A Meaningful Life

The Powerhouse Museum has posted over 400 Photo Plates on Flickr. You really have to take you hat of to them. It’s wonderful to make this so available to Australians. Hat tip to Sean Carmody.

This shot is quite sentimental for me. I grew up about 100 metres around the bend on the left from when I was two until four years old. I then moved to Perth until I was twelve before returning to live at Beauty Point (the right side on the other side of the water) until I was eighteen. After that I moved to Manly for a few years (bottom photo about 200 metres out of shot to the left).

This really gives me mixed emotions. Seeing the time difference between then and now gets me present to my short time on this earth, my mortality.

If I was in Jack Dorsey and Biz Stones I would be monetising their Twitter asset fast, damn fast. Sell it, open it up, whatever it takes. I think they aren’t far away from being standardised out of their current business model unless they can quickly fix their scale problems.

Driven by reliability issues on the Twitter platform, a plethora of conversation emerged this week. Bloggers and tech commentators are turning their conversation to workarounds. It’s as though the conversations and connections in Twitter have become bigger than Twitter itself. The conversation is alive and it wants to fix itself.

One example is Techcrunch’s coverage by Chris Saad of Dataportability.org. His workaround is micro bloggers using tools that are certified as compliant with a microblogging standard (posts of 140 characters and no titles). Users install complaint software on their own servers like you would blog software. He expects this to emerge from the opensource arena.

Personally I disagree, Twitter is successful because it’s easy. Easy to get started, easy to play, easy to have fun. I don’t want to install an app on a server to use a Twitter like product. I love the SaaS Twitter engine and the ecosystem of desktop and websites that have evolved around it.

It’s much like blogging where it’s just a small hassle managing a blog on a server. However, it’s still a hassle. I’d rather someone take care of that for me. My attitude to Chris’s self hosted microblogging application is the same - you’re taking my time away!

Twitter is most at risk from 3rd party application builders who have built desktop apps for Twitter. They are well positioned to build into emerging microblogging engines and thus becoming the microblogging feed readers. In much the same way RSS Readers cover many blog platforms. To do this standards are needed.

So there’s three pieces to the microblogging picture:

1. Platform
2. Reader
3. Standard

I expect one ‘rough’ standard across many platforms the way RSS has evolved. After all who seriously owns a 140 character field limit? How can you protect that?

Twitter the nuclear option
Stilgherrian points to a great read. I particularly loved this quote describing the potency of Twitter….”This newest of new things has only just started to rise up and flex its muscles. The street, ever watchful, will find new uses for it, uses that corporations, governments and institutions of every stripe will find incredibly distasteful, chaotic, and impossible to manage.”

Frasers Broadway
Grant Young points to this amazing (looking) bit of Green architecture. I have to agree with Grant that the various artists impressions always leave me a little skeptical. I’ll track the detail on their website with interest. Draping plants over balconies never seem to last long. Why? Because humans let them die. Let’s hope the building has systems for managing humans lack of plant care.

Microsoft Live Labs Photosynth
Photosynth is getting a run in CSI NY episode “Behold the Future”. CBS’s trailer is out but I don’t think the episode has aired yet. I first checked out the Photosynth technology mid last year when it was soft launched via the Microsoft labs blog. It’s worth a look through the tech preview on the Photosynth website - stuff of the future.

A couple of weeks back I wrote about User Designed User Interfaces. I talked about financial markets traders loving lots of info packed into the screen for screen real estate efficiency. Well I found a theme that meets my objectives but I’m not sure about my readers. However, I have a theory people are people, traders aren’t special so I have gone for lots of info in a tight space. I am guessing more readers will like this than and sparce whitespace design guru would advise me

Coincidently, we realeased Saasu R12 on Friday 2nd May and we have gone for slightly larger font but the Crtl +/- keyboard operation to change font-size is better handled for accessibility in this release.

Microsoft says it has a strategy to take on Google without Yahoo. See the Wall Street Journal story or the CNET story for details.

I don’t think this is over, it’s normal to put some flushing press out there to make the seller feel a little regretful and uncomfortable.

