Core Use Cases for a Smartphone (or Tablet)

I may be missing something -- in fact, in today's info-overload world, I'm sure I'm missing many things -- but I haven't seen a good discussion of use cases for a smartphone beyond calendar and email.

Here are a few I've thought about.  Would appreciate feedback about others:

• "Recalculating route"... The other morning I was driving my rental car to BOS when my faithful Droid Bionic said "Droid".  I managed to read the text message (at considerable danger to myself and others, of course) and found out that my USAir Shuttle flight to NYC had been cancelled.  What to do?  I ended up going to the near-ish Amtrak station and parking outside while I figured things out on my iPad (bigger form factor).  I looked up the Amtrak train schedule, thought I didn't have enough time to return the rental car to the station instead of the airport and catch the train, so I looked up Delta Shuttle schedules, USAir schedules, and decided to stick with USAir in hopes of catching the next flight.  I should have been able to do this all while still driving using voice and audio, or at least had some higher-level app or app-style workflow to make this an easier project.  This kind of mid-course correction over multiple data sources while in motion is a key smartphone use case.  If Siri could do this I'd jump ship.
• Multi-app workflows  It's reasonably hard on most mobile platforms (smartphone or tablet) to read an attachment to an email, which has got to be the most rudimentary kind of multi-app workflow.  My password manager RoboForm (and its cousin LastPass as well, as I recall) doesn't work well on my Droid or iPad, and needs basically copy and paste do do what happens automatically on my PC.  Imagine transferring information back and forth between a web site and a spreadsheet, working with a calendar and a map at the same time, etc etc, and you can see what's missing from the mobile client.
• Integrated Messaging  On neither of my platforms can you view in the same "inbox" your email, text messages, and various IM and social-networking client outputs.  Sad, but true.  I even remember fondly the Blackberry integration of at least texts and emails.  One place with a message timeline, like what Google is moving towards online.

Any others?

 

Zero-latency apps I would love to see, Part 7

A facility for musicians to virtually jam on the Intnernet.  "Licks with Friends" or the like.

Not sure where things are at with the platform this would require, but I think we're probably still a ways.

What's the latency below which you are all playing in rhythm?  Actually, half that latency I guess, since I have to react to your cue and play something back.  That's what we would need.

Plus it would be a nice-to-have to see the rest of the group as we play, although I'd settle for audio-only in R1.

Then and Now

I was talking with our senior partner Art Marks this morning about tech predictions for 2012, and he made a couple of interesting observations.

Back in the day Art used to run GE's time-sharing service.  At the time, some of his main headaches were:

• Finding points of presence, on-ramps to the GE network.  This involved painful and protracted negotiations with postal and telephone authorities, who viewed time-sharing as both a nuisance and a competitive disruption
• Training users how to use the computer.  Time-sharing terminals were unintuitive, inflexible, and unforgiving.  Users had to supply all of these.
• Finding and integrating applications for the GE service in order to incent users to sign up and to differentiate GE from other service providers.

Fast forward to today's network:

• With wireless connectivity shared between cellular radios and WiFi, points of presence are almost ubiquitous.  Most carriers accept the fact that they must carry both "open system" and proprietary traffic, although there's still some fear and loathing about that.
• Users today train the computer how they want to communicate with it.  OK, not quite, but we're getting there.  New services like Siri on the iPhone, voice search on Android phones, and location-aware services on all platforms, work with the user and attempt to be intuitive, flexible, and forgiving.
• Instead of a few huge applications which are bears to maintain and integrate, users today use a multiplicity of small single-purpose apps which are increasingly mashing up dynamically to produce larger-scale results.

Who says there's no such thing as progress?

Video as the New Text

I gave a talk in Atlanta last spring featuring some of my "hot things" for tech going forward.

foo.pdf Download this file

This slide -- a bit tongue-in-cheek, but fundamentally serious -- tried to slice history into three eras, one pre-dating Gutenberg, one from Gutenberg to now, and one going forward.  The one going forward uses video a lot of places where we use text today.

Not implausible.  But what will go along with text?  I think sometimes the Enlightenment was predicated on following long text arguments rather than "short-form" video.  We're certainly going to lose our privacy in the coming era.  Will we lose the whole Enlightenment sense of "self" as well?

"Internet magazines"

I've now installed a few magazine and book apps on my Android phone and my iPad, and I'm struck by how many of them attempt to reproduce the look and feel and interactive style of their print forebears (like the New Yorker app, for example).  (Same applies to catalog apps as well, like the Ikea catalog app.)

Result?  A clunky product that has a huge throw weight over the network, takes a long time to download, is hard to cache, slow to navigate, and not a pleasure to use even though individual pages are often a pleasure to look at.

Haven't the teams that build these apps read Nicholas Carr's The Shallows?  The Internet wants to grow our brains differently from the Gutenberg era.  We need to react quickly to patterns of information, not delve deeply into a logical stream.  We need to interact with the controls of our information rendering machine, not move our lips while we read words.

I'm being a bit arch, but there is a point here.  If you want a media property -- app, site, whatever -- that draws a big audience (and I assume these vendors do), then build something that works with the grain of the underlying medium, not something that recalls a lost era.

