Stardust Global Ventures

We suffer from a bad case of technological obesity. I know the is the perfect time to go with “a fat man gets onto a plane” but that’s not where I’m headed at all. Actually my train of thoughts was triggered by an encounter with Notes. Yes, I use Notes every day. It’s one of the most unsatisying experiences of my day. But this encounter, like many others, was positively draining. No I’m not going to elaborate. If you’ve used Notes, you’re already nodding your head; if not, count your blessings.

Glut and gluttony have made people in the US fat and lazy. It’s a problem impacting the health of our children. Information glut coupled with technology are suffering serious obesity problems and the business enterprise is,today plagued with obesity, clogged arteries, hypertension and general poor health. Lean and mean can only describe the smallest percentage. Enterprise business has become a middle age fat man.

Our emerging technologies are, in some ways like homeopathic medicine and healthy living. Service Oriented Architectures leverage cloud concepts to eat light in the corporate information buffet. Mobile solutions encourage exercise for the corporate mind, working outside the lines of the cubicle farm.

Today’s technologies in communications, broadband, mobility, cloud computing and the like offer a holistic life style for a healthy enterprise. An enterprise that can sustain a healthy lifestyle, making the most of each day.

I’ll be writing more on these thoughts in the weeks ahead. In my work as an enterprise architect defining next generation services and networks, I’m writing enterprise prescriptions for healthy living. I guess…the doctor is in.

Caveat: This is Ken’s opinion and post about Google Buzz. Sheryl and I have pretty different opinions and experiences. Don’t infer that she agrees with anything said here.

Last week the buzz hit the Internet to a flurry of very mixed reactions. My own reactions have been pretty mixed thus far too. Mostly the Buzz feels like a rug burn, but I want to be open about it and really give it a fair chance. I really really want to give it a fair chance.

Then there’s this:

Excuse me? Is Schmidt channeling Jerry Yang and leading Google to be the next Yahoo? Take a hundred days Eric. You can afford it. Get out of the way and let your team fix the damage. The worst thing an exec can do is pour gas on a fire, and you sound like a kid with a gas can and a book of matches. Go have a long conversation with Jyri Engestrom. By conversation, I mean go ask him what you should do, shut the hell up and listen. Take notes. Then get out of the way.

Up until today Schmidt was a long way from my list of executives in dire need of a smack with a clue-by-four. But he fought and clawed his way onto the list. Yes, one of these days, I’ll disclose who’s on the list and why. If you’ve followed for any length of time, you already know some.

Where was I? Oh yeah…Buzz. I’m left with questions. No answers. Ideas. No warm fuzzies. I see possibility. I see ego. I see the GOOG in a new light, and it’s not pretty. I could wax sarcastic about doing no evil. I could compare the sly and underhanded way Microsloth makes users de facto beta testers. I could point out how Google made a move to out Microsoft the big M by doing so openly, with a brash attitude. I could.

But that would take effort. Like Buzz, it would take more effort than any return could deliver today. I’ll save it for another time when I’ll get more out of it. And I’m saving Buzz until some time when I’ll get more out of it. More return for all the draining work it takes. Maybe. But really I’ll just step back and wait for some indication that the voices of reason, like Jyri, have been heard and somebody down at the Googleplex has done something really smart.

Creating and unleashing Buzz just because the technology made it possible does not creating a winning solution. For me, today, Buzz isn’t as big a flop as Wave, but it’s all fizzle, no sizzle. I’m putting Buzz in the hold file as something to dabble with when I’m very bored.

I’ve been busy this morning, but reading peripherally the twitstorm about user counts of tweets sent and inflated numbers. Mine currently shows I’ve tweeted 55,553 times. I know reality to be more like 18.5K, and I’m a heavier user than most Twitter accounts.

I haven’t researched this deeply. I’m not inclined to. As an enterprise architect and strategist, guiding business decisions, I can simply react. Twitter as a business tool or infrastructure element simply doesn’t exist.

We’ve all read how important Twitter is to business, although we mostly wonder if that’s true.  We may be just making it up as we go. I’ll admit that, while many won’t. But let me follow through with my thought.

If’ I’m in business and using Twitter, I want metrics. ROI. WIIFM – What’s in it for me is the biggest metric of all.

The dirty little secret of Twitter ROI and metrics is that today everyone of them is bullshit. Statistically inaccurate whimsy, fantasy and lies. Anyone who tells you otherwise should not get a piece of paper from you that says “pay to the order of.” Remember that.

