Picture Credit: Picupper.com

For most of the pundits out there in valley, OpenSocial is dead and meaningless. However, at Lotusphere 2012 last month, IBM was highlighting how they have used OpenSocial in their image makeover towards Social Business. They have relied on OpenSocial for activity streams and gadgets. When I was speaking to Suzanne Livingston from IBM if she anticipates OpenSocial to be resurrected inside the enterprises (which I personally think is going to be the case), she sounded affirmative. I thought I will do a brief post highlighting this view and get the feedback from other pundits.

Remind me, what is OpenSocial?

Simply put, OpenSocial is a set of APIs (containers) that helps add social component to web services/applications (for example, activity streams are a good example of this) and also in integrating different web pages by using OpenSocial Gadgets. For “interactions” that are not done using the browser, it also offers a REST API. Google threw OpenSocial as an alternative to a walled garden like approach taken by Facebook few years ago. Then Google didn’t have a social DNA and this move was seen as a hail mary pass to stop Facebook from getting a run away lead in social. However, it didn’t get enough traction in the consumer side and Facebook did run away with the kind of lead which Google feared at that time.

However, as the so called consumerization of enterprise started to happen and enterprise applications started getting socially aware (a core attribute as I have pointed out in this position paper), OpenSocial looked like a great opportunity for enterprise software companies. From Atlassian to Jive to IBM to SAP, many companies were embracing OpenSocial for injecting social DNA into their software. OpenSocial did start to gain traction in the enterprise.

Even though Lotusphere was all about IBM’s Social agenda, I didn’t fail to notice how effectively they have used OpenSocial to make their applications socially aware. In short, IBM has bet heavily on OpenSocial and I don’t expect them to go back from this moment onwards. They have tied their social future so closely with the future of OpenSocial.

But will it accelerate?

However, things are changing on the consumer side. Facebook has a strong runaway lead and Google is trying to catch up with their own approach to Social, Google+. This time they are doing few things right and Google+ seems to be gaining traction. Google+, even though it doesn’t have a good set of APIs at this moment, is built on top of OpenSocial and the relative success of Google+ is going to keep them heavily engaged in the OpenSocial community even as Larry Page keeps pruning their own services. Also, Google wants to take Google+ to enterprises and their approach with Google Apps offers some insight into where they are heading. If they want to really get some traction for Google+ on the enterprise side, they have to make Google+ the “social messaging bus” for enterprise application. It implies that they need to invest more on OpenSocial efforts. When you have companies like IBM and Google focussing their energies on OpenSocial, there is a very high likelihood that it will gain further traction and get further adoption. I am always in favor of open standards and I am realistically optimistic about the chances for OpenSocial in the enterprise. What do you think?

disclosure: IBM took care of my travel and stay for Lotusphere

Richard Wallis left Talis (my former employer) last month, and has set up as a consultant at DataLiberate. In this short podcast, Richard shares some of his thoughts on data, semantics, and ‘the power of the link.’

Our conversation is also an excuse for an experiment. I have been producing audio-only podcasts here and elsewhere for a number of years, but have always tended to avoid producing video. It’s more effort, it requires more bandwidth at both ends of the conversation, and I’ve never really been convinced that it adds very much to a conversation between two people. Anecdotal evidence would also suggest that my current podcasts are consumed in environments where video would not work; washing dishes, walking dogs, and sitting on buses.

However, rather than just continue to presume that my biases are correct, I’ve decided to give video a try. Richard kindly agreed to participate, and the result is available on YouTube and embedded here.

An audio-only version is also available for download if you prefer. The introductory remarks in this version are slightly different to those on the video, as they come straight from the original conversation.

It’s perhaps unfair to draw too many conclusions from this first attempt, but a few things are immediately apparent. The whole process takes an awful lot longer. The files are larger, so processing and uploading times increase 2-3 fold. Uploading a separate audio file also takes a bit of time. Simply dumping the Skype recording into iMovie worked just fine… but I’ve (so far) not managed to find any way to balance the audio levels. Garageband lets me do this with my audio-only podcasts, but iMovie doesn’t seem to, so Richard’s side of the conversation comes across as quite a bit louder than mine.

Having done one, I’m still not convinced that the video adds anything to the conversation. But what do you think? If you’ve listened to any of my podcasts, please take a moment to complete the short survey over at SurveyMonkey. Your responses will help me to decide where to go next.

Many thanks.

(Cross-posted @ Paul Miller - The Cloud of Data)

Living  on the other side of the world from the bay area, it’s sometimes  little frustrating just how inward looking Silicon Valley can be. Sometimes it feels like some technology vendors discount the 5 billion or so people who don’t live in that tiny West Coast sliver.

Apart from being an arrogant attitude it’s also a seriously bad business strategy – the bulk of technology consumers live outside of the US, the bulk of consumers do not speak English as a first language and the bulk of the really exciting emerging markets (meaning the BRIC nations) to a one converse in languages other than English.

So given his personal peeve of mine I as stoked to hear from Ryan Nichols from Podio (more on them here) that this small start up has already moved to offer their application in seven languages (Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, German, French, Italian, Danish and English).

They’ve also rolled out all these languages not only on their web application, but on their mobile (iOS and Android) apps too. Podio is a living breathing international company – they have employees from 14 different countries spread cross their two offices (in Denmark and the US), and they boast of users in 170 countries – given that fact, multi lingual is a no-brainer.

Awesome to see a little company innovating fast and seeing the world as borderless. Now to get those big vendors to do likewise…

(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog - SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)

Image via CrunchBase

Two days back IBM announced their plans to acquire Worklight, the Israel based mobile development platform, to beef up their enterprise mobile strategy. IBM realizes that in this era of BYOD/Consumerization of IT, they need to had a strong mobile strategy supporting various platforms. In fact, at the recent Lotusphere 2012 conference, IBM showcased their mobile strategy. They have built mobile apps that offer seamless feature set across different mobile platforms, a core attribute I highlighted in my position paper on enterprise software. IBM understands the need to have a development platform that will help enterprises and ISVs implement this core attribute in their applications.

With the Worklight acquisition, they can now offer a mobile development platform that will let enterprise IT or ISVs write hybrid apps that can work seamlessly with IBM’s enterprise offerings. Worklight platform is pretty powerful and versatile offering wide range of features including

• an easy way to develop HTML5, Hybrid and Native apps.
• allows for code reuse, pretty important in enterprise development
• an easy and secure way to deliver these applications
• an integrated feature to manage mobile and infrastructure

It will be interesting to see how it plays out and I hope I get to see some numbers on how this development platform is used by the enterprises and other ecosystem partners.

Related articles

• IBM to Acquire Mobility Vendor Worklight – An Analysis (web2.sys-con.com)
• IBM Acquires Worklight To Advance Enterprise Mobile Solutions Portfolio (thetechnologycafe.com)
• IBM Acquires Mobile Specialist Worklight (informationweek.com)
• IBM acquires Worklight, eyes mobile device management (zdnet.com)
• IBM Buys HTML5 App Development Company WorkLight To Expand Mobile Enterprise Services (techcrunch.com)
• IBM Buys Worklight for Mobile Software Platform (pcworld.com)
• IBM Buys Worklight (forbes.com)

Can someone tell Capitol Records that the music has stopped?

If you haven’t been following events, Capitol Records (EMI) has sued Boston-based Redigi (a used digital music marketplace) for what amounts to copyright infringement.

Today, Google decided to enter the fray as a third party, and filed an amicus curiae brief (friend of the court) to ask the court to allow their participation in some key disputes.  In Google’s estimation, Capitol Records is attempting to blur the established fair use, copyright legal lines.

Here is what Google is trying to protect:

1. The ability to allow people, at their own discretion, to move or copy their legally owned digital files.

2. That the service provider cannot be held liable for a users action with regards to #1

3. The fair use doctrine where users can copy their legally owned, digital files to other devices or cloud services controlled by the user.

4.  That ReDigi is infringing on Capitol’s exclusive right to “distribute copies or phonorecords,” despite Capitol’s admission that no material objects are distributed.  And that Google, “urges the Court to reject an internally inconsistent argument that would weaken the statutory restrictions on the distribution right.”

Capitol is fighting for the old status quo and is willing to sacrifice anyone that gets in their way.  Their filing against Redigi is an attempt to rewrite and revise established law to suit their pre-digital interests.

Why? As Google states, they are fighting over a 41 billion marketplace. A marketplace slowing slipping out of their control.  Instead of embracing the future, they’re endeavoring to fight it.

They may also be concerned about the conversations swirling around regarding some deep pocket investments and/or the potential acquisition of Redigi by some major players.  If that happens, the music industry will need a new strategy in its attempt to avoid irrelevancy.

The Music Industry Needs a New Strategy

It’s as if the Capitol Records legal team is litigating for litigation sake.  Cranking up the last bit of fees in an attempt to milk the last bit of cash from the last bit of control Capitol has on the industry.

