Bizwerk

Show not tell

2006-01-11T17:14:00.000-08:00

"You can no longer tell people about your brand; you have to let them experience it."

- Esther Dyson

Two obvious secrets

2005-12-29T12:49:00.000-08:00

A great observation on Seth Godin's blog:

The two obvious secrets of every service business

every one...

1. Take responsibility

2. Pay attention to detail

The thing that's so surprising is how little attention is paid to these two, how often we run into people (business to business or b2c) who are totally clueless about them.

You'd be stunned to see a hotel clerk stealing money from the till or a bartender smashing bottles or a management consultant drawing on the client's wall with a magic marker. But every single day, I encounter "that's not my job" or "our internet service is outsourced, it's their fault." More subtle but more important are all the little details left untended.

All the magazine ads in the world can't undo one lousy desk clerk.

All businesses are service business and experience is the product...

He says 'every one' at the beginning of the blurb, and he's right. I also think there are a lot of software products out there that don't understand that they aren't actually products, they are services -- and this is especially true of social software. Many companies launch their web "products" and then walk away, not understanding that after launch their job has just begun, requiring daily -- sometimes 24-hrs a day -- hands-on management and unflinchingly constant attention. Social software only works when the trolls and spammers are instantly squashed, good contributions rewarded, people listened to and provided with what they need.

Another thing: props to Seth and team who have built out Squidoo, which I have been following for a while. Have a look around; they're doing so many things right.

Mashup Camp

2005-12-27T17:30:00.000-08:00

David Berlind is spearheading an 'unconference' initiative called 'Mashup Camp'. A lot of the so-called "Web 2.0" conferences have a traditional top-down talking head format, and he thinks that if all the hackers came, brought their laptops and hunkered down together for a few days, some great new things could be built, connections made, ideas spawned. I love it!

Watch the Mashup Camp site (nothing there yet) for future details.

Delicious and Digg

2005-12-12T15:35:00.000-08:00

You can probably guess from the content here that this post has been sitting in my drafts folder for a long time. :-)

Yes! Yahoo has acquired Flickr's sibling company del.icio.us (which you may have noticed, is now accessible using the Delicious.com domain as well). We're whooping it up on the inside, from which vantage point watching the evolution of Yahoo is the most fun.

People have been discussing the parallel plots of Digg and Delicious, including my pal Marc on the O'Reilly Radar blog. He posted this map from Alexa, which, after the Yahoo announcement has put Delicious up in the peaks. But prior to the announcement they were neck-and-neck. I've been watching this too, having some interest in it myself.

Delicious is designed to be completely about the links. You can add text if you want, but most people don't: they just save the link, giving it their implicit "vote" or "seal of approval". Their "popular" links on the right side of the page is a look into their database. Digg, on the other hand, is explicitly designed to promote a link, and the links that are Dugg float to the front page. The author provides a title and description and the links with merit, having been Dugg by various Diggers, it rises to the top -- and some of this has to do with how well the user "sold" the link, i.e., did they write an attention grabbing headline and description?

I like Digg, not least because they have a beautiful UI, with the lovely "124 Diggs" in the big square box, a UI innovation I've seen replicated on bunches of sites, including Flock. My question is how long Digg can sustain the quality. Watching Slashdot and Metafilter, two similar sites whose members contribute links and descriptions, and sustain comments, it seems as if there is a sweet spot where the # of contributors vs. # of commenters are maximizing quality. And there seems to be a hazard with attention inciting inanity -- people write comments on Slashdot just to say stuff like "It looks stupid, I'm not even going to try it" just to get their name or POV up there, and these tend to take over after a while, as the thoughtful contributors move elsewhere. Individual blogs tend to maintain quality, especially in comments, as there is one benevolent dictator to keep the rabble in line. In some respects, a community site such as Digg's real value will come from the ferocious defense of quality, the weeding out of "It looks stupid" comments and relentless suppression of spam.

Blog Archives and Living Ideas

2005-12-11T15:29:00.000-08:00

I was having a conversation with Bob Baxley a few months ago about how the structure of Flickr makes it possible for people to continue to discover and view "old" photographs -- photographs that had been uploaded months or years before. These usually surface through tag surfing, or searches, or groups, or personal tag maps, or the feature on the explore page that shows the most interesting photos from a year before.

Usually, in a blog format, old photos, or old blog posts don't get a lot of a traffic. Most traffic is reserved for the most recent post, and regular readers of the blog are assumed to have already read what is in the archive. Blogs don't really accommodate *new* users -- who are arriving for the first time. The tag maps that people have been adding to their sites (see the one at the top of We make money not art) help with this problem, while simultaneously providing a snapshot of the interests of the blog authors.

If you know of any interesting blog designs that address this kind of issue, please post it in the comments.

Web 2.0 conference

2005-10-06T10:02:00.000-07:00

My favorite moment at the Web 2.0 conference was recorded on my other blog, but there's been plenty of good stuff being presented and discussed. Yesterday a bunch of companies launched their sites, and they all bear some investigation:

• Zvents built by Ethan Stock and team -- I met Ethan when he was working with a consulting company a few months ago, so I don't know how long they've been developing zvents. They had a really impressive "post to blog" event feature, which drew a lot of oohs and aahs from the audience.

• Real Travel is a company that associates a social network with contributions from travellers on their experiences: where to go, where to eat, how to get there.

• Rollyo was launched by Dave Pell, who made a lot of funny jokes and was generally very entertaining. It aggregates various sites into a "Searchroll" and searches just those. They did a superb job with the UED, and I'm impressed with their method of creating semi-celebrity "Searchrolls" to help people grok the product.

• Bunchball has built a social platform for play. Flash developers can put their games onto the platform, and generate revenue from them. I'm on the Board of Advisors with Andrew Anker and have a lot of confidence in these guys and their vision.

• Zimbra, and open source email client got a bunch of ooohs and ahhhs from the audience, as well as spontaneous bursts of applause. They demo'd an email that used the very best of all the web mashups: a date in an email would generate a pulldown menu of your calendar; an address, a map, and a Fedex tracking number the date, sender and status of the package. Phenomenal.

Today we've heard from Terry Semel, CEO of Yahoo, Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla Foundation, Jonathan Schwartz, CTO of Sun, and the list goes on. Mary Meeker is on now; she's showing us som fantastic stats. I want this deck.

Upcoming.org

2005-10-06T09:41:00.000-07:00

I couldn't be happier to welcome Andy, Gordon and Leonard into the Yahoo! fold, with the recent acquisition of Upcoming.org. They are some of the web's most brilliant web developers and grok completely the newfangled web we're all in the process of building in this Brave New World. I'm thrilled that my new parent company is continuing to make smart moves along the paths of openness, community and personalized content, and these guys are right at the heart of it.

Congratulations abound, and this is just one of many, but cheers! Congratulations! My favorite comment is from Andy's Mom.

Emerging from this acquisition more discussion, from David Is Yahoo more Web 2.0 than Google?.

Google releases astonishingly bad Blog Search

2005-09-14T08:38:00.000-07:00

The much anticipated Google Blog Search was released today, and now I understand why it was held back for so long. As I've heard, it was being developed for the past 3 years, and has been "on deck" for over a year. Evaluating blog search is hard (evaluating any kind of search is hard), but generally blog search optimizes for either freshness or relevance in actual blog posts, or toggles between the two. You can do that here, but Google blog search is apparently optimized for neither -- its stated purpose is finding blogs on a certain topic, and boy is it bad at that. But what it mostly it delivers is blog posts. Take my search for "celebrity". There's a small chunk at the top giving the "related blogs" to that search, but then the rest of it is classic keyword matching:

Related Blogs:
Celebrity Baby Blog - The only website devoted to celebrity babies (and their parents)!
Celebrity Baby Blog - The internet's only source dedicated to Celebrity Babies!
Hollywood Rag - Celebrity Ragazine - http://www.hollywoodrag.com/index.php/weblog/index/
Celebrity Calls - http://spaces.msn.com/members/calls/
{ KOREAN + celebrity } - Korean Entertainment @ LiveJournal

Oxfam Auction - grab celebrity seconds
5 hours ago by Katie
Oxfam's Suffolk division is due to hold a charity auction of various bits of celebrity jumble. It's being held on the 1st October in Woodbridge, Suffolk.
Sk8 er-girl Avril Levigne (or Lasagne as the Bayraider gang prefer to call her) ... Shiny Shiny - http://www.shinyshiny.tv/

SNL Celebrity Jeopardy
1 hour ago by Best Week Ever
"Here's the entire collection of all 13 "Celebrity Jeopardy" episodes on Saturday Night Live. Enjoy!" Relive your favorite SNL Celebrity Jeopardy moments. I pose a conundrum to you, a riddle if you will. What's the difference between ... Best Week Ever Blog - http://bestweekever.blogs.com/best_week_ever_blog/

Celebrity Fit Club
8 Sep 2005 by Jeanne
The other night while exercising on my recumbent bike, I turned the basement TV set on and watched back-to-back reruns of Celebrity Fit Club on VH1. Talk about a motivator. There is something about watching washed-up celebrities trying ... Out and Back - http://outandback.typepad.com/my_weblog/

I can't see any reason to switch, Technorati's recently release Blog Finder has gone further down the road in the direction I want to go. It's not perfect, but you can see where it's going.