If however, I am a business using Twitter, the tightest measure I’m going to track will be average return per tweet. It will be valid when it can be tracked. However, if Twitter stats inflate my numbers, Twitter invalidates itself as a tool. If my perception is that I make 4 cents on each tweet at 15K tweets, and suddenly the stats say I’ve done 60K tweets, I no longer know what Twitter’s value is. Or maybe I do. Maybe the value just went to zero, or even negative.

Twitter’s cavalier attitude about issues like this has been widely seen over three years. As they said in the  Twitter support forums, “this bug is a low priority issue because it does not prevent users from fully using Twitter. We do not expect to have this issue fixed in the immediate future for this reason.” You might read that to say “we don’t really believe we’re business capable infrastructure and neither should you.” That’s how I read it.

Think Twitter’s for business? Think again. For some business yes, but for many, it isn’t even on the radar scope. For good reason.

Is Twitter social? Absolutely
Is Twitter fun? Much of the time.
Is Twitter for business? Maybe
Is Twitter infrastructure you can either rely or measure? Not a snowball’s chance today.

Is it a technology issue? Not really. it’s a management issue. Twitter management wants to be core infrastructure at the vital level without putting in the work to earn it. They want a gimme. A pass.

I won’t give them a pass for business enterprises I advise and counsel. Play straight and call them the way they are.

Gosh people get so upset about a gadget that not only isn’t in their hands but isn’t supposed to replace current devices. This is supposed to be a new category of device. Why are people so tied to knocking a product or putting someone else’s opinion through a meat grinder?

My first thoughts on the iPad hold. I think it’s COOL! I want it. I can’t wait to own one. I would definitely be a first generation owner if I can justify throwing some money at it.

I think there are some perspectives missing from this whole discussion. Mr. Jobs said this is not a netbook, it’s not a phone, it’s not a pc, it’s something in the middle. A whole new way of doing stuff. Maybe not to the iphone user, though from all things I read and heard yesterday, there will be new things for those of us who already are familiar with that device.

I was on someone else’s site responding to comments yesterday about how I don’t think we should undervalue this new device. It seems to me, this is the future, not the past and to compare the two is not possible. They offer different strengths.

Ken made some great points to me this morning. He said this isn’t a computing device this is a connecting device. I hadn’t thought of it quite like that but that’s worth some consideration.

What about other possibilities? How about a holder that will keep it protected in the kitchen while you look up recipes? Or in the workshop where you might need to know what tool you need to do something? How about sitting on the coffee table so you can read the newspaper or as the remote for your home theater system so you don’t have to shell out 200 bucks for a remote to run it all? How many 200 dollar gadgets can it replace in an all in one new device that also happens to do some other really cool things?

Where are the futurists? We aren’t going to be sitting with a keyboard and mouse the whole rest of our lives. We’re going to be changing and evolving. We are going to be swiping screens and using our voice to do things that to now were just possibilities on the horizon. Tomorrow we’ll be doing a wide array of things we can’t even fathom. The iPad is a step toward it and a step away from where we’ve been. Am I the only one who sees that?

And another thing, to loosely use one of Steve Jobs statements, the processor in this new device was not meant to compete with a 3.8 hyper-threaded or quadcore anything. It is a different animal altogether. It is apparently as fast as anyone has seen anything run. I say WOW and COOL because it won’t heat up at the same rate as a traditional computer, won’t need the cooling system attached, and will in general require less power to run, which is FABULOUS!

My 2 cents, for what it’s worth. I don’t get all this hub bub about how scary it is to share your location with the world. We used to put our addresses in the phone book. OH NO! Who hasn’t been ’stalked’?

Just today I saw no less than 4 posts about the geolocation craze. I’m in it and loving it. My favorite quote comes from Euan Semple.

Euan wrote:

I am always surprised when people write as if they were victims of technology rather than in control of it – I guess it is a bit like email!

Why do I like this? It points out that with technology we have more choices and more options to control what we take in, or to better filter things. Expecting everyone else to accommodate us is a little arrogant. Certainly we should try not to be too disruptive, but we really do need to better handle what we take in and stop expecting others to handle it for us. Filters are a key component to our sanity in a world where we are inundated with too many choices and too much noise.

Just a little piece of my mind. I won’t be leaving too many lying around. I need them.

Technorati Tags: geononymity, sheryl breuker, filters

Every writer blogger feels compelled to spew at times. It’s one of our inner demons. We must write. This is my spew as we leave 2009 and look to the next year. If something I say here doesn’t make you angry, I will have failed miserably. If something I say here doesn’t motivate you to change how you view the world for at least one day, I will have failed miserably. If one of you reads this and takes some small action to change our world, even one, I will have wildly succeeded. Read on if you dare.

