Stardust Global Ventures

First, and foremost, I’m a Twitter fan. That’s common knowledge. I’ve been using it since it began as Twttr in 2006. I’m one of those “over three years” avid users, and I’m active still. All the time. Every single day.

Those of us who use Twitter, and other service like it, have watched for a long time wondering when the business opportunity will present itself. When we’ll see the big launch. This morning on Posterous, our friend and tech pundit Robert Scoble posits a dollar value for Twitter that I think is simply beyond absurdity. You can read Why Twitter is underhyped and is probably worth five to 10 billion dollars for yourself. I encourage you to. And I encourage you to make your own judgements.

I began this by trying to dissect Robert’s points, but it begs for me just a question really. Nonetheless, Robert’s points are highlighted and addressed below.

Robert, you gave a handful of reasons. I’m responding to the reasons below. But what are you using to substantiate those numbers? Where did they come from? Is there a reputable tech sector analyst anywhere who agrees in any way and has published a statistically viable report that remotely backs that up? Or are we basing all this on feel-good hunches and our gut? And yes, I believe many analysts in the industry evaluate Twitter and the like with gut feel and statistical inaccuracy.  I know I have. I simply don’t see it, and don’t understand where that wild dollar value comes from.

1. Twitter has taken over the business world and this should be very worrying for other companies like Google, Yelp, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and others.

Really? Twitter has taken over business? Or has it simply captivated as much as 3% of businesses attention. Scoble far too often seems to equate his window on the tech sector as all of business. Then he points out 3-4 major companies who are forward thinkers and looking to leverage trendy fads and proclaims facts not in evidence.

Let’s think about “the business world” Robert says has taken over. Think about your business world. How does your bank use Twitter? Your grocery store? Your auto mechanic? Your insurance company? Your health care provider? Sure your cable company is Comcast and you can get a rise our of @Comcastcares, but what percentage of businesses you do business with each month are through interactions on Twitter?

Some businesses in some sectors are indeed trying to use Twitter as a competitive tool. To say Twitter has taken over business is improbable speculation. I consider Robert a friend. I also consider Shel Israel, author of Twitterville a friend. And while we agree on many things and the potential power of tools like Twitter, let’s not make a mountain out of this molehill. In the global economy, and in North American business, Twitter is an interesting blip on the radar that continues to grow. But so far, that’s still what it is. A blip with the potential to be much more. Potential value isn’t market value. Not yet.

2. Twitter is underhyped. I’m now convinced that Twitter has locked up a whole raft of businesses and that Twitter is actually worth five to 10 billion dollars.

Twitter’s underhyped?. It’s only on Conan, Oprah, CNN, mobile carrier commericials and every place we turn. Underhyped? Give me a break. It’s more like the H1N1 pandemic. It’s all the talk, lots of buzz, with precious little substance. Funding for flu pandemic response really doesn’t exist. But find a dead bird, mad cow, or sick pig, and it’s all the buzz. It takes the center of conversation. In some ways, Twitter’s a bit like that. While the flu hasn’t reached pandemic levels to date, Twitter might be argued as having hit epidemic levels. Pandemic? I don’t know. I don’t want to quibble over term definitions. Instead, I’ll grant that when the celebrity of the week signs up, or the governor of a nearly bankrupt state visits Twitter HQ,  we will absolutely talk about it and little else. We are indeed a fickle, yet pliable flock of sheep.

Valued at 5-10 billion dollars?????? I have to repeat that – 5-10 BILLION DOLLARS???? Good God Robert, do you know what you’re saying? I really do want to know where that number came from. And who on earth you think is queuing up with something in between the GNP of the Bahamas ($4.92B) and Bahrain ($10.3B) is another interesting area to consider.

