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June 30, 2005
New product development & entrepreneurship
Joe Kraus has a great post on how it took $3M to start Excite and only $100K to launch Jotspot (here - via O'Reilly Radar). The reasons he lists are hardware being 100X cheaper, software infrastructure being free, greater access to global labor markets, and search engine marketing.
That is so true! The new environment also allows for "micro-businesses". I know many people that have self-funded and launched online applications that would have required a full staff, funding, and offices before.
$50-100K gets you a long way these days!
[Technorati Tags: entrepreneurship startups]
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great conversation on blogs and politics on the connection
Rebecca MacKinnon from the Berkman Center is chatting with Dick Gordon on blogs in China (here), Iran and other places - very cool!
[Technorati Tags: blogs politics]
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links for 2005-06-30
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Paper on motivations for bloggers
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Interesting stats from CMO magazine
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Interesting perspective on the negative effects on privacy by moving data to the US
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June 29, 2005
Baby Gender Mentor
As I was driving to a meeting today I heard Robin Young at Here and Now talk (here) about this new product - the baby gender mentor. The product costs less than $300 and reveals the gender of a baby with 100% accuracy only five weeks into the pregnancy. Oh - and its like a home pregnancy test - it only requires a finger prick.
Having read about the horrible results of sex selection in countries like China - my first reaction was one of disgust. How could a company be so unethical as to launch a product that could eventually lead to wars. That is indeed one of the accepted potential outcomes of a society with a large imbalance between the number of males vs. females.
But as I thought about it some more, I realized that if that company were not to do it, someone else probably would - concluding that there must be a better way than expecting "self-policing" on the product manufacturers' part. So maybe this is where we should have our Government step in? Nah...look at the stupidity of the stem cell research "virtual" ban imposed in this country. Referendums? Probably too complicated. Economic boycotts - maybe... at first, that seems to be the best form of self-regulation - relying on the intelligence of crowds to not buy goods that they do not approve of. But in the face of big corporate ad spending and its opinion-forming capabilities, somehow that solution seems to be flawed as well.
When your ethics are not the same as mine - that makes for very difficult conversations...
[Technorati Tags: ethics product innovation]
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links for 2005-06-29
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Group blog on the future of work
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Another sad decision by the supreme court
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mapping movies and music visually
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humor
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VC Wiki
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June 28, 2005
Funny...
Check this out...
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Corante launches Futuretense blog
Futuretense, a group blog on the future of work edited by Elizabeth Albrycht went live today. Contributors include Dave Desforges, Jim McGee, Regina Miller, and Jim Ware - a great team and a great topic!
(I was in the know on that one as I have been doing some work with those guys, but it is still fun to see it come online.)
[Technorati Tags: future of work corante]
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For most software companies hosted offerings are the way to go...
I was chatting with the new CEO of a software startup (a restart really) who was complaining about the fact that his product team never realized the importance of having their product available as a hosted solution rather than as an installable one.
In most cases I believe that software startups should offer their products as a hosted offering. In this case especially - where the application is primarily used by sales and marketing departments. The reasons for that are pretty straightforward. First let's look at the main barriers to adopting new technology (see here for more details - based on Rogers):
- perceived risk
- triability
- complexity
- compatibility
- observability
One interesting dilemma about hosted applications is whether they should become your only offerings. I am of the opinion that they should - especially if you are an emerging company. First of, and if you are a startup, you do not have the resources to manage two business models. But perhaps more importantly, I do not believe that the two models can coexist under one entity. The needs and characteristics of both offerings are too divergent - both internally as well as for the customer - to be positioned as "alternatives."
Back in the late 90's, when the 1.0 ASP models came out, there was a lot of religion about not outsourcing or hosting mission-critical data outside the firewall. That issue has largely gone away by now. Most companies' IT departments have developed certification programs for hosted applications. Which brings up another great advantage for hosted applications - they do not need to become a part of the IT roadmap - giving you and your customers a chance for speedier adoption and demonstrating faster that you can do well on the last bullet as well.
[Technorati Tags: asp hosting]
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links for 2005-06-28
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Mary Matalin and James Carville on communications
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continuous partial attention comments
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June 27, 2005
I took the MIT weblog survey!
And when you do, you get to choose one of those little logos.
[Technorati Tags: blogging mit]
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The message vs. the tools/channels
Shel Holtz blogs about a speech given by Mary Matalin and James Carville on communications at the IABC conference (here). It sounds like an interesting talk.
They distinguished the message from the tools to distribute the message - and find the message to be the most important part of communications. They took a shot at blogs - questioning what the hot tool would be in 5 years. And they also talked about the importance of soundbites, clarity of the message, and the power of storytelling.