Decisions based on Intuition vs. Data

2005-09-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

In today's Sunday New York Times, there is an article in the business section devoted to Sanford Weill, of Citigroup. There I find this quote:

He was largely intuitive and his deals didn't come from plotting, planning and study; they came from his own instincts and connections.

And in the eGang group this month, Barry Diller explained why he bought his first web company, Hotels.com: he wasn't sure why, "It was nothing but instinct." In contrast, the biography of another self-made billionaire, Warren Buffett, starts with a description of how obsessed he is with numbers, with data, with information.

One of the questions a colleague of mine asks in job interviews is, On a scale of 1 to 10, do you make decisions based on data (1) or intuition (10). I liked this question. I answered 10. I make my decisions almost entirely based on intuition. Data, as I see it, can be molded to fit any agenda, and is based only on the past. Most decisions will impact only the future. Data is a good slave, but a poor master. And of course, there are decisions you have to make based entirely on data, i.e. this insurance policy provides the same coverage as that insurance policy, but is $500 cheaper.

The interview question is a bit of a trick question, however. It is more of a test of the person's ability to make decisions, to be decisive. The worst answer you can give is 5.

Glocalization and Web 2.0

2005-09-05T22:05:00.000-07:00

Yes! We've all been circling around what "Web 2.0" really means, and I think Danah has gotten to the heart of it in her latest blog post. All this talk about read/write and user-generated content and people finding what pertains directly to them: she sums it up quite beautifully:

In business, glocalization usually refers to a sort of internationalization where a global product is adapted to fit the local norms of a particular region. Yet, in the social sciences, the term is often used to describe an active process where there's an ongoing negotiation between the local and the global (not simply a directed settling point). In other words, there is a global influence that is altered by local culture and re-inserted into the global in a constant cycle. Think of it as a complex tango with information constantly flowing between the global and the local, altered at each junction.

During the boom, there was a rush to get everything and everyone online. It was about creating a global village. Yet, packing everyone into the town square is utter chaos. People have different needs, different goals. People manipulate given structures to meet their desires. We are faced with a digital environment that has collective values. Nowhere is this more noticeable than in search. For example, is there a best result to the query "breasts"? It's all about context, right? I might be looking for information on cancer, what are you looking for?

A global village assumes heterogeneous context and a hierarchical search assumes universals. Both are poor approximations of people's practices. We keep creating technological solutions to improve this situation. Reputation systems, folksonomy, recommendations. But these are all partial derivatives, not the equation itself. This is not to dismiss them though because they are important; they allow us to build on the variables and approximate the path of the equation with greater accuracy. But what is the equation we're trying to solve?

Slowly but surely consumers are being taught the value of open systems that the hackers intuitively understood 40 years ago.

2005-08-15T19:08:00.000-07:00

Is this true? I hope so.

A VC posts about openness, and the hacker ethic of the 60s:

I've been reading Steven Levy's Hackers.

There is this great story where the hackers at the AI Lab at MIT are being forced to use a time sharing system on their beloved PDP-6 and they are in revolt.

So Ed Fredkin, who runs the lab, enlists Richard Greenblatt to create a new "hacker friendly" time sharing system. Richard enlists Ted Nelson and the two of them hack together a new time sharing sysem in "weeks of hard core hacking". They called this system ITS, for "incompatible time sharing system".

The reason for mentioning this is that ITS was completely open. It had no passwords. It was completely extendable. Anyone could add features to the system. It was designed specifically so that everyone could look at everyone else's work.

ITS was built in the late 1960s.

Almost 40 years later we are finally seeing the "hacker ethic" arrive in consumer software and services.

When we were trying to explain difference between Shutterfly and Flickr. When we were explaining the difference between Flickr and Shutterfly/Ofoto/Snapfish to users we often claimed that those services were "holding your information hostage" -- they were. Photo sharing was "free" -- but it was really a loss leader for photo finishing services. Photo sharing was the wide mouth of the funnel that led you to print your photos -- and that meant you could not access the high-res originals that you yourself had uploaded. These were kept away from you (and your friends and family) so they could charge you for prints.

People should own their own data, and interestingly, openness goes two ways. people own their own data, they are more willing to share their stuff. The examples that he gave in his post, the blog post, the public photos tagged with "Vietnam".

Wikitorial Failure

2005-07-27T22:42:00.000-07:00

On the LA Times and the Wikitorial:

A quote, I thought was worth calling out:

It was doomed to fail, because communities can't be created by editorial structures - editorial structures must be created by communities.

This is a classic failing of old school media thinking. Sure, folks could build on top of the Times' editorials, but then again, why would they? The reason folks build stuff is to build it together, and to do that, they have to know one another, have a shared set of mores, have a conversation that is already going.

A far better approach would have been to create a platform for readers to create their own communities. Leaders will emerge, voices will break out, and conversations will get started. Then the community itself will have a sense of ownership of the media, and begin to moderate out the trolls. It's one thing for the LA Times to kill the trolls - that feels like censorship. It's another for the community itself to do it.

In Defense of Design Dictators

2005-06-22T21:26:00.000-07:00

You don’t do good software design by committee. You do it best by having a dictator. From the user’s point of view, you must have a coherent design philosophy, and I don’t see how that could come about from open source software. The person who’s done it best is Steve Jobs, and he’s well-known for being a tyrant.

-- Don Norman

Surfacing Aging Content

2005-06-20T19:37:00.000-07:00

One of the strengths of blogs is that the freshest content is at the top of the page. Indeed, it was this design convention above all others, that led to the blog explosion. I remember having conversations with other people who published zines and personal soap boxes circa 1998 about the importance of updating content at least once a week. Otherwise people wouldn't check back to the site. The other thing we did in those days was send an email announcement when we'd updated our sites, back before our inboxes were what they are now.

I was having a conversation with Bob Baxley the other day about the importance of surfacing aging content. A lot of really great content on blogs tends to languish unread once it's dropped off the front page. One of the things that happens with Flickr is that I notice when visiting my "new comments" page is that people are commenting on photos, adding them to their favorites, and viewing photos that are often more than a year old. And the reason for this is that people are finding the photos in ways other than my chronological photostream: they are finding them through tag searches, or when browsing group pools.

There are a bunch of blogs out there that append a list of their categories on the sidebar, like Common Craft, which I visited today. Tech Ronin not only links the categories on the side, she links them under each post, as well as tagging them and linking back to the Technorati tag page (and let me take this moment to congratulate Technorati on their new launch!). I'd be willing to bet the content on blogs with such link practices stays alive in ways that the content of mine do not. As blogs enter their teenage years, and many people have 6-7 years of posts, surfacing this stuff will be more important.

I'm also thinking a great thing to build would be a flexible blog post microformat that can delaminate blogs from their native domains and aggregate all posts by tag or category in an RSS reader.

Building Trust

2005-06-14T22:13:00.000-07:00

The business of the future -- indeed the business of the present -- depends on a network of trust virtually devoid of personal histories and relationships.

Building Trust, by Fernando Flores & Robert Solomon

Niklas Luhmann says trust is a way of managing complexity, and that trust permits us to operate in an increasingly complex world -- especially in a global economy, and on the internet. I've often said that the reason that the internet is changing, and the reason that software such as Flickr is possible is that the psychology of the average internet user has changed. People have seen a lot of blogs, and perhaps have started one. They've joined social networking sites such as Friendster or My Space and have created an online digital identities for the first time. They've bought something on eBay, paid their taxes online, met someone on Nerve. They've gotten confident enough in the internet that they've been willing to contribute their own photographs and music and art. The main thing that has changed is that they trust the internet more, and when you trust, you are able to give.

Congratulations Technorati!

2005-06-10T01:27:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to the team at Technorati, for their fantastic new beta release. Starting with the new logo treatment and extending to the new site features, I love how the new design really shows you all the stuff that Technorati is capable of in a single glance. It's an art to make things the complex simple, ask Mingus.

Well done, Derek & Co.!

They give you free juice at Google so you can actually get some work done

2005-06-07T15:14:00.000-07:00

Like Paul, this was one of my favorite quotes from the surreal NY Times article on how much money everyone supposedly has out here.

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the billionaire co-founders of Google, were [at the party], so [Andreessen] was able to amuse himself by watching the valley's newest kings as they met their public.

The scene made him think of a study by a Duke University professor that has long fascinated him: monkeys were willing to forego substantial amounts of fruit juice (''That's like crack cocaine to monkeys,'' according to Andreessen) just to stare at a picture of one of their brood's alpha monkeys. ''There was this mob effect around Larry and Sergey,'' Andreessen recalled when we met for a late breakfast one morning at his favorite hangout in a strip mall near his Palo Alto office. ''The pair would try to move, but the crowd just surged with them.

The Very Worst

2005-05-31T23:42:00.000-07:00

The Worst Web Application in the World. Stewart and I laughed out loud for the second blog post in a row as we read through this post. Thanks, Doug, for walking us through that little piece of hell.

Merlin's Web 1.0 Summit

2005-05-18T22:41:00.000-07:00

I laughed out loud. The comments are great too.

