well, maybe not in a bottle, exactly, but communication is the centerpiece of every modern application. These products drive to the vision of seamless, integrated communication capabilities for personal and business applications. Demonstrations by:

Toktumi, Inc.	Makes small business look big. Like an office phone system, but uses the PC with hosted services. But like a VoIP control panel, with more customization. Had some problems with the demo, getting the service running.
Avistar Communications Corp.	Video for unified communications. Can overlay web pages on a video call. Managing multi-party video. And also video enhancement
Santrum Networks, Inc.	??
Movial	Makes social media social. Integrates social media with telecomm. Instantly share social media with friends that are not connected on the PC.
Ribbit Corp.	Developers can add voice to their apps easily through APIs. Unified directory (through Plaxo). Connected to OpenSocial and pulls info about caller into the window for more detail. Interesting stuff; probably an acquisition candidate (remember GrandCentral?)
LegiTime Technologies, Inc.	Professional SMS client which improves utility of SMS for business
Vidyo	High quality video conferencing over general IP networks (because it was designed for the internet). Really impressive quality and a good review at GigaOm

Demo- Brief overview by Chris Shipley

Posted by Jeffrey on Jan 29, 2008

Here is the schedule for the first day.

People starting to arrive for first day’s sessions.

['The number of iPhones here is pretty overwhelming, but I'd expect it with this crowd. ]

Chris Shipley (Host and founder of Demo) gives a brief kick off talk:

Her update on state of industry:

·         77 demos this week out of hundreds that applied; representative of the market and direction

·         Why 77? Not really driven by raw numbers, but only want to present best products and wide range of ideas

·         Can’t just show Web2.0 products but it has to represent broader industry

·         All products are interrelated; Demo is about seeing connections where maybe none were apparent before.

·         All of us are driving new products and concepts, we create a new opportunity and put more demands on infrastructure or security etc. met by many of products here

·         More reliable CDNs, or security; whatever it is should be driven by customers

·         Software on the web often better than many of the business apps we use today; the general web and interface experiences have upped our expectation. Why the slow response and bad user experience from Enterprise tools like SAP?

·         We can get these web tools without a requisition, they are just available and people in the Enterprise are starting to use them as they help get work done more effectively (like Basecamp?!)

·         Communication- text, voice, video need to be part of all applications- seamlessly

·         We as consumers are challenging s/w and h/w providers to make it easier and easier.

·         We are defined by technology we use – but we need to drive good user experience for ourselves. The experience will matter more and more

·         How will you deliver experience to our customers?

Early start at Demo

Posted by Jeffrey on Jan 28, 2008

I got in today after a bumpy ride into Palm Springs due to the remnants of some bad weather they had on the weekend so some coverage of some of the companies presenting here this week.

A few that I will be talking to include a content delivery network startup called BitGravity for a while (and also Squidcast which allows users to share HD video in a P2P environment!) and definitely Ribbit which allows developers to add voice quickly and easily to their applications. It “lets you make and receive multi-protocol calls via Flash-based phones, provides speech-to-text message transcriptions and provides an open message management environment – all built using Ribbit’s open APIs. ” I will have to ask them about their business model… Giga Om’s NewTeeVee has some Day One coverage here.

Demo is trying something a bit different this year; along the lines of CES they are trying assemble some companies around the “Green” concept; but there are only two of them this year. Sounds like they are going to start up a potentially new conference in the future called “DemoGreen” but have to wait and see how that pans out.

My question is around the whole impact of this show. Given that it is in the desert and most of the companies here are using electricity to power their demos, could the show have considered some offsets to somehow mediate their impact on the environment? Aren’t most shows doing something like this now?

The Opposable Mind – Discussion with Heather Reisman and Roger Martin

Posted by Jeffrey on Jan 27, 2008

I had the opportunity to attend a discussion about Roger Martin’s new book, “The Opposable Mind” at Indigo the other night. [I had purchased a copy of the book but I still had not finished it when I attended the discussion.] Heather Reisman the CEO of Indigo interviewed Roger and after a exuberant introduction asked him to explain the main thrust of his book.
He responded that many business books on the market now are challenging in that they ask the reader to emulate certain behaviours shown by successful leaders. The issue with this approach is that many CEOs approached problems differently in various stages of their career and more importantly readers have a hard time internalizing many of these key behaviours because each situation is unique and readers may not be equipped to deal with subtleties particular to their challenges.

So instead of looking strictly at anecdotal situations, he went back and asked was there a common thread in their ability to think about challenging situations and resolve them to a satisfactory conclusion? After interviewing many leaders, he saw that there was a common thread to their thought process: they were able to hold two opposing ideas in their heads at the same time and think about them not in as ‘either/or’, but as a ‘both/and’ manner.

Like the concept of an ‘Opposable Thumb’ where humans and some primates can create tension between the thumb and fingers, the concept of an ‘Opposable Mind’ allows great leaders to create this ‘Idea Tension’ between two opposing ideas to create something which is better than either of the individual concepts alone.

Heather Reisman then brought up Edward deBono’s concept that “our brains are like formed Jello” and that if you pour boiling water over the Jello, it creates a ridge which water then returns to again and again. This is roughly analogous to developing and reinforcing techniques by repetition.

If this is true she asked, can using your mind “laterally” strengthen the techniques in the Opposable Mind?