Amazon just bought Zappos for $928M. That’s a pretty nice chunk of change for a profitable company that’s got worldwide viral love from customers. But it’s a mere tenth of the kind of money in question here.

eBay bought Skype for $2.6B in 2005. It has been highly acclaimed since as one of the largest wads of money flushed down the toilet in the tech sector. Overhyped, overvalued, inadeqaute return. In short a financial catastrophe that nobody ever really owned as such. In the acquisition of a company that actually sells services, has a business model, makes money and is still growing. Skype is solid, growing, viable and measurable in financial worth. Is valuing Twitter at four times what Skype went for really reasonable?

Maybe we should get a little different perspective. Where do we look? Cisco bought Linksys for $500M. They bought Flip for $590M. Those don’t compare. Let’s move up the food chain to a substantial company – Scientific Atlanta. That acquisition was about $6.9B. I guess that puts us in the right financial range but isn’t a fair comparison really. Scientific Atlanta makes actual products, They opened doors for business in 1951, before Robert and I were born. Here’s some Wikipedia background:

Scientific Atlanta is a leading supplier of transmission networks for broadband access to the home, set-tops, cable modems and digital interactive subscriber systems for video, high-speed Internet, voice over IP (VoIP) networks, and worldwide customer service and support. Products for the cable TV industry, such as fiber optic network equipment, digital cable boxes (as well as universal remotes to go with them), and cable modems, dominate Scientific Atlanta’s sales. Scientific Atlanta also supplies distribution technology to networks such as Bloomberg Television, CNN, ESPN and many others.

So how on earth can we fairly, accurately and honestly say Twitter is worth that kind of value?
Continue reading “It’s not AT&T. It’s not Apple. It’s just Twitter” »

This evening as I was doing some housekpping here, I wandered across this post from March of this year, almost six months ago. And I realized once again how important the little fish are in the world economy today. I thought it was worth quoting to remind us all that the little fish outnumber and overpower the big ones.

Small and medium businesses employ more people, create more jobs, and drive more money through the economy that large ones do. We should all give warm thanks and healthy respect to the little fish. The big fish look more and more like a very tasty meal.

This week eComm ’09 took place in San Francisco. We were so disappointed that we couldn’t be there for a number of reasons. eComm is the vortex of change in the communications industry. There are plenty of conferences we love that focus on sustaining the industry and the evolution of communications technologies. eComm isn’t about evolution, but about revolution.

It really hit home for me in the past week that the key to this technological revolution is really accelerating because of something that eComm embodies. Many companies use the word ecosystem in reference to their developers, their outspoken customer fans and the like. I’m more of a mind today to think less of an ecosystem and more of a set of microcosmic innovators.

eComm is about the little fish, those innovators, and the attack being mounted on the big fish, the legacy telecommunications industry. The little fish will eat the big fish.

The companies at risk in the communications sector today are decidedly not the small innovators. I can’t begin to list them, but those attending and presenting at eComm are the leaders, not the followers. The innovators, not the defenders of the past. They are the inventors of tomorrow. The companies at risk? They’re many, and their names are recognizable. Cisco, Lucent and Avaya – not at risk for hardware infrastructure, but absolutely in danger because they can’t ever deliver the comprehensive solution that will win. They’re too big.

Microsoft may be one of the companies most at risk. They’re too big to survive. But in another way, Microsoft is far too cosmetic and superficial. Ok, this is only a partially formed thought, but Microsoft is focused on visual appeal. They’ve provided a wrapper around the visual appeal that is our interface to resources for a long time. Call it the OS if you like, but it’s still wrapping paper. They’ve certainly dug into real services with SQL and OCS, but they are a wrapping paper company, incapable of the microcosmic ferocity required to win.

There’s something that’s really notable about eComm and the people involved there. They’re engaged with a passion and focus. They’re intent and intense.

Small fish? Yes, and we should remember that piranha are small fish. The innovators that spent this week at eComm planning the industry revolution are piranha – fast, ferocious and hungry.

And the big fish? They’re going to be a very tasty meal.

Testing enhancements for the WP for Blackberry app.

I’m very pleased to see photo posting inside a blog post now fully functional in ths handy application. It works cleanly and seems to (able to handle multiple images making it easy to post a note with pics.