While it is true that the audiences control the message these days, Shel believes that it should not stop organizations from putting messages out there.
I buy all of that. Of course blogs are important, but they are only one channel. And of course it's important for organisations to put out messages - it's way easier for people to re-tell a story than it is for them to create one.
Posted by francois at 11:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-27
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Return on investment for Google
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Great post on PR and candor
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Tool to simulate pagerank
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June 26, 2005
Boston Globe picks on USWeb paying bloggers
The Sunday Globe today picked up on a story which Media Guerrilla reported a while back (here - Globe Story here). The story is that USWeb pays bloggers $5 to write favorable blurbs about their customers on their blog with a link (to increase "google juice").
[Technorati Tags: blogging transparency]
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links for 2005-06-26
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Traditional PR tools here to stay
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Attention...notes/comments on Linda Stone speech
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June 25, 2005
links for 2005-06-25
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Live 8 is a day of action that calls on the leaders of the world's richest countries to put an end to poverty and debt when they meet on July 6
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Different ways to follow your blog
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KM infrastructure at the BBC
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MIT Project teaching computers common sense
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June 24, 2005
Is it time to move?
If this is true, it is scary. Big brother spy in our new computers?
Update - this was a hoax. See Buzzmachine...
[Technorati Tags: homeland security patriot act]
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links for 2005-06-24
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Another tagging site
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June 23, 2005
Maybe you can help me
Think of this as a "virtual water cooler" conversation with me looking for some inspiration. Hopefully you will engage - and if not, that's ok too - I am used to talk to myself...
As you may know - I am helping the BlogBridge open source project with their marketing, positioning and go-to-market strategy. This morning, my friend Pito, who runs the project, asked me a simple question - If I were to spend more time on the project could we generate more "buzz"?
Considering that I want to keep a healthy balance between my paid engagements and my free engagements (did I mention BlogBridge is open source = free), I thought of pulling a classic consultant trick on him and overwhelm him with the "fundamental" differences between buzz, microbuzz, metabuzz, ebuzz, ibuzz, sbuzz... you get the point. But since that is not really like me, I decided against this strategy and instead launched into an exercise of dissecting the problem right there, and with him.
At the risk of exposing my ignorance, I want to share my thoughts here and see if perhaps you have anything to add.
Let's start with the product (RSS aggregator with a backend service). I will not get into too much detail, but I do believe that we have the right product for the market - it is easy to use, it helps people sort through the information they already subscribe to, and it helps people discover new information. In a world of information overload and chaos, this sounds like the right set of problems to solve. Trust me for a minute, forget that I am a marketer and assume that I am right on this and let's continue the analysis.
Buzz happens when people spontaneously tell one another about a great product experience they've had - and go as far as recommending that product to others. That buzz gets really amplified if you have some super network connectors who talk about your product as well…still with me?
The issue with spontaneous buzz is that people first have to try the product in order to get the "experience" from which they will recommend it to others. So the first thing we have to do is to reconnect with our couple thousand real users to ensure that they are having a positive experience, help them understand and use the increasingly rich feature set and ask for their help in spreading the good word. Long term, we have to continuously make sure that the product is easily “triable” (which probably means getting rid of Java Webstart…but let’s table this discussion for now).
In terms of the network hubs you can get them to give you some mention like David Weinberger did here (we know he is a user), Dan Gillmor did here, Robert Scoble did here, or like our friend and BlogBridge topic expert Jeff Clavier did here. These people are very busy and they probably don't have the time to actually play with too many products. And just like with other users, there is no way that they would give you a ringing endorsement without having a real positive experience with the product. Knowing that, what if we were to offer our time (whatever it takes) to set them up with our product with the promise that at the end of the exercise they would be better off than when we started.
What do you think? Do you think we're missing something? Are there other issues that are standing in the way which we are perhaps missing? If you have some other brilliant ideas, email me or post a comment...I will continue to keep you posted on our progress! And - did I mention it's an open source project, so if you want to get involved - feel free...
[Technorati Tags: blogbridge buzz marketing open source]
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Is your boss a psychopath?
The latest issue of Fast Company has a whole article on Psychopath bosses (not online yet- will link as soon as up). The article also comes with a quick quiz to help you calculate the extend of the problem:
- Is he glib and superficially charming?
- Does he have a grandiose sense of self-worth?
- Is he a pathological liar?
- Is he a con artist or a master manipulator
- When he harms other people, does he feel the lack of remorse or guilt?
- Does he have a shallow effect
- Is he callous and lacking empathy
- Does he fail to accept responsibility for his own actions?
Then compute your score.