Roger responded that he shared de Bono’s confidence that this is possible but added that it would not be enough to tell someone to “think laterally” but that leaders do something different; as described in the book, they use a four part thinking process (usually unconsciously). They consider:

1. Saliency - They consider more things and absorb complexity in the front end
2. Causality – How do these concepts relate? They consider increasingly complex relationships. Instead of looking at ‘A’ causing ‘B’ they also consider how then ’B’ can create more ‘A.’ He commented that “They wade into complexity to get to simplicity.”
3. Architecture - How to work their way through the problem. They hold the whole in mind while working on the parts in contrast to the tendency to break things up or parcel out the parts. He gave the example where Issy Sharp, CEO of Four Seasons Hotels emphasizes how Guest Services is a critical component of his operation, but in contrast to other organizations, there is no huge ’Guest Services’ Department. It is part of all the staff’s job description and responsibility to ensure a world class experience for all guests.
4. Resolution – They go back to the problem until they find sufficient resolution of the issues. He said that these leaders are, “Not constrained by two models but are informed by them.”

He made a good point in illustrating some issues where representatives from Herman Miller (disguised in the book as a company called VisionTech) hear two different things from a potential client based on their perspectives in the organization. “Reality seldom is,” was how he termed it, and leaders have to listen to different viewpoints of people in their organization to determine salience because some things are salient that were never in their original assessment of the situation. [Heather actually remarked that the way she remembered these steps was with a mnemonic: S.C.A.R. Roger responded that he'd never thought of it that way!]

Then Heather put out a real life challenge to the audience that Indigo faced: given the currency fluctuations and the fact that most of her inventory is sourced from the United States, when books arrive on the shelf there is often a marked discrepancy in prices in US and Canadian funds. How could Roger and then the audience use this methodology to come up with some solutions to the problem.

Roger went over the basics of the issue and then Heather asked the audience. There were a few suggestions, but one member remarked that the tendency was still to jump right to solutions without doing more listening to the different stakeholders, which is true to a point, but difficult to do in that context. [I have some thoughts on this problem... but haven't put them down in print... yet  ;> ] In the end, it seemed that this was a challenge which didn’t have any quick fixes but will require imagination and a different path to solving.

MacBook Air- Form or Function

Posted by Jeffrey on Jan 21, 2008

Apple launched the MacBookAir to great fanfare in some circles with much celebration about the form factor and design of the device. The Steve-note certainly highlighted the sleekness of this device and to give weight to the argument, compared it to a Sony Vaio. Other sites have a more detailed comparison here.

The real value I think is in the ‘Touch’ interface developed first for the iPhone and the iPod touch. The MBA has touch on the trackpad so you can resize photos, scroll, swipe, rotate, zoom and other motions to interface with the screen. But wouldn’t it be great if you had a screen you could do this on directly? So make the screen touch sensitive (like the iPhone) and all of a sudden you have the Apple tablet, with a better interface than the UMPC.

I have seen people who first encounter a PC try to either take the mouse and lift it off the table and point it at the screen, or often, put it directly on the screen and try to manipulate the icons directly. As seasoned users we may scoff at this behaviour but its not really as unsophisticated as it sounds.

If you think about it, this is an entirely natural way [See this fantastic presentation by Jeff Han about Multi-touch] of interacting with items, and the fact that we (Microsoft and Apple really) tend to describe the working surface of the PC as a “desktop” really makes folks believe that they can rearrange things to the same degree as in the physical world. Microsoft  is looking at this with their surface initiative and you could even draw a comparison with Nintendo’s Wii; that interacting with something on a screen with some sort of “controller” that has no real relationship with the actual task is not intuitive.

So even though rumors of an Apple tablet have been squelched before for a variety of reasons, I think for them it is the next logical evolution of a mobile device.  When users can’t go to the small form factor of an iPhone, with a great user interface they could be persuaded to give up lugging a heavy laptop around. And besides, it’s something that Microsoft/Intel tried (and weren’t too successful at) . And Apple has never been one to shy away from a challenge.

Update:

Tom Krazit from Cnet has also written about this today (Feb. 26th) in his blog article “Has Apple found the magic Touch?”

Nintendo Wii – Looking for Innovation

Posted by Jeffrey on Dec 30, 2007

Nintendo has quite a reputation in the gaming industry as video games have been this company’s forte for a long time. Although in the period leading up to the launch of the Wii you wouldn’t know that this company was once a giant in the gaming business. They were suffering from a distinct lack of buzz as other competitors spent more to drive the core gaming experience.

Nintendo is currently in the lead in the $30B game business (and correspondingly still generating a huge amount of buzz). This rather recent development was not anticipated by the other players in the industry: Microsoft and Sony bet on a continuation of better graphics and more processing power to sway core gamers over to their platform.

What made the Wii innovative is their intention to move beyond core gamers to casual gamers, which makes up a far greater sized pie. But first a few stats:

• Nintendo has already sold 13MM of their devices so far (at the end of 2007) and expects to sell 35MM or more by 2012
• In its first month on the market in the US (it launched on November 19th, 2006) retail market watcher NPD said the Wii sold 476,000 units, compared to 197,000 PS3s (launched on November 17th, 2006). It even came close to the X-box 360 which sold 511,000 in the whole month!
• Amazon.com sold Nintendo Wii systems at approximately 17 per second when they were in stock

Here is a sales comparison:

As you can see it appears that the X-box sales have leveled off (have they gone to the Wii?) 

So what happened to the gaming market? As the leading edge moved to move the bar higher and higher on high-res graphics and detailed gameplay, the number of gamers that wanted a less intense (but still engaging) experience was growing. Whether for time reasons (no time to learn detailed combinations/ controllers) or intimidation (I don’t want to feel lame in front of highly accomplished players) the market was less visible (and vocal) than the core gamer community. And here is where it is really difficult to guess what was going to happen.