Thoughts?

Why are the "Internet of Things" interfaces so crummy?

The Internet of Things is one of those predictions that is always pending: this coming year will surely be the Year of the Internet of Things.

It will happen some time (although it's neck and neck which will happen more slowly: the Internet of Things and the related advent of IPv6).  But the emerging flood of devices will need better interfaces than they have today.

I have a few "Internet of Things" things in my life: a home automation controller, my home router, our networked printer, our home NAS, our TiVos, Most of these devices have a Port 80 browser interface, and they are almost all... terrible.

Slow to load, buggy, clunky, non-responsive (you click on a button and it doesn't give you feedback that it got clicked).  Ugly.  Prone to crash or seize.

Reasons are straightforward: these are proprietary browsers, written in haste (by third parties, I should imagine), with no competitive pressure to improve or revise.  They are evidence that competition is basically a force for good.

Is there a standard or standards to be set here to make the market larger, to make it worth somebody's while to do the "non-computer edge device" browser once and for all, and right?

Let me know your thoughts.

See my article on "Disrupting the Disruptors"

Cutter Consortium was kind enough to publish an article of mine -- "Disrupting the Disruptors" -- in their IT Journal, a special issue on "Creative Destruction" in the IT industry.

Here's a link to a complimentary copy of that issue of the magazine.

Cutter is a huge panel of IT experts who will give you disinterested advice on most IT questions.

My article was on how incumbents might be able to defend themselves against disruptive technology business threats.  A quick read, IMHO...

Big Data as "Computation Brought to the Data"

A recurrent meme at the Hadoop World conference last week was the idea that part of "Big Data" or even "the heart" of Big Data is "bringing the computation to the data."

At first I thought that the main impact of this -- beyond the very real observation that "shared-as-little-as-possible" architectures are great for scaling data processing -- was poetic: it was sort of a democratization of compute power, or liberating compute power from the dark satanic mills of Oracle or the like.

But there appear to be architectural implications as well.  A stateless or practically stateless approach to data weakens any hope of transactional integrity, for example.  If you coordinate enough to be certain that everything will be undo-able, you'll never get anywhere on your data.  You need probabalistic assurances, not logical ones.

Also, new approaches will be needed for security and storage in an architecture where a vast universe of data/computation nodes coordinate.  Maybe there are startups looking at this today, but would love to hear of anything interesting going on in these areas.

"Consumerization of IT" is deja vu all over again

Was in a discussion today about the "consumerization of IT", by which people mean the trend to have consumer technology products and approaches become the leading edge for innovation in the enterprise.

The tenor of the conversation was that this was a historic shift, and that enterprise IT had formerly led innovation in consumer IT.

I found myself objecting.  It's not that consumer IT has never led; it just hasn't led lately.

In the '80's, a new machine called the PC (and even Macs were called PCs then) invaded the enterprise.  Its owners valued the pleasure of running software on a PC, the interactivity, the fun of using PC software.

Enterprise software, which was mostly time-sharing -- so-called "green screen" apps -- was ugly, cumbersome, and hard to learn how to use.  There was nothing fun about it.

PC software -- and it was the "consumer" software of its day -- led enterprise IT, and enterprises were dragged kicking and screaming into supporting it.

Throughout what you might call the "LAN-based PC" era, consumer IT led.  And then a different wind blew -- mainly databases and database-based applications -- and the client-server era began.  What led then was the ability to run large datasets in something less than geologic time.  Enterprise IT led, and led until... new clients came along that were a pleasure and fun to use, and users insisted that the enterprise support them.

Maybe it's a cycle, and not a series of epochs.

Your thoughts?

Connected TVs and Convergence

If you push down on what people think is attractive about "connected TVs" (television sets with an Internet connection built in), the use cases seem to boil down to apter another kind of "convergence": in this case, convergence between television programming and online programming.

Do you need a connected tv for that? No, but it should be a nifty medium in terms of screen real estate. Unfortunately not so nifty in terms of input device(s) unless you happen to enjoy spelling things out with a remote control or cuddling a qwerty keyboard on your lap. But maybe voice input will take care of that: the gadget-oisie is gushing about Siri, forgetting that Siri is witty but not that great at voice recognition (like a URL, say). Those of us who broke our hearts trying to do natural language stuff in the '70s and '80s appreciate the difference between wittiness and understanding.

In any case, I'm excited about the coupling of Internet interactivity and social connection with tv production values. Get ready for a great ride.

What will replace SQL?

OK, if we're going to have a significant increase in noSQL approaches to big data management, what will take the place of SQL?

This isn't just a Zen koan.  SQL, a language I never cared for, nevertheless has two signal virtues:

1. By being essentially universal (I know, I know, more honored in the breach than in the observance), SQL provided for separation of concerns between the data layer and applications.  It at least defined in principle some kind of border even if, like the border between Kenya and Somalia, it's something of a literary device.
2. By separating the results of a query from the procedure for the query, SQL allowed both to be honed separately.  We have good storage engines today and good data science because the two are separated.

