broadstuff

Been catching up this afternoon with what Eric Schmidt said at Actvate 2010 yesterday, its been reported in the Torygraph, Grauniad and El Reg (I am ignoring the twitterstream from now on - here's why). If you are interested in what will happen in the next 2 - 3 years then its worth catching up n as there are Googlefingers in so many pies, and the guy is no fool - maybe Evil, but no fool.

Schmidt said there were 3 big trends - the growth of mobile internet connectivity, the growth of cloud computing, and networking. To me those are two big trends - mobile and cloud - the other is an underlying architecture. I also think he is trying a 3 pot shuffle - to me, the three things that look like the 3 Big Trends in the Googleverse are Mobile, Cloud - and slipping past the Privacy/Trust issue in datamining. So, in reverse order:


Trusssst in Meeee

(From the Torygraph)

Schmidt says this enables them to deliver better-targeted ads - more lucrative for Google, more relevant and less annoying for you. However, it raises privacy issues, something for which Google has been criticised.

"I think the criticism is fine. I think criticism informs us, it makes us better. It doesn't bother me at all,” Schmidt says. However, he acknowledges the problem but says it’s a broader issue. "Those concerns are real - I'm not trying to move away from them. The fact of the matter is that if you're online all the time, computers are generating a lot of information about you. This is not a Google decision, this is a societal decision. In Britain, you all allow yourselves to be photographed on every street corner. Where are the riots?”

Google, Schmidt says, is kept in check by its customers and by the competition: “All of our testing indicates that the vast majority of people are perfectly happy with our policy. And this message is the message that nobody wants to hear so let me say it again: the reality is we make decisions based on what the average user tells us and we do check. And the reason that you should trust us is that if we were to violate that trust people would move immediately to someone else. We're very non-sticky so we have a very high interest in maintaining the trust of those users."

In other words trust the Wisdom Of The Crowds to know what is good for them. In that way you can fool most of the dumb b*star....er, People most of the time...... Sadly for Google, that does not apear to be the ay it is working - too many people who can't be fooled are taking too close an interest.


Mobile Internet

(From the Grauniad)

"Mobile is the hottest area of computer technology," Schmidt said. "The smartest developers now are writing apps for mobile before they write for Windows or Apple Mac desktop operating systems. Part of that is because these devices are hugely personal to us when we use them."

Asked what he thought of the future of newspapers, Schmidt said: "What does the newsreading experience look like many years from now? I think it's delivered to a digital device, which has text, obviously, but also colour, and video, and the ability to dig very deeply into what you are supplied with. At the moment we have readers, but it's not intelligent enough; newspapers often tell me what I already know. We'll have advertising products that are much more media-centric. The most important thing is that it will be more personalised."

They will beat Apple by suing the Microsoft Gambit

"We don't have a plan to beat Apple, that's not how we operate," Schmidt says. "We're trying to do something different than Apple and the good news is that Apple is making that very easy."

"The difference between the Apple model and the Google model is easy to understand - they're completely different. The Google model is completely open. You can basically take the software - it's free - you can modify whatever you want, you can add any kind of app, you can build any kind of business model on top of it and you can add any kind of hardware. The Apple model is the inverse."

Except that when Microsoft played Apple they had all the App developers, and a good hardware distribution network - two things Google/Android is struggling with - as El Reg notes:

Google CEO Eric Schmidt has convinced himself that the company killed its sold-direct-to-netizen Nexus One phone after less than six months because it was "so successful."

"The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did," Schmidt told The Telegraph, demonstrating just how far removed from reality his mind has become.

Microsoft never did direct sales. A lesson for Google there methinks. It is possible for them to win the "Microsoft" position in the mobile smart device market, but to do so - if Microsoft's lesson is anything to go buy - you have to have a large scale 3rd party distribution system (IBM, anyone?) and the lions share of the developers on your platform.



The Cloud

(From the ToryGraph)

This is about more than just selling people a new product, it’s about shaping a social change. Within three-to-five years, Schmidt says, we’ll be consuming almost all of our information online. We’ll do it, he adds, “on devices that are live not static. The characteristics of these devices are that they know who you are, they know where you are, they can play video and they carry memory."

To get a sense of the likely rate of change of the next three-to-five years, think back over the same period. Google has bought YouTube, launched Google Docs, taken leaps forward in mapping and expanded into mobile operating systems with Android and desktop operating systems with Chrome OS.