By listening to their core community, both Microsoft and Sony built some of the most advanced technology to deliver a superb gaming experience to their customers. Problem was that there was this growing (but less vocal) customer group playing Bejewelled and Tetris that felt disengaged from the core. This is where the Wii, with its intuitive gyroscopically controlled gameplay could succeed.

It really lowered the bar on console gaming, bringing casual games that did not require significant effort to understand (uhhh, bowling?) to a larger audience. (They also did a fantastic job at viral marketing. Because the Wii was new and different, it automatically attracted people that wanted to find out what made it tick). All of which drove Nintendo to increase production three times in 2007 . Still the devices are hard to get a hold of…

…Leading to the fact that we are in 2008 (almost 18 months after launch) and I still can’t get a copy of Guitar Hero for Wii!

Transparency and Dell; not the end of the story

Posted by Jeffrey on Dec 14, 2007

A week or so ago some colleagues and I were having a discussion about transparency. No not the transparency associated with clean windows, but more around how corporations interact with their customers.

Not always an easy topic to discuss because most corporations guard their external profile with care to keep a consistent message lest customers get confused and disoriented about the goals of the company. But these days as so many people with a PC have access to reams of information on every available topic, it becomes difficult to separate what the ‘official’ postition of the company is from what is being written about them by customers and others.

A case in point is illustrated by Dell’s struggle to be transparent to customers and the marketplace when confronted with evidence that serveral laptops had caught on fire. Even over a year later, there are parody videos being created on this issue as it enters the public lexicon. As part of a separate initiative Dell had created a website called Dell IdeaStorm just prior to the incidents reaching the public. The site was to gather from the public ideas and commentary around Dell’s products with ratings and reviews on postings by the community. It has a companion site called Direct2Dell which is a blog about “Dell’s Products, Services and customers.”

So about the time this was all happening the company had several options (maybe more!): stay silent on the issue; put out an ‘official’ statement; deny the link; or come out and say they are looking into the issue. Obviously they chose the latter and in this post responded that they were ‘investigating the cause.’ The first comment on the blog states that the customer, “almost never thought I’d see the day” that Dell would join the conversation on this issue.

Even more telling was the case of the ex-Dell employee blogging about his experience buying a Dell (22 Confessions of a Former Dell Sales Manager) and appeared on the blog Consumerist. It came to the attention of Dell as something which contained from their point of view “confidential information” and they wanted that post taken down. Well you can imagine what happened… Some call it the Streisand Effect, where demanding information be removed calls more attention to the original issue than doing nothing, or just correcting the inaccurate information.

So Dell again realized that their position was not tenable given the criticism they were getting not over the original article, but the follow up to ask for it to be removed. To their credit, they posted a ‘mea-culpa’ with their 23 confessions and very bluntly saying, “We blew it.” They (actually Lionel Menchaca, Chief Blogger for Dell) went on to say, “instead of trying to control information that was made public, we should have simply corrected anything that was inaccurate. We didn’t do that, and now we’re paying for it.”

[In fact, something I learned while reading this post is that Dell wants to be the "Greenest Technology Company on the planet," and provides free recycling for all consumers worldwide.]

So is Transparency difficult? Absolutely, even in a company as committed to it as Dell. You have to have support from the top of the organization as shown by Michael Dell’s support for the Direct2Dell blog. You have to be in it for the long haul because this can’t be a short-term fix for customer service issues. (BTW, Dell mentions that they have noticed a positive swing in the tone of the blogs towards Dell since they started blogging). And most importantly you have to have a culture that supports it and have faith that just because an situation is complex customers have the capacity to understand the issues. Because these days you have to be ‘working for the customer rather than against them.’

Design is the New Black

Posted by Jeffrey on Jun 8, 2007

I was in a meeting this morning and we were discussing the role of design and how customers seem to demand better design (cf. iPod and RAZR etc.) as table stakes in new consumer electronics devices. This raises the stakes for designers and product developers to get the whole package right rather than just one aspect of a product.

It led me to think that now, “Design is the New Black.”

Building a Web Business: Mark Evans talks to Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster.

Posted by Jeffrey on Jun 6, 2007

Part of Mesh07

One of the earliest businesses on the web Craigslist actually started as an email list in 1995 when Craig Newmark decided to send cool tech event listings to people he knew. Then as people started adding to the list he had an idea: what if these people could post all the new additions on a website? Well, in 1996 Craig did just that added a web interface and it has pretty much stayed unchanged for the past 12 years. Some of the reasons for its success, according to CEO Jim Buckmaster are that it has stayed true to its original roots and is useful “across all human needs.”

The approach that the site takes with respect to the user interface, translates right down to how the business operates. They are able to serve over 7 Billion PageViews per month with a small team. They have 24 employees and all work out of same dilapidated Victorian house in downtown San Francisco Of those 24 employees 2/3 are technology and the rest are in customer service. The site runs on open source software and is all about getting out of the way of the users.

They serve about 20 Million unique users per month using Linux, Perl, Apache, and compress pages 10 to 1. They endeavour to maximize Pageviews / kilowatt hour both from a business and green perspective; they are down to 175k pageviews/ kwh. Jim commented that they serve 7 billion pageviews on only 200 servers where Google is reported to be north of 1 million servers!

Given that basically none of their resources are devoted to marketing, how do they market if it is not a strategic imperative? They follow the lead of the users and try to make site as useful as possible and they believe that word of mouth traffic will flow from a good user experience.