I’ve been focused on a word the last week or two that echoes in my brain. Transformation. I’ve used it a number of times lately, and as I begin writing this, I think of a friend who asked “what are we transforming?” Thank you Eran, for making me reach for an answer that came effortlessly, without thinking…the world. We are going to transform the world.

I’ve spent 30 years of my life in the tech sector. Telecommunications and networks, switches and routers, bits and bytes. Bullshit and dollars my friends. Bullshit and dollars.

Depending on how you count the decades, we’re wrapping of the decade of decadence. Gadgets and toys, we’ve got plenty.  As the song says “whoosits and whatits galore.” And with any collection of gadgets and gizmos, we’ve been awash in a sea of marketing/sales/pitch babble that has threatened to drown out our own humanity. Threatened and failed dismally.

I work in sector that’s all about information movement. It doesn’t matter whether it’s voice or data, pictures or video. It’s information and we hunger for it. Or so we tell each other. We need more. More more more. Faster. Bigger. Cooler, Slicker. New UI. Broadband. Wideband. High Definitiion. Let’s concentrate the bullshit so we can inject the essence of crap directly into our brains and a concentration of 1 million ppm. That’ll sell right? People will buy it. We’ll get rich. Then we can have more!

What a crock!

If I learned any real lessons in 2009, it came as a result of being laid off in January and spending almost the entire year looking for work. Not very successfully I might add. God has this mysterious way of slamming us to the ground hard before he let’s us bounce back. Crying uncle isn’t enough. Not really. But I’m not alone. I won’t call out the names of friends and colleagues who are unemployed or underemployed. You know I’m pulling for you every day. Just like you do for me. And every day is still a scary new beginning. But the lesson I learned this past year, is that I’m alive. I’m well. I have a wonderful woman I love by my side, and she loves me back. I have dreams. We have dreams. We have friends far and wide.

I’m not decrying technology. Not at all. We’re geek freaks and admit it. I’m a geekaholic, and it’s been 2 hours since I last lusted after some new gadget. We’re human. It’s our nature. But with technology comes a price if we pay it. We don’t have to pay it, but sometimes it’s easy to choose to pay the price. Let me explain, and I’m going to use a phrase I will abandon this year. It’s something I intend to speak about in the past tense. It was a bubble, and I’m just the prick to call bullshit and burst the damn thing. That’s right, I’m talking about the elephant in the room, social media.

There are very few more ill-conceived terms in use, but they do exist. Web 2.0. SEO. SEM. Convergence is another. They are the cornerstones of buzzword bingo. Designed to either befuddle us or set our salivary glands to drooling so we’ll write a check and buy something. Dammitall stop that foolishness. Now.

Is social media about technology? No
Is social media about business? No
Is social media about marketing? No

Dictionary.com has a number of meanings for social. Let’s just look at the first nine:

1. pertaining to, devoted to, or characterized by friendly companionship or relations: a social club.
2. seeking or enjoying the companionship of others; friendly; sociable; gregarious.
3. of, pertaining to, connected with, or suited to polite or fashionable society: a social event.
4. living or disposed to live in companionship with others or in a community, rather than in isolation: People are social beings.
5. of or pertaining to human society, esp. as a body divided into classes according to status: social rank.
6. involved in many social activities: We’re so busy working, we have to be a little less social now.
7. of or pertaining to the life, welfare, and relations of human beings in a community: social problems.
8. noting or pertaining to activities designed to remedy or alleviate certain unfavorable conditions of life in a community, esp. among the poor.
9. pertaining to or advocating socialism.

I used to talk a lot about what I called digital common sense and it’s time to get back to that. Look at the definitions and you’ll see that social is all about people and human society. It’s not about bits and bytes. It’s also not about how many followers we have or how often we get retweeted. It’s not about whuffie in any way shape or form.

Forget media. Your voice is media. Writing a grocery list uses media. Think about the core. Social is about people. What we practice online, badly for the most part, is a form of digital socialism. Did that make your back teeth hurt? That same dictionary defines socialism as

a theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, etc., in the community as a whole.

Ouch you say. Why? Does that hurt. What the Internet has given us is real democratization where every individual has voice. The real question is not what toys you have. It’s not whether you have an iPhone or Blackberry, tablet or netbook, Kindle or Nook. The question that matters is how are we using our voices?

I know you’re wondering where I fell off the planet and lost my theme of transformation right about now. So put your thinking cap on and hang on. It’s about to get bumpy for those of you selling trinkets, gadgets, and yes, services.

Fire did not transform the world. How we used it did.
Gutenberg’s printing press did not transform the world. How we used it did.
The light bulb didn’t transform the world. How we used it did.
Same for the automobile, the airplane, and countless other inventions and discoveries.