As Google warns: “The Court can and should deny the motion for preliminary injunction without reaching the complex and profound legal issues outlined above because any decision should be informed.”

One has to wonder if Capitol has been informed that we’ve entered the digital age. Because their decision to fight, not embrace and profit from the new, digital era will only expedite their departure from it.

(Cross-posted @ Seek Omega)

 In a recent post examining the future of retail, I used the jobs-to-be-done approach to break down the industry. And I’ve been using it more in other ways. It’s quite useful as a basis for innovation.

The premise of the jobs-to-be-done approach is that it provides a much better basis for innovation. The focus is on unmet needs of customers. Compare this to asking wide open, pie-in-the-sky types of questions.

I thought about this when I saw this question posted on Quora:

What currently nonexistent websites would you want to be created?

Wow. Talk about an open ended question. I don’t know about you, but that question doesn’t help me. I get brain freeze. I need a prompt to come up with something. Wide open questions like that are somewhat divorced from what people actually need. And will generate a lot of ideas off the mark, or none because it’s too divorced from what people are thinking about (although one guy has an idea there).

Now I’ll describe a different situation. For Spigit, I often find myself needing to come up with a new idea to show off the system functionality. If I used that question from Quora, I’d find myself straining to generate ideas that pass the smell test.

So instead, I’ve been using the jobs-to-be-done framework. I think of my own jobs-to-be-done. Here’s one I actually used to come up with an idea for a client demo:

When I’m traveling with my family on vacation, I want to keep the kids entertained happily the entire trip.

From this job-to-be-done, I came up with an idea for a long haul family SUV (or could be a minivan). It’d have storage for games, and a flat surface for playing them. A refrigeration unit on board to keep beverages and food fresh. Multimedia for videos, music and games. It would take some design genius to develop. But it’s a vehicle I’d actually take a good look at.

And that’s the point. The jobs-to-be-done approach is incredibly useful for generating ideas that are relevant and actually have potential. You’re plumbing the depths of what people really feel and what they actually want to accomplish. A powerful head start on innovating.

OK, let’s take this one out with a little Holiday Road.

(Cross-posted @ I'm Not Actually a Geek)

Exciting news today from Xero ahead of their user conference tomorrow that spans two important announcements. I’ll cover them individually.

$20M Raised from Existing Shareholders

Existing shareholders have reinvested to the aggregate tune of $20M. Sam Morgan, Sam Knowles, Craig Winkler and Peter Thiel’s fund Valar Ventures have all taken part in the round. This is interesting as I was picking a major investment from a US based fund. While admittedly Valar is US based, I am a little surprised at the modest quantum and the Australasian focus of this round. CEO Rod Drury has spent some time recently talking with VC funds in the US and I would have expected a much larger round from an assortment of US funds. I see two possibilities – first that this $20M is an interim step to fund growth in US prior to a major round for a mass US attack. Secondly there is the possibility that Xero has made a strategic decision to keep a modest pace to their US operations (growing, but not seeking meteoric growth), if this is the case the $20M will see them able to deliver this growth.

At the same time Xero is offering a shareholder purchase plan to existing Xero shareholders under the same terms as the new round – namely $2.75 per share (a slight discount on what they are trading at currently). This will appease any existing shareholders concerns around dilution and shareholder equality.

Acquisition of WorkFlowMax Completed

18 months ago Xero made a strategic investment in what was then project management vendor WorkFlowMax. This investment was in my assessment a reaction to the announcement of a tight partnership between Xero competitor Saasu and former Xero partner Acclipse (the deal came less than a month after the Saasu/Acclipse hookup was announced). Xero has long told the story of the modern practice which sees client side and practice side operations occurring over a common ledger. In order to delvier on this vision, Xero needed a strong practice management offering and with Acclipse having gone elsewhere, Xero had to run fast to find this. While WorkFlowMax wasn’t primarily about practice management per se, they have since built out sufficient functionality to deliver upon this single ledge vision.

Xero made the decision that since the single ledger is central to their strategy, full ownership of WorkFlowMax was critical and hence has acquired the company for $2M in cash and $4M in shares.

I’m surprised that Xero has made the full acquisition, my earlier view was that the strategic investment gave them enough control over WorkFlowMax to achieve their aims, obviously having a separate entity didn’t sit comfortably with the Xero board and the benefits of bringing it in house with total control were worth the cost of acquisition.

It’s fair to say that, in Australasia at least, accounting practices are in a state of flux, unwilling to pay for a practice management solution that is growing ever less functional (when compared with modern approaches). Xero aren’t alone in trying to capture this latent demand, Acclipse is also doing well with its iFirm product – it’ll be interesting to see how the two of them grow.

Disclosure – I am involved in an initiative, LiveMigrate, that aids end users and practices moving from varying accoutning solutions. Our initial product being launched at Xerocon is an MYOB to Xero conversion service.

(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog - SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)

I was at Integration World Europe 2012 today, organised by Pervasive at the Cumberland hotel in London.
A nice environment and a party of a hundred plus, today’s topics were Big Data, Data Integration, Cloud and Strategic Business Solutions.
Clear divisions were made on Cloud: IaaS, PaaS and SaaS, and public, private, community and hybrid

Shawn Rogers from Enterprise Management Associates showed an extensive amount of tips and tricks on how to make sure you get the Cloud solution you need, being honest about the small print. The 50-page report he squeezed into one presentation showed many insights, and I’ll certainly study it

In their journey to the Cloud, Pervasive swapped almost all their internal (largely .Net-based) applications by various external providers, mostly Cloud-based. Some of those really solved business and compliancy problems, others just saved a lot of money, and some where an alternative over a big upgrade or an entire product replacement.
Of course, integrating all that is not an issue for Pervasive. There is only one issue, and that is user management and single sign-on (read: synchronised password expiration) across all those different solutions. Great session by Steve Padgett

The biggest issue that lies at the root of all problems is master data. Hot almost 10 years ago already, it seemed to somehow have been conveniently ignored – at least in my world it didn’t reach the hype it promised to be.
Geoji George presented a rapid approach to one version of the truth: data quality leads the way there. Pervasive uses a good range of products here: Data Integrate to extract, custom industry-based libraries to cleanse a first round, MatchMerge to apply filtering and cleaning rules, and then Data Integrate again to load. MatchMerge has a good set of capabilities including fuzzy logic, and the combination of it all seems like a strong combination to improve data quality so it can end up in a database to serve MDM purposes. Pervasive doesn’t really mind which database that is, they support more than a few.
Pervasive doesn’t offer MDM as a product or solution themselves, but the hardest part of getting there from scratch is supported very well

Finally, Pervasive’s Mike Hoskins, CTO, showed Pervasive’s Big Data products and solutions for Extreme Computing. This will be released / revealed in the coming months, and unfortunately the future session was under NDA so I can’t tell you more – I wish I could

I couldn’t attend all sessions of course. Pervasive Data Integrator 10 I would have liked to see for sure. It’s offered on-premise, off-premise, whatever suits your needs. It just so happened all my sessions were presented by Pervasive people, yet I’d liked to have heard from customers and only half of the sessions were given by Pervasive people so I made a somewhat unlucky choice there – although I have no regrets.
I managed to finish attending the panel session which was okay but only got very interesting towards the end, but then had to run and catch my flight which I managed to do with only half an hour to spare – next time I’ll change my flight strategy for sure: I missed a very valuable part of the day

My takeaway from this day: the market for Integration is growing faster than ever, and the notion that it’s not about either-or is slowly getting through. If the last decades in IT have taught us anything, it’s that there is no next new thing that will take all our problems away.
Our problems persist, because we seek new business opportunities every day.
Our problems persist, because we find new business opportunities every day.
Our problems persist, because these new business opportunities pose different challenges to us every day.
Forget about building a house on rock versus sand: you will be building right over a vault line no matter where you do so – evolution will simply go on no matter what

Did you think things were settling down? Cloud will tear up your IT solution whether you like it or not, and Big Data, which isn’t a problem now, or in the next few years, certainly proposes a lot of business opportunities right now.
The last decade and then some has shown a convergence from batch-oriented processing and thus execution towards real-time and in some cases even event-driven operation. While the amount of information has increased within enterprises, the time to keep it has done so as well due to regulations and compliancy, among others.
To be able to crunch that, and metaphysical data which becomes available in abundance, you and your competitors all take weeks, which is fine, because you all do it, right? Now what if that were just days, or even minutes? What if you could decide, e.g. in retail, to sell an item at half-price for like an hour? Before the competition knows it, your run is done and you’ve made a quick buck, just because you could act much sooner on information available – because it was you who turned data into information.