The Cloud is upon us! And yet, and yet...... every 10 years or so some company pops up with the (rather self serving) nostrum that The Cloud will rule. And all the Kings horses and all the Kings men spend PR money like water, but it dies down again as reality intrudes. Mr Schmidts says that:

"The internet is the most disruptive technology in history, even more than something like electricity, because it replaces scarcity with abundance, so that any business built on scarcity is completely upturned as it arrives there," Schmidt said. "You have to plan your corporate strategy around what the internet does."

Leaving aside whether or not the Internet is " the most disruptive technology in history", a lot of people think IP will be like electricity and other commodities, but consider the differences:

- There are no similar "economies of scale" for production infrastructure to justify massive centralised plants vs local production. This is seen in the (reluctant) admission by Cloudists that its benefit is not cost saving.

- The variabiity required in the end product is far higher (for now anyway), so the benefits of end product commoditisation are not as high and the complexity costs of its mass delivery are worse.

- Those who win from mass centralisation (Cloucd Co's) are not those who own the Transport infrastructure - objectives are not aligned. Witness the 'Net Neutrality bunfight.

- "There is no Plan B" if a Cloud based infrastructure goes down, at least in the forseeable future. Nobody with any form of risk will thus put all their eggs in its basket.

- There is not as much fungibility in the supply chain. Apple locks you in one way, Facebook another, etc etc. Imagine if your dishwasher would only work off one companies' electricity and your TV off anothers.

In other words, The Cloud ain't going to take over anytime soon. But then, Google knows that, which is why its not putting a lot of its resources into it - the main Googlegame is to try and wreck Microsoft's economics by giving it away for free. Which is, of course, why Microsoft has gone into Search with Bing.....

One University has ended its evaluation of Gmail as the official e-mail program for its 30,000 faculty and staff members— Information Week.

In a joint letter last week to employees, University of California-Davis CIO Peter Siegel, Academic Senate IT chair Niels Jensen, and Campus Council IT chair Joe Kiskis said the school decided to end its Gmail pilot, which could have led to campus-wide deployment, because faculty members doubted Google's ability to keep their correspondences private.

Many faculty "expressed concerns that our campus’s commitment to protecting the privacy of their communications is not demonstrated by Google and that the appropriate safeguards are neither in place at this time nor planned for in the near future,” the letter said.

Google officials, for their part, insisted that their privacy controls are adequate

We disagree - we believe that Google's "Free to Consumer" cloud model does not meet the standards that any enterprise larger than a SOHO (Small Office / Home Office) sort of operation would find acceptable (and even a SOHO has near free and more secure options)

One of the main reasons why a hedge fund will always beat the Small Man is that up till now they have had the big computers and Maths PhD's and you have not. This may change - Reuters:

Backed by private equity, or armed with bonuses earned at banks, traders have been encouraged by an 80 percent or greater fall in the cost of setting up lightning-fast systems over the past five years, trading software provider Portware said.

"The numbers of these firms has exploded," Richard Balarkas, chief executive of broker Instinet Europe, said at the Reuters Global Exchanges and Trading Summit last week.

"I hear venture capitalists are giving money to guys coming straight out of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and setting up desks," he said.

...................

Europe could see the biggest rise in high-frequency trading, being a less mature market. Ultra-fast trading accounts for 30-50 percent of equity market volumes, against 60-70 percent in the United States, the UK Financial Services Authority said.

I've always felt that a lot of what "the Cloud" is supposed to do so far - like knock off Microsoft Office and stick it on Google - is pretty small beer when you think of where most of people's wealth goes. And where the money counts, up till now, the Small Man gets screwed because they just don't have access to the heavy duty technology.

Most consumer fund managers underperform the market, and even if they overperform they have to do spectacularly well to cancel out the fund fees etc. (It has been statistically true since dotcom times that if you managed your own money by random selection you would, on average, out perform the average fund due to fee saving alone)

One of the big switched about a decade ago was the "tracker" fund, which used the automation of the last decade to allow you to buy into a fund that tracked the market anfd the fees were far lower. This is the "2.0" step. (3.0 is an AI that does what bankers do, but without $million bonuses - surely the economic case for that is worth a startup or two too!)