One of the most important ways that Craigslist maintains its leadership in the online classifieds space is that in terms of product development the only things they work on are things that the users are asking for. In fact, in response to a question about whether the company is interested in the transaction market, Jim responded that virtually all exchanges on Craigslist are local and face to face, so there is no need for a payment engine. In contrast eBay has 90% of their transactions taking place at a distance and their requirements early on necessitated a transaction/payment engine.

One recent study estimated that if the site ran banners and other advertisements, it could be driving $1 billion in annual revenue. So the question arose about why they were not implementing this strategy? Jim noted that they were making enough money for all their needs, and focussing on the revenue would necessitate taking their eyes off of what the users want. He commented that the endless game of trying to make more money is not really fun and not taking external money allows them more freedom to do what they want to do.

Why is the company not focused on revenue? He responded that when you have no constraints and no psychological need for money, more money is not really necessary. The public companies are always measured by revenue growth so they are free to run company in a fun and meaningful way. They have no outside influences to push them in other directions which gives them more latitude to run the business as they see fit.

At this point, 90% of classified revenue is still in print but the costs online are lower, so the migration to online is continuing. Some newspaper commentators have stated that Craigslist represents all that’s wrong with newspaper industry. It may be part of a class of businesses that are changing traditional businesses but the newspaper industry is still 2x as profitable as average industry in the United States.

The site started charging for jobs in 1998 in San Francisco. Craig asked the users how to raise revenue and they said to charge for postings. What happened is that the quality of jobs were higher as paid listings were instituted as it took out “job spam.” Some might say that fees were the ‘lazy mans’ tool to take out substandard listings, in contrast to putting a coder in to work on the problem. Now they charge for job ads in 7 cites and brokers in NYC pay for apt listings. Their expansion plans call for more cities, more categories and more languages.

Digital Blinders – Are We an Inch Wide and a Mile Deep?

Posted by Jeffrey on May 30, 2007

Rob Hyndman talks with Nora Young, Mark Schneider and Mark Federman at Mesh07.

I often find myself flipping back and forth between my real work and a bunch of webpages to get my information hit, and realize that I seem to have a shorter attention span these days. When I mention this to others I get a lot of comments that blame the internet. “Of course it’s the internet.” But really, have we lost the ability to go deep in conversations because of our constant need for information bites? Has the internet in particular hastened the decline of our ability to think about complex issues?

With the advent of television, early commentaries bemoaned even back then, there was a tendency to a shorter attention span. But perhaps more problematic are the negative aspects that surface during online conversations and comments that lead people to think of the internet a huge amplifier for some less desirable parts of the human psyche.

But didn’t the printing press change things back in the 15th century? Now we are all literate, but back then it turned things upside down for those citizens. Bloggers of the time were called ‘pamphleteers’, they were subversives back then. Effects people predict are linearly extrapolated from what we at the time know. So it is difficult to see what some of the effects will be from the current explosion based on our current knowledge, so in my view it is important to try things, and see if they work by asking users.

Bill Joy wrote a article called “Why the future doesn’t need us anymore.” Is there a way that we can step back and evaluate what is happening in this new medium? This would be a nice luxury, but we are part of history and hard to stop the clock.

There is a place for long-form perspective journalism, but we are changing what it means to construct an argument. What we think of as an argument is more open ended and more multi-perspective. Life becomes more like a Venn diagram. We need to take multiple contexts and put them together. The concept that there is more than one right answer needs to stem from a multi-dimensional way to understand the world.

But this often is not really viable or evident (see flame wars).

Where is the value in NowPublic? If something newsworthy happens because of ubiquitous proximity, there is a chance one of the members can record it. “This matters to me and there is value in sharing it with others.”

TV in its early days was bringing reality into the living rooms (eg the Vietnam war). It has become a hypnotic medium; you sit down and zone out. People’s engagement with the Net is similar to TV; it initially felt the same way. But as a new generation comes about, it creates an effect that TV never could when editors and cameras that faced in one direction only. The internet can bring together all these bits of information and allows user to create a picture. Every little bit of info by itself is not significant but together provides a more complete transparency into issues and concepts.

Does meaning evolve over time? We used to have a newspaper or story, but now we understand that media is emergent, and we will come to understand that nothing is ever completely finished.

We don’t consume media, (this was an old concept), we produce media (we contribute to YouTube or contribute to a blog).

“Information doesn’t want to be free- it wants to be valuable.”

There is a great divide between those socialized with TV and the idea of separate channels and those that have less division (see the TV show Heroes and the combination of the show and the website and the graphical novel to have more engagement with the story and concept.)

Michael Arrington discusses TechCrunch and Start-ups at Mesh2007

Posted by Jeffrey on May 30, 2007

Techcrunch was started in 2005 because Arrington was interested in the internet and particularly start-ups. At the time, there were a few sites like technorati and bloglines but not many others. It was started because there was no single blog that covered new start-ups. At the beginning it wasn’t thought of as a business, but just something to do for fun.

He realized the site was taking off about the time he was getting more reads to stories than 4-500 per day he was reading using Bloglines. It was a full 6 months after that before ads ran on the site.

From an overseas perspective, TechCrunch France is largest blog in France and TechCrunch Japan is a sizable blog in that market. It wasn’t too hard to find foreign correspondence. Most get in contact online and express an interest in reporting on start-ups for TechCrunch. In fact the reporter who covers France is a guy living in TelAviv.

Each story is primarily a discussion and although Arrington gets the first say, he feels the best comments are in the feedback and that is something he can also participate in.