Radio and television changed us into receivers. We became fat, dumb and happy. Spoon fed by an industry created of greed that became the choke point of information that fed us what was popular. And we know that because people (advertisers) paid lots of money to spoon feed us that stuff. They changed the world in ways that are neither good nor bad at this point. Some of each.

The iPhone did not transform the world. How we use it hasn’t either. But it can.
Netbooks did not transform the world. How we use them hasn’t either. But it can.

Technology, used by people, can and does transform the world. And let me give you some examples. First, remember the story of the little girl throwing starfish into the ocean. A man told her she couldn’t make a difference in the number of starfish dying. She simply tossed another one back into the see and said “it made a difference for that one.“

Now I’ll give you some off the cuff examples of some people I met online this year. People who make a difference one person, one child, one village, one cause at a time. Transformation heroes who are out to make a difference. They’re using social tools for social causes. Helping fix broken pieces of our society and make the world a better place.

Jeff Power – Schools in Africa
Lotay Yang – Cause after cause
Pete Miller – Children, our most precious resource
Mark Horvath – Homeless people and their value
Drew Olanoff  – Cancer awareness
Alex Plank – Autism education

These folks are simply a tiny handful of the people I’ve met this year who through either little things every day, or major investments of their lives are transforming our world by using the tools of technology to bring about awareness, involvement and change.

We, yes we the people of the world, can transform the world in ways technology cannot. We’ll do it in the ways we come together to support causes, to support one another, make friends, engage, and share our lives. Technology won’t do that.

Used one way, technology is a great enabler for mankind. Lose sight of that and it becomes a great obstacle driving lust and greed. In the tech sector, I see fartoo much lust and greed. I’m too often guilty of it. If you’re honest with yourself, so are you.

What we have every day is something best illustrated by Hugh.

We reinvent ourselves every morning when we awaken. Are you awake? Who are you inventing today?
Are you inventing a marketer? Are you selling snake oil or making the world better?
Are you inventing a maker of products? Are you distilling snake oil or making the world better?
Are you inventing a commercial service? Are you selling illusions or making the world better?
Are you inventing a conference to promote hype? Are you selling tickets on a carousel or making the world better?

Many of you…many of us are far too busy building a house of cards. We chase money, success, prestige, and objects rather than real good.

2010 is a year of transformation. It’s a year of change. When we leave it on December 31, 2010, the world will be transformed. How are we all going to help?

One thing I’m going to do is pay far more attention to real change, real transformation and real commitment. Companies that do things that can changes our lives will get far more attention than bit twiddlers who can shave a penny off the cost of a phone call. Gadgets and services that are me too responses aren’t creators or innovators. I’ll do my best to either ignore them or call them out. I want to focus on the things that matter in the world.

Sure, I’m a geek. An enterprise architect. Technology strategist. Business professional in marketing and sales. But before all those things, I’m a person on this planet we call home. In 2010 I’m going to do something to make it a better place for you and me.

I’ve been thinking about the power many of us grant Twitter lately. It’s been fueled by a number of conversations and articles I’ve read. I’d like us to consider something I’ll call the Zen of Twitter.

In the visual, the little blue pie slice represents our network – our real network – the people we know that we know. Large numbers or small doesn’t matter. It’s a finite set of people we know we have an established connection with.

The larger coral section represents a larger group – the people we know that we don’t know. We aren’t connected, but we know they exist. We saw someone speak to them or of them. They were on some video we saw and mentioned their Twitter name. We know these people use Twitter, yet we have no connection. We’re simply aware they’re outside our network.

The largest slice, the green one, represents most of Twitter. The people we don’t know that we don’t know. They’re there on Twitter. Some are more active than we are. Yet we don’t know that they exist. We don’t know what they do. We don’t know their value. They could easily become part of our network, but we’re unaware of each other, so far.

Consider how much effort is spent in follower counts. It’s the holy grail for the clueless on Twitter. More is good, more is better, I need more. More, more, more.  I won’t name anyone, but the misconception that more has higher value is rampant among even the most elite of the Twitterati. And many speak of little else at times.

I’m not denigrating the value of enlarging your network, but I am going to make a point.

Twitter exists inside that pie. It’s a closed ecosystem. True, the barrier to entry is zero but let’s be realistic and not give Twitter more power than it has. I know you want me to explain that, right? Read on. (more…)

I operate under the assumption that, like many, many bloggers have half-written, partly formed (or ill formed) blog posts that never quite see the light of day. I know many people who write drafts and then never finish them. I generally don’t. Rather, I leave the ideas rattling around in my head, half-baked and unwritten. Sometimes they come back to to haunt me, demanding attention. Lack of interest, insufficient motivation or some other vague notion simply prevents me from completing my thoughts and writing the post.

