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Friday, September 30, 2005 |
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E-ruptions
The first panel focused on "networks" with a lot of discussion about blogging, music sharing, social networking of various kinds, and of course the long tail. Panelist Hank Barry, former ceo of Napster, had a really good way of explaining the impact of the Internet on markets. He explained micro-markets by using the example of a merchant who sells Manchurian hamster supplies. Such a merchant can not afford mass media and perhaps can not afford any traditional marketing. However, by purchasing Google AdWords, any of the handful of people in the world interested in Manchurian hamster supplies and searching on Google will find the merchant's store.
The second panel focused exclusively on Voice over IP (VoIP). There are many stories here at patrickWeb about this topic. (See the Internet technology category). Since a recent survey showed that 47% of the respondents had never heard of it VoIP and 20% thought it was a hybrid European car, you can tell it is still relatively new -- even though it has been around for more than a decade. The fact that eBay paid $2.6 Billion for Skype, a European startup that offers VoIP to fifty million or so customers, tells you there must be something very real going on. There are a billion traditional phone lines out there and they will co-exist with VoIP for a long time, but the billion lines will undergo a constant reduction. Every day people are switching to either VoIP or to a cell phone. If this sounds strange just talk to kids and young adults -- they start their careers, get their first apartment, and they don't even consider the idea of calling a phone company to install a "line". Tom Kershaw from VeriSign made the important point that people don't buy technology, they buy services. VoIP is a service that allows people to talk to friends, family, and colleagues using the Internet. The last panel, "Empowering Consumers; Undiscovered Opportunities" was moderated by Randy Rothenberg, Senior Director, Intellectual Capital, Booz Allen Hamilton. Three of us did our best to discuss key marketing issues from our perspective. Katherine Bagin, Vice President, IP Communications, AT&T was enthusiastic about how VoIP is changing the world and she emphasized that understanding the real needs and wants of consumers was the key. Eric Johnson, Norman Eig Professor of Business and Director, Center on Excellence in E-Business, Columbia University focused on "defaults" and showed examples of how the layout and sequence of steps on web sites can influence what people buy and how much they spend. I suggested that we are five percent of the way into what the Internet has in store for us and referred a recent essay I wrote about "The Bubble". As for the "next big things", I suggested that blogging and podcasting continue to be underestimated, that healthcare is about to change dramatically as people demand personal health records, and that geocaching is an example of a coming explosion in geographic based data. All three of these are areas written about here with much more to come. |
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Thursday, September 29, 2005 |
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1-800-FREE-411
Call 1-800 FREE-411 (1-800-3733-411) and request a phone number for "Sally's Hair Salon" and you may get a message saying, "Hold while we look up that number". "If you would like a $5 discount for your first visit to Steve's Hair Salon, press 2". "If you want the number for Sally's Hair Salon, please wait and you will be connected at no charge". Try it yourself, or listen to a live demonstration of my experience in trying this.