Mixing oldbies and newbies

2005-05-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

Old players and new players make the best teams, according to this article. I've read this somewhere else as well -- I think in The Wisdom of Crowds -- it's important, when building teams, to have some people who are new, who haven't drunk the Kool-Aid, who don't really understand what is going on.

In a paper to be published April 29 in the journal Science, Northwestern University researchers turned to a different type of team -- creative teams in the arts and sciences -- to determine a team's recipe for success. They discovered that the composition of a great team is the same whether you are working on Broadway or in economics.

The researchers studied data on Broadway musicals since 1877 as well as thousands of journal publications in four fields of science and found that successful teams had a diverse membership -- not of race and gender but of old blood and new. New team members clearly added creative spark and critical links to the experience of the entire industry. Unsuccessful teams were isolated from each other whereas the members of successful teams were interconnected, much like the Kevin Bacon game, across a giant cluster of artists or scientists.

"Do people go out of their way to collaborate with new people?" said Luís A. Nunes Amaral, associate professor of chemical and biological engineering and the corresponding author on the paper. "Do they take this risk?

"We found that teams that achieved success -- by producing musicals on Broadway or publishing academic papers in good journals -- were fundamentally assembled in the same way, by bringing in some experienced people who had not worked together before. The unsuccessful teams repeated the same collaborations over and over again."

It's hard to say why this works. Perhaps the introduction of new practices and habits enlivens a group. Maybe a newbie, needing a lot of coaching and assimilation causes a group to better define itself and its objectives. Maybe people who frequently work with new people have a propensity for collaboration, or an innate social intelligence. (via Kottke.)

Donald Norman Defends Cheating

2005-05-09T18:49:00.000-07:00

A great quote by Donald Norman snagged from Foe:

...In real life, asking others for help is not only permitted, it is encouraged. Why not rethink the entire purpose of our examination system? We should be encouraging students to learn how to use all possible resources to come up with effective answers to important problems. Students should be encouraged to ask others for help, and they should also be taught to give full credit to those others...

Consider this: in many ways, the behavior we call cheating in schools is exactly the behavior we desire in the real world. Think about it. What behavior do we call cheating in the school system? Asking others for help, copying answers, copying papers.

Most of these activities are better called networking or cooperative work...

In a system where copying is punished, the student feels compelled to lie. Suppose that copying were encouraged honest copying, where the source must be revealed. And suppose that both the copier and the originator of the material were rewarded, the originator for their contribution and the copier for knowing where to seek the information. This would reinforce the correct behaviors, minimize deceit, and encourage cooperativeness...

Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness

2005-04-22T01:03:00.000-07:00

I'm enjoying the new O'Reilly Radar, blog, and am intrigued by this post by Tim on Non Obvious Relationship Awareness:

.... Jeff Jonas [is the] founder of System Research and Development (SRD), the data mining company that made its name in Las Vegas with a technology called NORA (Non-Obvious Relationship Awareness) -- software that would alert casino security, for instance, that the dealer at table 11 once shared a phone number with the guy who is winning big at that same table....

His current focus is "anonymous entity resolution" -- the ability to share sensitive data without actually revealing it. That is, by using one-way hashes, you can look across various databases for a match without actually pooling all the data and making it available to all. As you can imagine, solving this problem is fairly critical to the government if they want "total information awareness" while maintaining citizen privacy and some semblance of civil liberties.

O'Reilly Radar also led me to this great post on Object-centred Sociality, with which, it is probably pointless to say, I very much agree. :) I'll have to check out The Practice Turn in ContemporaryTheory by Karin Knorr Cetina. I just ordered it.

Community Building

2005-04-15T19:48:00.000-07:00

What does it take to be Flickricious? Sony might find out.

Absolutely, Mr. Sony, don't shut the PSP hackers down! This kind of hacking is the scrimshaw of the computer age, and if you suppress it, you'll lose a huge opportunity to connect meaningfully with people.

As for the question, with how many users does the meaningful commmunity activity begin, I'd have to say it doesnt matter how big the community is -- on Flickr we saw this kind of spontaneous participative creativity arising when there were only the first 300 or so users, and I've seen this happen in online groups as small as 10 -- and this on a mailing list.

These kinds of communities are not as "step out of the way and let the community do its thing" as the article would suggest. First the community has to come into existence, and while this looks easy, it's actually a very difficult thing to get going, as the many companies who have attempted to create online communities will attest.

In the beginning, the creators of the community space have to create the tone and attitude of the place, set the parameters of what is and what is not allowed, and participate heavily, engaging directly with other people, mercilessly kicking/banning trolls, creating a real sense of there being a there there. Friendster, and the banning of "Fakesters" is often used as an example of a misunderstanding of online community -- but I think this misunderstanding went back further, to the beginning. I was an early member of Friendster and, the first message I got was from the founder. "How do you like the service?" he asked, and not -- and this is really the crux of it -- "Pynchon! Man, how can you read that stuff! DeLillo is 10X better." or "ZEPPELIN ROX! Zoso is my *so* favorite album!!!" I'd filled out a profile. See what I mean?

Like Sasquatch

2005-04-10T21:29:00.000-07:00

Paul Kedrosky, on his blog Infectious Greed (a must-read!) contemplates the difficulty VCs have in finding the Successful Serial Entreprenuers.

It is admittedly a guess, but my hunch is that for every ten entrepreneurs who has a seven-figure exit from their first venture only five or six bother to try again. And for every ten that has an eight- or nine-digit success the number of repeats falls even faster, rapidly heading towards one -- or, asymptotically, toward zero. (Granted these ratios change from country-to-country and era-to-era, but it is a good first approximation.)

Why the die-off in repeat entrepreneurs? Because frankly, even entrepreneurs are prone to saying no mas. Faced with the idea of 18-hour days and seven-day work weeks people are happy to sit on boards, advise other companies, travel, become venture capitalists, ski, fix their house, do angel investing, and so on. They don't feel as obliged as entrepreneurship dogma says they do to do it all again. After all, if they were more eager to do it again then it wouldn't be so darn hard as a venture capitalist to find more successful serial entrepreneurs -- they'd be everywhere, and they sure aren't.

As several people wrote in -- and I think this it's true -- the ones I know of are off funding their own companies far from the VCs rapacious grasp.

2005-04-06T00:17:00.000-07:00

A story in the MIT Technology review about "which emerging technologies are the most important for their nations’ societies and economies, and to explain what makes these technologies uniquely characteristic of their countries", What matters most depends on where you are.

Each country reveals its own preoccupations, usually born out of its peculiar history and current circumstances. Leave it to the Dutch, for example, to pour computer modeling resources into the management of water and soil—endeavors without which the Netherlands’ very existence would be imperiled. The United States has measured the value of R&D projects largely by their potential for adding to the nervous nation’s power to fight wars and defend against terrorist attack. In Germany, home of the world’s first superhighways and some of its most storied carmakers, it’s no surprise to see projects aimed at making driving safer and smarter.

It's a Flat World After All

2005-04-05T21:08:00.000-07:00

It's a small world, after all by Thomas Friedman.

Some of the good parts:

''Outsourcing is just one dimension of a much more fundamental thing happening today in the world,'' Nilekani explained. ''What happened over the last years is that there was a massive investment in technology, especially in the bubble era, when hundreds of millions of dollars were invested in putting broadband connectivity around the world, undersea cables, all those things.'' At the same time, he added, computers became cheaper and dispersed all over the world, and there was an explosion of e-mail software, search engines like Google and proprietary software that can chop up any piece of work and send one part to Boston, one part to Bangalore and one part to Beijing, making it easy for anyone to do remote development. When all of these things suddenly came together around 2000, Nilekani said, they ''created a platform where intellectual work, intellectual capital, could be delivered from anywhere. It could be disaggregated, delivered, distributed, produced and put back together again -- and this gave a whole new degree of freedom to the way we do work, especially work of an intellectual nature. And what you are seeing in Bangalore today is really the culmination of all these things coming together.''

At one point, summing up the implications of all this, Nilekani uttered a phrase that rang in my ear. He said to me, ''Tom, the playing field is being leveled.'' He meant that countries like India were now able to compete equally for global knowledge work as never before -- and that America had better get ready for this.

Nilekani is the CEO of InfoSys in Bangalore.

''Today, the most profound thing to me is the fact that a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want,'' said Marc Andreessen, a co-founder of Netscape and creator of the first commercial Internet browser. ''That is why I am sure the next Napster is going to come out of left field. As bioscience becomes more computational and less about wet labs and as all the genomic data becomes easily available on the Internet, at some point you will be able to design vaccines on your laptop.''

I'm cutting and pasting all this because whenever I read a great article on the Times web site, they take it down so I can't get back and refer to it:

How did the world get flattened, and how did it happen so fast?

It was a result of 10 events and forces that all came together during the 1990's and converged right around the year 2000. Let me go through them briefly. The first event was 11/9. That's right -- not 9/11, but 11/9. Nov. 9, 1989, is the day the Berlin Wall came down, which was critically important because it allowed us to think of the world as a single space. ''The Berlin Wall was not only a symbol of keeping people inside Germany; it was a way of preventing a kind of global view of our future,'' the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen said. And the wall went down just as the windows went up -- the breakthrough Microsoft Windows 3.0 operating system, which helped to flatten the playing field even more by creating a global computer interface, shipped six months after the wall fell.