What will take the place of this border in the noSQL world?  Today it's anarchic: the query is a method in some languages, a specification in others, and (thanks to some bridging technologies), SQL itself.

Just as web applications took UI/UX back a decade, noSQL risks taking the data layer abstraction back a decade or two.  Needs some work.

Anybody know good companies or approaches to this problem?

Connected TV

We're looking for investments in connected TV.  Apple TV and others have thus far not ignited this market, but we believe something will.

Ideas?

Great product" vs. "Great business

We investors frequently fault entrepreneurs -- especially tech entrepreneurs -- for not understanding the difference between a great product and a great business.

A business is so much more than a product: it's a value proposition; it's communicating that value proposition to the customers; it's bringing the product to the market, and to the customers; it's establishing an advantage vis a vis competitors; it's building an organization that can reproducibly do all of the above.  It's no wonder that many startup businesses don't know whether or not they have a great business, even when they might have a great product.

To be fair, however, many VCs and angels don't get the difference between a great product and a great business either.  We convince ourselves that just because we understand how a product works that we understand the business that could successfully sell that product.  Or we think that because we can understand a product in a marketplace that we undertand all the "gotchas" of running a business in that marketplace.

It's not just entrepreneurs who need to be honest with themselves about the distinction.

B2C and B2B

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tecosystems

because technology is just another ecosystem

You Are Who You Build For

Every successful technology vendor knows who their customer is. For Apple, the end user is prioritized at the expense of every other consideration, save possibly form. IBM, on the hand, has traditionally designed and built software for businesses; users are a secondary concern.

The distinction is relevant because the requirements of users and businesses are frequently at cross-purposes; what’s good for users may not be good for employers, and vice versa. And while it’s possible to develop products for individuals within a business context – Microsoft Office is but one example of this – it remains a practice distinct from building products for the average consumer. As Windows Mobile’s history demonstrates.

Product development is inevitably a reflection of its target; the institution is a reflection of all of the above.

While this focus acts to constrain an organization’s addressable market – Apple is famously indifferent to selling to enterprises and IBM divested itself of its only consumer brands in 2005, attempts to service non-core audiences have historically been problematic.

HP, for example, seems to have belatedly come to the same conclusions that IBM did, as it publicly contemplates the separation of its PC business. And Palm’s webOS – a consumer oriented mobile operating system business that HP paid $1.2B to acquire, was orphaned in the same timeframe as HP’s now ex-CEO Leo Apotheker ended the firm’s dalliance with consumer relevance to focus on the business he knew best: business technology.

HP was, in that respect, merely following in Cisco’s footsteps, as the enterprise datacenter and networking supplier spent $590M to acquire Flip – a consumer oriented hardware business – that it retired two years later, having concluded that it lacked the ability to run consumer and enterprise businesses side by side.

Sun, likewise, was an enterprise technology company that sought to realize the perceived synergies between consumer and enterprise businesses; billions of Java handsets will sell tens of thousands of Sun servers, as the theory went. And while its technologies live on as core pieces of today’s mobile consumer experience, with a cleanroom reimplementation of the Java runtime at the heart of Android’s success, the firm itself was acquired at a steep discount by Oracle, having never realized its grand consumer-side ambitions. Because it fundamentally lacked the ability to develop and grow a non-enterprise business.

RIM may be the latest to learn this lesson. As consumer oriented operating systems – Android and iOS – absorb its marketshare, the one time mobile business standard has attempted to become more consumer friendly. While that by itself is challenging, the collateral damage – its core customers – is the real problem.

The practical lesson to be learned here is that it is crucial that vendors understand who their target market is generally, and who they’re targeting within that market specifically. Acquisition or development strategies that target non-adjacent, distinct markets may appear attractive, even accretive to the core business, but the execution is challenging enough that such efforts are rarely successful. Which is why there are no vendors with an equal ability to service consumer and enterprise markets.

While both enterprise and consumer focused businesses have historically produced revenue generating businesses, with capital markets traditionally favoring the outsized revenues that business software and hardware generate, the ongoing consumerization of IT represents something of a wild card.

When enterprises were able to impose their will upon their employees, enterprise vendors enjoyed barriers to entry sufficient to shield them from the likes of Apple. Businesses only bought the products that they wanted, which in turn were the products enterprise vendors built for them. But with “Bring Your Own Device” in full swing and accelerating adoption of consumer products like the iPad in Fortune 500 organizations, it seems clear that the barriers to entry that once protected enterprise oriented vendors are breaking down. The inmates are, more and more often, running the asylum.

Which doesn’t mean enterprise vendors should try – like RIM – to become consumer companies. History tells us that is precisely the wrong lesson to learn.

It does mean, however, that as enterprise vendors compete with their consumer counterparts, they will be at a disadvantage relative to their design, and must make adjustments to philosophies accordingly. Life was easy when you were selling to a business; now you have to sell to each and every one of their employees.

The lesson that statecraft has learned – “in the old world you’d negotiate with governments, in the new one you negotiate with populations” – is one that will become more and more familiar to those who would sell user facing business technology.