Very cool.

Thanks to @euan for pointing out this video of moments.

Earlier today on FriendFeed and Twitter I shared an observation that ZDNet is following Forrester, and that they’re asking the wrong questions. Here’s the spark:

Study: unified communications doesn’t deliver — yet
It would seem that converting technology that has existed as proprietary, embedded-code hardware-driven solutions to service-oriented software would be very productive.

Driven by a Network World article from Tim Greene, who I highly respect and have often disagreed with. Sometimes Greene just climbs on the southbound train when everyone’s looking north.

ROI doesn’t always pan out with unified communications
Return on investment is a big but unfulfilled promise of unified communications.

The well established potential for cost avoidances and lower operational budgets with UC don’t necessarily pan out in practice, says Henry Dewing, an analyst with Forrester Research. “They’re not deriving the benefits they expected,” he says.

His research finds that about half the respondents have no plans to deploy UC this year, about half saying they don’t have the budget and about half saying they don’t see the business value.

“When you talk to end users, they want a 12-month return and a triple digit ROI,” Dewing says, and that is not achievable in many cases.

First, let me put on a simple businessman’s hat and state the obvious for those who missed the day clues were handed out. Dewing, the Forrester  analyst behind this says end users want a 12-month return with triple digit ROI. Let me repeat that – a 12-month return with triple digit ROI.

Now run off and ask your CFO/CTO/CEO how realisitic that is for any technology. I’ve been in voice and data networking for thirty years. Traditionally, a TDM PBX was a ten year investment. LAN/WAN technology is five. To pay for itself in a year, most smart CFOs will see value and move. To expect triple digit ROI in 12 months is akin to winning the lottery.

I think Forrester is asking the wrong questions and the wrong audience. Personally I think the audience was targeted specifically to give answers that cast doubt on the viability of unified communications. And UC is a very broad field. VERY BROAD. If you want a sense of unified communications from my perspective, take a look at a post or two:

• Is Unified Communications an Industry or just Buzz Words?
• Unified Communications and Social Media – The Convergence Zone
• Thoughts in Knowledge, Unified Communications and Networking
• Dominate Unified Communcations by Thinking Small
• More on Small Thinking in Unified Comunications

In my view, Forrester missed the train entirely because they don’t know what the heck unified communications is. They see the industry as consisting of perhaps a very small group of vendors – Microsoft, Avaya, Alcatel-Lucent and Cisco. (Hint reminder for old-timers: Remember a phrase from our past “Gang of Four”?) They do this because someone says those are the leaders. The problem is, they’re the trailers. The big names with deep pockets for advertising and influence. They’re the loud voices in unified communications, but they aren’t the best. They aren’t the brightest. They aren’t the leaders. They aren’t the innovators. They’re the also-rans who are running in what they espouse as big numbers.

Off base? As the wrong questions of the wrong audience slanted at the wrong solutions and you will get a wrong conclusion indeed. Ont he other hand, ask any good marketing or salesperson for an honest answre, and you quickly find that an industry survey always says what somebody wants it to say. Always. Numbers and surveys can be made to say anything.

What interest me is another question – who’s behind torpedoing the real success, real value, real revenue stream and real ROI being realized every day in unified communications, and how did they sucker Forrester into their game? The list isn’t very large. I have mine. You should make your own. Consider it an exercise for the reader.

Yesterday I got into a brief conversation about complexity vs. simplification. It led to a real disconnect talking to someone with  enough experience to know better. He was explaining to me how complex networking is and why it has to be complex. And my point completely escaped him. Why? Because my point was to simple and he was one of those network-centri people who believes complexity is the rule of the day.

I explained how vendors and solution providers too often make things overly complex for bad reasons. The biggest reason is to create an arcane lexicon that keeps customers in the dark, perpetuating the illusion that networking and technology is so complex that a mystic shaman is required to understand it all. And that’s just plain horsefeathers.