The second key date was 8/9. Aug. 9, 1995, is the day Netscape went public, which did two important things. First, it brought the Internet alive by giving us the browser to display images and data stored on Web sites. Second, the Netscape stock offering triggered the dot-com boom, which triggered the dot-com bubble, which triggered the massive overinvestment of billions of dollars in fiber-optic telecommunications cable. That overinvestment, by companies like Global Crossing, resulted in the willy-nilly creation of a global undersea-underground fiber network, which in turn drove down the cost of transmitting voices, data and images to practically zero, which in turn accidentally made Boston, Bangalore and Beijing next-door neighbors overnight. In sum, what the Netscape revolution did was bring people-to-people connectivity to a whole new level. Suddenly more people could connect with more other people from more different places in more different ways than ever before.

And more: Six Flatteners: Outsourcing, Offshoring, Open-Sourcing, In-Sourcing, Supply-Chaining, Informing.

The fact that the Y2K work could be outsourced to Indians was made possible by the first two flatteners, along with a third, which I call ''workflow.'' Workflow is shorthand for all the software applications, standards and electronic transmission pipes, like middleware, that connected all those computers and fiber-optic cable. To put it another way, if the Netscape moment connected people to people like never before, what the workflow revolution did was connect applications to applications so that people all over the world could work together in manipulating and shaping words, data and images on computers like never before.

Indeed, this breakthrough in people-to-people and application-to-application connectivity produced, in short order, six more flatteners -- six new ways in which individuals and companies could collaborate on work and share knowledge. One was ''outsourcing.'' When my software applications could connect seamlessly with all of your applications, it meant that all kinds of work -- from accounting to software-writing -- could be digitized, disaggregated and shifted to any place in the world where it could be done better and cheaper. The second was ''offshoring.'' I send my whole factory from Canton, Ohio, to Canton, China. The third was ''open-sourcing.'' I write the next operating system, Linux, using engineers collaborating together online and working for free. The fourth was ''insourcing.'' I let a company like UPS come inside my company and take over my whole logistics operation -- everything from filling my orders online to delivering my goods to repairing them for customers when they break. (People have no idea what UPS really does today. You'd be amazed!). The fifth was ''supply-chaining.'' This is Wal-Mart's specialty. I create a global supply chain down to the last atom of efficiency so that if I sell an item in Arkansas, another is immediately made in China. (If Wal-Mart were a country, it would be China's eighth-largest trading partner.) The last new form of collaboration I call ''informing'' -- this is Google, Yahoo and MSN Search, which now allow anyone to collaborate with, and mine, unlimited data all by themselves.

So the first three flatteners created the new platform for collaboration, and the next six are the new forms of collaboration that flattened the world even more. The 10th flattener I call ''the steroids,'' and these are wireless access and voice over Internet protocol (VoIP). What the steroids do is turbocharge all these new forms of collaboration, so you can now do any one of them, from anywhere, with any device.

The world got flat when all 10 of these flatteners converged around the year 2000. This created a global, Web-enabled playing field that allows for multiple forms of collaboration on research and work in real time, without regard to geography, distance or, in the near future, even language. ''It is the creation of this platform, with these unique attributes, that is the truly important sustainable breakthrough that made what you call the flattening of the world possible,'' said Craig Mundie, the chief technical officer of Microsoft.

There's more:

As if this flattening wasn't enough, another convergence coincidentally occurred during the 1990's that was equally important. Some three billion people who were out of the game walked, and often ran, onto the playing field. I am talking about the people of China, India, Russia, Eastern Europe, Latin America and Central Asia. Their economies and political systems all opened up during the course of the 1990's so that their people were increasingly free to join the free market. And when did these three billion people converge with the new playing field and the new business processes? Right when it was being flattened, right when millions of them could compete and collaborate more equally, more horizontally and with cheaper and more readily available tools. Indeed, thanks to the flattening of the world, many of these new entrants didn't even have to leave home to participate. Thanks to the 10 flatteners, the playing field came to them!

It is this convergence -- of new players, on a new playing field, developing new processes for horizontal collaboration -- that I believe is the most important force shaping global economics and politics in the early 21st century. Sure, not all three billion can collaborate and compete. In fact, for most people the world is not yet flat at all. But even if we're talking about only 10 percent, that's 300 million people -- about twice the size of the American work force. And be advised: the Indians and Chinese are not racing us to the bottom. They are racing us to the top. What China's leaders really want is that the next generation of underwear and airplane wings not just be ''made in China'' but also be ''designed in China.'' And that is where things are heading. So in 30 years we will have gone from ''sold in China'' to ''made in China'' to ''designed in China'' to ''dreamed up in China'' -- or from China as collaborator with the worldwide manufacturers on nothing to China as a low-cost, high-quality, hyperefficient collaborator with worldwide manufacturers on everything. Ditto India. Said Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, ''You don't bring three billion people into the world economy overnight without huge consequences, especially from three societies'' -- like India, China and Russia -- ''with rich educational heritages.''

And so on. I'm really putting this up here so you can get to it -- I've already put the whole thing into my DevonThink database.

Yes it's true

2005-03-31T11:03:00.000-08:00

Yahoo is the New Google

Yahoo is the new Google. Google is the new Yahoo. Up is down, and black is white. This spring has been very strange. Google, it seems, has jumped the shark. It has been overtaken, left standing, and not by some new startup of ultra smart MIT alumni or by the gazillions in the Microsoft development budget, but by the deeply unhip and previously discounted Yahoo.

Zopa

2005-03-08T21:38:00.000-08:00

I'm fascinated by Zopa, a kind of DIY bank, which Michael showed me today. My first reaction was that it was a dream venue for loan sharks, money launderers and con artists. But conversely, I considered all the times I'd groused about the 5 day float banks get on checks over $2,000, and the 30 days it takes to clear a US check at a Canadian bank, and thought perhaps this was just what I needed.

Right now it is only open to UK residents, and lenders are limited to loaning 25,000 pounds. Loans are distributed among 50 borrowers, to mitigate the risk. I don't know if this would fly in the US, or if banks are regulated differently here. But 1% up front, and a commission for the sale of insurance seems as good as a license to print money if they can get to scale. And I'd be interested to hear from some PayPal execs on their perspective on the risk of fraud. Here's a BBC Article as well as an article in MyFinance.co.uk.

I'll keep an eye on this one, it might be huge. It's backed by Benchmark.

Image results in search

2005-01-14T10:37:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned on my other blog, Technorati has launched the ability to search tags from Technorati, Flickr and del.icio.us -- in other words, blog posts, photos and bookmarks. Some examples: here are the search results for tags of japan, guitar and swimming.

Amazon's search A9 has added images to their search results (though the results can be less than optimal as you can see from my search on "notepad") -- something that Google, who provides the image search results, cannot do, as they've pledged fealty to the Lords of Simplicity. Most of the other new search sites have followed Google's lead, so it will be interesting, especially to us here at Flickr, as to how the integration of images with search plays out.

Yesterday's 'no comment' is tomorrow's press release

2005-01-05T23:13:00.000-08:00

Congratulations Six Apart and LiveJournal! I love it when the rumor du jour turns out to be true.

Ludicorp aka Flickr Top 10 Web Company to Work for

2005-01-01T22:06:00.000-08:00

Digital Web votes Ludicorp aka Flickr one of the top ten web companies to work for (#4 even!). Morale can't help but improve now that we're in our new office either!

The Six Myths of Creativity

2004-12-08T19:34:00.000-08:00

According to this Article in Fast Company, these are the six myths of creativity in business:

1. Creativity Comes From Creative Types
As a leader, you don't want to ghettoize creativity; you want everyone in your organization producing novel and useful ideas, including your financial people.

2. Money Is a Creativity Motivator
People put far more value on a work environment where creativity is supported, valued, and recognized.

3. Time Pressure Fuels Creativity
Time pressure stifles creativity because people can't deeply engage with the problem.

4. Fear Forces Breakthroughs
Creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively associated with anger, fear, and anxiety.

5. Competition Beats Collaboration
When people compete for recognition, they stop sharing information.

6. A Streamlined Organization Is a Creative Organization Creativity suffers greatly during a downsizing.

Move Over, Diploma-Brandishers, Make Way for the Pro-Am

2004-12-07T20:36:00.000-08:00

The Pro-Am Revolution: How enthusiasts are changing our economy and society

From astronomy to activism, from surfing to saving lives, Pro-Ams - people pursuing amateur activities to professional standards - are an increasingly important part of our society and economy.

For Pro-Ams, leisure is not passive consumerism but active and participatory, it involves the deployment of publicly accredited knowledge and skills, often built up over a long career, which has involved sacrifices and frustrations.

The 20th century witnessed the rise of professionals in medicine, science, education, and politics. In one field after another, amateurs and their ramshackle organisations were driven out by people who knew what they were doing and had certificates to prove it.

The Pro-Am Revolution argues this historic shift is reversing. We're witnessing the flowering of Pro-Am, bottom-up self-organisation and the crude, all or nothing, categories of professional or amateur will need to be rethought.

Long, but worth the read. (via Future Now)

Quote of the Month

2004-12-06T02:12:00.000-08:00

"If people are going to be stealing software, we want them stealing our software."