I've been interested in taking these sort of big iron resources and putting them "in the Cloud" as it were for quite a while. And as with VRM, which seeks to turn CRM around and put the buyer in control of their data, giving the average Joe access to trading supercomputers must be a Good Thing

This could all get very, very interesting in the next few years. Definitely a trend to watch

There have been many guides to business strategy that have (mis)used some sage or hero of the past (or future) - Attila the Hun, Shaka the Zulu, Caesar the Roman, Sun Tzu of China, Yoda the ..... - you name it. And today I thought that a group famous for their simple wisdom, that have not been given a chance to elucidate their strategy, were being called on. Yes, I saw the TechCrunch headline:

Apple's Secret Cloud Strategy And Why Lala Is Critical

At last! Someone is putting Teletubby wisdom into our wonderful web world, I thought, though I was a bit worried that Dipsy, Tinky Winky and Po were being ignored. But it turns out that its not the Teletubbies, no, there really is a thing called LaLa, and it is in fact critical to Apple's Secret Cloud strategy:

What is of value is the personal music storage service which was an often overlooked component of Lala’s business. As Apple did with the original iPods, Lala realized that any music solution must include music already possessed by the user. The Lala setup process provides software to store a personal music library online and then play it from any web browser alongside web songs they vend. This technology plus the engineering and management team is the true value of Lala to Apple.

Which is all very interesting, especially as its Secret - except that if they are going to store that music the user possesses online, or even point to it for re-use, it may be an issue if it is - ahem - not paid for. Now, the TechCrunch reader base, smart fellows that they are had already listed all the Things That May Go wrong, chief one of course is that its very likely to be deemed illegal.

But on to the real purpose of this post, which is to outline how to use Teletubby strategy for these sorts of situations, to wit to invent secret strategies for high buzz count companies for improbable services in nonexistent markets, based of course in The Cloud.

There are Five Core Assumptions of Teletubby Cloud Strategy Model:

1. The business climate portrayed shall always be sunny and pleasant save for occasional inclement moments, and a bit of snow at Christmas time. There are no dark clouds in Teletubby Strategy

2. All users are already fully wired and carry their own personal signal receiver and an iPad screen (Teletubby 2.0) in their tummies to receive whatever messages you send 'em, wherever they are

3. All users will continually, constantly and comprehensively collaborate in this closed world

4. There will always be an automated system to clean up the mess when things go wrong, freeing users to carry on playing with their stuff.

5. When times are getting tough, The Cloud will send a Calliope with rocking horses, and a man who tap dances with a cane down from The Clouds to amaze the users. .... interestingly, no other Cloud based social network system has thought of these applications yet.

And Lo, today we read about the failings of other players vis a vis Apple:

There ought to be some soul searching going on right now among Apple's competitors. For this is not the first time the company has picked up a discredited idea and created not just a successful product, but a whole new industry. There were MP3 players before the iPod. There were smartphones before the iPhone. And there were plenty of tablet computers before the iPad, even if they did run Windows.

It is clearly Time for a Teletubby Cloud Strategy - Po, TinkyWinky and Dipsy are still free..........

Today we read with some amusement that Google is stating that the desktop is dead (again):

Google believes that in three or so years desktops will give way to mobile as the primary screen from which most people will consume information and entertainment. That’s according to Google Europe boss John Herlihy who said that smart phones enhance Google’s mission to make information universal.

Speaking at the Digital Landscapes conference at UCD, Herlihy said that the cloud-computing opportunity will make sure that every mobile device will be capable of doing rapid-scale applications.

“In three years time, desktops will be irrelevant. In Japan, most research is done today on smart phones, not PCs,” Herlihy told a baffled audience, echoing comments by Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the recent GSM Association Mobile World Congress 2010 that everything the company will do going forward will be via a mobile lens, centring on the cloud, computing and connectivity.