Disclosure: HP, IBM and Microsoft are RedMonk customers; Apple and RIM are not.

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Related posts:

1. Who’s Going to Build the App Store for the Enterprise?
2. You Can’t Fight What You Are
3. Network Offering: If You Build It, I Will Buy It (And Some Other Folks Might, Too)
4. Don’t Listen to Your Customers?
5. The Elephant in Moscone: JavaOne 2009

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Categories: Consumerization.

By sogrady

— September 30, 2011 at 1:34 pm

« The War for Tech Talent, With Numbers and Graphs

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Steven O'Grady gets it right in his post about "You Are Who You Build For", but the point extends to individuals as well. We are endowed -- if you will -- with a bent toward individuals and solving individual problems (B2C) or organizations and solving organizational problems. (B2B). No shame in either; the shame lies in trying to be something you're not.

When Will the Digital Home Tip? And What Will Tip It?

I've been personally quite interested in the "digital home" for decades.  Yes, I'm one of those X.10 geeks.  I put Tut Systems IP-over-POTS cards into my equipment in the '90's.  I use Sonos.  All of the above and more.

Professionally, I've been wondering what's holding back the Digital Home?  What I mean is: there are multiple networks in lots of homes today -- WiFi for data, service-provider cable or FIOS or whatever for Internet access and video, maybe dedicated audio for home theater et. al.  When will this all be tied together?  When will vendors rush to equip homes with servers, converged networks, NAS/SAN, cloud backup, media servers, and every bit of kit you'd think you'd need for a home.  What's stopping homes from being like SMBs, in a word?

Well, obviously consumers/households think about capital investments differently from SMBs, but not all that differently, if truth be told.  My guess would be that SMBs are being tipped because of the need for a web presence and the lure of ecommerce.

What will drive households is probably video.  Video is increasingly used where text was before: for news, for communciation, for entertainment, for instruction.  And current video plant in the home is ripe for tipping into something that converges networks and systems.

One bet would be that the first generation of connected TVs somehow causes a massive tipping point in the way households consume video, which will necessitate new networks, new network gear, and new kinds of servers.

What do you think?

10% Cloud

From talking to a few data center operating execs -- tier 1 and otherwise -- we get similar numbers: 10% of their business today is cloud business (the rest is colocation and other forms of hosting).

What does this mean?

1. Early days for cloud.  Lots of upside still for cloud providers, both computing and storage.  Good long-term news for our companies Nirvanix, BlueStripe, and Solidfire,
2. Early days for cloud.  Bad news for immediate growth in these marketplaces.  20% is the magic number in many markets for when penetration starts to inflect.  Plausible to believe that's close to the magic number here.  It could be longer than we would like to get from 10% penetration to 20%.

What are you seeing?  What do you think?

Mobile Opportunity: Happy Birthday, Business Computing

via mobileopportunity.blogspot.com

Couldn't resist passing this along.

Are Service Providers the "Storage OEMs" of the Public Cloud?

Again, maybe I'm a slow learner, but it dawns on me that service providers -- Rackspace, Savvis, Terremark that was, and all kinds of MSPs for the SME/SMB market -- are going to be the trusted providers of public cloud services in the near future.

Maybe not this year (it's fashionable to sneer at public cloud nowadays, which means nothing except that it's passing through the Trough of Disillusionment).  But in 3 years, or 5 or 7?  You betcha.

And, just like customers today won't buy storage systems from startups, but buy them from VARs and OEMs today, customers won't buy public cloud from startups.  They'll buy it from service providers and MSPs.

Which puts these guys in a similar structural position to storage OEMs: they need to buy startups in order to get R&D, and startups them them to partner with in order to show a great balance sheet and other stigmata of credibility to their customers.

My impression -- pretty uneducated, but I'll look into it shortly -- is that service providers are still somewhat green at the partnership/BD/M&A game.  That should change rapidly.

Your thoughts?

Death of the PC

Maybe I'm behind the curve here, but it strikes me that we need to start seriously planning for the death of the PC.

Those of us who remember the Larry Ellison/Scott McNealy "network computer" chatter of the '90's will wince a bit, but this time it's for real.

Consider:

1. The network is now ubiquitous enough and reliable enough for an almost-always-connected model to work.  Not perfect, but good enough.
2. New clients (tablets, to be sure, but netbooks and smartphones as well) are gorgeous and compelling, more usable in some ways than desktop PCs and creeping up on laptops.
3. We are beginning to understand how to connect cloud backends with multi-client front ends.  These will get better and better.

All of this is a recipe for multiplicity of clients, and a accelerated drop in share for PC clients.

HP's move to spin off its PC business, and Dell's flailing about with new acqusitions and acquisition models are evidence that the top two PC makers are planning for the deatfh of the PC.  Microsoft's bluster about the robustness of its Windows and Office franchises is typical disruptee talk.

More later on how to invest.

NoSql and its Skeptics

A September 2010 post by Michael Stonebraker was the subject of some back-and-forth in a recent CACM.  Dr. Stonebraker was saying that enterprise customers were skeptical of non-SQL or anti-SQL approaches because, among other things, they lacked ACID coherence and didn't have a uniform functional query language like SQL.