-- Exec at large unnamed software company

Notes from Web 2.0

2004-10-05T09:32:00.000-07:00

We're here at Web 2.0 in San Francisco. I'll take some notes here:

Business Models for RSS: recreating the INBOX? Authors, as always, being left behind? Will the market sort out the compensation for each of the constituencies -- author, publisher, RSS service? Do the authors even care? NYTimes clearly cares very much, but PR Blogs -- these people don't care who benefits, their blogs are out there to garner publicity. HEP: a RSS to email gateway, that enables bidirectional communication between the author and the audience (must investigate). Extending RSS: through RSS you receive text, products, music, photos -- right now these are all flattened, then you receive the feed and have to reintroduce specificity to the data. Trusted Networks a la Ebay -- possible to decentralize it? [The network more valuable intact (entertainment value, discovery)]. People Lie. People are Lazy. First mentions of Flickr. :) Tagging by the seller sucks; tagging by the community works. Tagging when done for a non-commercial reasons no one is trying to sell anything tends to be more accurate. Humans need to do the tagging. On Flickr there is an incentive to tag, to find info later. People tagging it themselves because it will have value to them later.

I've heard the word "Kumbaya" twice now to describe something touchy-feely, let's all hold hands.

Dialing on the App Tone Ebay opened up their APIs to generate more GMS -- General Merchandise Sales -- 40% of their sales come through their APIs, not insignificant. Affliate programs are essentially a micropayment system. Guy from eBay recommends a book called "Platform Leadership" (a book about how to build a business around "complementers") To Flickr: what about Wallop? We do not want to establish or push a standard. Open APIs as a way of acquiring innovation -- see what the outside developers build and, if you're Microsoft, then copy them.

At this point the sessions began and I stopped taking notes.

Products that "Do the Rest"

2004-10-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

From The Anatomy of Buzz by Emanuel Rosen:

Cameras were invented in the 1820s. Why did it take roughly sixty years for them to become popular? The answer, I believe , is embedded in teh slogan used by Kodak to introduce their first camera in 1888: "You press the button -- we do the rest." When they were first invented, cameras were very complicated to operate. Then George Eastman reduced their operation to a three-step process: pull the cord, advance the key, and press the button. Eastman also understood that to appeal to mass markets, he needed to offer a simple development process. So the Kodak camera came loaded with film for a hundred exposures, and when the roll was done, the customer just mailed the whole camera to the company for development. Eastman demystified the process for thousands of people who knew about photography but previously perceived it as a complex process for only professional photographers and serious hobbyists. Eastman also understood the importance of communicating the simplicity of the innovation. To write the product manual, he hired a New York advertising man but ended up crafting the copy himself (in less than five hours), because the advertising executive, according to Eastman, "utterly ignored" the simplicity of the camera. By the mid-1890s, just a few years after its introduction, one hundred thousand Kodak cameras had been sold. "The craze is spreading fearfully," the Chicago Tribune wrote about the new camera.

Persistence Pays

2004-09-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

Bnoopy is in fact turning out to be a great blog. Case in point: Persistence Pays, Part 2, which tells some stories about the bulldog tenacity of Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun, who flew with his team to the headquarters of a corporation who had just rejected his offer and accepted a competitor's and sat in the lobby until they got an audience with the people who had just turned them down. Great stuff.

Bnoopy

2004-09-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Bnoopy, Joe Kraus's recently launched blog, already has a lot of great posts about entrepreneurship, such as the importance of finding great people (can't be overstressed) and some conjectures about how to "rate" great engineering talent. Good stuff.

The Art of the Start

2004-09-19T08:47:00.001-07:00

There is an abridged version of some sections from Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the Start online where he writes on the art of the pitch. There is also a chat transcript. He provides such pithy advice as

The key is the 10/20/30 rule: 10 slides given in 20 minutes using no font smaller than 30 points.

but emphasizes that the best pitch isn't gonna help you if you haven't "made meaning":

HDOWNING: What is the biggest challenge new entrepreneurs face today?

KAWASAKI: If you were to ask ten entrepreneurs this question, seven would say raising money, two would say closing deals, and one would say building the team. If you experience great difficulty in raising money, it's not because VCs are idiots and cannot comprehend your curve-jumping, paradigm shifting, revolutionary product. It's because you either have a piece of crap or you are not effectively communicating what you have. Both of these are your fault. End of discussion.

Closing deals is similar. Sure, it's tough to make a sale, but that's the way the world works. You have to make meaning and show customers why they should be happy to open their wallets and give you money. Building a team is also similar. I guess that it all comes down to the entrepreneur coming up with a meaningful idea and communicating that idea. The good news about entrepreneurship is that your fate is in your hands. The bad news is that your fate is in your hands!

How much the community matters to business

2004-08-29T13:57:00.000-07:00

I haven't heard much about Alvin Toffler lately. He is probably fairly old. I tend to hear more about futurists -- I would call them 'trend watchers' -- such as Faith Popcorn and Marian Saltzman in recent years. Toffler was big in the 70s and 80s when he published the books Future Shock and The Third Wave. He apparently runs a business consultancy that "help[s] companies and governments create their future in the fast emerging "Third Wave" economy." As explained on their site:

The Third Wave Information Society is more than just technology and economics. It is not just "digital" and "networked." Painful social, cultural, institutional, moral, and political dislocations accompany our transition from a brute force to a brain force economy. The Third Wave helps explain why so many industrial-era institutions, from giant corporations to governments, are dinosaurs gasping for their last breath. It is why America is suffering from simultaneous crises in everything from education system, the health system, and the family system to the justice system, and the political system. They were designed to work in a mass industrial society. But America has left that behind.

Apparently, Toffler likes to ask executives what it would cost them in real cash if none of their employees had ever been toilet-trained, in order to point out the enormous debt that corporations owe to communities, parents, networks and teachers, the kind of work, in other words, that women most often do.

Quote: Henry Ford

2004-08-29T13:53:00.000-07:00

Business must be run at a profit, else it will die. but when anyone tries to run a business solely for profit...then also the business must die, for it no longer has a reason for existence.

-- Henry Ford

Exceptional Customer Service Experience: SleepCountry

2004-08-25T13:24:00.000-07:00

This morning I received a Thank You note from SleepCountry, where I'd bought a box spring last week. From start to finish, the experience was great. I went in, told the salesperson I was looking for a box spring. She asked me if I'd bought my mattress there, I said I had, she looked me up in the computer, then told me what kind of box spring I needed based on my mattress purchase. She showed me the two least expensive models. I picked one. She said, do you want it delivered tomorrow? I said yes. She called the delivery department, they said yes. I paid and left. The whole transaction took 5 minutes.

The delivery people called me at 9AM and said they'd be at my house between 2 and 5. They rang at 2. They got to the top of the stairs and apologized for taking so long, because the box spring didn't fit in the elevator and they had to walk up the stairs. Upon entering my apartment, they put little slippers over their shoes so as not to damage anything. They assembled the bed in a matter of moments, had me sign a receipt, put a thank you note on the bed, and then left. I'd wanted to tip them for taking the stairs. They didn't hang around.

Then this morning I received this handwritten thank you card from the salesperson who had helped me at the store, with a series of questions where I could rate the store and experience.

SleepCountry makes the following commitments:

* Fully staffed professional customer service department
* 60-night comfort guarantee
* 5% price guarantee
* Free delivery
* Removal of old mattress and box-spring for donation to charity
* Wearing booties in customers homes
* Timely response to warranty issues, scheduling inspections, and liaison with the manufacturer
* Trained Sleep Specialists
* Professional Delivery Specialists

Each sales person goes through 180 hours of training before they become a Certified Sleep Specialist and are put on the floor. The company has been around only since 1994, starting with 4 stores and one warehouse in British Columbia, and appears to be growing, with 89 stores in seven regional markets, and expanding into the U.S. Market. Here's ttheir latest report.

Flawlessly executed. I'll never buy a mattress anywhere else.

Things I've read recently

2004-08-22T21:05:00.000-07:00

Who Reads Blogs? Apparently not the teenagers we thought read blogs. They're older, wealthier, and smarter than we thought. This was a study sponsored by a company that delivers blog advertisements, so take with NaCl.
A story about RSS's first non-blog business application, a product called RSS Calendar, made by a company in Cincinnati. He promises a plug-in for Outlook in the future.
If we do not change our direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed. -- Chinese Proverb
Comparison of Cost-Per-Lead. Still amazes me.

Tagging

2004-08-22T17:25:00.000-07:00

Jon Udell writes a great piece at InfoWorld on the use of tags in Flickr and del.icio.us, and how seemingly simple features such as tags can become such powerful tools.

The 99 Cent fallacy

2004-08-21T16:06:00.000-07:00

David Pogue talks about .99 pricing, and claims that companies do this to dupe consumers into thinking that they are getting a good deal ($2.99 is less than three dollars!!). From what I understand, this practice originated as a means of keeping cashiers honest, in the days before credit cards. If an item was priced $1.99 and not $2.00, the cashier would have to enter the amount and open the cash register to give an extra penny to the customer, ensuring that all sales were entered, and that the cashier couldn't pocket the money if they were given exact change.

It is likely that this practice continues to this day because it was assumed that consumers perceived prices being lower, but I don't think any of us are dumb enough to fall for it any more.