This of course was predictable, as the above chart shows. The "Network is the PC" meme comes around regularly every 10 years. Its one of the best examples of a perpetually reccurring hype cycle that we know of. To recap:

The IBM Network PC wave

In 1988 or so and to regain its position (and play to its overall strengths) IBM brought out the Network PC, essentially a dumbed down device that would serve its client faithfully on these new fangled Client-Server Local Area Networks. It failed of course, as (i) The network wasn't reliable enough, (ii) the users liked the standalone capability and control and (iii) the kit wasn't good enough to replace the desktop at that point

The Sun "Network is the Computer" Wave

Cometh the Internet, and Sun has a problem - its tins are in the server farms but not on the desktops. Clearly, the world needs to move towards this new fangled Internet thingy, and put all its data in the (I forget, I think it was called The Cloud at that time too). It failed of course, as (i) The network wasn't reliable enough, (ii) the users liked the standalone capability and control and (iii) the kit wasn't good enough to replace the desktop at that point

The Google "It will be in the Cloud" Cycle

Cometh Big Broadband, and Google has a problem - too many customers are irresponsibly sticking to their desktops rather than sticking all their data into the big GoogleMine. Hence the call for The Cloud rings out clarion like across the Valley. It will fail of course, as......

Why Ten Years? Our hypothesis is that that is the time it takes the Corporate Memory to wane to a level where the Bright New Things can haul the Network PC punt out again without some grizzled and wise old hand reminding them of the phenomenal waste of time and money the last cycle had been. Its also interesting that Eric Schmidt's company (Sun, now Google) has been the major proponent of these last two cycles.

What's interesting about the Googleshot is that this is almost a double top, in that they've tried the "netbook data in the cloud" gambit - which hasn't crossed the chasm - and now its a smartphone gambit. A sign of desperation surely, as if the netbook didn't work its a lot less clear that todays' (even less capable) smartphones will - which is why we think its a sign that this cycle is already on the wane.

Here, as they say, endeth the lesson.

Update - well, not quite endeth - as my learned commentators have pointed out:

(i) There has always been a (shifting) balance between client side and server side, its juts that companies (and bloggers) always push the edges for their own ends

(ii) Each wave does result in a new layer of cloud service usage - networked data, web services etc.

But we suspect static services will be around for a long, long time as (i) people are largely static and (ii) they too improve over time. Th high power workstation with 2 large screens has attractions all of its own.

On Tuesday night David Terrar and I ran the first Social media in Enterprise session (#smie on Twitter), as part of London's Social media Week (and Benjamin Ellis took some pictures). We only thought of doing it a week before, in fact one of the lessons of Social media is that it was very easy to organise the event - though one of the social technologies used was email, which many "social" purists think of anathema . Its interesting to look at that in fact - Twitter DMs and email were the main "back end" tools used to organise and co-ordinate, Twitter and blogs were the main tools used to publicise, and a cloud based app - Eventbrite - was used to take tickets and Paypal used to collect payment. All this was set up in about 48 hours, part time (Kudos to Cass Business School for stepping up to the plate). You have to stop and think about how easy it would have been to do that even 5 years ago.

We used the Patchwork Elephant to symbolise how the area was still confused, we are like blind men feeling our way around the elephant and by looking at various viewpoints we may see it completely. But its also a patchwork, in that tere are many types of Enterprises - not for profit vs for profit, physical vs digital, manufacturing vs service etc etc.

Anyway, on to the show - the speakers ran in alphabetical order, but I'm going to re-organise it in sequence of big picture to detailed actions (David has a good summary of teh speakers and their organisations over here on his take of the evening).

Umair Haque talked about "Peak Organisations" - in a fascinating talk, he outlined his thesis that organisations designed on 18th century principles are just not fit for purpose today, and that hierarchies built to organise masses of people to perform the same menial tasks do not work when the key issue is to maximise knowledge work. He went through some of the new principles of organisation design that will maximise value.

Benjamin Ellis took this point to the next level of detail, looking at the differences between corporate hierarchy networks, the "real" networks that make things work (his slides are over here). He then mapped this to how a social media network works and what the likely organisational impacts will be - and where the fault lines are. Now people have been writing about "hollowed out" organisations for years, and Social media gurus have long noted that its structure is more sympathetic to knowledge work - but Benjamin is one of the few I''ve seen pointing out that an in-enterprise social network is very different to a friendship one and has all sorts of "plumbing" issues to work through. (a point later picked up by Mat when he noted two different types of capital - social and financial - existed uncomfortable together. Render unto Caesar....! Adriana and Euan picked up on this in other ways too).

Mat Morrison then took this to another level of detail again, showing work he had done on the actual social networks in real organisations. One of teh fascinating lessons was that a social network left to grow "au naturel" in an organisation is patchy and has a few massive nodes, who cause mass failure if taken out. He showed that a certain amount of design is necessary, as well as "automatic implementation" onto desktops to ensure both that everyone was networked and the resilience was acceptable.