Google is moving fast, time is against Yahoo and Microsoft. Every day that passes saw further options for Microsoft to take as an alternative strategy and possibly a cheaper strategy.

The deal is never good if both parties don’t feel a little discomfort - Yahoo was wanting a mega win. The Yahoo board should have read the shareholders intent and acted on it.

The press highlights all the problems with the deal and the analysts carve it up leaving juicy excuses lying around for Microsoft to justify not paying a higher price.

When 37signals in Getting Real dished meetings it really smacked of what I call zero math opinion. I really enjoy reading their blog but on occasion I disagree with their opinion. I was reminded today when Seth Godin posted a funny cartoon on the topic of too many meetings.

Meetings can be good, very good. Meetings can be cheap options, investments with uncertain pay-offs and a premium price, maybe an hour of your time. You can treat your meetings like buying cheap call options. Many will expire worthless, but occasionally one will hit pay-off in the form of sales, capital raising, a change in strategic direction, new ideas, an acquisition or a new channel. Theoretically at least, an unlimited upside.

So the maths is all about the premium cost of these options, say an hour of your time, versus the pay-off probability.

You can practise a portfolio approach where you try and pick the eyes out of the market, pick the best meetings for you and your business but clearly recognise you stand to miss the big one every time you decline a meeting or think it’s better handled via emails and phone calls.

In my experience meetings I thought were valueless have ended up being the ones they have had huge pay-offs. One meeting I didn’t really want to go to at an investment bank I worked at ended up resulting in one of our best customers adding seven figure revenue to the bottom line over the subsequent year. Obviously this altered my thinking on meetings.

Humans are very bad predictors of outcomes. On a portfolio basis we are quite ok at predicting but in isolated circumstances and incidents such as a single meeting we are a bad predictor.

So spin the maths in your favour and have a few more meetings than the time efficiency champions would allow you.

I have started writing for The Calm Space online magazine on the topic of sustainability. My first article is The Sus in Sustainable. I get asked to write for tech, saas blogs but time restricts me. The environment however is a topic which can’t wait as it will impact us all much sooner than we think. It can’t wait for ’some day’ in the future when I have more time. Article teaser -

Society holds much suspicion toward sustainability. In the back of many minds out there I’m fairly certain that life may not be quite as balanced with nature as we would all like it to be… goto The Sus in Sustainable article

Leah Maclean one off our Saasu customers also writes for this online magazine. She wrote a great article about how it’s not easy being green in technology.

There’s plenty of frustration amongst social media commentators about the steadfast attitude of many enterprises towards the adoption of social tools. More specifically, accepting the philosophy of Enterprise 2.0.

Ross Dawson of Future Exploration Networks and Stephen Collins of AcidLabs amongst others have often commented in detail on this topic. They have pointed to some great successes and I also hear their frustrations. There is language, thinking and approaches around social tools that simply don’t fit into the corporate culture of old. Barriers need to be broken down to give people free open access to these tools, sometimes rules need to be put in place and even some situations call for access to be restricted during work hours. There isn’t a clear and general solution for all enterprises be they large or small.

I’m an advocate for open access for enterprise knowledge workers, as we do in Saasu. We’ve even built connections to social platforms from our online accounting web finance engine. We are building Enterprise 2.0 capabilities into our products and services. However I also hear the frustration of business owners and management teams who believe they are losing productivity due to Facebook and Myspace.

The main factor causing slow adoption by enterprises is productivity fear. Decades of workhorse enterprise culture has left management in fear of productivity declines from social tools. Just as SMS, Instant Messaging systems were perceived to be slowing productivity so are social networks at this early stage of their technology cycle.

Naturally they jump to no access for anyone. Well, they are totally justified to have this fear, but not to apply it to everyone unilaterally. If in managing the flow of information in tools like Facebook can only be served by blocking certain users and allowing others then that’s justified but far from ideal. Many roles in organisations may not be well served by these tools until either a self managing culture or a social communication workflow system is firmly in place that understands or controls acceptable versus unacceptable use.