Here are some examples of topics and ideas that just haven’t made it out to see the light of day for one reason or another.

• Quality of Service vs Gigabandwidth – I’m a pretty staunch advocate of QoS, which is nothing but a prioritization scheme for deciding what traffic to throw away first. How do we really determine the effectiveness of QoS given the reality of gigabandwidth? And aren’t we really almost to a transition to petabandwidth? And how useful will QoS really be in that mode?
• Why do we think 4G/WiMAX/LTE are such a big deal when we really should be talking about the future of mobile gigabandwidth? That’s our real future.
• Due diligence in development. When did we give up the idea of alpha/beta testing and decide to let others test for us? Has market demand for immediate gratification really offset the value of QA testing? It seems so in many cases, but do we have empirical data to support that. Or are we just intuiting it because it’s what we’d like to believe. And are we really just taking the lazy way out? 
• The evolution of what we call journalism. There are implications of citizen journalism and the now media that get discussed, but is there a change in journalistic integrity we simply don’t talk about? Prior research and fact finding have always been cornerstones of good journalism. Today bloggers and journalists alike seem to often simply show up for the story, with expectations that a story will present itself. Prior research and the art of investigative journalism seem to have lost their way in the NOW media. Instant gratification and the demand for “realtime news” seem to be superseding the motivation to put in the effort to investigate and prepare for many, especially bloggers who aren’t legacy journalists. And I plead guilty to being one of that group often.
• What’s happened in the culture of collaboration that led us to the idea of a team requiring UN-like consensus to move forward? When did we give every member of a team veto power with a vote. If we’re doing something innovative, new, next-generation, or exciting, shouldn’t we expect some percentage of the team, user population or audience to not like it and feel uncomfortable? Isn’t healthy disagreement still a good thing? If two people are in business and always agree on everything, isn’t one of them unnecessary?
• Why do we emotionally invest our support in startups that either don’t listen to feedback or don’t respond/acknowledge customer input and then complain? What made us so shy about pulling the plug. Instead we hang on and harp about what sucks and why we wish they’d listen or change. Why don’t we simply go somewhere else? What makes us stay so fiercely loyal to products and services that don’t give us what we want?
• Where is literacy headed? Books are being written on Twitter and Wave. Our literary world has become a 140 character sound bite. There’s an old Sioux adage about the impact of our actions on the next seven generations from now. So what will the William Shakespeare of seven generations now write in 12 characters and two emoticons that will impact generations to follow and be studied in school?

These are just a few things that rattle in my brain and haven’t made it out to posts yet. Will they? Maybe. And they may just remain half-formed thoughts and questions that never get fully explored.

The other day I posted 2009 – Ken’s Year in Review and promised I’d follow up with this requisite annual blogger’s rite, my look ahead. There may be some bumps in the road and unexpected twists here, so hang on dear reader. Put your tray table in the upright and locked position, raise your seat back and make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened. I’ve never been particularly shy or softspoken about my look at the future, and I probably won’t be now.

Disclaimer: These are my opinions alone. They don’t necessarily reflect the opinions of any employer past or present, my lovely partner Sheryl, the companies named herein, or anyone else on the planet. Your opionions and mileage may vary widely. Cheap shot comments will be tossed into the abyss, but open conversation and debate is always welcome.

Disclaimer 2: This is not only an opinionated post, it’s a long one. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Early in 2009 I predicted it was going to be the year Cisco took a big black eye. I agree, that didn’t happen. Instead they’ve taken a light bruising all year long. 2009 was a year when Cisco excelled at absolutely nothing that mattered in the market in my view. They were vanilla custard and simply didn’t matter in the market. They got off easy, and in 2010 they won’t. I said a black eye in 2009. I’ll predict a savage beating in 2010, the likes of which they’ve never felt before. I bet you’re curious where, aren’t you?

First in unified communications and VoIP space. I’d say Cisco is going to get their lunch eaten by multiple players. The Cisco solution set is pretty decent (Call Manager and the like), although their phones are forgettable. It won’t matter. I think they’ll get beaten repeatedly by Lucent, Asterisk, Mitel, and others. Even IBM, yes IBM, will cause pain for Cisco. 2010 will be the year Cisco learns how much they don’t know about telecommunications. It will be a bitter pill to swallow.

They bought Pure Digital for the Flip and they’re about to get a bunch of hype for the new Flip with built-in WiFi. I give that buzz six weeks and then they’ll take a good old fashioned, bare knuckles ass whuppin from the likes of Kodak’s Zi8 and a handful of others. More importantly, the current generation of cameras built in to mobile phones, notably iPhone and Blackberry, are likely to shift up taking another huge bite out of the whole dedicated camera market.