Arguably the impulse to be first to post a story is a fundamental journalistic imperative. The advantage to being first is that you don’t have to be intelligent, insightful or witty. That responsibility is for the later writers as you must contribute to the conversation.

In fact, he often prefaces the post title with the term “breaking” and only fills in the first sentence and fills in the rest of the post later. Does traditional publishing have a problem with this? Perhaps and he freely acknowledges that there are some problems in New Media reporting, but they correct themselves as more people contribute to the conversation.

The SF Chronicle has been on death row for years cutting staff etc in relation to the evolution of ‘New Media’ but do you want to hear only their viewpoint on newspapers vs. the new technology? What about others viewpoints and this is where bloggers really add value; broadening the conversation rather than restricting it to a few journalists’ viewpoints.

A simple response to this is to blame online news aggregators, but is it really Google’s fault? It is a fundamental misunderstanding of what Google is doing for news, and failure to evolve in the traditional media space. Google news has no assets and it is generating no revenue off of these stories. It is however sending traffic back to other sites. The content is actually the start of the conversation and to seed these conversations TechCrunch does is give away content as RSS feed because it establishes very loyal users who feel passionate about the stories they read.

In fact, blogs are eating traditional media’s lunch. The traditional argument is that blogs are fast and not very good at reporting, but readers don’t just return to sites with crappy content. There is the same imperative to do quality reporting to get return visitors and build credibility.

Perhaps one of the things that traditional papers can do is to allow all its writers to start their own blogs. Arrington commented that the best journalist can make more money on their own by starting to write on the side and building their own brand.

Given what happened to Engadget around their reporting of the hoax around Apple’s delay of the iPhone, would TechCrunch have reported this story? They would have reported it as the email appeared to come from Apple’s own email service and seemed credible. He would have posted it as fast as he could, based on the logic above. The credibility of Engadget suffered but perhaps shouldn’t have. Apple’s PR should have responded to him and denied the story. Does someone writing too fast have consequences? Yes, but having many more bloggers writing and contributing is more beneficial.

What would Arrington do if he was running traditional newspaper? Maybe stop printing a paper version, and make all stories available free online. These newspapers’ archives must be available free and able to be searched by consumers. NYT doesn’t get the traffic because they don’t make their stuff available to crawlers.

In the Social networking space Arrington believes that the next generation is Virtual reality… like WoW. Once the hardware catches up to what we think we should do, it will be the equivalent of SecondLife versus.

As far as traditional web-based social networking, Facebook looks like it is here to stay, because they understand Web2.0 principles like sharing, openness. MySpace probably will survive but they are doing something wrong; they don’t understand really understand the principles and are trying to close access to applications and the eco-system.

Running a startup Like Ghengis Khan -Kevin Hale

Posted by Jeffrey on Apr 25, 2007

Do big things with small teams
Technology Mashups
Word of Mouth Marketing

1. Expose yourself to harsh conditions
o Less hardware, less features, less money
o Practice in stress, practice disagreeing, do things people hate
2. Be a Nomad
o Huns, Bulgars, Magyars, Pirates
o Nomads don’t wander (migrate only 2x per year)
Nomad
Sedentary
Mobile
Settles
Tents
buildings
o Martha Stewart’s smores, the value of hunger (always hungry)
o Hot or Not – made it free to force it to survive
o Bubbleshare (Albert gave most of his money to parents)
3. Efficiency
o Good to great , hedgehog principle (what is your economic engine), Google profit per click (profit per X)
o Strip away and measure – you make what you measure (put up metrics on the board
4. Say no to infantry
o Voltron – why start with the tigers, why not with giant robot?
o Infantry, cavalry, archers, (Roman idea)- Khan said everyone needs to do everything.
o Roman army 20 mi / day; Mongols 60 mi/day (limited by slow infantry)- very small Mongol horses, no heavy armour.
o Mongol bows more advanced (recursive composite)
5. Word of mouth
o Chanted and drummed for hours, could hear it for miles. Then stopped.
o Tried to fight on cloudless days. Initiated combat by flags, then at a unified time they’d scatterà not traditional attack.
o Gmail created word of mouth marketing (WuFoo – making forms fun!)
6. Do not fight the enemy by their rules
o built a wall around the fortress and waited them out
7. Appropriate the best people and skill for your war machine
8. Build bridges
o They’d marry Mongols with heads of state, then had rights of the Mongol state, not slaves
o Maybe don’t be as secretive- share it
9. Inspire fierce loyalty
o Employees, customers – if anything happens to you I’ll take care of your family.
10. Remember the lesson of the many headed snake
o Snake with many heads had trouble in winter finding a hole
o Snake with many tails found hole and was ok
o Stick you core competency- hard to find discipline, but stick to it.

Genghis Khan and the making of the modern world
Founders at Work – Livingston

Particletree.com/web2expo/gk.pdf

Word of Mouth Advertising

Posted by Jeffrey on Apr 23, 2007

A quick word on Word of Mouth Marketing

Voice is tied to relationship.
It works according to clusters- sticking together. Now this type of information can spread even faster online. The key is that you have to have something that your users care about- they must love the product

It must go beyond reason; almost a religious interest like the Firefox versus Microsoft fervour in the browser wars (Part 2). You have to use storytelling, what people want to hear more of.

Now all this cant exist in a vacuum; yu have to have a great product and be able to build awareness and excitement. In fact the move Crouching Tiger did this to great effect by creating exclusivity in its initial release by showing only to those who loved its “nightclub” type effects.