Turn it around: what if you can analyze today’s data on the spot and thus spot trends that no one else can – yet? It’ll feel like you’re trading stock based on real-time information while the others have day-old information. Analysing quickly and swiftly gives you the ability to trend and look into the future – or at least gives you the audacity to do so

What matters, is being adaptive. Adopting new solutions and thus waiting for them to become available (for the whole market at the same time too) is just plain silly and only pleasing the typical vendors and system integrators. Has client-server solved anything? We’re back to dummy terminals now with Cloud. Has ERP or CRM solved anything? It gave us more customization than bespoke could ever dream of, while at the same time threatening us with a major update every other year.
Has ERP solved the integration problem? No, we now just have SAP- and Oracle silos that are still bespoke on a functional and technical level.
Integration? It’s still on the agenda, and if we focus on replacing SOAP by REST, and Connectors by API’s, it will still be on the agenda 10 years from now – in a useless way.
If we keep on talking about Cloud, that will also be on the agenda 10 years from now, unless we address SaaS, PaaS and IaaS, how we get to the various flavours via private, hybrid, community and public cloud and explore how we can keep all that together with on-premise or other off-premise where it needs to be.
When it comes together, we need to realise that the average dictionary is so big because it pleases everyone: in the next few years we’ll find out that it’s a truth that also applies to the enterprise, when we jot all our increasingly becoming disparate stuff together.
My vision for the future is clear: diversity is here to stay, because time-to-market and real-time decision making will dictate so. Out go the dinosaurs (although they’ll manage to squeeze out another few updates on an increasing discount), in come the packs of velociraptors. That means slowly converge from on-premise to off-premise where that will ROI, and do something else or stick to proven solutions where it doesn’t

What I especially like about Pervasive is the fact that they’re hype-free. They tell it like it is, and show that being sincere and open can lead to great success. They know what they talk about, and can relate that message to any audience. Their great promise is DataRush, which you should be watching closely. I know I will.

(Cross-posted @ Business or Pleasure? - why not both)

A lot has been said and discussed about RIM’s downfall: indecisive leadership, inability to innovate at fast pace, and no clear path to recovery. I don’t disagree at all with the analysis and the interpretation of the situation, but I do disagree with the conclusion that many people are drawing and vehemently disagree with their advice to RIM to keep trying to regain the smartphone market share. That train has left the station and RIM doesn’t have a chance to catch up, even if they do everything that they could.

But RIM may have stumbled upon something that they probably least expected. It’s the BlackBerry Messaging, popularly known as BBM. We got to see the power of BBM during the London riots. During my recent trip to India, I firsthand witnessed how much of people’s lives depend on BBM. These people were sad, upset, and depressed due to a RIM infrastructure outage. This is a phenomenal success. The recipe behind this success is quite simple: provide free messaging that looks likes SMS that supports groups in a network. RIM has significantly leveraged network effects; BBM got better as more and more people used it. The sale of BlackBerry in India has gone viral. The consumers buy Blackberries since their friends have it so that they can chat with them for free and perhaps do their emails. These consumers don’t use any apps at all! Their needs are quite simple. These phones are also priced well – the median price is somewhat around $200 for an unlocked phone. The Indian middle class and upper middle class have no issues shelling out this money to buy a BlackBerry. I talked to quite a few people and they are moving away from Android and iPhone to BlackBerry. Yes, that’s right. If RIM can manage to introduce lower end versions of BlackBerry this will further fuel the growth.

May be, just may be, there’s a category between smart and non-smart phones. For a large number of people in emerging economies making a phone call and staying in touch with their friends and family via text messages and email, and not paying too much for doing that are the driving reasons to purchase a right kind of a phone.

Let’s briefly look at the history of RIM. It was the device of choice for email and calendering and perhaps still is for a lot of people. RIM myopically focused on going after the enterprise customers while iPhone and Android pulled the rug underneath them. RIM initially ignored and later underestimated the disruptive nature of this innovation. What started out as a consumer market, iPhone and Android easily crossed the chasm and entered into an enterprise and started replacing BlackBerry. We all know this story. But, something happened during this era of RIM: they ended up building a massively scalable and reliable enterprise class messaging infrastructure. This is an amazing feat of technical excellence. Building BlackBerry Messaging was a logical extension of leveraging this infrastructure. What if RIM uses this as a strength and not worry about competing in the smart OS area.

It’s time to pivot.

Build a robust phone that is primarily driven off by BlackBerry Messaging and double down in emerging economies. Change the rules of the game and beat Nokia at its own strategy. Even better, spin off BlackBerry into two separate businesses: one that exclusively focuses on this strength and the other that embraces innovation by OEMing either Android or Windows or both and defend the handset as well as the services market share. I don’t believe BlackBerry is cut out to innovate on a new smart phone OS quick enough to beat iOS or Android or an emerging contender, Windows phone. That would mean playing by your competitors’ rules. If you learn one thing from Apple, it would be not to do this.

I don’t need to tell you how many cellphones the Indians own and how many of those can buy a BlackBerry. This may not be an intended move, but this social effects driven business in emerging economies such as India as well as in other developed countries could be the second act for BlackBerry. Can other vendors replicate this? May be. Not many companies in the world can do what BlackBerry does with emails and messaging in general. Group messaging on a mobile device is a killer app in itself to drive the sales of handsets. Also, this works across the carriers and the geographies, essentially allowing RIM not to be threatened by a provider. SMS GupShup in India has been an extremely popular group messaging service. It’s a validation that there is significant untapped potential for RIM.

Photo courtesy: NoHoDamon

Related articles

• RIM’s ‘dramatically different’ recycled marketing campaign (business.financialpost.com)
• BlackBerry squeezed out of Enterprise say stats (slashgear.com)
• Inside BlackBerry: Our BBM Emoticon Wall (blogs.blackberry.com)
• Meet RIM’s team of ‘Be Bold’ BlackBerry super heroes (business.financialpost.com)

(Cross-posted @ cloud computing)

There’s a perception that cloud computing has become a “mature” technology, a perception shared by few but anticipated by most everyone else with the exception of those trying to preserve their self-interests. I don’t blame them – each person inherently protects self-interests.

They’re wrong though. Cloud is not mature. It is evolving.  The paradox is simple — if something begins to appear as an evolution people bucket it as slow moving and look for faster moving “shinier” objects. It’s almost like discounting the earth for the sake of studying meteorites.

But there is some truth – while cloud has gained acceptance despite some murky areas around the definitions, the path for competitive  innovation has moved to other areas, particularly around mobile and social. This is true even in the traditionally slower adopting public sector, independent of geography.

Any time new technologies command intelligent and perhaps occasionally combative discourse, one realizes not that a shift is happening, but it has already happened. No matter how fast real-time networks are, there has to be some fomenting underlying substrate of a trend in order for the intelligent discourse to happen. In chemistry, a catalyst by itself for example does nothing without the agent and reagent. In physics, kinetic or potential energy requires some kind of mass.

With technology, the quantum shift that has already been happening is cloud. However, the shift that many are already moving past is now situated deep in the hands of technologists, who are carefully and quickly articulating their needs to move to the cloud. That is why today, one question I am asked less frequently than in previous years is how cloud computing impacts the public sector. The question also now spans into areas that impact the government, specifically the economic impetus behind private sector adoption and efficiencies. In other words – two years ago, the question was what is cloud? And now it is how fast is it permeating the public sector and what kind of efficiencies can we expect?

Now before I am labeled as someone who says bureaucracy kills innovation, I want to be totally clear. It does. But that’s not the issue with the public sector – it is simply that the public sector is not a “sector” at all. It is hundreds of self-interested parties forced to work together in each nation. In other words – it’s just like any corporation but potentially on a larger scale.

Yesterday– January 30th — Neelie Kroes – who was the head of the European Commission for Competition and now is the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda spoke at the World Economic Forum on cloud computing. Her thoughts are here:

Building a European Cloud Partnership by NeelieKroesEU

In the United States, much has changed in the public sector, the vast majority of cabinet level agencies use the public cloud. They also probably use MS-DOS and Lotus 1-2-3. But the innovation path is something that is now being addressed.

The US government, however, is highly scrutinized, particularly in election years. I wanted to get a pulse on the European market, and while I was there last week, I had the opportunity to talk to David Bradshaw, program director for IDC, a major analyst firm and one well known for analyzing trends, market drivers, and market share. He presented last week to the European Commission – some of the specifics are in this very specific and articulate video:

The EC-ommissioned research is monumental and focused on cloud computing adoption. The European Commission’s main role is to improve the regulatory environment in the European Union. The commission references cutting through red tape, making better laws for consumers and businesses, and re-examining existing provisions to foster a better business environment. In other words, they are looking at this very seriously.

The EC has four goals:

1. systematically assesses new initiatives for their potential economic, social and environmental impact
2. consults stakeholders and interested parties on all major initiatives
3. works to simplify the existing legislation
4. measures and reduces administrative costs of regulation.