The discussion was reminisicint of many in the "disuptor/disruptee" wars of technology: noSQL approaches (lumping them together for the moment) are inadequate for the cutting-edge needs (OLTP) of the cutting-edge users (big enterprise customers).  Of course, there are a number of niche applications -- processing Web logs, for example, or call data records, or maybe BI applications in general -- where the noSQL-based solutions are "good enough", or, maybe, even better.

The trick for the noSQL vendors -- and their investors -- is to find out which niches those are and suffice them, quick.

Backing the Ferber Brothers

Seven years ago, AOL acquired Advertising.com for some $500M, a nice payday for brothers Scott and John Ferber, who had co-founded the company, named TeknoSurf.com, in 1998.  Valhalla founders backed the company as investing professionals at predecessor firms.

Estimates are that the company, before and after the AOL acquisition, has grossed some $3B in online products and services.  Understandably, the Ferbers (and other investors) felt that we left money on the table by what now seems a "premature" acquisition.

A made-to-order Serial Entrepreneur scenario.  Scott Ferber has taken another turn at bat with TidalTV, a video ad network founded in early 2008, and this summer John Ferber has stepped up as co-founder of Domain Holdings, a "domain-lifecycle management" company.

In both cases Valhalla has invested in its winners.  Why not?  These are brilliant guys with a great business sense and a technology-enabled advantage that should help them win -- and win perhaps even bigger than before -- in their new ventures.

The Healing Power of Greed?

In an earlier post on "software factories", I touched on the question of why America's software engineers were not, by and large, working on projects that would enhance American software competitiveness:

...the finest software minds of the current generation are not interested in solving the American productivity problem, but are interested in profiting from what I elsewhere call flash-fads, huge blockbuster moneymakers that last for the comparative blink of an eye but, like the Pet Rocks of my youth, make lots of money.

This is probably rational behavior on the part of these software engineers.  Sacrificing current income to make the income of the nation greater over time is a bit like voluntarily helping to pay down the national debt by giving extra money to the Treasury: patriotic, maybe, but certainly not a mass choice.  (One of my partners told me this morning that some $81M had been contributed to the Treasury in this fashion, versus a national debt service obligation several orders of magnitude greater.)

But how does the rational behavior of individual software engineers feed the public good?  Our market orientation in the U.S. gives us a touching faith in what we might call "the healing power of greed", an exaggeration of Adam Smith's point of about the "invisible hand" into the notion that individuals can do whatever we darn well please and somehow benefit the polity.  In this raw form, it probably ain't so.

Yes, over time the drive for hundreds of flash fads has in fact made software development more productive.  It is probably an order of magnitude cheaper and quicker to bring an application to market today than 30 years ago, when I got started in the tech business.  But these benefits accrue to everyone, and don't provide specific advantage for our country.  Which is what we need to remain competitive.

It seems we can't escape from a policy that targets innovations which are game-changing and then invests in them directly from the public purse or incents the private sector to factor innovation projects in among the Pet Rocks.

Your thoughts?

Link Quality

I'm sure many people are on top of this, but isn't there a big difference between different kinds of links in the social network based on their quality?

I'm thinking about this because I'm gearing up on Google+, which features the idea of circles, discrete collections of contacts with different characteristics: friends, colleagues, running buddies, frenemies.  And a lot of the discussion in the service about circles revolves around what to do with low-quality links.

In finance, margin is a measure of the quality of a business's income.  If it costs a lot of money to earn your revenue, it's not as high-quality as higher-margin revenue.  High margins inhere to businesses that create differentiation.  Low margins are the h**l into which weak, aging, or commoditized businesses descend.

So with links.  We all have 80-20 rules with our link forests, where some few are priceless to us and most are almost worthless.  Should be a weighting in measuring social network influence or the like.  Probably someone is doing it already.

Thoughts?  Want an invite to Google+?

App Connectivity Empowers Apps

I've been pleasantly absorbed getting an iPad up and running the last few weeks, and I've learned something that is applicable to any client device: apps gain most of their power from interacting with other apps.

Case in point: I use Tripit, and got another travel-oriented app called FlightTrack (in fact I paid for FlightTrack Pro, as much because I believe in paying for software as because I like the Pro features (although I do)).

Well you can type flight numbers into FlightTrack, and it'll give you vital info about them, like mainly whether or not they'll be on time. But if you integrate FlightTrack with TripIt you get automatic lists of all the flights in your TripIt trips, without lifting a finger. Power of integration.

So now, on the mobile, I get a flight itinerary from the travel agent, forward it to TripIt, who parses it and turns it into flight, calendar, and other relevant info, then feeds the flight info to FlightTrack.

This is the future of apps, this is the future of app-driven programming from the cloud.  Workflows of app(let)s dynamically assembled to accomplish a one-time or recurring task.

(Now in this case the apps were statically assembled, a big hassle with manually typed-in passwords and all kinds of other (shudder) legacy stuff.  But you get the idea.)