My talk was on the challenges Social Media faces to convince people of its overall Return on Investment, I looked at the potential role of Social Media in 3 key areas of value creation (slides are here):

- Innovation
- Operational Excellence - Sales, Operating costs, etc etc
- Agility - the ability to react quickly to changes in a marketplace, and deal with disruption.

In essence this was a discussion on the business economics of SM, and where the biggest levers may be found, It is dependent on the company - for example SM seems quite useful to handle churn, great if you are in a high churn industry, but if you are a low churn industry its not a great benefit.

Adriana Lukas looked at her experience of implementing social media in large corporates (see her slides here), and drew some conclusions about how to do it effectively. Her view reflected the theme that Benjamin and Umair had already floated about traditional hierarchies being orthogonal to social media structures. She pointed out that even the social media structure in an enterprise looks different. Her main hypothesis is that it is not going to be possible to re-engineer today's organisation to use social media - you have to build them this way from the ground up. to build stuff in businesses you have to have small pilots, below the radar, so you can prove it.

Euan Semple talked without notes (he came on towards the end of the event and I think talking powerpointless was very high impact at that time) about his 10 years of experience of working with social media tools in organisations. His basic point, like Adriana's, was that the way social media works is orthogonal to the way rigid heirarchies work. He then noted that Social Media does actually map quite closely to the way people like to work. He also showed that there is no inevitable move towards Social Media , looking at the Burtian Era in the BBC as an example (John Burt tried to impose a Tory style internal market plus industrial grade hierarchy to a creative public service)

What I took away from this and Adriana's talk is that it may be possible to re-engineer some businesses, similar to the way you had to re-engineer to use JIT techniques - but it is very hard, and JIT only took off in this way because some companies like Toyota had spent decades changing to operate that way, and were now whipping competitive asses.

Sue Black talked case study - how she utilised Social Media for a Not for profit Enterprise - Bletchley Park (where the German codes were broken in World War 2) has been left in a shabby state (the UK does not love its technology heroes much - poor old Frank Whittle, who invented the jet engine, was only remembered by an Industrial Estate named after him for decades). What she described was a masterful use of social media - at very low cost - to mobilise people to help. What really struck me was that Sue didn't pretend she had a perfect strategy, but in fact had to try many different things in the process, some worked, some didn't. A reminder that this is experimental stuff.

Dave Terrar then gave a number of case studies from companies doing things today - Swiss Re, Cisco amd Wachovia, noting that what is now needed is to aggregate an emerging body of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. His key point was that this may move like the ERP market in future:

Although a lot of my social media colleagues favour a bottom up, disruptive or even "skunk works" approach to implementation, which can all work… the old rules of project implementation still apply inside the culture of many, or even most, businesses. Swiss Re is a perfect example of how you get senior executive buy in and sponsorship to ensure success, and then spread the word to 11,500 employees. It was the way we used to get a successful ERP implementation going, and it can be done for the change management required for implementing these sorts of collaboration tools too. One of my key messages is that these tools need to work with, enhance and improve the existing business processes, not go around or subvert them.

I think what we are seeing here is two phases in the evolution of a system (Dave puts Enterprise 2.0 in The Chasm right now) - before ERP there was MRP, and in its early days it was skunkworked, then when it was shown to work it got taken up by a few go ahead companies, whose success drove others to emulate it.

Shefaly Yogendra and Will McInness couldn't make it unfortunately, but have put up thir contributions online here and here. Well worth the read, Shefaly dealing with highly regulated industries and Will taking up the theme of it being inevitable as it works as we do. (I will link to people's stuff as they paste it up)

In the Q&A and discussions afterwards there were quite a few interesting threads around what the endgame will look like - Ronald Coase's work on sizes of firms being driven by transaction costs, abiut Dunbar and the optimal size of hierarchies, about the industrial era organisation of current enterprises vs the organic structure of social media (a few old salts noted the smallest unit in a Just In Time organisation is a self reliant "cell" - a thread I want to push further in future). But one has to come back to a corollary of Umair's thesis - before we see major changes there needs to be a structural change in the way capital is accumulated (the rich get richer regardless) and distributed (small, nimble companies find it far harder to get money than large, sclerotic ones) whereas most of the innovation and value is being created outside of these existing systems.