This led me to think about today’s genre of tools we call social media. I detest the phrase social media. It’s nothing more than communications, but we continue to build the sense of mystery around human communication so that we can create a marketplace to enlighten the masses with our wisdom and mystical powers of understanding.

If you’re looking to one of these mystics to enlighten you, you are truly wandering in the wilderness. The basic skills and tools you need to make the most of NOW media and Internet technologies are the simplest communications skills you learned in kindergarten. In other words, you may need a little help with the mechanics of the different platforms, but you already have what you need for the operating principles.

In kindergarten, did you run around all day every day trying to make fifty new friends? I don’t think so. I know I didn’t. We build circles of friends and they grow organically based on our interests. The same holds true for Twitter, Facebook and all the rest. Let them grow naturally based on your conversations and engagement.

Simplicity is more powerful and more effective than any marketing tools, sales pitch, or magic pill you can buy. We’ve taken simplicity to heart in our lives. We’ve lightened our load on the planet. We’ve tightened up our web site look and feel again. We continue to simplify. Walking around town has become a part of our daily routine. Simple.

We’re focused on our local Walla Walla community and how we can help businesses here build. The local, or hyperlocal economy is the engine that drives the global economy. Big business is not going to provide the jobs to pull the US out of recession. Big business isn’t going to save the world. Big business isn’t going to try. Big business is about one thing, and only one thing – greed fueled by the profit motive.

Small and medium business, the macro-economy of the community is sustainable and thriving. Why? Because like a social network online, a city community is made of people engaged in one another. Invested in one another. And we get the greatest return by simply investing of ourselves.

Want to be more effective and powerful? It’s simple. Invest of yourself where you live both online and in the real world. Give your talents, resources and work efforts to the people around you and you’ll see far greater reward than in pitching a message at ten thousand nameless, faceless followers and loose connections. If you want people to invest in you, invest in them. Invest yourself.

While considering this project, it occurred to me part of what draws me here, has always drawn me here, is a sense of my own history. Walla Walla is not just a place for me, it’s a feeling. I realized during my tour for photo’s, the name Walla Walla means land of “many rivers”, but to me, Walla Walla is the land of “many opportunities”.

Join me as I share my thoughts on this beautiful little city. I believe you’ll see what I do, this truly is a special place.

As an aside, I will be bringing you new content from local businesses and people. I discovered while poking around, that while Walla Walla has certainly survived on it’s own, for newcomers to the community it’s hard to know what’s out there. Towns of this size always seem to promote things they love about themselves, but for tourists and possible new arrivals, well, there needs to be more, especially in today’s world of constant connection. People want a lot more than just a website with a lot of pictures and words. It can be overwhelming. All I can say is I’m working on it!

Here’s a little of my history:

My grandparents – Martin and Clarice Marbach at the Marcus Whitman Hotel, Walla Walla, WA.

Thanks to our pal Jeff Pulver for pointing to the video embedded here.

We’ve been recognizing lately that the media, while not stiff from rigor mortis just yet, has died.

Newspapers are a dying breed, but there’s hope, even now while they see record declines in both subscribers and in advertising revenues. No, Rupert Murdoch’s sad scheme to monetize Newscorps drivel content isn’t going to save the industry. I don’t even think it will save Murdoch or Newscorp. Old media using the broadcast “I’ll deliver, you consume what I give you” approach is as dead as the tyranoosaurus rex it once was in the industry. But local news, in communities like our Walla Walla home are thriving and growing. Why? They embrace the community rather than spew broadcast at eyeballs. Examples abound here in Walla Walla from the Union Bulletin to KWCW at Whitman College.

Advertising and PR have changed forever, but a huge percentage of the flacks don’t get that. There’s another big percentage who think they do and want to make a living telling you how to get rich in the NOW media world. Their problem? It’s actually obvious. They spew broadcast in your direction – transmit only. No receive. Zero engagement. The quality of engagement to them is still CPM and eyeballs and clicks. They don’t value you or I as people, as partners, as human. To them, you’re a click. That’s what they count. Not your thoughts. Not your ideas. Not your engagement. You are just a click.