I talked about restricting access to social tools some time ago in my post about Facebook in the workplace. I’ve witnessed first hand productivity costs in an enterprise environment. I still advocate restrictions and policy around access based on a role by role basis. Access to social networks should be no different to any other communications or knowledge tools used to generate productivity. Any approach to this which is not analytical and scientific in it’s assessment is simply decision making based on poor business intelligence.

Even in the Saasu business we are careful what each new system is that we adopt. It’s not about a free for all, an unequivocal license to explore for all employees. That’s nice, but an analogy springs to mind. If all the scientists choose to go out into the field because it’s fun then none of the lab work gets done.

Most importantly I’m committed to scientific rigor on the adoption of any tool in an enterprise. Anecdotal, emotional and social benefits are all important but what do the numbers also say about the social tool being employed. This is where enterprises should look at the usefulness in numbers and not just jump to conclusions. There is no substitute for at least some rough scientific checks being applied to any system, business or otherwise.

Many managers witness staff spending time working their personal Brand in Facebook. Plain and simple it often about entertainment, events and niche interest groups. So a manager in that situation adds that anecdotal evidence to their bag of reasons and moves on. That evidence is then pulled out of the bag when a decision is being made to block a tool or if thought leaders like Ross or Stephen happen to be giving advise and encouragement on adoption. The argument no doubt becomes tough in the face of this. My approach would be to:

1. Demonstrate why social tools are an opportunity and not a time waster in many circumstances.
2. Get them to adopt an Enterprise 2.0 framework with metrics or that connects to a system that has metrics.
3. Get the social flow managed via culture, tools and procedures.

The reality is that some jobs simply become less productive while others benefit. The job specs for a production line worker, retirement home salesperson or waste removal person probably don’t call for it. However, there is an argument that even people in those roles gain job satisfaction, get better communication with colleagues and possibly better access to management when using social platforms.

Knowledge workers should always be given access to platforms. I’ll leave it to Ross and Stephen to communicate this. Read their blogs, they are the experts.

One of Australia’s top IT Journo’s brad Howarth wrote Saasu up in his lastest Dynamic Business article on Automating Businesses. I’m a product person and often struggle trying to write how I feel about our product (I’m confident I’m not alone). Brad just seems to have the knack of communicating it without all the ‘tech’.

Many SaaS applications also feature in-built connections to other SaaS tools, quickly creating a web of interconnected applications that can automatically send data among themselves.

1. Telco’s online reach is smaller than they think. Sure Telco’s have large customer bases but the only time I have gone to my Telco’s website was when I upgraded my ISP plan. It’s anecdotal I admit. What’s your use of their websites like?
2. Telco’s have bad websites. When I did upgrade my plan, the website navigation experience was agonising. A good analogy is government versus corporate. Their web mail was one of the worst I’ve seen.
3. They are big but that doesn’t guarantee a win. When Telco’s spend to compete they serve up a high Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) number for their competitors to squeeze them against. Lean startups can squeeze margins tighter, and if they can hang on to triple digit growth rates then they can drop a big Telco Goliath with a very small stone.
4. Telco’s are good at being Utilities, full stop. This is appliance market versus utility market difference. Just because your toaster is an appliance on an electricity network doesn’t mean your electricity utility will be a good toaster maker. They are very different markets, very different sales approaches, very different products and require very different people to execute.
5. Lessons learn’t. Many Telco’s have already tried and failed. Telco’s, since 2000, have been desperately trying to replace falling fixed-line revenues. They just didn’t understand these web business, the appliances of the net. The revenue messiah didn’t come. Consumers were flocking to cool niche shops like iTunes not the big Telco department stores.
6. Telco’s had the wrong skill set. Telco’s are big ships. Changing the crew from sailors to steam engineers wasn’t and still isn’t quick or easy. Even worse, short web application lifecycles requires you to destroy your mother ship by building newer and better technology quickly. Telco’s extract long term value from long term fixed assets. Two years is frightening when you normally invest for twenty years in fixed assets.
7. Web business’s tend to invent. Telco’s tend to be slow followers while web startups who successfully commercialise have tended to come from the womb of inventiveness. University assignments (Google), for the fun of it (YouTube) or everyday business problems that need fixing (Salesforce.com). Telco’s tend not to think this way.