It therefore is studying the impact of cloud computing specifically to do those things. It is early in the process but the EC hired IDC to analyze the state of the industry and measure cloud adoption. What was surprising to David Bradshaw, who is leading the study, which is not published at this time, is not the growth in cloud computing in the public sector, but the major increase in the growth and how much adoption of cloud in the public sector there is.

The United States, meanwhile, has its own studies. When the White House in 2009 announced its cloud computing policy spearheaded by the first US government CIO Vivek Kundra (now the head of emerging markets at Salesforce.com), there was a focus on cost reduction of infrastructure. At the time, Kundra said that the government had an IT budget of $76 Billion of which $19 Billion was spent on infrastructure alone. That’s a whopping 25 percent of the budget just to keep the lights on. There was also a need to increase the efficiency and speed of deployment of programs, such as those at the Department of Energy and Federal forms for student aid. The announcement was covered in this CNET post.

Factoids – The Harper’s Style Index of Government IT Total US Government IT Budget $76 Billion Amount Spent on Infrastructure $19 Billion % Spent on Infrastructure 25% Year Government Cloud Initiative Started 2009 USA.gov site cost expectation $2.5 Million USA.gov site time to first benefit 6 Months USA.gov site cost w/Cloud $800,000 USA.gov site time to first benefit 1 Day Number of Federal sites eyed for cloud implementation 79 # of Federal IT services migrated to cloud in 2011 40 IDC initial estimate of government public cloud market size in 2014 $56B Top issue cited in public and private sector Business agility Where   Satisfaction with cloud services 94 percent % of UK companies using cloud services 48 percent Lead decision maker in UK on moving to the cloud IT (65 %) Average # of EC cloud-based applications in use 5 (with business applications leading forefront) Data IDC data will be published 2012 (est. 2Q)

Suffice it say that some things don’t move that quickly in the government and there are policies to work through. No one is naïve to think that any technology provides a panacea for all things that have gone wrong in the past, including spaghetti code, case tools, client/server, and the like. There is no nirvana. However, there are major trends. Public cloud solutions are creating efficiencies, helping to make users more agile, and therefore competitive, and it is has been and is increasing in adoption in the private and the public sector.

I anxiously await The Bradshaw report – otherwise known as the European Commission on Cloud Computing Adoption. It’s a quantum shift in technology, and when implemented strategically, provides a foundation for competitive benefit across the board.

(Cross-posted @ The Cloud)

LotusSphere is an odd name for an event about non-Lotus software. That was just one of the themes from IBM’s (presumably last) LotuSphere 2012, that it is killing  the Lotus brand. Not that the show is dying – it’s a huge show. IBM has slowly been distancing itself from the name/brand Lotus – and replacing it mostly with IBM: IBM Notes, IBM Symphony, IBM Web Content Manager, Domino?, etc.

Moving away from Lotus intrigues me. Officially, the message is ‘out with the old.’ That the brand is associated with legacy. Really? How did “Lotus” get dated when “IBM” didn’t? IBM is associated with mainframes – Notes is  associated with Groupware. Which is more social and modern? I never understood why the “Notes” server  - which had a great brand – became the Domino server. I understand products have life cycles – but brand cycles should last much longer, and I think Lotus had some value.

The strangest part is IBM really needs a brand to wrap around its family of social products. There are a heck of a lot of products in its social strategy – some new products, but mostly renamed products and services.

IBM Connections is the anchor product, but don’t commit that to memory because it is going to change to Connections Next. It’s where you are supposed to go for your ‘river of news,’ email, calendar, collaboration, and other communications. That sounds simple enough, but it isn’t as it requires all those communication components to be be compatible with Connections. I think IBM wants you to use Lotus/Domino for email and calendar, but they stated 60% of Connections users use Exchange. LotusLive, which is changing to SmartCloud for Social Business, includes email and calendar (I think).

Here is the list of key products to IBM’s (brandless) social strategy:

• Lotus Connections/IBM Connections/Connections Next
• Notes/Domino
• Notes and Notes Social Edition
• Sametime
• LotusLive Meeting
• IBM Docs formerly known as LotusLive Symphony
• Symphony
• Some third party for voice – preferrably integrated with Sametime.
• LotusLive Cloud relabeled as SmartCloud for Social Business

Within most of the products and services are numerous options and SDKs. They are even bringing to the social arena a fairly analytical view that includes (Cognos) analytics. IBM paraded numerous customers on the LotusSphere stage repeatedly endorsing the virtues of IBM’s social vision. IBM’s own internal social transformation is impressive with about 10% of its payroll now blogging.

For documents, it used to be Symphony, or Symphony Live (hosted), but now it is IBM Docs which is a brand new version 1 product optimized for collaboration.  It was made clear IBM will embrace/tolerate Exchange and Office customers, but would prefer to assist in assisting customers reduce their annual payments to Redmond. In all this shuffle, it seems Sametime got demoted – so much that IBM might be giving Sametime the Lotus treatment – and backing away from it.

IBM has this broad social vision – and it is impressive. But the menu of ingredients is complex and contains several non industry leading components. The current buzz in UC is around collaboration and mobility. For collaboration, in addition to the social appraoch, IBM Docs is new (not a name change). If you want to embrace IBM’s vision for mobility – stock up and save on these products (as outlined by Michael Finneran)

• Sametime Mobile Client
• Lotus Notes Traveler
• Tivoli End Point Manager
• Lotus Mobile Connect
• WebSphere Mobile Portal Accelerator
• WebSphere Mobile Portal Experience

IBM wants everyone to know there’s gold in them thar connections, but it isn’t yet clear if the gold is adopting a social enterprise or selling the tools to one.

IBM is also selling a vision that includes the cloud. Numerous aspects of its social strategy are available as a hosted option. But that’s second to social. The social enterprise is certainly cutting edge vision, but is it real?  IBM isn’t alone in thinking so – Google, VMware (SocialCast), Salesforce.com, and Yammer all agree. So does Facebook and Twitter for that matter. You have to admit, when you look at that list – a list of innovative, anti-establishment companies – IBM seems a bit out of place.

Isn’t IBM still largely associated with big iron mainframes and related services? Aren’t those mainframes associated with inflexible IT departments of yesteryear?  Obviously the company is active in various aspects of  desktop computing, but primarily at large organizations. Isn’t the new paradigms of social and cloud computing about flexibility and consumerization? Will this sea change come from the Fotune 500 or innovative upstarts, or both? Isn’t IBM selling to IT when we hear repeatedly that IT buying decisions are decentralizing into LoB units?

These questions reflect that IBM has more heavy lifting ahead. Though don’t underestimate IBM – this is a very large and profitable company that has lived through bigger transitions.

Related:

LotuSocialSphere (UCStrategies podcast)

IBM Lotusphere 2012 – Socializing ‘Social Business’ (UCStrategies)

Lotusphere: IBM Puts Meat on the Bones of Its Social Strategy (NoJitter)

My interview with IBM CTO Charlie Hill weeks before LotuSphere  (NoJitter)

IBM’s Social Agenda (CloudAve)

Lotusphere (2011) (TalkingPointz)

(Cross-posted @ TalkingPointz)

With the upcoming IPO of Facebook this week, I got a little worried. I told a few people “Mark my words, this IPO is going to blow the Social Media bubble once and for all” and even “Wouldn’t be surprised if FB’s IPO is going to start the final leg of this crisis and finish everything off”.
A bit gloomy, I admit. But I really need to get something off my chest here: you could put a value on people, but not in this context, and certainly not at a price like this

Amounts have been predicted as low (yes, “low”) as $ 10 billion, and as high as $ 100 billion for Facebook’s IPO. At their claimed amount of 800 million users, who miraculously seem to be logging on every second day at the least, that would mean at least $ 12.5 per user, at maximum $ 125.
A maximum amount of one hundred and twenty five dollars per Facebook user, dead or alive – would you offer such a ridiculous amount of money if it were your own? Of course not

The thing is, I’m afraid this IPO just has to succeed. We’ve been fooling and fudging around in social media for so long, suggestimating and guesstimating profits and ROI (look up ‘evangalyst’ on my blog) and now the time has finally come: monetisation is here!
If you aren’t going to monetise on Facebook’s IPO, hell, when and on what are you going to monetise? Never, on nothing, if you don’t do it here. This is the biggest and baddest thing that has happened to Scoial Media, and it’s here and now: this simply has got to be the most humongeous success in the last few years. Golden parachuting our way out of this crisis – who doesn’t want to do so?

So, you see, if you’re not in on this, you’re a sucker and a failure. VC’s will finally have a way to blow their funds again, millionaires who forgot to buy gold and oil can now make a decent wager, in short: this IPO is going to open high and reach beyond the skies, beyond the heavens, and maybe even tickle Gawd’s balls – that’s how high it’s going to get

Did you see Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy? Somewhat like the final scenes is what I imagine when I think of FB’s IPO. People will buy, buy, and buy, and somewhere along that buying frenzy, people will start to sell, and make a huge profit, conjuring that out of thin air. Instantly making fortunes. They eyes of the world will be directed at FB’s IPO, and this economy isn’t luxurious and laid-back enough to deserve or undertake an IPO like that. Hundreds of millions of people will be watching it, and as soon as something seems to be very wrong, people will go mad, panic, and dump FB like crazy

IPO a Social Network? What were you thinking?