Television ads? Ahh the big ticket, right? Did you know that only 18% of television ads manage to generate a positive ROI? Yup, most of them are nothing but a money pit. Some poor company still being sucked dry by the old media leeches draining the coffers.

Want to succeed? Listen first and sell second. Better still, engage. Draw in your audience by knowing who’s interested in what you offer and invite them to your party. As Anthony Hopkins said to Antonio Banderas in Zorro, “you must draw him into your circle.” And how do you do that in NOW media? You don’t, and that’s where the flacks get it wrong.

You do not create a community and expect people to come. You join a community and participate. Brand awareness is bunk. Awareness of anything personal, business, public or private is only created by the way you engage with those around you. And if you’re an introvert, you pay a PR flack to create a catchy ad with a kitchy song and you write a check. And you lose. And every day that goes by in the NOW media world, you lose just a little bit more.

The losses add up, and at some point, you can’t sustain them any more. That day is when the music dies for you and your company. Being reactive, creating a community and hoping people will come is a fools errand, and you aren’t a fool. You know it’s time to get off your dime and go engage with people around the world. The world is your oyster and the world is your market.

Social media? It’s a road to the global world of all of us. Time to hit the road, Jack. Now.

And if you don’t?

We’ll do a video tribute to your industry when it dies too. Just like this one for the poor walking wounded on Madison Ave who haven’t figured out yet that they’re dead.

Mobile VoIP, while slow to grow in the US, is gaining traction around the world. The US, lagging due to ongoing telecom industry regulation and carrier reluctance, is sure to follow, and we’re seeing more attention here.

Germany opens its Mobile Network for VoIP Services w/o extra charges
Today, Telefónica O2 Germany announced that it cleared the way for Voice over IP (VoIP) use on mobile phones. From today, all O2 customers can access Internet telephony services like Skype, Fring and others with the use of its O2 Internet Packs. O2 Germany will not charge any further fees for the use of VoIP services, unlike T-Mobile Germany and Vodafone Germany, which unveiled earlier this summer to introduce dedicated VoIP tariffs later this year.

One of the sleeping giants in mobile VoIP, is Truphone, a company I’ve worked with for quite some time now. Here’s what Truphone’s North America president, Tom Carter had to say:

“What we’re starting to see is the embracing of VoIP by the mobile operators. Over the weekend Verizon referenced VoIP publicly as part of their LTE trials. We see 4G players like Clearwire stating publicly that they want VoIP on their networks, which will benefit companies like Truphone. Now we have Telefonica’s German operating brand welcoming VoIP. As someone who has been banging the drum for Mobile VoIP, this is most rewarding to see.”

LTE rollouts are going to be very VoIP centric as the leading edge providers embrace the change we’ve been feeling ahead. With more traditional wireless services beginning to tap out, we’ll see more providers pull out like Quest has announced.

The next generation of mobile VoIP is headed our way and we can see it on the horizon. And I know there’s some other news ahead from our friends at Truphone that will continue driving their success.

Since we moved here, we go out for a walk almost every day. Sometimes more than once a day. We always take pictures, but don’t always send them as we walk. For many of our friends who wonder “why Walla Walla” we thought maybe you’d like to join us for a short walk and share what we see when we walk.

I’ve been following and involved with unifed communications leaders since the inception of VoIP, actively engaged in the niche for ten years. Because of my involvement, I’ve had the opportunity to become friends with some really brilliant people across the industry. Many, like me, are watchers and analysts rather than creators. The creators are the real agents of change. They’re many, and they are all too frequently overlooked by the big players in the game until they’re creations shake the foundations of the industry. I want to tell you a bit about one of these powerful agents of change, and what he’s working on. His name is Aswath Rao (@aswath).