Then there’s Cisco’s core business – switching and routing. Coupled with some repercussions of the recent Starent acquisition and Juniper getting serious about the market, I expect some big moves in this space. Juniper will play big and strong. The big dog, Cisco, is going to get rocked back on their heels in some major networking deals in 2010. People will start to think about other options more often before simply choosing Cisco.

Oh, and John Chambers, the Rupert Murdoch of networking, will finally move on. I’ve seen his leadership at Cisco as ineffective in recent years and I expect him to move on, flying off with his golden parachute.

Then we have Yahoo. The worn and beleaguered Yahooligans will continue trickling out the door at every opportunity. There’s still a lot of talent at Yahoo and they are ripe for the picking. They don’t have that many execs left from the old days. Jerry Wang’s departure was really good for Yahoo. Replacing him with Carol Bartz was, IMHO, not a good move. Other than trying to prove her balls by swearing, she’s done nothing that I’d expect from a CEO leading a company. She needs to go. I believe in 2010 she’s out the door. She can take the flying monkees with her too.

Of course there’s Microsoft, the Gorgon with more snakes in its head than Medusa. (Yes, the irony of Gorgons being female is intentional, for a reason…read on). I expect more layoffs at MS. Significantly more. Microsoft is still a very fat company, with plenty of trimming to do. In 2010, I think they’ll do some in the right areas. They’ve missed the mark a time or two with cutbacks, and some course corrections will happen this year. OCS will do well, especially against Cisco. Momentum will gain there.

Most importantly, I think Steve Ballmer will depart. He isn’t good for MS. I think many people feel that way, but nobody says it. I expect him to leave MS and land somewhere equally visible. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s somewhere near either Redwood Shores or Pleasanton in California. ‘Nuff said.

Oh, and MS in an effort to prove they’re not evil and soften their image will place a woman in a very visible leadership role, perhaps Ballmers. We should hope it won’t be Carol Bartz, although she certainly seems to cast a flirtatious eye toward Redmond every now and then.

Yes, there is plenty more if you’re still here. (more…)

Every year bloggers around the world write two posts – the year in review and projections for the coming year. Thanksgiving seems an appropriate time to join in the annual event, and this year has some interesting areas to address.

Last year I expressed a lot of disappointment with Truphone. I still think the company has a long way to go. This year, I like many of the things they’ve done, which pleases me greatly. They’re friends and it was disappointing to see them struggling. They’re finding their way and I expect to see them continue to rise in 2010.

Twitter is everyone’s hot topic. I was very pleased to see the success of our friend @shelisrael’s book Twitterville this year. I’m far less bullish on Twitter itself. Just yesterday @biz held the annual news conference to announce that next year we’ll have a revenue model and make money. I think I’ve heard that announcement every year since I joined Twitter, and I’ve been using it longer than most. The people I think it’s important not to listen to when it comes to Twitter’s direction are the Twitter leadership team. They don’t eat their own dog food, don’t understand Twitter, and really seem to simply have hung on to the tiger’s tail this far. What they, and much of the design team at Twitter do well is break things. I still love Twitter and use it every day, but in 2009, Twitter was a boring yawner for the most part. There was zero innovation, reinvention and precious little progress of any kind. Not incremental change, but barely noticeable change. Chainging “What are you doing” to “What’s happening” simply isn’t innovation. It sends a message that says to me, we have no clue what we’re doing. If ever a service was more overvalued that Skype at the eBay purchase, it’s Twitter. Fantasy and delusion reign supreme when it comes to this simple service that simply hasn’t approached mainstream after nearly four years. No matter how wild the growth or how phantasmagorical the hype, Twitter is simply a niche tool for communications junkies.

Location based services saw some shifts. Brightkite finally did a release 2.0, but I fear it’s release 2.end in the long run. Unremarkable in every way, and broke much of the functionality. Brightkite has simply failed to ever achieve any critical mass. Google Latitude remains another fizzle. Google seems to be stuck in a half-decade development approach that’s served well enough in the past, but may raise problems for the future. More on that in another post about the GOOG later on.

Foursquare hit the scene pretty hard and is doing well. It’s on the rise, and I expect that will continue into 2010, and beyond if the trio behind it keeps moving. As LBS go, it’s the big winner with the most potential ahead. I think the game aspect of Foursquare is something that will have to be eliminated, but with the right advances, this simple service can easily lead the future in mobile LBS for mainstream adoption in the future. Monetization for this one is easy, lucrative and huge. Foursquare will be worth a fortune. Foursquare will surpass Twitter in value and popularity by 2011. More on that in another post.