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Sunday, September 25, 2005 |
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DEMOfall 2005
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Saturday, September 17, 2005 |
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Conference Update (and Microsoft comments)
At the end of the month I will be participating in a new conference, called E-ruptions, to be held in New York City. Some of the topics to be discussed include "E-ruptions Nobody Heard", radical disruptions occurring in society and commerce, "The Value of Networks; Does Anybody Know?", "Voice Over IP; How Big?", and "Empowering Consumers; Undiscovered Opportunities". Most tech conferences are quite expensive to attend but this one is open to the general public for $25. See E-ruptions for details. There are two interesting conferences taking place in October. I will not be able to be there this time but a really good conference is Vortex. Take a look at John Gallant's blog to learn about it. Finally, the BlogOn 2005 Social Media Summit, will also to be held in New York. The summit will explore what is happening and key trends for blogs, social networking sites, collaboration tools and syndication feeds. As of today, technorati.com is offering search across 17.3 million blogs. This is the tip of the iceberg of people expressing themselves on every imaginable topic. Businesses are embracing blogs too - except perhaps at Microsoft. In Friday's BusinessWeek CEO Steve Ballmer was asked if he read the blogs being written by Microsoft employees. "I do not", he replied. He went on to say "I'm not sure blogs are necessarily the best place to get a pulse on anything". During the last half of the 1980's, IBM's top guys were not listening -- and the company paid a big price for it. As for Microsoft, BusinessWeek summed it up well. "There's a plea for action to Gates and Ballmer to do more -- slash the bureaucracy, tend to morale, and make it easier to innovate. But is anyone listening?". |
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Sunday, September 11, 2005 |
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Disasters And The Gift Of Knowledge
Ten years or so ago, Ron sent me an email after a speech I had given about the future of the Internet. Ron liked the vision he heard about the Internet and he described to me the vision he had for global health. I knew very little about his area of expertise but was captivated by the passion he had for changing the world. Ron invited me to the University of Pittsburgh and I went there to share my thoughts. That was the beginning of a decade of sharing thoughts with each other. During that time, I saw Ron draw people and organizations into his web of collaborators and I have witnessed huge strides he has made in using the Internet to share information through creation of a "global health network". (read more) |
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Saturday, September 3, 2005 |
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Just Enough Is Good Enough
We have all experienced the frustration of receiving a spreadsheet or text document but then couldn't open, read, or print it. Wouldn't it be nice to have globally compatible documents that would work equally well with mainframes, Macs, PC's, Windows, Linux, handheld devices, etc.? There is only one opponent of the idea -- Microsoft, which says that it has no plans to support OpenDocument. Microsoft also says it plans an XML approach for documents in the next release of MS Office and that it will be superior to OpenDocument. It likely will be superior. Excel is superior to the OpenOffice spreadsheet (although PC Magazine just gave OpenOffice a very positive review - see Office Software On The Cheap). A company with the resources of Microsoft can bury us in features. What percentage of the features of MS Office are used by the average user? Five percent? Fifty percent would surely be high. There are two questions. Do standards matter? Does the "superior" feature-set that MS Office provides matter? My theory for office and personal productivity documents is "Just enough Is Good Enough" -- in other words, having a standard document format that works on any kind of computer in the world is much more important than having some esoteric features that the vast majority of users will never take advantage of and which are proprietary to one company. IBM learned this lesson the hard way. In the mid-1980's the United States government began to issue requests for proposals which included a restriction that any proposed solution must operate on Unix. At the time, Unix was not used much in the corporate world where IBM gained most of it's business so the company ignored the RFP's that required Unix. The government argued that Unix was going to be the standard for all government IT and that it was important because all agencies and departments could more easily share software and data. IBM argued that it's mainframe solutions were more robust, more scaleable, and easier to manage. After losing a lot of government business, IBM started taking Unix seriously and introduced AIX which went on to become very prevalent in not only government but also in financial services and other corporate sectors. IBM saw the light and began a transformation toward open industry standards and today is a model for leadership in Linux (the most popular flavor of Unix) and in collaborative innovation (see Irving's blog). What's wrong with Microsoft providing XML support for MS Office documents? Nothing per se -- the devil is in the details. It is very easy to bury some proprietary features and functions in XML. With OpenDocument, the full specification for the format of the document is in public view. No guessing and no surprises. (All 706 pages of what OpenDocument is and how it works is here). Note: A major supporter of open industry standards is Opera Software ASA. See story about their birthday party at news.com |
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Thursday, September 1, 2005 |
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IBM Happenings: August 2005
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T
Remember when 411 calls were free? Those days are gone -- now it can cost up to $3.49 for an information call. In spite of the cost, there are billions of these calls made per year. I admit it -- I avoid calling 411. It's not that I can't afford it -- it's a matter of principle. I don't want to pay for information that I know is available free on the web. Fortunately, there is a new way. A startup called Jingle Networks, Inc. has developed 
Natural and unnatural disasters have been happening for all of recorded time. The common element to all disasters that I can remember has been the incredible 
The 