Aswath Rao has more than 25 years of experience in the telecommunications field, having worked for leading R&D firms. He has worked on ISDN, Frame Relay, BISDN, wireless and satellite communications. For the past 10 years he has been working on VoIP related issues. Long before intelligence at the end became acceptable, he advocated “functional terminals” in ISDN. His proposal for Inter Connect Function has been incorporated in the TIPHON architecture and currently it is known as Session Border Controller. He has developed ways to offer PSTN subscribers many of the features available to VoIP subscribers.

Aswath is leading unified communications work in key ways that I see many of the major players simply missing. They’ll catch up. Aswath is one of those leaders who runs far ahead of the pack. He’s one of those people I term “scary smart” and hangs out far to the right of the bell curve. When Aswath talks, I listen. And more people should. He makes a lot of sense, but you’ll have to think about things and not make snap decisions without hearing the full idea. Do that, and you’ll miss the boat. And there are plenty of people missing the boat in our industry these days.

Aswath has two projects underway that relate to unified communications in different ways.

EnThinnai is your front porch on the web where you can store and display information that you can share with your designated buddies. From EnThinnai, you can exchange notes with your buddies, you can share files with them and you can tell them how they can contact you. Also, we will be adding other capabilities incrementally. In many respects, social networking sites offer many, if not all of the features. But in one respect, EnThinnai stands out: on other sites, your buddies have to belong to the network to be your buddy; that is not necessary in EnThinnai. If other social networking sites are like a bazaar or a bar where you meet your buddies, EnThinnai is the veranda in your house where you invite your buddies in. It is in this respect we call EnThinnai to be an un-”social networking” application.

You identify yourself and your buddies using OpenID, “an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity”. There are many providers of OpenID and you can use any of them. But please make sure that they are dependable and secure. It is also possible for you to be your own OpenID provider. You can get more information at their organization (www.openid.net).

OpenID is an initiative that gets talked about, but in the competitive sector, everyone wants their own spin on things. While momentum has been growing, the ability to manage one unique identity for logging on to anything and everything through some federated, universal identity management platform has remained almost within reach for far too long. We are moving very slowly towards achieving it, but still too slowly. Why? Because so many players want to support the open standards only if they can own the definition of the standard. Everyone wants to tweak it their way and have others come to their party. Even Google, while supporting the OpenID standards, hasn’t played by the standards. It’s been a game of one-upsmanship that is changing slowly.

I believe we will have one federated identity management platform that spans multiple services, letting us use our identity of choice to log on to many services. I think of this as our First Identity, that may come from Twitter, Facebook, Google, MySpace, our own services, or anywhere we choose in the unified identity universe. We aren’t there yet, but we will be. Aswath is focused on the OpenID standards as the route to achieve this goal.

He and I have spoken a lot lately about unified communications and precisely where unification will occur. Microsoft thinks everything will be unified in OCS. Cisco believes it will happen in Call Manager. The major players will all tell you they provide the unification and integration that is unified communications. That’s according to them, but after many years of watching them, I say they’re wrong. They’re 180 degrees off course and while they provide infrastructure (let’s call it plumbing to be really clear) for unified communications, unification, or integration will occur at one place, and one place only – at the client.

The client is our tool. It’s where we work and get things done. The platform is simply one landing place, among many, for the client. And the client in the real world of unified communications isn’t the client your grandfather used back on the IBM System/360 mainframe from the early days of computing. The most common client today, for many users, is the web browser. It doesn’t matter if you like Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or if you’re using that default browser from Redmond that everyone hates. The interactive age on the Internet has made our browser the most common software we use. Clients can also be standalone programs. They start to become important when we’re using mobile tools like iPhone/iPod, Blackberry, Nokia Tablets and the like.

I expect clients to soon be embedded software in televisions, homes, appliances, cars and just about everything imaginable that we’ll connect to the net.