Incidentally, this is one place where Android shines.  The operating system embeds connectivity through a "publish and subscribe" facility exposed to users via the "Share" menu.  iOS jumps through hoops to accomplish the same thing, generally on a one-off app-by-app scheme that is, frankly, flakey.  (I'm not especially an Android zealot, but this is one case where it's clearly ahead to my mind.)

How do you chain together or connect apps to accomplish tasks?

LinkedIn sends more traffic to TechCrunch than Twitter

My friend @drbobschu sent this my way: http://www.linkedin.com/share?viewLink=&sid=s452149609&url=http%3A%2F...

Gist?  LinkedIn sends more traffic than Twitter to TechCrunch because of LinkedIn's hot new LinkedIn Today, which caused LinkedIn's 250,000 TechCrunch fans (as well as others) to smoke Twitter's 1.7 million TC followers.

Product matters.

 

Amazon's Cloud Play vs. Google/Microsoft's

I heard the figure of $100M in AWS (Amazon Web Services) revenues bandied about lately.  Not too shabby for a business that started out as a spare-time as-is reuse of Amazon's infrastructure.  By far the healthiest supplier of IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)

Compare them to Google and Microsoft, who started PaaS (Platform-as-a-service) businesses instead of IaaS.  PaaS (if I understand it right) tries to get developers to develop applications for the platform, whereas IaaS "just" provides a run-time environment for applications built elsewhere.

Microsoft of advertising the bajeezus out of Azure, but I'm not hearing much about great results.  Certainly no $100M in revenues (yet?).  And Google seems to be flailing about with its various cloud and app-dev platforms.

Makes IaaS look like the right bet, at least so far.

Thoughts?

Facebook is the AOL of the '10's

At one time AOL was bigger than the Web.

I went to AOL from Compuserve in the late '80's or early '90's because AOL gave you a user name instead of a pair of user numbers.  At AOL, I was Smilesburg.  I was somebody.

The big pitch of AOL in those days was Community: they pioneered chat rooms for the masses.  They had common-interest groups for parenting, for dating, for everything.  I don't recall that people could upload their photos, but at 56.5 Kb that would have been an unpleasant experience anyhow.

And they were a walled garden.  It was hard to get from AOL to the 'net.  AOL vigorously offered alternatives to keep the inmates within.  They wanted us to stay put.

Sounds a lot like Facebook today.  It may get bigger than the rest of the Web (although not likely).  It features Community.  And it vigorously tries to keep the inmates within.

What happened to AOL?  Well, the inmates slowly and then rapidly escaped.  ISPs killed AOL.  gmail killed AOL.  The sheer wealth of content and interactivity growing in the rest of the Web killed AOL.  A walled garden can't keep up.

Thoughts?

Flash Fads

I don't think I invented the "flash fad" meme (or, as I prefer to call it, "flashfad" in the "down-with-the-space-character" mode that's sweeping the world in the 21st Century), but I think it's a huge idea.

Years ago, I read a science fiction story where businesses rose during the early part of the evening, were indispensable by 10 pm, and were forgotten by 2 am.  I forget the story -- does anyone remember this theme? -- but at the time I found it intriguing but silly.

Guess what?  It's become true.  You get a flashfad like "planking" (see the excellent YouTube video on planking, and the coverage, of course, in Wikipedia) where, as far as I can see, it's a dumb thing you can do with pictures and UGC, but it's novel and kind of silly and endearing all at the same time, so it catches on... for the first part of the evening.

As I said elsewhere, the thing is to be the platform for flashfads, and Twitter has that sown up I'm pretty sure.

DC Tech Meetup on Big Data 6/7/11

Valhalla was fortunate to be part of a great #dctech DC Tech Meetup last night on the theme of Big Data.  Catch the stream on this from @dctechmeetup.

 

Followers of mine know I’m a big fan; Valhalla and I are actively looking for Big Data enabling technology businesses and businesses that do game-changing things with Big Data datasets.

 

If you’re interested in talking to us about a Big Data business idea, give a shout to @pipik or comment back here.

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Valhalla Video Summit Predictions from Last Year

Valhalla has a small annual Video Summit for our digital-media companies and some outsiders.  A half-day discussion on a series of topics.  Always interesting.

I was reviewing predictions made last year by the attendees for discussion this year.  Here are some which come due in 2011:

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

·         DVD sales are dead with post-theatrical movie business becoming 80% rental by 2011

·         Content will start unbundling and challenge the traditional business model in 2011 

Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE

·         Hulu doubles ad-weight from 2 to 4 ads per video, making it more like TV in 2011

·         Comcast/NBCU merger will usher in a new wave of consolidation of content + distribution players, starting in 2011

Anybody care to comment on how these will turn out by year-end?  Anyone care to weigh in on predictions for 2012??

The Shallows

Started reading Nicholas Carr's The Shallows on a flight out to San Francisco last week, and was pretty drawn to his argument.  He claims that using the Internet is actually changing our brains, making us respond to short-form broadband stimulation rather than long-form contemplative "deep reading" (his term; a good one).