(Cross-posted @ Business or Pleasure? - why not both)

It was only a few months that salesforce acquired Assistly (more here) but already we see the product relaunching under its new corporate overlords. Rebranded desk.com, the offering has been rebuilt from the ground up including an all new UI, a new HTML5 mobile app and a range of new APIs.

Given salesforce CEO Marc Benioff passion for all things social, it is unsurprising that desk.com has Twitter and Facebook integration out of the box and is mobile enabled via HTML5.

It would be nice if desk.com had its own landing page and didn’t just rediect to Assistly.com but such are the joys of blogging in real time!

MyPOV

This is a big move down the foodchain for salesforce. The salesforce core CRM product is an enterprise tool with a corresponding sales cycle – with desk.com salesforce is aiming for the sort of viral uptake they’ve achieved with Chatter. There is only a requirement of four fields before a company can register and get its own helpdesk up and running.

In a very interesting move salesforce is offering standards monthly pricing ($49/user) but also a casual agent price of $1/hour. It’s a great idea and really delivers on the “cloud brings agility” argument. It means that organizations with very spikey help desk requirements can have overflow agents on an ultra flexible basis.

Desk.com signals salesforce moving strongly down the food chain – the tool is very applicable to SMBs and I’m expecting to see significant uptake among that group. I’ll also expect to see a similar kind of lightweight offering from the Rypple acquisition coming out in the next few months.

(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog - SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)

I’ve written my fair share of posts on Klout. 1.5 years ago I started off with a mild post called “Why I have doubt about @Klout”

At the beginning of that I stated

First of all, I highly appreciate the service

- and I ended with

11 extra Klout points in 12 days on the one hand comforts me, and on the other makes me think about the stability and value of it all…

Since then, I’ve become increasingly weary of the product, especially because of the consistently incosnsistent quality of the product, its lack of service, and its continuous drumming on the marketing machine nonetheless – no wonder 2.5 million people instantly killed their Klout profile as soon as they finally got the chance to do so

Today, I present a way for Klout to actually create some goodwill on Twitter

If you are on Twitter and have been for a while, you will have noticed the increased amount of spam. Search for “amazon” on Twitter search and you’ll find 25-30 tweets per second spawned by bots to redirect you to Amazon.com. Just tweets, that’s all.
Apart from that, spam bots send tweets to you (to get your attention) and bring similar content to your attention

Foxy is a fine example. On Twitter since November 14th 2011, this bot has produced (at this very moment) 34,261 tweet. It follows 8, one of which being Klout, and has 263 followers, and doesn’t appear on any list. Yet, Klout values it with a score of 36, accrediting it the usual BS achievements.
Go to Klout influencers tab in this particular case, and you’ll see that

foxy hasn’t been influenced by anyone recently.

Well, Klout got that right…

I’m not trying to prove that bots can achieve great Klout scores. That’s been proven already, beyond a doubt. I’m stating that bots can be detected in an early stage by Klout, who is after all catching up on Twitter stream at best.
Taking foxy again, here are the bot’s stats:

75 days on Twitter, 457 tweets a day (i.e. 19 per hour), relatively no followers at all, and not following anyone, no lists, no favourites: that’s clearly a sign of “the odd one out”.
This is default behaviour of bots: very few followers, very few people they follow, yet many, many, many tweets. What have I seen, in the last 3 months?

Bots that have almost no followers, don’t follow anyone, yet send out a few messages every hour, sometimes even every minute, sometimes every second. Whenever they send me a message, they have 0 followers, follow 0 people, have 0 lists, and 0 favourites, and have usually sent less than 10 tweets. Next to that?
They have no Klout score

And that’s where Klout could – and should, IMO – enter the arena. It is simple, really. Here’s my proposition:

Twitter and Klout should cooperate on spam detection and blocking. The possibilities are endless, and the algorithms could end up so complex that they can only be maintained bu a regulated crowdforce, but that is worrying about the future. Today, the patterns are simple:

1. If a user without a Klout score gets blocked for spam at least once, there’s a moratorium of 24 hours on Klout before they can profile it / him / her
2. If a user gets blocked three times within a Klout moratorium, the account is suspended on both sides: Twitter notifies Klout
3. Klout must enable marking an account for spam as well: only registered users can apply. Klout is the best place to establish the trust level required, and will probably enable this feature for profiles with a given score and up
4. Twitter will receive the “mark for spam” reports from Klout and immediately suspend the account at hand. The eventual quantity and quality of complaint(s) following will determine the degree in which they (dis)qualify the initial report, and its reporter’s credibility – for current and future references
5. Bonus as well as malus points will be settled on both sides. Too many malus points will lead to a life-ban, too many bonus points will lead to scrutiny by a wider committee for every case at hand

This is a proposition. I would very much like your reaction(s) – I get increasingly more Twitter spam every day, and I would just love to do without it. How about you?

(Cross-posted @ Business or Pleasure? - why not both)

Not *that* cat. Image by Mastrobiggo via Flickr

A mini firestorm broke out recently when 37Signals posted about their 2011 growth statistics. As part of the post, 37Signals told the world that the 100 millionth file to be uploaded to their software was the picture of a cat. Naturally those who subscribe to conspiracy theories got all fired up and started to express massive concern about 37Signals being able to access customer files.

In a follow-up post, 37Signals advised that they only knew the 100 millionth file was a picture of a cat because the file name was cat.jpg, they also apologized profusely saying that;

Because the natural train of thought from there goes: Hey, if they saw the file name cat.jpg and shared it with the world, what’s to prevent them from sharing other data? Actual sensitive data, like Downsizing-Plans-2012.pdf? Hell, what if they’re actually looking at my secret new logo and leak it to the press?

That’s a completely legitimate train of thought to ride and it was our mistake to get it on track. So let’s start with first things first: We’re sorry. We made a mistake. We should have thought it through and remembered that storing your data with someone else in the cloud hinges on a fragile layer of trust. We poked that trust in the eye and it was wrong. We shouldn’t have checked the log files to see the name of the 100 millionth file.

The issue is a massive one for the industry and in a back-channel discussions a number of people made comments regarding how much of a risk to the cloud industry service provider access to data is. One person went on to say that this perception is poison to sales growth in the industry.

That conversation got me thinking – I’m involved in a bunch of different initiative which have a degree of service provider access to customer data. I’m also aware of a number of vendors who, despite protesting that their employees cannot access customer data, have a global override option that does in-fact give people within the vendor organization access to a customer file – yes this access is audited, but it’s still there – no one will admit to it publicly, but suffice it to say it happens.

I’m actually pretty relaxed about that fact, despite it sounding scary. I’m relaxed about it for a couple of reasons;

A Cloud vendor lives and dies by performance – As a Cloud vendor, all that matters is giving customers the service they expect and treating their data with unbelievable respect. Any vendor that breaches trust, loses data or allows something untoward to occur will soon go out of business. I’ve yet to see proof of a real event for a paid cloud product where data escaped to competitors or the outside world

It sure beats a USB key left on the train – Face it, businesses, and especially those on the small end of the scale, have absolutely hopeless data security procedures. I’ve seen full unencrypted spreadsheets of the most incredibly sensitive nature stored on USB keys and inadvertently left places or downloaded to foreign laptops. Put it this way – faced with a choice between my data being burned to CD and passed around amongst high society on the London underground, or the potential that a handful of highly professional technicians within a vendor have access to my data, I sure know which choice I’d make.

Last word has to go to someone involved in the data integration industry – an industry where having access to raw data is table stakes. The reality for integrators is that they’re paid precisely TO look at customers data – so that they can ensure a speedy and effective integration. As this person commented;

Even at the bank some rogue employee can check your bank statement but we still keep our money in there. Even at the hospital some random nurse could access your file and see details you consider very private. I don’t think it’s possible or commercially viable in our world to write a product to the point where you can guarantee that *nobody* can read the data (devs, sysops, customer support, db admins) and I don’t think you can prove/convince the customers about that either.

Yes, trust is important and yes, customers should ensure the professionalism of those with whom they place their trust. But knee jerk reactions just because somebody working within a software vendors can see your data are misplaced and misguided.

(Cross-posted @ The Diversity Blog - SaaS, Cloud & Business Strategy)

Picture Credit: Gluster.org

In October of 2011, Red Hat (previous CloudAve coverage) announced the acquisition of Gluster, the company behind GlusterFS (previous CloudAve coverage) open source distributed storage solution. Even though Red Hat is a company based on open source philosophy, there were questions about what is in store for GlusterFS under Red Hat. Last week Red Hat held a webinar where they talked about their plans for GlusterFS and it is turning out to be similar to another Red Hat story, Fedora Project.