Aswath’s demonstrating a live example of this on his own Unified Communications Portal. This is in short, a demonstration prototype of how unified communications tools can tie in to your small business web site or corporate intranet. But for those of us who work as independent consultants, it’s also easy to tie into your blog or other web service page. Here’s a simple view:

In case you’re missing the elegance of this, let me share a simple idea. Your business is real estate and you have six agents working in your brokerage. This tool allows each of them to share presence information and chat online with people hitting your website. Powered by EnThinnai, but using OpenID, you can instantly share presence information with the public for your business. Not just individuals, but groups. Business groups like sales, marketing, shipping and customer service.

You can easily power engagement with your customers using unified communications tools right now today. Tools not brought to you by Megabux Super Unified Communications, a company you can’t afford to do business with, but by an innovator leading the way with tools that really work. How does it work? That’s the easy part.

Insert your OpenID and talk to Aswath to find out. When you do, you’ll find power of multimedia communications is also alive and real. And available now. Today. Not tomorrow. Not smoke and mirrors. Real solutions that work while they evolve.

The reality and power of unified communications is alive and well. The source of advances and development generally aren’t housed inside mega-corporations. The best and brightest innovations, the cost effective ones that a small-to-medium business can implement cost effectively today don’t start there. They start with the agents of change who make real advances in technology.

Aswath is one of those agents of change, and I believe he’s on the right track with solution ideas that work today, and will be here tomorrow. And he knows, as I do, that they don’t cost a fortune for a business to implement.

I’ll be highlighting some other incredible agents of change in the weeks ahead, bringing you some of the brilliant people in the industry doing amazing things that you should be talking to. They’ll make your business more competitive, more viable, more interactive and stronger. And as a small-to-medium business, you should be there first. They’re where venture capitalists should be investing smart money.

This morning Ken came across a study, published this week in the Journal of Financial Economics, though originally posted as a discussion at the Financial Times, written by Daniel Ferreira and Renee Adams. 

FT:

The study, published this week in the Journal of Financial Economics, appears to contradict research into the effect of female directors in finding that, on average, companies with proportionally more women on their boards were less profitable and had a lower market value.

Businesses are under pressure to recruit more women and people from ethnic minorities to their boards, to break the stranglehold of middle-class white men.

Among FTSE 100 companies, for example, women still hold less than 12 per cent of directorships, in spite of reforms that have aimed at boosting diversity.

Their study, Daniel Ferreira and Renee Adams, which was based on a survey of nearly 87,000 directorships at 2,000 US companies between 1996 and 2003, concluded that boards with more women were more effective at tasks such as executive supervision and monitoring.

Female directors also had a better record of attending board meetings, which appeared to have a beneficial “knock-on effect” on their male counterparts.

Yet while those traits often helped badly governed companies, the Ferreira and Adams study suggests that increased monitoring can have a negative effect on well-governed businesses.

As a woman, I understand that in the executive world, when traditional male roles are taken on by females, just as women struggle to fight to the top, men fight to stay at the top.

It’s not an easy task for either side and until we reach a point where it is no longer necessary to pit one sex against the other…until the discussion is no longer happening, we will have articles like this and studies created to support one position or another.

That’s what this is about. Someone paid to have a study to what purpose? Not because it’s good for business, because business will go on regardless. No, they do these studies to keep a separation and/or segregated situation. There are clearly biases, not only sex biases, but that is what is pointed out here. From my perspective it just grows tiresome. Did we really need yet another ‘study’ done to continue to support the animosity between the sexes? The only value is to those writing it. They gain a bit of notoriety in the world of sociology.

It may be obvious, but I don’t like this sort of study. I think they should be banned. There is no value in them and there are much more important things to focus on then which sex wins in the boardroom. Plus all statistics are subjective and skewed. It’s like trying to come up with ROI of social media.

We already know there are differences in how men and women handle themselves in both industry and personal existence. To suggest that one ‘wrecks your company’ is taking us back in time instead of moving us forward. Why not accept the differences and use the strengths that exist instead of denigrating an entire subset of humans?