Organizr for Flickr

2004-08-18T15:57:00.000-07:00

Once again the best team in the world has built an incredible tool: Organizr. You can group your photos into photosets, batch add photos to group pools, and easily browse your entire photostream. The other thing we've done is opened up the Flickr API so that other developers can roll their own Organizrs (or whatever else they dream up!) Flickr is becoming the King of Webapps. Check it out:

For every new feature you need to:

2004-08-14T23:05:00.000-07:00

1. Come up with the concept.
2. Say no.
3. Force the feature to prove its value.
4. If “no” again, end here. If “yes,” continue…
5. Sketch the screen(s)/UI.
6. Design the screen(s)/UI.
7. Code it.
8-16. Test, tweak, test, tweak, test, tweak, test, tweak…
17. Check to see if help text needs to be modified.
18. Update the product tour (if necessary).
19. Update the marketing copy (if necessary).
20. Update the terms of service (if necessary).
21. Check to see if any promises were broken.
22. Check to see if pricing structure is affected.
23. Launch.
24. Hold breath.

Jason Fried on 37 Signals.

This is probably sage advice for many, if not most, companies. But if we had actually followed i.e. steps 1, 2 and 3 and tried to figure out in advance if features were worthy, Flickr would not exist at all.

More on this later.

In Negotiations, make the first move?

2004-08-11T04:17:00.000-07:00

Received knowledge dictates that in negotiations one ought not make the first move, but this article suggests otherwise. By putting the first number on the table, you can anchor the perceived value of the deal at a higher level.

The answer lies in the fact that every item under negotiation (whether it's a company or a car) has both positive and negative qualities—qualities that suggest a higher price and qualities that suggest a lower price. High anchors selectively direct our attention toward an item's positive attributes; low anchors direct our attention to its flaws.

But the article cautions that the person that has more information has the advantage in any negotiation:

There is one situation in which making the first offer is not to your advantage: when the other side has much more information than you do about the item to be negotiated or about the relevant market or industry. For example, recruiters and employers typically have more information than job candidates do; likewise, buyers and sellers represented by a real estate agent often are privy to more information than unrepresented buyers and sellers are. This doesn't mean you should sit back and let the other side make the first offer. Rather, this is your opportunity to level the playing field by gathering more information about the item, the industry, or your opponent's alternatives to the negotiation. The well-prepared negotiator will feel confident about making the first offer and anchoring the negotiation in his favor.

Cameraphones driving Blog Adoption?

2004-07-28T19:31:00.000-07:00

Ross Mayfield, on Many-to-Many, looks at cameraphone uptake, why it is the fastest growing area of the blogosphere, and why we entered the photo-sharing business at a very good time. He says that Lycos, in its latest survey of Angelfire and Tripod users and their "device penetration", "make[s] the case that blog adoption is being driven by media sharing, abundant connectivity and advances in ease of use."

"Device Penetration" sounds a little too J.G. Ballard for me, thank you.

Jeff Bezos on the Power of Word of Mouth

2004-07-25T19:52:00.000-07:00

BusinessWeek: How important is advertising to building the brand?

Jeff Bezos: We don`t do any television advertising, and we take all of the money that we would put into television advertising, and instead put it into things like free SuperSaver shipping [free shipping on most orders over $25], lower product prices, category expansion, and invention of new features. We take those funds that might otherwise be used to shout about our service, and put those funds instead into improving the service. That`s the philosophy we`ve taken from the beginning. If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful. ...

BW: It`s fascinating that the increase in the value of your brand has happened at the same time when you`re not advertising in mass media at all. Do you anticipate ever needing to use broad-scale advertising again?

Bezos: No. Never say never, but I don`t anticipate that. I like the strategy we`re on.

(via heif)

And the Bushel Goes Bad

2004-07-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

One Bad Apple by Lori Howard.

Never underestimate the impact of one person on an entire team. One person with a problem attitude or divisive nature can stifle communications, make people tense, and ruin the productivity of everyone around him.

I've worked on a couple teams where there was one person like this. In both circumstances I talked to the manager in charge and while both of them were aware of the problem, they were both reluctant to do anything. In one case the problem was so dire, two valuable team members gave notice and left, since they could see no one would do what needed to be done, i.e. fire her. After about 6 months, management finally fired the Bad Apple, but not without significant damage having already been done -- bungled projects, missed dealines, low morale, a toxic environment. They scrambled to try to rehire the two employees who had left because of that one bad egg, but they were already happy at their new jobs and wouldn't return.

2004-07-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

Plunge Protection Team. A bookmark to read later when I'm not so swamped.

You're a manager now. Congratulations.

2004-07-14T02:42:00.000-07:00

Great article on Rands in Repose: What to do when you're screwed.

The state of being screwed is unique. You know when things are going smoothly because you can arrive in the morning and quietly sip your hot beverage until your first meeting at 11am. Screwed is the oppposite. Screwed is being accosted the moment you walk out of the elevator and being unable to even check your mail... until Winter.

Screwed is mental paralysis.

Screwed is career panic.

Screwed is also an opportunity to hit it out of the park. Overcoming screwed will give you confidence, experience, and respect, but you need to figure out how screwed you actually are and then then figure out and how to fix it. If you aren't interested in unscrewing yourself, I'd suggest this article is not for you. I'm assuming you've have passion regarding your professional career. You want to do more. You want make more money and, if it all works out well, you want to change the world.

Google Acquires Picasa

2004-07-13T09:38:00.000-07:00

Google Acquires Picasa, which makes sense, no? Email, groups, now photo management. They are going to offer the full suite of services that Yahoo now offers. I think chat will follow within the year. And when are they going to improve their image search?

This is of course of great interest to us at Flickr. :)

VC's and Valuation

2004-07-07T10:54:00.000-07:00

A good summary of valuation over on A VC by Fred Wilson, as well as a follow-up on Feld Thoughts.

Entrepreneurial Drive

2004-07-07T07:47:00.000-07:00

Q. Describe a day in the life of Nick Denton.

A. Coffee at Balthazar at 8:45. Deal with the morning's e-mail backlog, lounging on the sofa. Check freeconference.com for the details of the conference call. Agonize over the name of the next site. Try out name variants on onelook.com. IM with Gabriela (advertising operations) in Paris, Patric (design) in Chicago, and Choire (editorial) in the East Village. Lunch at Lever House or Balthazar, with a media buyer, if possible. A nap. Surf aimlessly around the Web. Hey, I can always *pretend* I'm on the lookout for new writing talent. Exercise, sometimes. Alcohol, often.

There's other intesting stuff in the article, but that was my favorite part.

Pravin Jain, Part III

2004-07-05T10:01:00.000-07:00

I continue with a passage in Jain's essay about the structure of the "Capitalism Inside An Organization" as it played out at Enron in the 90s. This may be have been all over the business press during the scandal; I was not tuned to that wavelength at the time, so this is new to me:

Enron needed to create a moblike energy for their task, one that only Adam Smith's relentless pursuers of self-interest could come up with. To attract and cultivate such an army of zealots, Enron was internally designed along free market principles. Every level of the organization invited opportunistic risk-taking. Just as Walt Disney had asked every employee at his theme parks to view himself as part of a performing cast, Enron cast every employee as a potential dealmaker.

Anyone at any level could initiate and pursue a deal, and all profitable deals were rewarded promptly. At Enron International, an employee could receive up to three percent of the earnings generated by his deal, no strings attached. This could easily run in the millions. The dealmaker was free to distribute the bounty as he pleased, usually as rewards to people who helped him close the deal, including his superiors.

Jain points out that bonuses were deliberately made the largest piece of an Enron employee's compensation, to encourage this entrepreneurial behavior. But the most interesting part was this: Employees had to "sell" their deals within Enron in order to gain access to company resources:

No one was entitled to anything. Support groups such as legal and finance could allocate their efforts based on their own estimation of a deal. If they chose right and supported a high-stakes deal that succeeded, they made a lot of money when the dealmaker handed out his rewards....The net overall effect of these dynamics was the awesome competitive energy generated in every part of the company. Manipulating others, devising spins and stories, doing whatever it took to move a deal forward were all part of this ruthless, tribal, capitalistic culture.

Ultimately, though, Jain believes that what happened at Enron is part of what happens and will always happen in capitalist economies, and that it can't be legislated out of existence. He believes they are a necessary part of the process, and that government intervention to "slow or stifle" the reemergence of Enron's method's will fail. There will always be Enrons.

Either that, or we will see the slow atrophying of the larger capitalist experiment. This acceptance and honesty may make us, as a nation, less hypocritical and more tolerant of societies that choose not to embrace capitalism

Ruining it for everybody

2004-07-02T17:05:00.000-07:00

Seth Godin says on his blog today that search engine optimization is a black art and is generally not worth paying for. This is true. The other thing not mentioned there is that search engine optimization essentially undermines Google's value as a search engine. I posted about this before. If everyone is gaming the system, the comment spammers, fake site builders and SEO-d sites rise to the top and the search results are crap. Of course, if everyone else is doing it, your business probably can't afford not to be doing it too. And so the circle becomes increasingly vicious.