Seven ways to succeed at Word of Mounth marketing:

• Know your customer
• Have a great product
• Be Open and Honest
• Find a common Enemy
• Get fanatics to use and love the product
• Loosen controls
• Love your customers

Overview of Widgets and Badges – Dion Hinchcliffe

Posted by Jeffrey on Apr 20, 2007

This was based on a talk by Dion Hinchcliffe at the Web2.0 Expo, Tuesday April 17, 2007

Important trends-

• Web sites with portable content and functionality
• Putting modular web parts on the blogs and profiles to host the pieces of the web that they want to share
• Realization the there is limited value being on one site
• Atomization of content – smaller pieces are easier to reuse
• Microformats are the smallest pieces
• Do it yourself trend is combining with the rise of web portable content and functionality- people help themselves

Web as a parts “Superstore”
Little question that the web is turning into a sort of online Home Depot with its shelves line with thousand of useful off the shelf parts of every description and utility- a lot of problems users can solve themselves w/o programmers

Jakob’s law

• Users spend most of their time somewhere else
• Design your products and service to leverage the fact

Widgetbox

• Everyone has a channel on the web, end users remixing the web out of parts.
• Javascript, flash, WPF/E

How to think about it?

• Build open platforms instead of stand alone apps- self distributing ecosystems
• Spread you product beyond your site- APIs, badges, syndication
• Standing on the shoulders of giants- leverage Yahoo, Amazon etc.
• Automated mass servicing of markets with low demand content and functionality (Long tail) – bulk of the demand

What are they?

• Widgets- small apps that can be embedded on the web – can be AJAX or flash- usually pulled live from the site.
• Badges – displays of content pulled under the covers from other sites (more of content display)
• Gadgets – more formal widget models from Google and Microsoft

Key aspects

• Supreme ease of consumption and distribution – copy and paste is best; single line Javascript includes (Google maps); Object embed tags for flash
• Connect to the underlying sites to provide value and control as well
• Have a business model backed deeply into it – driving site traffic content consumption, advertising.

Power of widgets

• Makes your web apps functionality and content portable
• Works anywhere not just on your site
• Network effects via viral propagation
• Supply both mashups as well as hosting on blogs wikis

Users

• Consumers – moving content and functionality they want to where they need it
• o Building simple dashboard and applications
• Developers and Prosumers
• o Easy to integrate with high value functionality
• Business
• o External sourcing of functionality and content
• o Web apps built on top of the shoulders…

Widget stories

• Youtube video badge
• o Highly viral excellent end user motivation
• Uses web as a content billboard
• Consistently drives user growth, video views and traffic back to the site
• Didn’t take the users intelligence for granted
• Showed the raw code for hosting right next to every video

Google adwords widget

• o Most successful widget in history
• Drives enormous revenue to Google
• Turns entire web into Google ad platform
• Key aspects
• o Good user incentive
• o Extreme ease of use
• o Strong viral feedback loop

Business Case

• Content on millions of other pages
• Let users broaden you distribute globally at virtually not cost
• Turn your apps into open platforms and foundation of dozen of other products (or leave majority of value of online product and services untapped)
• o AMZN has 50k businesses build on top

Key design considerations

• Scalability
• Cost effectiveness
• Reliability
• Exploitation of others
• Global reach
• Security
• o Think through all the cross domain issue, sharing of personal data (eg pictures and video)
• IP issues
• o Do you have a license to redistribute the content?
• o Con other violate the IP protection of others
• o Do you widget make it hard to other to take content out of the widget
• Not losing control
• Ease of Consumption
• o Must be really simple copy and paste
• Leverage network effects
• o Encourage every view to share
• End user motivation
• o Only if it does something useful for them
• o Sharing interesting content, shared access to person data or even paying them (as Google does)
• Enabling mashusp
• o Widgets are key ingredient to the mashup phenomenon
• Many believe this is new app dev model
• o Widgets provide raw ingredients to this
• Build in weeks vs months

Examples

• Flashearth
• Zillow.com

Business mashups

• Mckinsey- 10% of companies are looking at mashups inside the firewall

Recommendations

• Small pieces loosely joined
• Simplicity and extreme loose coupling
• Reuse the web palette first
• SLAs will get more interesting
• Get experience now- begin trials to offer your capabilities or services
• Make sure it legal to build business from profitable for others and extremely easy to do
• Provide minimum of restrictive structure and make it possible for users to do it themselves

Joost is interesting and it is like some other things you may have seen.

Posted by Jeffrey on Apr 18, 2007

In the Wednesday Keynote Joost CTO Dirk-Willem van Gulik explained a bit about their service. Joost mostly behaves like normal TV. You can “channel up, channel down; volume up, volume down” (as described by a well known Cable Exec.)

We can look at the screen to get an overall view of the service.

The EPG on the left shows a fairly standard line-up which includes My Channels. However you can watch shows like a TV as well scrub back and forth like a PVR. Also since there are content objects you can tune into at any time it also behaves like VOD.

The area at the top displays the content owner’s information and what’s really interesting is that after you click and an overlay comes up the resulting overlay is writable by anyone. Anyone can write, can interact with content or just display it as an overly to sit on top of the content. What this means to content owners I think is still up for debate.

One of the issues they have been struggling with is one which is familiar to all of us-How do you find content? The list just keeps gets longer and longer as more content is added to the network. This is something which they will be spending significant resources on over the next few months as they gear up for a major release in the summer timeframe.

The bottom has a search box anyone can expose on their own site. Every piece of content has own URL and users can comment on parts of the video.
You can save a list as a channel (“Smart Channel”), which you can share with friends.