To end - an observation by Patrick Hadfield:

To change the culture and behaviour in organisations, we need to look at all aspects of working – including the processes and the reward structure. If we don’t tackle these aspects of organisation life, we will have little success: people will work to the outcome they are rewarded for and by which they are managed.

The move to flatter, less hierarchical organisations – even, perhaps, the fabled “virtual” organisations where almost all aspects of business are outsourced – may be the most fertile ground for social media in enterprises: they can be nimble, and they rely on effective communication to function properly. Here, use of social media could provide a real business advantage – and maybe this is where the real value of social media in business will be found.

Afterthought - on reading this, I know a number of people will say "we've heard this before". To them I'd say, you are right - but you have also heard a lot of other stuff, a lot of which is total snake oil, that was NOT said. This is the considered view of a bunch of smart people who have been looking at this for a long time, long before there was a bandwagon to jump on. I'm not saying this is canonical, but i can see the glimmerings of an elephant taking shape. More later, as they say.

A Patchwork Elephant a bit better described, then. There does seem to a considerable feeling to do another one, and there were at least 8 people in the audience who could as easily have been speaking, so I think this may, like our elephant, have legs

Last night we had rather a good session on Social Media in the Enterprise, where we did quite a bit of crystal ball and navel gazing, so its interesting to see Gartner's predictions today. Here they are with my takes:

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. “While e-mail is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services. “

My take - what is more likely to happen is they will all be integrated into unified comms systems that can receive and send a message in whatever format one wants. And why cloud based? Enterprise email hasn't needed a cloud based system so far?


By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

“However, it will be very difficult for microblogging as a stand-alone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter's scale is one of the reasons for its popularity,” said Jeffrey Mann, research vice president for Gartner. “When limited to a single enterprise, that same scale is unachievable, reducing the number of users who will find it valuable. Mainstream enterprises are unlikely to adopt standalone, single-purpose microblogging products.

My take - the reason enterprises are interested in Twitter and similar is not due to it being a social network, but because its a very flexible transport system. That transport system will find many uses, including M2M, M2P, P2M and P2P functions. It will be used for broad and narrowcasting and be part of the Unified Comms (UC) Architecture.


Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

My Take - Indeed, but thats a "so what" - its a fairly standard failure rate with new technologies. Lessons will then be learned, best practice will emerge etc etc. The far, far bigger issue that emerged last night is that the way organisations are organised and the way social media works are orthogonal to each other, so it will require big shifts in workflow, processes, culture etc - companies will only do that if they can see a clear ROI based rationale. And because metrics are still new, failure will be as much about mis-measurement as mis-steps


Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

As we move toward three billion phones in the world serving the main purpose of providing communications and collaboration anytime anywhere, Gartner expects more end users to spend significant time experiencing the collaborative tools on these devices. For some of the world, these will be the first or the only applications they use. The experience with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to handle far more conversations within a given amount of time than their PCs simply because they are easier to use. Just as the iPhone impacted user interface design on the desktop, the lessons in the mobile phone collaboration space will dramatically affect PC applications, many of which are derivatives of decades-old platforms based on the PBX or other older collaboration paradigm.

My Take - this is Planet Mobile we are talking about, which is very susceptible to hype. Halve everything. Restated this is that " Within ten years, 35 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications." Much more likely.


Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Social network analysis is a useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among the people and groups in an organization, as well as among business partners and customers. However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.

My Take - Companies will try to spy now, staff won't like it, and some companies will go too far - expect regulation to emerge by 2015. Also, not all business functions and companies will have the same "bang for buck" from social media, so many will not really use it very much.

Our first iPhone Application is demonstrated tomorrow at Mashup's "Apps- Whats your Strategy" Event.

Its an application that lets you photograph documents with an iPhone, then tag and store them and share them on Google Docs. Why? Well, this takes you down an App strategy. We think that SOHO/SME will pay far more for useful applications than consumers will, and will pay on an ongoing basis for useful additions. So, on to (ta-dah)

The Portable Paperless Office

Whatever Happened To The Paperless Office, we hear you ask? It hasn't happened - its too big a task, and too difficult to integrate, too inconvenient and for the most part - outside of some parts of the corporate arena - forgotten

But imagine if we used a few of today's technologies and shrank it all - and made it mobile? We believe that today there are all the elements required for the truly effective and ubiquitous mobile paperless office:

- Phone replaces the scanner
- 3G allows fast transmission to cloud storage
- Paperless Office app supports really fast scanning, OCR and filing of a document on the iPhone
- Captured documents are stored locally and mirrored remotely

So we built an end to end delivery chain system to do just this. Come and see it tomorrow.