What is GlusterFS?

GlusterFS is an open source POSIX compliant software based storage solution that can be slapped on top of commoditized hardware pool that can scale on demand. It can easily scale out to petabytes and has high throughput comparable to other enterprise grade proprietary systems. It can be deployed either on premise or on public clouds. Since it is POSIX compliant, it can easily fit into an existing IT environment. GlusterFS has gained widespread global adoption with more than 300K downloads from 45 countries. To recap, some of the features of GlusterFS include

• Distributed Storage with global namespace
• High Availability
• Geo-Replication
• Self-Healing

etc..

GlusterFS was born due to the need for a low cost, highly scalable distributed file system that is also future proof. Since then, a company was formed around the platform and they could successfully monetize using an open core approach. Since it was open core and they required the copyrights to be assuaged to Gluster, there was very little participation from the open source community.

What is Red Hat’s plan for GlusterFS?

Red Hat is planning to make GlusterFS more towards open source than open core. The idea is to make GlusterFS bigger than Red Hat and be community driven. It will open up the collaboration in a big way with increased outside participation. Unlike before the acquisition where the commercial Gluster products had all the features of open source GlusterFS, there will be a shift under Redhat. Open Source version of GlusterFS will be the upstream to the commercial Red Hat storage. Much like RHEL to Fedora Project, Red Hat storage will have fewer features than GlusterFS but will be hardened, more secure and thoroughly tested. To put it bluntly, GlusterFS will first be tested on the free users before a robust and mature system is offered to paying customers. In a way, it is a win-win situation for the users of open source software. Depending on the license terms, we may even see a CentOS equivalent of the mature Red Hat Storage product.

Conclusion

It is a smart move from Red Hat to take the Fedora Model. It not only gives them a very good testing ground in the form of smaller organizations who will deploy the apps for free but it will also help them reach larger enterprises with a more mature and secure product. As large organizations enter the big data age, GlusterFS gives Red Hat a strong play as they take their end to end open source solution to the enterprises. With HDFS compatibility coming in GlusterFS 3.3, due later this year, Red Hat has a very good big data story to push. The 2-3 years will show if this strategy is going to help Red Hat in the big data age.

Related articles

• Introduction to Red Hat Storage [ GlusterFS ] – free webinar (goinggnu.wordpress.com)
• GlusterFS Scalable Storage Pools Now Officially Part of Red Hat (readwriteweb.com)
• Red Hat snatches storage Gluster file system for $136m (go.theregister.com)
• Red Hat Expands Storage Portfolio With Gluster Acquisition (informationweek.com)
• Red Hat moves into Big Data with Storage Software Appliance (zdnet.com)

Fred Wilson wrote two posts in 2010 that were very influential with the startup community.

The titles were:
Mobile First, Web Second
Mobile First, Web Second (continued)

If you’re in the minority that never read them – you should.

I know that they really impacted an entire cohort of startups because every company that was coming to pitch me businesses was (is) saying, “I’m a ‘mobile first’ company.”

Part of the beauty of blogging that in two sittings Fred was able to influence what was built over the next 12 months.

I loved the idea of “mobile first” but something always bothered me. Kind of like a law firm (or VC firm) with four partners but shortened to just two, people dropped off his second two words. People forgot that Fred also wrote “Web Second.”

So I’ve had to encourage an entire cohort of startups that I’ve met not to ignore the power of the web.

I’ve wanted to write a blog post called “Mobile Second” for a long time to make this point more forcefully. But it never quite sat right with me because that wasn’t my point. I’m not trying to argue that mobile should be an afterthought but rather that the web shouldn’t be either.

So I thought I’d try a different approach and reword Fred’s title and call it “Web Second, Mobile First.” Maybe people could shorten that to “Web Second” as a reminder to not give up on the power of the tethered web. The power of large screen real estate. The power of a keyboard.

Here’s my view:

I support a “mobile first” strategy for many companies

Fred’s post was right. The world is adopting smart phones and for many young people and many people in the developing world this will be one of their first computing devices.

Mobile has many attributes that are critical:

• The devices are individual, not shared
• They are location aware, which is important in personalizing the service offering
• They are more likely to be the “bottom end of the sales funnel” or in other words close to “point of purchase.” If I am looking at movies on my mobile phone there is a higher chance I’m out-and-about and ready to buy tickets. I have talked with people in the industry who tell me that mobile movie sites convert ticket sales much higher than desktop websites.
• They are limited in size. In some senses this might seem like a disadvantage. BUT … I’ve talked to a number of eCommerce sites that also report much higher conversion rates than standard web. The hypothesis is that the limited real estate forces less choice and therefore less distraction. This increases conversions of items shown to you.
• They are often one click away from buying. It’s not pleasant handing over 30% margin to Apple when you sell stuff through the App Store. But on the other hand if you have a product with a very high gross margin (software, virtual goods, etc.) then this is often more than made up by higher conversion rates versus asking somebody for a credit card.
• They occupy a lot of people’s leisure time. Therefore if your app is geared toward leisure activities (games, communications with friends, etc.) then mobile is awesome.

BUT (and this is a big but …)

I believe in integrated products. Thus I endorse Web Second.

I think many recent companies make the mistake of not investing enough in web products, if they invest anything at all. I mostly use Twitter on my mobile devices. But there are some things you just can’t do with mobile app. Most notably following many conversations at once the way can do with TweetDeck.

I love using Yelp’s mobile product. If I’m traveling in an area I don’t know well I love to set up a filter to say I want, “Chinese food, 3 stars within 2 miles” or if I’m walking it’s great to filter based on distance to where I’m at. But the killer feature for me is “open now.” I use this all the time. Where can I eat at 3pm nearby? Which restaurants in LA serve past 10.00pm (turns out not many on the Westside of LA, unfortunately).

You couldn’t have the same impact with your desktop Yelp.

BUT … try doing proper restaurant research on a mobile device. Try reading a bunch of reviews, checking 5 different restaurants to try and compare the differences. Try writing long reviews of a restaurant. That’s why Yelp is effective. They do both well.

So when I talk to the numerous photo sharing websites that I’ve met I always encourage them to think about all of the awesome Mobile Second features that they can build to supplement their product. Mobile is great for capturing images and quickly & easily sharing them. It’s great for quickly scrolling through photos. That’s why I love Instagram. It’s fun social entertainment that without words helps me feel connected to people that I’m close to or whom I want to follow.

But photo sharing sites ought to have web tools that allow me to create “collections” of photos – mine or otherwise. They ought to feel more like Pinterest (photo above) where discovery is awesome and integral to the service itself. That’s where the picture of the baby at the top of the post came from. My wife showed it to me.

Mobile First photo sites ought to integrate with other services that might let me send postcards , create photo albums to print, create blog entries or other similar features. I know that many third-party apps are stepping in to do much of this … but that’s the point. It’s a hole that isn’t filled by the initial applications.

I also love Batch. I think it’s a beautifully designed product that is also tremendously useful and focused. It allows me to upload a bulk set of photos that I can then more easily share. But I’d love it 100x if it had a complementary web product that better let me organize my photos into batches, view other people’s full collections and integrate more seamlessly into my social sites.

I’ve been saying this “Web Second” privately for long enough to not feel like I’m just getting on the bandwagon of Pinterest’s success (just ask any team at a company in which I’ve invested). But Pinterest’s success really proves the point I’ve been making.

My wife (and it seems every woman in America) is now addicted to Pinterest. It’s the new magazine. I think it’s replacing time spent on TMZ. It’s graphical, beautiful, simple to consume and has a wonderful layout. But that product is the perfect example of perfectly suited for the web given the real estate available. What if Instagram had a beautiful collage of images like Pinterest. How awesome would that be?

I would love to see FourSquare double down on web development and market it harder to its user base. It seems that FourSquare’s strategy has appropriately broadened from “check ins” to “discovery” of great places to eat or visit. This is a product feature that is easier to consume AND to create on the web.

For example, everybody should easily be able to follow Holger’s top sushi spots in San Francisco. That’s a list I plan to work through. (by the way, Holger, Kaygetsu should be number one, other than ambiance )

FourSquare in the future? Web Second, Mobile First. I hope so.

I’m digging LinkedIn’s new mobile product. I use it more than the web version (although it certainly could use some performance improvements). But I would never want to do my recruiting search campaign on mobile. I need more real estate for that.

I recognize there is an issue with resource scarcity

Come on, Mark. We only have 5 engineers, how can we do all that?

I know. I get it. But once you’ve launched your iOS product and finished your Android roll out, you need to do a strong push on an integrated web product before you double down on your next generation of iOS features. MVP on mobile then hit web.