It gibes with a lot I'm seeing. First of all, he observes at the beginning that he and his friends have seemingly lost the ability to read books, or at least have had the ability diminished.  True here.  I wallow in "short-form" reading all day, but it's almost not reading anymore, it's flitting from link to link in order to form a quick "gist" of things.  It's a new form of intellectual interaction, well-suited to the Web.  All arguments Carr makes.

I had noticed the atomization of content on the web.  As bits industries are disintermediated (see my post on that here) the length of the information artifact gets smaller.  Albums get replaced by songs get replaced by ring tones.  Features get replaced by stories get replaced by blog postings.  Movies get replaced by episodes get replaced by snack videos.  This atomization of course supports Carr's thesis: it's optimized for info-grazing.

What'll happen to the world of long-form thought?  I argue that "Morlocks" -- the scientific, technical, and clerical managers who actually run stuff -- will still have to read and write and think "long form", because complex technical and other systems need extended thinking to work properly.  But maybe I'm just trying to salvage a bit of the Enlightenment.  Maybe it can all be done with some kind of intellectual MapReduce: simple operations performed in parallel over a huge set.  Maybe that's the wave of the future.

What do you think?

What's Hot in a Flat World

I gave a talk by this title to a terrific audience in Atlanta yesterday.  Sharp, relevant questions, laughed when they should have and didn't laugh when they shouldn't have.  Not that a bunch of slides speak for themselves, but happy to send you the pdf of the slides if you ping me.  Also, @jacquichew was very diligent (and kind) in tweeting regularly during the talk, so catch her on Twitter (sorry, still learning how to link to Twitter in a post like this) if you're curious.

Audience is King

It's been growing on me slowly, but in the last couple of months I've a "duh" (or maybe a "doh") moment: it's not content that's king online, it's audience.

Property after property succeeds -- either as a business or an exit -- because it draws and keeps an audience.

Content is one way to do that, but there are others.  Facebook doesn't draw an audience because it's social, but because it does something very compelling with the social medium that draws and keeps an audience.  MySpace drew an audience, but didn't stay compelling and didn't keep them.

Fads can draw an audience.  I think of Twitter more as a "flash-fad" generator than a social medium.  Something outrageous -- Charlie Sheen, Osama's death, whatever -- draws a crowd of bystanders who goggle at it and magnify the effect.  Flash fads.

What would make Twitter enduring if if they have a reliable repeatable way to generate flash fad after flash fad.  It seems that's what they're on to, and, if they succeed, they will do well.

Whatever builds an enduring audience is king.  Your thoughts?

Thoughts on Journalism 2.0

By commenting on a blog posting on Internet Evolution about one of our companies, statSheet, I ended up having a great conversation with Joe Grimm the author, who ended up inviting me to an online chat about Valhalla and Journalism 2.0.  I had never done a chat before, but it's essentially marathon top-speed IM-ing with a live audience whose comments are moderated but real-time.

Terrific group.  Mainly journalists trying to figure out how to make sense of the new world.  The remark I made that was most enthusiastically received by the group was that the transformation of the journalism industry produced "opportunities to make lots of money".  Good luck, I know the journalists of the world will migrate to the new world of Journalism 2.0 and make out well.

Here's a widget with the whole chat:

 

Convergence of the Network, Divergence of the Client

Valhalla’s Art Marks had an insight about one way the Internet transforms existing businesses: it weakens the value of special-purpose networks.

Consider what is happening with pay TV today.  Today some $56B flows into the cable providers, satellite providers, and other “MVPD” organizations who essentially control special-purpose networks for distribution of video entertainment content.  The “entertainment-weighted” equivalent flowing into Internet Service Providers for so-called “over-the-top” video is something like $5B.

It doesn’t take a genius, reflecting on the history of music distribution, software distribution, and news distribution, to conclude that most of the $56B will flow over to the Internet providers over the next four or five years, and the Internet will eat the lunch of yet another special-purpose network.  What VPNs did to VANs, what VoIP does to TDMA, an Internet video stack will do to pay TV.

At the same time that networks are converging, the devices attached to the Internet are diverging.  Yesterday we had PCs, then laptops, then netbooks.  Now we have smartphones and tablets.  Tomorrow we will have so-called net-tops (desktop appliances with Internet access and cloud-oriented computing), connected TVs and set-tops.  And the day after that, perhaps the full-blown “Internet of Things”.

It makes sense, and to paraphrase what, for example, David Isenberg said in 1997: “dumb network, smart edges”.

Product and Service cultures

Moving from Silicon Valley to DC in 2001, I found I was leaving the land of Product Imagination and entering the land… of what I’ve come to call Service Imagination.  The two couldn’t be more different.

 

Product Imagination is all about what goes into the product and what’s left out.  The product is a crystallized packaged of functionality which customers can take or leave.  It’s what you get.  Product imagination tunes the package to be most beguiling to the biggest bunch of customers, but there are always features (and therefore customers) who are left out.

 

Service Imagination is just the opposite.  Customer by customer, the organization delivers exactly what that customer wants, and then does the same for the next customer, and the next.  Service Imagination is about faithfully recording and reproducing requirements, and building them on a reliable timetable.