On the right there is displayed MyJoost where when you click, you see an overlay of widgets on top of video. Once again there are APIs for this and you can pin the widgets to the screen. There are almost limitless applications that can interact with viewers and content.

Interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezon

Posted by Jeffrey on Apr 17, 2007

Jeff Bezos was one of the keynote speakers at the Web2.0 conference and in his eagerly anticipated talk he took the opportunity to highlight some of their initiatives to grow to the next level by providing outside businesses access to their world-class systems and technology. This approach would have seemed completely backwards about 5 years ago. Why provide potential competitors access to key technological assets and speed their time to market? Jeff tried to outline some of their thinking by kicking off his talk using their Amazon S3 internet-enabled file storage system; the same system they use internally for their e-commerce site Amazon.com.

Amazon S3 has grown from about 800m objects stored in the system in July 2006 to over 5 Billion objects today. To illustrate some of the benefits of using the service, Bezos put the site Blueorigin (his effort to build a space vehicle) and all the video for the site on S3 so that they didn’t have to worry about scaling. This ended up being a prescient move as the traffic spiked when someone posted the site on Digg.

In fact on that day in January after getting Dugg, the website and media objects on S3 responded to 3 million requests. There were countless downloads of the video leading to transfer of 758Gb of data in one day. They did this without a contract or any sales contact; it was all done self serve by filling out some forms on the site. And the best part of it was that for all of January it cost $304 dollars, with most of the charges coming for that one day!

On S3s busiest day they were serving 1 billion requests per day and almost 16k requests/ second. Interestingly enough users include a company we may be familiar with; Microsoft. Secondlife and Powerset are also among the users.

Another example of what Amazon is working on with their services involves a service called EC2 (EC2 stands for Elastic Cloud.) If for instance your business needed to process many media files from avi to mp4, you could use their EC2 service to process all these files, which traditionally has been a very processor intensive task.

What would happen is that the raw media files stored in S3 pass messages to a queue service in EC2. EC2 finds a pointer in S3 to that avi file and starts the processing into an mp4.

To maintain quality control when the queue grows long, the EC2 can spawn new EC2s to clone itself to increase throughput of the service. So in effect you have an on-demand virtual server environment, which you only have to pay for when used. After processing the objects the virtual servers are redeployed to other tasks so your business does not have to pay for all those processors 24/7. You can use what they call “pay-per-drink” pricing in order to only use what you need at that time.

But a key question is how did Amazon get from a bookstore to an infrastructure provider? They took learnings from how to scale and deliver Amazon.com to other applications. Once they had this knowledge, they realized that they could then leverage this and open up this on a pay-per use basis so that companies didn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they wanted to create an application or business.

The question then comes to mind whether Amazon is ‘traditional’ Web2.0 business? They have grown up alongside other trailblazing Web 1.0 companies but in contrast to the newer Web2.0 companies, they also have many hard offline assets including huge warehouses. But even thought they have 10 million ft2 of fulfillment space they are trying to again leverage their processes and infrastructure to outside players to create an ecosystem.

They reason that physical movement of goods won’t go away in next few years. So they will take the high cost services that businesses up to now have been forced to build or partner to get and allow businesses to exploit Amazon’s fulfillment network. You could think of this as the ‘programmable warehouse.’

You would simply hook into Amazon’s system and send a message that they should expect to receive items you will send over for storage in their warehouse. And the cost? Only 45 cents per cubic foot of storage per month. Then you can send a message to pick those things and Amazon would send them to an address you specify.

So they look at the future of Web2.0 a bit differently; they don’t just look at what will be the big disruptors, but they also put dollars into what they think won’t change. Interestingly, they feel they can build a strategy around what won’t change rather than what might.

Apple TV vs. Media Center vs. Joost

Posted by Jeffrey on Mar 28, 2007

OK. This is an unfair comparison as some of these products involve hardware, some are just software, but really if all I want to do is watch video do I as a consumer care?

The answer is of course yes! The reason is that aside from the price there are other considerations that will make a big difference in how they are used. Especially if you use them with traditional broadcast television, but more on that in a moment.

Lets start with the ‘oldest’ solution Media Center PC. As we all know, it needs a PC (and one with a fairly robust video card) in order to do the processing and display of the TV signal as well as the DVR functionality. There are some distinct advantages to having a PC based DVR, as the interface tends to be better than the hardware DVR that gets slapped on by the provider and the ability to modify hardware as you see fit. But in practice, how many of us really swap out the video card or upgrade the RAM on a regular basis? Especially on this type of device which will be located right beside the television (and likely compared to) other home entertainment devices.

In fact, about 3 weeks after getting this MCPC, it died in the middle of a show (like that really sucked) and I had to take it back to the Best Buy to find out what the heck was wrong with it. So then I had to rewire the Set-top box back into the TV/Stereo while we waited for the verdict. And how long did it take to go back to HP to get fixed? Three weeks! Three weeks to get it fixed and they had to put in a whole new mother board. These are some of my concerns when PCs get pushed out of the office into the rest of the house: the reliability of the hardware/software potentially becomes a concern because if something dies in the middle of and episode of Lost, you bet people are going to be pissed.

So now that I got the unit back, I have had a chance to do a comparison with Apple TV for the setup. The AppleTV unit was easier to set up, but didn’t have to deal with integrating a STB and a program guide and changing channels with the remote. However as I said before, the Apple TV remote reminds me most of a stick of gum (spearmint I think) and it will probably get lost.