Blaming the User

2004-07-02T15:51:00.000-07:00

I made the mistake of visiting Photosite using a Macintosh computer and received Homestead's Browser "Warning"

One moment, please!

You are using a computer that does not support Homestead.

If you would like to take advantage of the Homestead's flexibility, power, and ease-of-use, please return to www.homestead.com with a Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, or NT computer.

Astonishing. Flexibility, power and ease-of-use? Au contraire! And their tagline is YOUR web site company. Hahahahaha!

Emphasis mine, of course.

The user-centric and customer-focused parts of an organization should really be writing or reviewing the 404 and "browser alert" type pages, as well as any alerts. We, of course, have also been guilty of such faux pas; there was one of these on Flickr, and it drove me nuts. When you were in FlickrLive and away from your keyboard and someone tried to acquaint themselves with you, the invitation would expire and you'd get a message that said "You took too long to respond to this request". It wasn't the user's fault, they were just off having coffee or something. What had really happened was we had done some poor programming and made it so the invitations expired. This has, thankfully, since been fixed.

Pravin Jain, Part II

2004-07-01T10:48:00.000-07:00

Jain emphasized throughout the essay (see prior post) that capitalism was practised in its purest, most unimpeded, form within the confines of Enron, as if Adam Smith were its patron saint. And this was was responsible for the great successes and innovations that Enron was able to achieve, as well as its final downfall:

Laissez-faire capitalism within Enron did not discriminate between wannabe entrepreneurs -- the con men -- and the genuine ones. Both were equally nurtured by the intoxicating environment, much like weeds and grass growing side by side in an untended lawn. But however dangerous, this was a logiacal, even invigorating, engine for Enron's greatest potentials. New worlds are not easily born, and Enron sought nothing less than a new world in their attempt to loosen potential commodities such as energy and bandwidth from the grip of old monopolistic systems. Con men -- the energy release by the intensity of their passions -- helped the older, sclerotic systems break down, so that new markets could be born.

I read this with fascination and horror. It reads like the part of Beowulf that describes Grendel's spawn. But I also read this with complete recognition. If you've ever worked on Wall Street, or in Silicon Valley, or anywhere that great fortunes were being made and lost, you will recognize this frenzied, monomaniacal activity:

Innovations this far-reaching require a radical mutation in their environment to grow beyond a certain point....To catalyze more far-reaching changes, the economy seems to mobilize a special breed of people -- people so obsessed with self-interests that they end up deceiving themselves and others. The intensity of their passion imbues them with the amorality of any destructive force.

I'll post a third part to this series.

Flickr Blog

2004-07-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

We have put up Flickr Blog, an off-site blog, which will have news, offsite status (for scheduled maintenance, etc.), and selections of great photos from the Flickr community. Check out the new stuff we added this week: Creative Commons licenses, a beta of the Mac Uploader, and Calendars. What a great company!

Pravin Jain, Part I

2004-06-30T06:27:00.000-07:00

Business articles keep popping up in the strangest places. In Clear Cut Future a literary magazine containing short stories, poetry and essays, I found a fascinating article by Pravin Jain, who worked as an EVP at Enron, called Capitalism Inside an Organization.

The Article is an apologia of sorts for the great catastrophe that was Enron. Jain's company, Firstpoint Communications, had been acquired by Enron as they were forming Enron Broadband, and he recalls that when executives from Enron first came up to Portland to meet with him, they gave him the Enron formula for success:

1. It takes just as much energy to chase after rabbits as elephants. Go for the elephants.
2. Don't try to boil the ocean.
3. You eat what you kill.

I recall being fascinated by the originality and pragmatism of these principles. They sounded like something that came out of old hunting tribal cultures. These men came across as so different from typical large-company executives. Physically, they seemed quite restless, obviously not used to sitting in long, drawn-out staff meetings or planning sessions. They reminded me of the hustlers I used to bump into in the streets of Hong Kong or Bombay, always on the lookout for a deal. There was a predatory feel to them, but in a charming sort of way.

Jain goes on to describe the monumental difficulties of the task at hand: changing the energy and telecom industry from a sluggish, moribund monopoly to a fast, aggressive entrepreneurial business. Which is of course where, for better or worse, Enron innovated. Enron was, as has frequently been noted, voted by Fortune Magazine as the World's Most Innovative Company for six years running.

I'll get into the rest of the article in another blog entry.

For you telecom nerds, here's a talk Jain gave on fiberoptics infrastructure builds in foreign countries vs. the US.

RIP Mass Marketing

2004-06-23T13:03:00.000-07:00

McDonald's Declares the Death of "Mass Marketing". Their CMO Larry Light describes their new brand strategy as something more akin to "brand journalism" or "brand narrative". Finally, marketers -- not just McDonald's, though they are a bellwether -- are seeing the advantages of telling a more complex "story" over clobbering their customers with the same message in the hopes they'll get it.

AOL and Yahoo abandon their Enterprise IM plans

2004-06-23T10:19:00.000-07:00

AOL's move out of enterprise IM underscores the lack of success the company, and its rivals, achieved in luring businesses to pay for software that many workers were already using for free. Available for monthly or annual fees, the enterprise tools typically included features not available in gratis IM software, such as conversation logging, authentication and identity management. AOL representatives said the company had signed up only about 150 companies to pay for AIM Enterprise Gateway.

Crossroads, Granovetter and Pitching Manure

2004-06-19T03:10:00.000-07:00

When I linked to the Structural Holes story before, I was thinking of how it relates to a number of different things: how this weblog relates to the other weblogs that I maintain; Granovetter's influential work on the strength of weak ties; Malcolm Gladwell's article, Six Degrees of Lois Weisberg; Malcolm McCullough's talk two years ago at Doors about how ideas (and businesses, societies etc.) flourish where roads and networks cross (from his latest book Digital Ground); a quote I loved when I was 14 and reading a lot of Robert Heinlein ("A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, write a sonnet, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, solve equations, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently,die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."); how that article (and these assorted references) support my lifelong polymathic world view; and, most egotistically, how I am uniquely positioned at the crossroads of so many different fields, with such a wide range of interests and weak ties into so many different fields (conceptual art, business, mycology, web design, gnosticism, etc.) that holy shit, it is only a matter of time before I find myself ruling the world.

I am only joking of course, but then again, as we know from Freud, there are no jokes.

I am meant to be in Amsterdam taking a vacation from all thought about "business" and turning my attention solely toward "art" but it turns out that is impossible. So I thought I'd mention the links above and that since I've been here I've forayed into bookstores specializing in art books, and emerged with two odd volumes: Margeting by André Plateel, subtitled "Inventing a different Marketing Language", and The Accursed Share, a book of economics by, of all people, Georges Bataille. Excerpts and ideas from these two curious books are soon to follow. From the preface to Margeting:

'Margeting' is based on the words 'marketing' and 'margin'. It is the constant creation of margins in which desire can take shape and marketing can find new avenues for a more appropriate relationship with customers.

Macintosh Product Introduction Plan

2004-06-11T19:06:00.000-07:00

I've been reading the Macintosh Product Introduction Plan that Michael linked today. These two passages made me smile:

"Our objective is to understand our competition (IBM)...."

and

"Due to a close working relationship with Microsoft..."

But of course, in 1983, who would have known what the latter was about to do to the former? When IBM and Microsoft were drawing up their licensing agreement, IBM gave away something that appeared to have no value: the right for Microsoft to license their software to other PC makers. At the time there were no other PC makers. But it may have been Apple that opened up the door to those manufacturers by introducing a new product that was successful in competition with IBM, and opening up the competitive field. In their Competitive Analysis on this Product Introduction Plan, they anticipate that one of the ways IBM will challenge the Mac is this:

IBM Attack: Apple once again has come out with a non-standard operating system and no connections to the large base of software already written for MS-DOS and CP/M. It will take quite some time, if ever, for to complete all the required software for Macintosh and right now it has only three applications.

It's interesting how the first sentence has inside it an inkling of how Microsoft will overtake IBM. IBM's "attack" is based on the legacy of MS-DOS, software they did not own. In 1983 were there IBM PC Clone startups? I'd guess that there were, but not big enough to be on Apple's radar. If they had seen them coming that sentence would have read differently. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and this Product Introduction Plan is nonetheless Kickass with a capital K.

Raise gas prices even more, please!

2004-06-09T18:24:00.000-07:00

I'm with Dan on this.

But what I want most of all is for us to use less energy from polluting, non-renewable sources. I want to see us invest in sensible public transportation, conservation and renewable energy.

The best way to make that happen is to raise the price of oil even higher. Then, subsidize the technologies and transportation systems that will help us in a more permanent way.

The stakes transcend the few extra dollars a week in gasoline costs.

Why is Fisher so quiet all of a sudden?

2004-06-08T16:20:00.000-07:00

We heard from Draper today, why not Jurvetson?

Microsoft is like a global monoculture and therefore subject to catastrophic collapse. The pace at which viruses and worms spread is outstanding.

I haven't had a virus in my Mac for 10 years. No one writes applications for the Mac, not even viruses, and it's a safer world.

So there's an argument for biodiversity in this economy.

-- Steve Jurvetson, Managing Director of Draper, Fisher & Jurvetson (big Valley VC firm that funded Hotmail and Skype)

I had to smile when I read this. When people are tearing out their hair because a virus has shut down their whole system, lost their email, or emailed porn to their entire client list, I always recommend they go out and get themselves a Mac.