 

An organization built around Service Imagination can’t scale, of course.  There’s only so many customers you can faithfully support per engineering (or product requirements) body in the shop.  More customers require more bodies.  Product organizations don’t  have this problem.  The same development group can serve a customer base of almost any size (of course, some things have to scale, like product support and distribution, but R&D does not).

 

The two kinds of cultures (and hence the two kinds of businesses) hardly ever co-exist or cross over.  A product company is very hard to turn into a services company, and vice versa.  And what usually happens when they try is one of two possible hybrids.

 

Hybrid #1 is a “services organization with a toolkit”.  In this kind of organization, the repetitive element of various customer jobs is built into a kind of ur-product (often called a “toolkit” or “framework” or “template”) which is customized for each client.  The professional services organization which customizes the toolkit then becomes the locus of swelling body count, with the toolkit group emerging as some kind of product organization embryo.  Very rarely, this product organization spins out into a successful product company, but most often languishes on in symbiosis with the PS group.

 

Hybrid #2 is a “product organization bogged down with per-customer versions”.  In this hybrid, the company is supposedly producing a product but in fact modifies it for each customer (or for the biggest customers).  The symptom here is a development group that can’t implement new features because they are too busy with the per-customer modifications.  The company doesn’t turn into a full-fledge services company, usually, but languishes as a product company progressively falling behind.

 

Are there examples you see of the two cultures mixing, merging, or migrating?

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Whatever happened to RDF?

A friend and I were talking the other day, and we realized 1) that we both thought RDF was a nifty idea for organizing graph-oriented stuff and 2) that we had no idea what had become of it.

I looked around a bit and it seemed as if little was happening in the RDF community.  The links all seemed to peter out in the mid-‘00s, and I wondered where, if anything, the innovation was happening in this area.

Please comment if you can point me to cutting-edge companies and research ideas wrt RDF and its stack.

Inquiring minds would love to know.

Venture Capital as a Manufacturing Business

Half in jest and half to spur my thinking about our business, I’ve found it convenient to think of venture capital as a manufacturing business.

Most people in and around the venture business think of venture capital as a services business.  Our “customers” are our backers – Limited Partners – whose money we invest (hopefully) profitably.  Nothing wrong with that point of view, except it doesn’t lead you to think outside of the box.  And it’s wrong.

Our backers are, more accurately, our shareholders or our investors.  A limited partnership doesn’t work exactly like a joint stock company, but close enough, and certainly closer than thinking of them as customers.

OK, you might say, if you’re in the manufacturing business, what do you manufacture?   Very simply, we take raw materials – ideas, entrepreneurial talent, intellectual property, and so forth – and turn them into companies that can be sold profitably to a buyer, an exit.  We manufacture exits.

Our customer, then, is the buyer for our exits.  And they come in two forms.  In the B2B form of the venture business, our customers are major M&A acquirers.  Cisco is a VC customer.  IBM is a customer.  Google is a customer.

In the other form of sale, the B2C form, we “sell” the company to the public.  This is a “channel” sale because we use channel partners – otherwise known as investment banks – to distribute our “product” to the consumers.

How does this affect your thinking?  Very few VCs pay much attention these customers or channel partners, and the few who do reap outsized returns.

Mobile Client Wars and Client Diversity

As Android’s market share creeps up on iPhone, the drums of blogerati buzz beat louder on topics such as “which platform will win”, “battle of the titans over mobile”, etc.

A lot of this is just the chattering e-classes chattering (and, btw, Android’s going to win), but there is a trend below the radar here that has longer legs: I call it “client diversity”.

The fact is we are driving toward a computing architecture where different kinds of clients all attach to the network and use network resources (increasingly) for storage, computation, and collaboration.

Smartphones are one kind of client; “new” tablets like iPad (and the raft of Android tablets to be announced at CES shortly) are another.  But the various smartphones have more in common, say, than iPhone and iPad.  We are moving toward an ecosystem where different clients will be used for different functions and will co-exist more-or-less stably.

Most of my friends and colleagues are experimenting with substituting an iPad for a laptop in their road trips (the consensus seems to be that iPad does better for short trips, laptops for multi-city ones).  Most everyone with a smartphone and an iPad is finding that some apps, games, and activities work better on one than another.

Guess what?  Things are probably going to get more diverse.  We have second-class network clients like wireless picture frames, and even the poor Sony Dash.  We have automobile-based clients like media players and on-board nav systems.  (We have in fact nascent clients in all the GPS units out there, longing to be web-connected as well as GIS-connected.)

Why so many?  Because they are cheap enough (eventually) so that it’s more important to have the best client for each purpose than to have one client for all purposes.

Guess what else?  The mobile clients will start to control the non-mobile ones, so that your content from your smartphone will show up on the on-board nav system where the display is larger, although it may still be controlled from the smartphone (whose keyboard is better for input).  Your email will segue to the giant TV in your hotel room when you arrive because it’s easier to see.  This won’t take tech miracles, but it will take a hell of a lot of negotiations, similar to what the wireless voice world went through when it discovered how to do universal roaming.