Try to think about how leveraging the web will do the following:

• Create a differentiated product versus your mobile-only competitors. Use that as a source of competition.
• Have the ability to enable “content creation” and “content curation” in a way that makes all of the mobile consumption by other users a better experience. If you have a fashion-sharing product, wouldn’t viewing collections of outfits on mobile devices be a richer experience if there were more content and deeper content because your web product enabled your power users to more easily create it?
• Conversely allow your mobile products to shine on the web. Using the fashion-sharing example, imagine turning your shared fashion photos into beautiful magazine-like collages that can be scrolled through, Pinterest style.
• Build features that make using native-phone apps pointless. Case in point: Text messaging. If you use the native device your messages get purged eventually on most devices. You also lose them if you lose your actual phone. Having a web product abstracts the text message from the device and makes it a truly cloud service. When consumers realize this – who in their right mind would keep their text messages locked on their mobile device?

Web also allows you to become a funnel for converting more users of your mobile app. Obviously.

Tablets Third

I’ve starting thinking more about tablets. They are clearly an important part of our future computing fabric. They are somewhere between web & mobile. I think starting as an extension if your mobile strategy makes sense due to resource scarcity. But as your business grows I think it warrants consideration of how your table product will differ. It’s clearly a larger real estate which makes increased features possible. The larger real estate also makes content discovery different.

I don’t yet feel strongly enough about tablets to encourage entrepreneurs with whom I work to put too many resources against with few exceptions. Tablets are huge video consumption devices. So anybody building “second screen” TV apps or even “primary screen” TV apps needs to think seriously about their tablet strategy independent of their mobile strategy.

What’s Your View?

What do you guys think? Do you think Mobile First companies have taken the web seriously enough? What examples do you have of mobile products that would be greatly enhanced by a better web product?

Or do you think most mobile developers should concentrate their resources on being MEMO (Mobile Excellent but Mobile Only)?

I’ve got strong views on this topic. But I’ve love to hear yours to refine my thinking.

I know that “Mobile First” has become engrained in developers minds. And that’s a good thing.

I hope I can at least etch in a small number of developers minds the ending – or starting – of that sentence: Web Second.

(Cross-posted @ Both Sides of the Table)

StartupCamp5 will be taking place at ITExpo Feb 1-3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. I’ve attended the past four ITExpo’s and StartupCamps, but won’t be at this one. Feeling a bit wistful as so many people I know are heading that way. ITExpo is a good show – particularly strong for hosted service providers and VoIP heads. Lots of really technical people roaming the halls too.

But every year, the most excitement at ITExpo is around Startup Camp. Embrase puts on this event every year -and unlike all the other co-located events that take place there – StartupCamp doesn’t compete for the same audience. StartupCamp is the one event that runs in the early evening – after the exhibits and before dinner. As a result, it is one of the most packed events there – more so than the keynote presentations (although that be because of the free drinks).

StartupCamp runs in a launch-pad format – but it is telecom focused. It starts with a keynote presentation. Bob Metcalfe did an excellent keynote at StartupCamp4 in Austin, listen to it below. This year, the keynote is Sir Terry Matthews – cofounder of Mitel, and about 30 other telecom companies. After the keynote, each entrepreneur makes a short pitch and then gets torn to shreds by a panel of esteemed judges. This year, the judges include  PhoneTag founder Jamie Siminoff and Cbeyond co-founder Brooks Robinson. At the end, the audience also gets to pick a favorite. The presenting companies this year are:

• Townhall 140 was founded with the singular goal of harnessing technology to promote civic engagement. Launched out of the Harvard Innovation Lab in November 2011, the Townhall 140 virtual platform integrates video technology with real-time voting to bring constituents face-to-face with political influencers on the issues that matter.
• CallTrunk sees the spoken word as the ‘left-behind’ in the march of technology. While searchable records of written conversations are standard, talking — our most natural form of communicating albeit one that allows room for error, uncertainty and dispute — has fallen between the cracks. Based in London, CallTrunk’s mission is to make the spoken word accountable and verifiable, capturing spoken conversations by automatically recording phone calls, securely storing them on the web and openly integrating with leading productivity applications.
• Vernoa, based in Israel, believes that the Internet is no longer a luxury – it’s a necessity. And therefore should be compared to usage base utility services such as Electricity, Gas and Water. Yet unlike other utilities, the demand for capacity will always exceed availability, making it a must for service providers to manage user expectation and their networks. Vernoa will provide the only service to offer smart-meter like functionality for telecommunications carriers.
• LawLoop.com revolutionizes legal enterprise software by fully integrating the next generation of front and back-office software, in the cloud, through an online business-networking platform. LawLoop.com allows legal professionals to communicate and share documents seamlessly and securely and to more efficiently manage billable time-keeping, bank accounts, and client invoices.

StartupCamp is a fun event – electric really. I’ve written about it before here.

Larry Lisser, a senior partner at Embrase, brought some expertise to the Innovation Showcase. Larry keeps a close ear to the tele-startup community. The Innovation Showcase won’t be taking place until late March, but the deadline to apply is Feb 1.

 

Dr. Bob Metcalfe Keynote (Metcalfe is commonly spelled without an “e”, but if you invent Ethernet, you get one on the end of your name.)

Dr. Bob Metcalfe (Video)

 

(Cross-posted @ TalkingPointz)

Last week IBM hosted the annual Lotusphere event at Orlando. Last year, they made a strategic shift and started pushing heavily on the idea of Social Business and followed it up this year by not only brining last year’s announcements into fruition but also moved out of the Lotus brand to remove any legacy tag the name might bring in. Overall it was an impressive show put up by IBM and I will dig in a bit more on what I heard during the show.

First a brief look at the announcements

IBM is moving IBM LotusLive, business collaboration tools that enabled collaboration, into the IBM SmartCloud for Social Business brand. Lotus brand is deeply tied with the legacy applications and IBM hopes that the new brand not only gives them a chance to push hard in the cloud but also helps remove them from the legacy umbrella in the market. However, IBM is still continuing with their legacy products hosted inside the organizations but their next version will bring many of the features in social and mobile that are usually associated with cloud based applications. Most of the announcements made during the conference centered around IBM Connections, their social business platform. Announcements like activity streams, contextual information through OpenSocial, mobile support, integration of connections to notes, etc. brought IBM’s solutions to meet the needs of modern enterprises.

First, why I am excited

As I believe in the great compute convergence of cloud computing, mobile, social and big data, IBM’s strong social push during Lotusphere 2011 excited me. This year they showed the world that their social talk is not talk but they are very serious about it. Their IBM Connections Next platform, even though it will not be generally available till summer, has been architected in a way similar to message bus used in development platforms. While talking about Social as one of the core attributes for an enterprise cloud application, I argued that social features should be deeply integrated to all the dimensions of enterprise cloud applications (applies to all of enterprise software if social is going to be a factor) and it should extend to third party applications in the ecosystem. IBM connections is well architected to meet these needs of modern day enterprise software. Their use of activity streams and OpenSocial standards makes IBM connections truly modern. Even though Lotus Notes is predominantly used by IBM customers, I could see that IBM is taking necessary step to help them move away to modern day social tools. The integration of IBM Connections Next to Notes is the first step in this regard.

IBM also signaled that they see cloud based enterprise applications as the future and they are taking steps to push it hard in the coming years. I see their renaming of LotusLive to IBM SmartCloud for Social Business as a first step in this direction. Their integration of IBM Connections platforms to all the applications in their LotusLive Suite shows seriousness of their social business push. The way they have integrated social to LotusLive Symphony, cloud version of their Lotus Symphony product which I talked about last year, bodes well for their Social Business vision. Their seriousness about betting their future on cloud was evident from the fact that they were pushing their client Newly Wed Foods both on their website and during analyst briefings. I had a chance to talk to the person responsible for Social Business rollout and I will be doing a case study in the future based on what I understood during out conversation. But I have to tell you that their existing clients like Newly Wed Foods who want to take advantage of social and cloud, will help IBM in the cloud based future. Organizations like them want to take advantage of benefits offered by cloud, mobile and social technologies but want the assurance of a company like IBM before they roll out. I will dig more into this point when I do the case study sometime in the near future.

Another interesting aspect of IBM’s announcements is about their plans to tightly integrate analytics on top of social data. While talking about the next iteration of PaaS, I highlighted the importance of a powerful analytics engine in the future PaaS offerings. IBM is approaching PaaS from the applications side by integrating analytics engine tightly with the organization’s data (social and others). If they execute it right, this will be one powerful platform in IBM’s kitty which will keep them as an important player in the years to come.

But

After talking about why I am excited with the direction IBM is taking, it is time to point out to the hurdles they are facing. As in the case of companies having a baggage from the traditional IT world, IBM is finding it difficult to disrupt themselves even though they show their intent to do so. Their announcements related to Social and Cloud clearly indicate their eagerness to disrupt themselves and be relevant in the future enterprise market. However, the biggest obstacle to such an evolution is going to be their sales team. It is going to be difficult for IBM to convince their sales team that they should sell low margin cloud solutions instead of high margin legacy solutions. Even if they manage to convince their sales side about it, it is going to be difficult for IBM to convince the younger Youtube generation about their services. There are two reasons for this and, in fact, I was highlighting this in my discussions with someone from their Sales team.