- 1-4....be frustrated
- 5-7....be cautious
- 8-12....be afraid
- 13-16....be very afraid
It is amazing to me how companies can function with people like this in prominent positions (see also the revenge of the "c"th). Or maybe it just tells us something about the resilience of companies as social organism...
[Technorati Tags: hr corporate]
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links for 2005-06-23
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June 22, 2005
Internal communications - broken
Corporate blogging today relates the results of a Scandinavian survey (surveyed 12,000 people in 24 companies) about internal communications (here). The results are pretty poor - and I am sure that if we were to run a similar survey in the US or broader Europe, the results would be pretty similar.
Check this out:
- Top management is neither visible nor credible. Just 4 out of 10 think the top execs do what they say.
- Strategic communication doesn't succeed. Only 50 % of the employees say they know the goals and strategies of their company.
- 50 % feel that they are not enough informed about changes in the company.
[Technorati Tags: employee communications internal communications]
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links for 2005-06-22
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Social bookmarking usage at IBM
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June 21, 2005
More on folksonomies
By now you know that I am very interested in this topic and that I believe that this is one of the potential cornerstones of making KM finally work. That being said there are a few interesting developments that crossed my aggregator today.
First - here is a great article on folksonomies vs. taxonomies that will be presented later this week by Emanuele Quintarelli (via coporate blogging). The author does a good job of explaining where taxonomies fit vs. where folksonomies fit. He also takes you through the good and the bad of folskononies and specifically addresses the use of it within the enterprise - citing as one of the benefits the bridging of silos within companies where the same thing sometimes goes by a totally different name.
That reminded me of a large medical devices company I used to work with. The terminology used for product innovation between the different product groups was so dissimilar that a product manager from one department simply could not be transferred into another! Talk about barriers to cross-product innovation...
IBM is also rolling out enterpise usage of folksonomies - check out James Snell's post on that yesterday.
[Technorati Tags: tagging folksonomies]
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Awesome new release of BlogBridge
BlogBridge today came out with an awesome new release (you got to be willing to sign up for the weekly version to get it). Note that I am affiliated with those guys in a non-paid capacity...
This release really did a great job in helping you sort through your information clutter (if you don't have David Weinberger's problem - I do). Basically this release let's you create "smartfeeds" - collecting posts from within your own subscribed feeds based on specific criteria in one new feed. That is in addition to smartfeeds that can be created from delicious, flickr, findory, feedster and technorati...very cool!
Next job we will tackle tagging from within BlogBridge - if you have any brilliant ideas - let us know.
[Technorati Tags: blogging rss]
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links for 2005-06-21
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What goes through a consumer's mind when he walks into Circuit City and sees 250 different televisions in all shapes and sizes
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interview with the starbucks ceo on creating an emotional tie with your customers
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Feedster CEO writes about turning on customers to your brand through blogs.
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Tag plugin for MT
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Collaboration and the future of work...
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June 20, 2005
Marketing to older people - lock-in opportunities
Based on non-scientific data it seems to me that older people have a lower tolerance for change than younger people. They like the comfort of "sameness" and familiarity when buying products and services.
If that's true - and with the upcoming wave of retiring boomers - there are tremendous "lock-in" opportunities for a variety of consumer goods. And as long as those companies don't screw up, they'll enjoy huge switching cost benefits over their competitors.
No? Am I perhaps missing something or starting from a wrong assumption?
[Technorati Tags: baby boomers marketing]
Posted by francois at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 19, 2005
links for 2005-06-19
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More feedback on the Ketchum announcement
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Free photos
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June 18, 2005
Teaching 4th graders business ethics...
I truly enjoyed the last of my junior achievement classes - this one teaching 4th graders "business ethics."
When I ran the examples from Seth Godin's latest book by them (i.e., Johnson lying to congress to get funding for Vietnam and Prudhomme's promotion of red fish which almost led to their extinction), they had no problems distinguishing the ethical from the unethical. When we talked about the fictitious pencil company needing trees to produce pencils - they understood why in the long run it makes sense to take less profit upfront in order to re-plant trees. And when they role-played being on the board of directors of a company that polluted the air to the point where their workers became sick - they made the right decisions...
But then I tried to come up with an example that would be a bit closer to their world. The question was - what would you do if your best friend tells you that he or she is about to hurt some other kid?
- Answer 1 (majority of the kids) - go tell someone else (teacher, parent, etc.)
- Answer 2 (1 kid) - try to convince my friend not to do it before telling someone else
- Answer 3 (1 kid) - never tell on your best friend
- Answer 4 (1 kid) - it depends on who he or she is about to hurt...if I don't like that person then I would not tell
[Technorati Tags: junior achievement ethics]
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links for 2005-06-18
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goal is to help understand the way that weblogs are affecting the way we communicate with each other.