But which of these solutions is more disruptive to the current Television model? Well, like everything else it depends on what part of the experience you’re talking about… but narrowly my vote is for Joost as it really changes how content is distributed out to the viewers. It is still at this point pretty much the same user experience for watching TV; there are a bunch of numerically denoted channels and you can go up and down the dial just like your regular surfing habits. Also, you don’t at this point have to decide to purchase individual content items (like at this time the iTunes videos) so it suits the established broadcaster behaviour.

I believe that in the short term there will have to be some subscription/aggregation in place that aligns to the current model in order to attract a mainstream audience who doesn’t want to spend the time picking and choosing media objects, but whether that looks like the traditional broadcast model or more like the recommendations on Tivo is still up for grabs.

Now if you could somehow align your preferences online over to the set top box that would be pretty attractive…

Apple TV installation- A Non-Apple acolyte’s perspective

Posted by Jeffrey on Mar 24, 2007

Forget all the comments about backwards operating systems (PCs) and elegant simple to use interfaces (Mac); I wanted to see for myself if this extremely well-hyped device could do all the stuff that it was supposedly able to do. Things such as levitate objects, create food (“Earl Grey tea hot”; the Enterprise PC had to be Mac-based, no?) and other feats of magic.

Seriously this device had to live up to a lot of hype, not the least of which involved super-easy setup and use. I actually used Macs off and on over the years, from the Mac Classic back in 1991 to PowerMacs in the mid-90s to even a super-powered (at the time) G3 to do video editing and other tasks around 2000. I have also had a bunch of PCs as well (seems like everyone was using them.. and still is). My latest PC is about 5 years old and is in need of replacement, but now I am seriously thinking about going to a Mac. But that’s another story, for another post.

This is about my installation experience with the AppleTV box. When I heard that they were creating this product back in 2005 I thought that this would be a fantastic addition to a home entertainment system. I mean think of it; the ability to play all that stuff that is locked up on your computer without having to physically bring it down to wherever your TV was sitting seemed pretty attractive. I thought that they’d announce it at MacWorld in ’06 but there was no mention of a product that people had started to call iTV. So still had to wait, and wait and wait.

So when it was announced along with the iPhone I thought that it would be a great opportunity to try finally get to try out something that would make this type of whole home “cross-platform” media experience a reality.

I confess that I was not quite as well informed about the requirements for the product as I thought. In fact (cue the inspirational music) I thought that I could just bring it home and hook it up to the flat panel in the basement with the many cables I have on hand from other devices/installations that I have put in over the past few years. Turns out that after I unboxed the unit, (kill the music), I realized that the only video connections were HDMI (not a chance) and Component. Crap; I didn’t have any of those cables on hand.

So it sat for a day uninstalled and unloved on the shelf on top of my Satelite box waiting for me to go out and get the component cable. Home depot to the rescue. So brought the cable back, hooked it all up to the flat panel and then tried to insert the power cable. Guess what? Due to some sort of manufacturing problem, the cable doesn’t properly seat in the unit. It just falls out. So I had to resort to good old painters tape to hold the cable to the unit so at least I could do the setup.

Don’t try this at home kids

After taping the cable temporarily, I looked in the box for the remote and nearly had to tear the damn box apart to get it out. This remote is so tiny that for sure it will get lost on the coffee table or eaten by a hungry animal out looking for snacks inbetween the cushions.

Finally getting the remote out allows you to choose the language, and pick the resolution. Weird but none of the higher res options work for this monitor, even though it does support higher resolutions. I’m going to to worry about that later….

The tricky part was trying to get it to find the iTunes client running on the network. I had this running but apparently there is an option in the Firewall section to share iTunes that has to be enabled or it won’t find the AppleTV box. (Good to know; I found this on the Apple site.)

But the box does find the network and I can put in the WEP key (slowly using the remote and picking each character one by one), so it does go out and find a short teaser version for Feature Films and TV. [Note that I am in Canada which sucks from an iTunes perspective as we are a third world country when it comes to getting video. The short answer is that we really have nothing, except some trailers and some music videos. Get with the picture Apple/Studios and let us get the content that we want!]

So finally got everything to synch after fooling around a bit with the menus and content looks surprisingly good. There still are some jagged edges and some blockiness in the blacks but in my opinion I only notice this because I am comparing it to higher resolution video. I really like the way I can access the video podcasts on this device to check out the previews for all the upcoming movies, so I can at least pretend that I know what’s going on and delude myself that I’ll actually have time to see them when they come out.

So overall, not a bad user experience for installing what could be a really complicated device. I think Apple has done a few things right: limit the number of options in setup (so as not to confuse the user); use wireless to synch content from the PC as well as connect to the iTunes service for the most up-to-date previews of shows and films (too bad we can’t see them here); made the user interface really simple with a few clicks of the (too small) remote.

I also have hooked up our Media Center PC to this flat panel and will try to get that back online in the next few days… but not really a fair comparison as the AppleTV is a purpose built unit and the MCPC is more of a PC with the TV client grafted on. But I think that the AppleTV unit looks waaaay better anyway.

Update: Last week I finally got the power cable to stay in the socket; basically by shoving it in waaay to hard for my comfort level. So now I am just waiting for Apple to sign more content in Canada…. (still waiting…)

How the web (2.0) is influencing us.

Posted by Jeffrey on Mar 2, 2007

This is a brilliant video, under 5 minutes, on how blogs, wikis, web feeds, social networking sites, and folksonomies are revolutionizing our culture .

Both for the technical person who understands it and also for the digital neophyte / newbie who needs to get a taste for how the web is transforming itself and impacting the way we click to learn and share knowledge. Fast paced, great soundtrack and super thoughts!