I was reading this article mostly because Stewart recommended I do so, and I recommend you do so too. There are a lot of great ideas, forecasts, and observations there.

Tim Draper: Hotmail as Marketing?

2004-06-08T11:23:00.000-07:00

In an article on the Always On Network, Tim Draper lists what he believes are the 3 most important contributions of the internet. He says email, search and -- soon -- internet telephony. Interestingly, he thinks the main benefit of Hotmail for Microsoft was as a marketing tool.

The other thing that Hotmail did is open up a new kind of business, which was in effect free marketing. Hotmail’s marketing budget was almost zero, but it reached 11 million people in 18 months. And it grew from there to (now under Microsoft) 200 million Hotmail users. That’s free marketing for Microsoft. And that’s quite valuable, because marketing tends to be 20% of your sales in most cases. So I’d say that’s the biggest impact.

The first commenter notes that Draper didn't mention IM as one of his top three, and I'd tend to agree there. IM is all but eclipsing email as a form of communication, especially for Generation Y and younger. I too use email as a last resort, or for things such as sending long documents.

Structural holes and productive theft

2004-06-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago there was an interesting article in the New York Times which I'd meant to link to, but it has expired and is now pay only. Fortunately, it has been posted elsewhere: Where to get a Good Idea? Steal it Outside your Group

Got a good idea? Now think for a moment where you got it. A sudden spark of inspiration? A memory? A dream? Most likely, says Ronald S. Burt, a sociologist at the University of Chicago, it came from someone else who hadn't realized how to use it. "The usual image of creativity is that it's some sort of genetic gift, some heroic act," Mr. Burt said. "But creativity is an import-export game. It's not a creation game."

Mr. Burt has spent most of his career studying how creative, competitive people relate to the rest of the world, and how ideas move from place to place. Often the value of a good idea, he has found, is not in its origin but in its delivery. His observation will undoubtedly resonate with overlooked novelists, garage inventors and forgotten geniuses who pride themselves on their new ideas but aren't successful in getting them noticed. "Tracing the origin of an idea is an interesting academic exercise, but it's largely irrelevant," Mr. Burt said. "The trick is, can you get an idea which is mundane and well known in one place to another place where people would get value out of it."

The Rise of the Mompreneurs

2004-06-04T15:38:00.000-07:00

A recent article in Business Week The Rise of the Mompreneurs (free registration required), outlines the ways in which eBay has made it possible for many high-powered women to create businesses for themselves by selling online. The numbers are amazing. More than 430,000 people in the U.S. make a full or part-time living off of eBay, more employees than GE and Proctor & Gamble combined. The most successful businesses are grossing up to $1 million a month. And it turns out that 48% of these business people are women.

As we have seen time and time again, women are looking for a saner work-life balance, and eBay provides the opportunity to manage one's own business from home, on one's own hours, and according to one's own schedule. And some of the very things that "keep women down" in corporate environments, are a boon on eBay:

EBay, experts say, is a welcome, recession-proof option for many women, especially since it makes a virtue of the very traits that are often perceived as weaknesses in Corporate America. Research shows, for example, that women's detail-oriented strengths -- as well as their tendency to bear down and have lunch at their desks -- are impedients to advancement. On eBay, those so-called shortcomings become a competitive advantage, allowing women to provide the kind of high-touch customer service -- the Holy Grail among buyers -- that the big retailers just can't give.

[Cross-posted on Misbehaving.net]

"Search and Destroy" in this week's New Yorker

2004-06-03T10:54:00.000-07:00

I generally don't count on The New Yorker to give me business or tech news -- it always seems a year or two behind -- but I always read The Financial Page by James Surowiecki, which follows Talk of the Town. This week it's called "Search and Destroy" and in it he writes about Google-bombing and Google's dependency on the collective intelligence of the web, and the inevitable gaming of the system that takes place when each link is treated as a "vote" for the linked-to site. This is all old news to most of us, but this sentence really struck me:

The more important Google becomes, the harder its job gets, because more and more people find themselves trying to game the system, and wind up undermining it instead.

It's funny. I'd long considered the comment spammers, and link farmers and Google-bombers to be undermining search, but I'd never considered the people and businesses who are defensively engaging the same activities because they have to in order to stay competitive, and how this creates a situation that makes Google results increasingly valueless. And I assume that legitimate businesses engaging in these practices are even more numerous than the "search optimizers". Surowiecki writes:

Google works best when no one knows it's there -- when people are making their own decisions about which sites are useful or good. The more important Google becomes, the harder its job gets, because more and more people find themselves trying to game the system, and wind up undermining it instead. When Google purges dubious Web sites and rejects links from link farms, it is, in a sense, counteracting the consequences of its own success. Collective intelligence relies on a certain degree of innocence. Google is using guile to re-create a guileless world, under the assumption that what we don't know should help us

All the Other Kids are Doing It

2004-05-31T10:36:00.000-07:00

Rafe Needleman writes about a company that uses peer pressure as a marketing tool to sell online games:

Xfire, made by the eponymous company formerly known as Ultimate Arena, is an application that gamers run on their desktop, like an instant messenger client. The application tracks what game you are running and lets you see which games your friends are playing. You can just click on any friend's name and, if his (or her) game server has room on it and you have the game software, you'll find yourself in the same game, on the same server as your friend, so you can play with your pal.

[...]

Xfire is free to users and is growing well—the product has been out for four months and has been downloaded over 500,000 times. So where's the money? Of course, gamers want their pals to be running Xfire so they can find each other. This means that the application should spread virally (and current download numbers indicate that it is). Xfire sells advertising in the client software, and it is highly targeted.

And here's the peer-pressure angle: if a bunch of your friends have a game installed that you don't, you won't be able to play with them. Xfire, though, will alert you—it will tell you, "Five of your ten friends are playing Far Cry, and you don't even own the game." Then it will sell the game to you, and make you one of the cool kids. Of course, the company takes a big cut of these transactions.

I love getting shit done

2004-05-21T17:21:00.000-07:00

Caterina's To-Do List January 1-2
Originally uploaded by caterina.

My father-in-law said that at one point in his life he was completely caught up. And he meant completely. He had returned every phone call, answered every email, apologized to those he'd wronged, paid his taxes, made his bed, flossed his teeth. He said that it took him months to get there, but that when he crossed the last item off his To-Do list he had never felt so good in his entire life. He was completely free.

I found this very inspiring.

As is inevitable, few days later things started to pile up, the list lengthened, and it started again. But that is how it is.

Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki

2004-05-21T11:53:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I read Rules for Revolutionaries by Guy Kawasaki, chief evangelist for Apple Computer, which was written in 1998, and was amazed at how much of it had already come to me in the form of received knowledge. Was Kawasaki just putting into print the customary business practices of Silicon Valley (churn, evangelism, failing fast) or were his several books so influential its tenets became standard practice? Reading In Search of Excellence I had a powerful sense of deja vu, because these were the business practices that emerged out of the 80s, and which my father exemplified when I was growing up. Another book I read recently, the autobiography of Jimmy Pattison, a Vancouver tycoon, was likewise informed by In Search of Excellence. The waxing and waning influence of business books is an interesting phenomenon. Everyone these days seems to have read Crossing the Chasm and The Cluetrain Manifesto and all those Tom Peters books (which I'm reading now). Business books are as trendy as hairstyles and skirt lengths.

In any event, I did glean some useful ideas out of Rules for Revolutionaries. Kawasaki described evangelizing Macintosh software to developers in 1984:

At the start of meetings with developers, we used this three-pronged pitch:
Macintosh is a technological breakthrough. With what-you-see-is-what-you-get printing, pull-down menus, iconic interface, developers can finally create the kind of software they dreamed of
Macintosh will expand the market for personal computers and therefore for your software. Because of its radical ease of use, people who wouldn't have considered buying a computer can finally do so.
Writing Macintosh software is a way to spread your risk. IBM is publishing MS-DOS application software and competing with you, so the market for your software can get extremely crowded.

If there was any interest in Macintosh development, one of these three pitches appealed to the people in the meeting, and they began to resonate with what we were saying. From that point on, we deemphasized the other two pitches and focused on the one that appealed to the developer.

Good listeners, marketers and women understand this point intuitively: people will tell you how they want to be evangelized.

Business apps continue moving online

2004-05-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

In a posting on the AlwaysOn Network, Brian Desmond muses on the Future of the Business Applications Market. He predicts that:

...five years from now the market for business applications will be dominated by a group of business service providers that provide applications in a utility like manner. The majority of applications will be accessed via the web negating the need to implement software and customers will easily be able to transition from one provider to another if they are unsatisfied with the service provided and/or value attained.

I tend to agree with this prediction. It is already happening to a large degree, and I'm sure there are dozens of other products currently in development beside the three he indicated (Salesforce.com, Webex, and Ketera, his own company), and the ones that I am aware of. The installation and maintenance of software systems is onerous for any company, and if it lies outside the company's core competencies, it's almost always easier and less expensive to offload the burden to a web service. See also the first commenter, who points out which industries would benefit most from "software as a service model."

I, for one, think that we should push absolutely everything that we can online. More on this in a future post.