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YubNub is a command-line for the web.
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European blogosphere summary page (wiki)
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Google pagerank factors from their patent application
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Don't try to fool the reader with a sales pitch or by disguising your blog as a press release or advertisement.
Posted by delicious at 4:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 17, 2005
[off-topic]How can we afford people like that
I was speaking with a good friend of mine who works for the state. She was totally stressed out about a problem employee she has had to deal with for months. Apparently the person in question is totally inept – only good at screwing things up and screwing other people in the process. She calls in sick all the time. Once she called in sick on a Saturday (that group does not work on Saturdays) – twice! The second time she called (20min after the first call), she said she could not remember whether she had already called or not.
Of course, the impact on the morale of other team members in her group are predictable – people are getting fed up, people are sick of having to work extra time to cover up for her, etc.
The amount of fully documented cases of incompetency for that person are apparently very high – and she has even been given an official warning through HR and been put on ‘trial’ or whatever term hr uses for putting people on probation.
Problem is – my friend is unable to fire her! And there are apparently tons of people like that on our state’s payroll… it's not fair to the taxpayers and not fair to the good employees that work for our government
Posted by francois at 9:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
links for 2005-06-17
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The Internet may be entering a new phase that will decentralize control inside companies, enable employees to collaborate more easily, and drive efficiency
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great essay on the new internet - tagging, ajax, etc.
Posted by delicious at 4:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack | Bookmark This | Linking Posts
June 16, 2005
Rescuing Social Software
David Pollard at How to Save the World has another post on the problems related to the first generation social software applications (here). He basically feels that his blog provides him with a much more robust social network that all the other SNA's.
What he would like to see is some sort of environment in which you could list what you have to offer, who recommends you and what you're looking for. And if someone is interested in contacting you - he would like to see a much richer virtual presence solutions - think of it as Skype with video, document viewing, chat and white-boarding all in one.
While I too would like to see a richer virtual interaction environment integrated with my SNA, so far the application which I have been using - LinkeIn - has proven useful to me. True, there are maybe more sellers than buyers and there are truly lazy networkers who try to abuse or waste the precious social capital you have with your contacts - but by and large I have had no problems ignoring those pests and make the app work for me.
[Technorati Tags: social software linkedin]
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Dark Blogs - a case study
Suw Charman over at Strange Attractor and Corante Research released a case study on the use of dark blogs (blogs used inside corporate firewalls) in the enterprise. This one is focused on a pharmaceutical company and can be downloaded here as a pdf and distributed under the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons licence.
The first application for dark blogs within the pharmaceutical company was for Competitive Intelligence and the new blogging platform (from Traction Software) replaced static web sites as well as some Lotus Notes apps.
It won't be long before many companies start realizing the benefits of blogs, wikis and tagging software solutions to perform collaborative tasks like competitive intelligence, customer needs gathering and other knowledge management activities.
[Technorati Tags: dark blogs knowledge management]
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links for 2005-06-16
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Analysis of blogging behavior of three A-list bloggers
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Cool blog with bad UI's
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The goal here is to give you a basic roadmap to the legal issues you may confront as a blogger
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Through the central blog dashboard at the intranet W3, IBMers now can find more than 3,600 blogs written by their co-workers
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Yahoo! buys blo.gs and joins FeedMesh
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June 15, 2005
This time, it's for real: Save NPR and PBS
(Via whatsnextblog) - the following text from Moveon.org:
You know that email petition that keeps circulating about how Congress is slashing funding for NPR and PBS? Well, now it's actually true. (Really. Check at the bottom if you don't believe me.)
Sign the petition telling Congress to save NPR and PBS:
http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/
A House panel has voted to eliminate all public funding for NPR and PBS, starting with "Sesame Street," "Reading Rainbow," and other commercial-free children's shows. If approved, this would be the most severe cut in the history of public broadcasting, threatening to pull the plug on Big Bird, Cookie Monster, and Oscar the Grouch.
The cuts would slash 25% of the federal funding this year—$100 million—and end funding altogether within two years. The loss could kill beloved children's shows like "Clifford the Big Red Dog," "Arthur," and "Postcards from Buster." Rural stations and those serving low-income communities might not survive. Other stations would have to increase corporate sponsorships.
Already, 300,000 people have signed the petition. Can you help us reach 400,000 signatures today?
http://www.moveon.org/publicbroadcasting/
Read the Washington Post report on the threat to NPR and PBS at:
Update 6/24 - cut rejected 248 to 140 to maintain funding for the corporation for public broadcasting! Moveon sent notice that they got over 1M petitions...this works.
[Technorati Tags: npr congress]
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