There’s a sleeper company in the unified communications space that’s been on the rise for years – Voxeo. They recently got $9M in funding, and that was a good investment. While I think Twitter was ridiculously overvalued, I think the absolute reverse is the case with Voxeo. I think they’re on track for a billion dollar valuation and an enormous acquisition when the time comes. That’s right folks, there’s a $1B sleeping giant inside this little company. One with value in a trillion dollar industry that keeps doing all the right things. Watch Voxeo. (more…)

We spent the past week traveling to Washington DC for work. During that time we took the opportunity to use a new popular service called Foursquare. We’re big fans of location based services (LBS) and think they have huge potential for the future. Huge potential, but not for today in the mainstream.

A week of using Foursquare has me firmly believing that Twitter’s “What are you doing? question (recently degenerated to the 70’s “What’s happening?”) is pretty worthless until you add the “Where are you doing it?” component. Where you’re doing it leads to serendipitous meetings with friends and colleagues, old and new. More on that in yet another post.

Before I continue, I need to give a hat tip to Gartner, an organization I’m often highly critical of. Gartner has two concepts that I think fit very nicely in the analysis sphere. First is the widely acknowledged Magic Quadrant series of reports. The other is referred to as the Hype Cycle. While I think highly of the methodology in general, I’m critical of Gartner’s very narrow view. I understand they focus on the market their clients are in, and that’s appropriate. Too often people take a market segment report and apply it to the industry as a whole. Gartner simply doesn’t cover the innovative start-ups doing magical things in the tech sector, and to accept their reports as fact overlooks a myriad of facts and realities in the industry.

But in keeping with some of the hype in my reading lately and the Gartner philosophy, I give you my own personal hype cycle as it pertains to Social Media, VoIP, and mobility. It’s not complete. It’s not comprehensive. It’s a glimpse of how I see things going on today.

Let me elaborate a bit. These are simply my opinions based on thirty years of watching the tech sector and a boatload of criteria that may or may not be enumerated here as I ramble through some of my observations.

We’ll start on the right at the plateau of mainstream or very close. One might even say passe in some cases. Blogging, Skype,  YouTube, LinkedIn, etc. These are technologies that have arrived. In some cases, peaked or nearly peaked, but they are spreading into the mainstream. With the exception of SkypeHype, an uncertainty, they’re well known and predictable.

There are some you’ll disagree with, so I’ll get them out on the table. These are simply things that I see as fading from the scene or I believe they will prior to ever achieving mainstream adoption. Look for the red Xs – MySpace, Digg, Brightkite, and of course Jaiku. The surprise may be WiMAX. I see WiMAX as too expensive, too cumbersome, too light in coverage, and on the way out. Personally, I don’t think it will achieve mainstream penetration. I think Clearwire is going to continue in a one-horse race. They’ll win the WiMAX race, but I fear they’ll lose anyway because they’ll be too far behind with too much sunk cost.

There are at least two others that will rile up emotional folks. The iPhone is, in my view, past the hype and on the downward slide to disillusion. No let’s be clear, it will cycle back up and achieve solid mainstream adoption for years. It’s a winner and will be around for a long time. But in the hype cycle it’s sliding. That slide will continue before it turns a cornet at the bottom of the trough. We all have to hit bottom after a big win. The iPhone hasn’t done that yet and simply can’t plateau in the mainstream until it does.

Android is a mixed bag. I like the OS. I think it has potential. I think the hardware, those phones, peaked the first weekend on the market. I think the hardware will be the greatest failing of the OS. Android may well be another OS like BEOS, destined for  the dead media pool. That’s it’s a wonderful OS is irrelevant. That developers love it also. If the hardware sucks and isn’t adopted by the mainstream, there won’t be an audience to develop for. At best, it may live a life similar to the Sharp Zaurus – a spectacular device with a tiny niche and couldn’t ever win the major markets.

For me, the location based services are particularly interesting. Rather than elaborate here, I’ll bring those thoughts back in another post.

Keep in mind, these are just my own thoughts based on my experience. Your mileage may vary. Your opinions certainly will. If you’re especially passionate about something, leave a detailed comment or post in return and we’ll discuss it for the world to see.

I’ve been thinking a bit about influence and what that all means. Let me tell you what started this train of thought. I’ll try to keep it short.