I guess we know why I don’t make the big bucks… but I should. )

I couldn’t help but chuckle when I saw this post from Om:

Are Competitors Eating Into Cisco’s Core?
Cisco Systems today announced that its earnings for the quarter ending July 25, 2009 slumped 46 percent to $1.1 billion from $2.01 billion a year ago. The revenues dropped to $8.5 billion from $10.4 billion. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that thing are looking up and has promised to return the company to double-digit growth.

The worst part, however has been a share decline in company’s core business — switches. The Wall Street Journal reports that the sales for Internet switches declines 11 percent to $12 billion its its fiscal year – hurt primarily due to competition from rivals such as Hewlett-Packard. Check out this little tidbit from this great Journal story on Cisco:
[Read Om's full post]

Why chuckle, you ask? A few months ago, Sheryl moderated a Calliflower call discussin the “VoIP is Dead” issue. At the end of the call, she asked for opinions on where the winners and losers were going to be this year. Most folks on the call waffled and hedged their bets with vague answers. I didn’t I was pretty strident that I thought it was going to be a very bad year for Cisco. I said they’d take a huge black eye this year.

Sure, they’ve got Linksys. But not a clue what to do with it. They grabbed up the Mino because what? Video was a hot idea that they also don’t have a clue how to manage? And then there’s telepresence. Yes, the most phenomenal video conferencing service that most of the world will never be able to afford.

End result? Cisco doesn’t even know what its core mission is any more. So now they’re losing ground in the truf they’ve outright owned for years – switching. The switching market is down, true, but Cisco revenue slumping 46 percent is pretty significant. And HP is coming on strong and rising against Cisco’s decline.

And let’s not forget Chambers said things are looking up and he promised to bring Cisco back to double digit growth. I’d like to know how he’s going to do that, but frankly, I don’t believe he’s going to be the one to do it.

Om siad “you can’t own the market forever. Beyond that, Cisco can’t own it any more.

Tonight my son was coming home. My 17 year old son. He has spent some time in Canada visiting friends and family etc. and was due home tonight. I was to pick him up at Walla Walla Regional Airport. I won’t be picking him up there, now.

My ex husband made the ticket arrangements to fly David from Northern BC to Walla Walla. It’s been done a ton of times. David was flying international, like always, and had to make a connection in Seattle to get a little commuter flight to Walla Walla. And then the trouble began.

David typically flies into Seattle or Spokane from Vancouver. Since he was flying into Walla Walla he needed to make a connection in Seattle and when he has had to do that we have always gotten him tickets ensuring there will be plenty of time between flights. This didn’t work today.

David’s flight from Vancouver arrived in Seattle at 7:10. The two flights getting him to Seattle were with Air Canada. The flight from Vancouver arrived late. His flight from Seattle was supposed to leave at 8:00, but Horizon failed to state clearly that in order to get on the flight, luggage must be checked in 40 minutes in advance, and the person flying must be checked in 30 minutes in advance. Advance of gate closure, not flight time. Gate closure is 15 minutes prior to departure. Which means, in order for David to make the flight to Walla Walla he would have needed to not only depart his plane which landed at 7:10, and have luggage in hand and checked in by 7:05. Can you guess what they said to me on the phone? There are no more flights out tonight and he will have to spend the night here.

I flew into a rage yelling that they were forcing a minor to stay in a strange city and they had no right to do that and why couldn’t they just get him through anyway…he was ONE child! Eventually I asked to speak to a supervisor who insisted it was Air Canada’s fault and we should ask them to provide a voucher for David to spend the night. I yelled again and said wait a minute. He’s a minor child in a strange city and you expect him to handle all this on his own when the airlines made a mistake and his safety is now compromised?

Finally the supervisor said we can get him on a flight to Pasco, which is an hour away, but you will have to pay the transfer fees and taxes etc. Are you willing to do that? Did she expect me to say no??? I said of course I would but it was again ludicrous I was expected to pay additional fees for a problem I had not created and a flight that is SHORTER than originally requested. Eventually she came back on the phone and said they would make an exception this one time and not charge me the additional fees and she hoped we learned a lesson. I did. Do NOT fly HORIZON or AIR CANADA!