As you know, we are a consultancy and system design house, but most of our systems are embedded deep in other companies' stuff so never seen. This is one off our own bat, and we would be keen to talk to others who want to add functionality to it, or embed it in their systems.

(And yes, we have the scars from building Apps on iPhones, and integrating to the Google cloud, Don't let anyone tell you its easy - most of what we blog about has some basis in our real network design experience, hence some healthy Cloud scepticism in Broadsight Towers)

And yes, we will integrate it to the iPad, when the hype dies down After all, it has no camera - yet....

From a WSJ article on VC spend, it would seem that capital intensive technology such as networking equipment, telecommunications, semiconductors, solar and alternative fuels are not getting any money - two snippets:

"We're preoccupied by capital efficiency," said Bob Ackerman, a venture capitalist at Allegis Capital in Palo Alto. "You look at the capital requirements and risk-reward ratio [for areas such as clean technology] and it becomes very, very difficult."

Preoccupied by the low spend and quick buck in other words. Not sure the risk/reward ratio in easy-to-reproduce services is any better though, but I guess you fail quicker so can redeploy any capital left faster. Fred Wilson had an interesting post on the changes in VC economics a day or so ago.

Then there is:

Navin Chaddha, a venture capitalist at Mayfield Fund, said his firm was interested in investing in online education, online health care and cloud computing this year, but was shunning capital-intensive industries such as biofuels. And he is being choosier in areas like networking, storage and telecommunications. "You have to be selective" and look for disruptive innovations in those fields, he said.

Cloud computing not capital intensive? Somebody's been selling Snake Oil to those nice VC chaps again I suppose if its only defined as Free-to-use-and-f*ck-all SLA consumer presentation layer web services sitting on top of the big iron then it isn't, but last time I looked Cloud Computing of any form of industrial quality had big transport, hosting and middleware requirements that ain't solved yet.

Update - good counterpoint by Ovum's Vuk Trifkovic pointing out that Cloud is capital intensive, but not as capital intensive as some of the others mentioned.

Whjch prompts a further thought - In theory capital intensiveness raises barriers to entry, reducing competition and lengthening the time a market leader has in the sun. Also, when all is said and done the patents are easier to protect. Perhaps that explains Cloud's popularity for "WebTech" VCs, despite it being pretty ephemeral right now as fa as deplyability is concerned - its the affordable face of capital intensive infrastructure industries.

And that prompts a further aha - its mainly large companies (Amazon, Google, Microsoft) that are building the infrastructure layers right now.

Update II - but, on my side of te argument, note that Facebook is now building its own datacentres. That, dear reader, is Capital Intensive!

We have pointed out before that women are a bigger economic force online than men, especially on Social Media. Now, as Copyblogger notes, if you want links, you gotta do Lurve - most especially use the words that Women Want. These are:

- Love

- Secret

- King, Queen, Princess, Prince (or some other honorable title)

- Temptation and Forbidden

- Cloud, Moon, Stars (and other celestial bodies)

- Heaven, Paradise

- Kiss

- Virgin

- Magic, Enchanted, Bewitched (and other references to the supernatural)

So, for example, here is how you may write copy:

Plain: “Solve Email Problems”
Heroic: “Battle Your Email Overload”
Romantic: “Love Your Email Inbox Again”

Plain: “Stop Procrastinating”
Heroic: “Defeat Procrastination”
Romantic: “Kiss Procrastination Goodbye”

Plain: “Advice to Help You Do Better”
Heroic: “Advice to Help You Win”
Romantic: “Advice to Make You a Star”

Plain: “Ditch Your Bad Habits”
Heroic: “Conquer Your Bad Habits”
Romantic: “Make Your Bad Habits Disappear Like Magic”

So - thats a little magic secret you'll love - send you over the moon in fact. Of course its tempting to be the Queen of Feminine Copy at once, but you're still a virgin here, so take it slow.

(Update - Charlotte Cooper notes that they forgot to add Unicorn)