Earlier I was looking at friendfeed and noticed one of Leo Laporte’s updates for his show and listed his guests. Most of you know I’ve been a Leo fan for many years. Leo invited me to visit his show and I went. Now I’ve told that story often enough I won’t go back into it, but what matters is that I am an original fangirl. I watched him on tech tv, listened to his radio show, have followed him from his early days in internet stardom to his growing empire today, and what struck me was that on his show one thing has remained constant. His guests are almost always the same. Oh sure he has a fairly large pool to draw from and he does switch it up when a new star hits the horizon, but it’s sort of like a green show. He recycles all his guests from year to year, other than those shiny new stars, like Ev or Biz.

The last couple of weeks twitter got a new feature called lists. We now have the ability to create lists where we get to categorize people where we want to see them or where we think they fit. Tonight Robert Scoble tweeted:

I agree. Not everyone should be in such a list. There are several reasons that’s the case but the most important one is because not everyone is a social media guru. However, if Robert wanted someone in his list to be there, that is certainly his business.

Still, this created yet more thoughts and I even tweeted back to Robert a couple of them: following up with: Which brings me to my basic thought processes and something that came to me all at once.

Robert Scoble is a nice enough guy. He is what most people would term fairly influential. So is Leo Laporte. Both nice enough guys who work pretty publicly and influence a lot of people and even get them to change their minds. What they aren’t is always right. They are human. They are fallible. They may have influence, what we see as clout, but when it comes to making a list the same people will be on their lists. The same people will be invited to their parties, and hang out with them at the bar in the *name a famous hotel* in Half Moon Bay or Petaluma. They both appear to be real people who really engage, but you and I both know there is a limit to that engagement. If you don’t live near them, don’t attend the same parties, don’t regularly socialize in the circles they socialize in you aren’t one of them and you won’t be on the massive insider list that only they have the ability to build and create influence with.

That’s a fact. Dispute it, disagree but it is what it is. We aren’t the insiders. We are regular people who may be every bit as intelligent as the people on those lists, but through whatever forces that be, aren’t as influential. I own it. Do you?

Technorati Tags: Robert Scoble, Leo Laporte, Sheryl Breuker

When I started pondering this post, I began with something I wrote so long ago it’s mostly vanished into the Wayback Machine. It was sometime in early 2006 I wrote a post entitled Death by Powerpoint on my old Digital Common Sense blog. While I still own that domain, and there’s some backup somewhere, I blew the content offline long ago. I’m not at all convinced I have any responsibility to maintain old links and content like that. It was mine to kill. And it’s still in the Wayback Machine somewhere because I found this excerpt, which I share to set the foundation for my initial thinking:

PowerPoint as a tool has destroyed much of our critical thinking process. We have become a society of bullet points (3 per slide) that’s increasingly incapable of completing the thought process. And it isn’t because the tool is bad. It’s all in how we use or abuse it. PowerPoint has made it too easy for people to project slide after slide and bullet after bullet of boredom ad nauseam . . . Critical thinking and analysis is being pushed into the background.

Slides should be simple. To paraphrase Einstein, make your slides as simple as possible, but no simpler. Don’t read them. If your audience can read you’re not doing them any favors by reading the slide. And you’re boring the hell out of them. The value a speaker brings is that penchant for speaking extemporaneously about the topic on the slide. To add value. Yes, if you’re presenting material, you need to add value to the material. If all you’re doing is blasting slides and reading them, you are wasting your audience’s precious time. I can tell within 3 slides if I’m going to be engaged or bored in a presentation and I’m rarely wrong.

Elaborate
Elucidate
Engage
Elegant

Elaborate on details not in the slide. A PowerPoint slide is a skeleton. It’s a framework for discussion. It’s the means, not the end. Your role as the presenter is to put meat on the bones and flesh things out. You provide the context and weight that can’t be conveyed in a slide with three bullets. If you don’t, you’re wasting your audience’s valuable time. Elucidate to trigger thinking. Slides that are effective are those that raise questions. A slide with three boring, obvious points says nothing. A slide that triggers a “WTF” reaction from the audience, followed by clarification has impact. It makes people think. You are the catalyst to trigger neurons firing across synaptic gaps. Don’t state the obvious over and over and bore your audience into a comatose stupor. Engage the audience. Get active participation. In large groups, find engagement
behind the eyes. Tickle and tease. Tell a story. Lead the audience down a path. Make them think…. If
your audience can’t read your slides, you’re wasting their valuable time.

This was written from lessons learned teaching very technical courses for a number of years. You don’t teach a week long class on Frame Relay at the bit level and read slides. In fact, when you teach like I did, you run 165 slides a day and never look at them when you teach. The value lies in the presenter, not the handout, but I digress.

PowerPoint has in so many ways dumbed down business in the US. We have become a business community of three bullet slides, with one goofy picture. It’s the core of almost every presentation. (more…)

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?
(more…)

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. )