• It will be difficult for IBM to change the perception with this generation. Most of them see IBM as a legacy vendor. Their continued push for legacy software (which they have to do till organizations are comfortable with the cloud) will make them attractive for the younger generation
• More importantly, the younger generation don’t want the IT to dictate them on their compute resource consumption. They want to try out the newer solutions first before they can accept IT’s mandate to use any new technologies. Also, in many organizations, IT realizes the value of newer technology (it happened with open source, it happened with social and it also happened with cloud computing) only after many in their organizations use as a part of day to day activities. The reason why modern applications from startups or even infrastructure solutions from Amazon Web Services are famous with this group is because of the ease of access. They could go to their website and try out the services for free or by swiping their credit card and paying much less than their daily coffee consumption. This ease of access helps these modern compute resources get adopted in enterprises against the marketing and sales push by traditional IT vendors. IBM gets a F grade on ease of access and hence they are finding it difficult to get the attention of Youtube generation. I highlighted this fact to the Sales person who asked me how they can get the AWS and Rackspace users for their cloud offering and, also, to the IBM executives whose attention I could grab.

So

Believe me. IBM has got the technology right. Their social platform is very well architected and they have powerful analytics platform which they can use to build futuristic platforms which developers will use to build self organizing intelligent applications. However, they have a big image problem with the Youtube generation. They need to fix that fast because these are the people who will become decision makers in the coming decade. I am cautiously optimistic about IBM because technology problem is the difficult part and they have managed to get it right. If the top management really focus their energy on fixing this image problem, IBM will stay highly relevant for decades to come (just like how they managed to stay afloat for one century).

Disclaimer: IBM took care of my travel and stay during the conference.

Related articles

• Lotus Clouds (ibmwhoknew.wordpress.com)
• LotusLive Becomes IBM SmartCloud For Social Business (informationweek.com)
• What might IBM learn from Apple (enterpriseirregulars.com)
• IBM Docs Beta Now Available (arnoldit.com)
• IBM Lotusphere 2012: The Old Lotus Has Wilted (Pretzel Logic)
• Lotusphere 2012 (Michael Fauscette Blog)

Thinly disguised contempt for the customer is an easy trap to fall into, after-all, without customers our jobs would be a lot easier. There is just one problem with this line of thinking…

The first time I heard the term Thinly Disguised Contempt for the Customer was from the book In Search of Excellence. The example provided was overhearing a flight attendant refering to boarding passengers as “Here comes the Animal.”  Thinly disguised contempt, in unchecked, grows – and can destroy any lingering notion of quality customer service.

Unfortunately, telecommunications and airlines are the stereotypical worst at passive aggressive thinly disguised contempt toward customers.

For telecom, the best example was the Ernestine character by Lily Tomlin- a regular onLaugh-in.  Earnestine was a nosey, condescending telephone operator. Famous quotes include:

• “Here at the Phone Company, we serve all kinds of people; from President’s and Kings to the scum of the earth…”
• “Next time you complain about your phone service, why don’t you try using two Dixie cups with a string. We don’t care. We don’t have to. (snort) We’re the Phone Company!”

Ernestine worked back in the days when Ma Bell was a monopoly, but the breakup of Ma-bell only spread the contemptuous practice to all kinds of telecom firms – carriers, equipment makers, cellular providers, web services, etc. The monopoly is gone, but telecom firms still hide their customer appreciation behind long term contracts and “your call is important to us”  recordings.

But all in all – I think airlines still take the cake. They don’t have long term customer contracts and are facing  an arguably tougher competitive environment.  I just flew UA – the first time in a while. Instead of long term contracts – the airlines use frequent flyer programs to determine the kings to the scum of the earth.

I used to play the frequently flyer game – but decided a few years ago that the “free” trips weren’t that valuable with their limited availability and restrictions. So I made a conscious decision to select flights that offered the best schedule and fare without artificial loyalty. While the decision was sound based on the free trip “rewards”  - the service impacts were underestimated.  UA has two types of passengers – valued and tolerated. Over the past few years, the real value of mileage programs has transitioned from free trips to better customer service.  ”Valued” customers get shorter lines, live answer attendants, better seats, etc. Unfortunately, those perks are what used to be standard, so those without “status” get a substandard experience.

I just flew Denver-Dallas round trip. The flight is only an hour and a half. I paid $650 to UA for an economy ticket featuring a middle seat. When I played the game at UA – I was a Mileage Plus Premier member. Today, I am grateful for the “free” soda.

Here are some examples of the thinly disguised contempt.

• I printed my boarding pass at home – and was once again offered lots of ways to pay even more  (better seat, shorter line, first class upgrade, and mileage accelerator). After rejecting all those, I got my ticket with my boarding group 4 (which is actually something like 7) – also known as dead last.
• At the gate, they have two boarding lines. The difference is a “red carpet” – actually a red mat. They have two lanes for boarding the plane and only valued customers can step on the red mat. Don’t even think about stepping on the red mat unless invited to do so. They didn’t actually use the two lanes at the same time – it just took space. Secondly, about 90% of the plane boarded via the red mat. In other words, boarding through the red mat isn’t special or a privilege, but ‘no matters’ are scum.
• While waiting to board – the gate staff kept repeating that the flight was full and there is no way anyone in group 3 or 4 will be able to bring on their “rollerboards.” They kept on “offering” to check the bag for free at the gate.  I don’t mind waiting, I prefer the open seating assignments on SWA, but here I have a seat assignment so no rush. However, the issue at hand isn’t the seat, it’s the overhead bin. The bins get full on UA flights. This doesn’t happen on SWA. My assumption is SWA passengers don’t pay extra to check bags so there is less carry-on. Basically, the no matters don’t get to bring carry-ons – that doesn’t seem fair. Did I mention I paid $650?
• After boarding, the stress about carry-on’s intensified. The flight attendants kept begging passengers to check their “rollerboards” at the jetway. This now requires swimming upstream to the front of the plane. Once we finally had everyone sitting, the flight attendants still could not close three bins, three bags were causing problems. Since the UA flight attendants won’t actually lift bags, and since the bags were stuffed no where near their owners, it took five minutes to identify the owners of each of the bags. This was necessary for proper routing of the bag, because UA wants to know exactly what city to avoid. Of course, they did not need to check all three as checking two freed-up some room, but that’s a different conversation. I am no more loyal to SWA than UA – but I have to say SWA doesn’t have any of these carry-on/baggage problems.
• Now I can sit back and enjoy the flight. Only one problem. I’m in a UA economy seat. UA actually has three classes on domestic flights – first, Economy Plus and Economy. The difference between Economy Plus and Economy is leg room. Economy Plus has too much (I felt this when I had Premier status) and Economy doesn’t have any. This Goldilocks situation makes the back of the plane unbearable. Working on a laptop is out of the question – it’s a good thing they don’t give out peanuts as there isn’t room for them either.

Of course, it is just money. I could buy first class tickets and many of these problems would go away. Or, I could fly more to reclaim my Premier status. But here is the irony- I don’t want to fly more on UA. Air travel is painful enough (special points to TSA), and UA doesn’t make it better. The experience is terrible and flying 25,000 miles a year in order to get more leg room (when available) seems like a bad trade. I can generally pay less, get leg room, and overhead bins on competitive airlines without feeling like an intruder.

The loyalty program creates a situation where – fares and schedules being equal – I will avoid UA (disloyalty program).

Is telecom better?

Not much. On the CPE side, most manufacturers don’t want to talk to their customers (call your dealer). If you are not loyal (current version on maintenance) then don’t expect a return a call. From a channel perspective, the most loyal customers tend to pay the highest prices – discounts are for new customers. From a hosted or services perspective it is all about self help – buy your POE and phones from a dot.com.

Things are improving – the complexities of a UC&C solutions do create a lucrative opportunity for vendors to strut their service. UC is complex and confusing allowing the dealers, vendors, and service providers an opportunity to distinguish themselves on service. The mobile space is more competitive than ever – Apple taught the industry a few lessons by not purposely debilitating phones, but unfortunately, not all of the carriers were paying attention.

I do feel a bit of loyalty to T-Mobile as they allow me to tether my Kindle and Laptop without a penalty. I know some people that are loyal to Sprint – but I’ve never heard anyone say they love Verizon or AT&T. That doesn’t stop them from sending in monthly checks. I say life is too short for that. If you are feeling nickel and dimed or otherwise disrespected by your vendors and/or carriers, move on!

 

Thank you for reading, I know you have a choice in your blog content and I appreciate you choosing this one.

(Cross-posted @ TalkingPointz)