Foursquare Badges & Mayorship

EDITS on Thursday Evening March 11,2010

Is someone reading my blog?
Starbucks and Foursquare

Been giving serious thought to why I take the trouble to check-in my locations via Foursquare and less often via Gowalla. Well I do have an understanding why centered around the gaming aspect of winning badges, becoming mayor of my own Subway station or frequented Starbucks. But outside of this very basic gaming angle and the pride of being Mayor of an out of the way Dunkin Donuts in Whitestone, Queens , what utility is actually being driven for me?

Over time, and the time may be near, I can imagine the utility to the business establishments and franchises that I visit having access to the stream of information about who ,when and how often folks are frequenting their establishments.To what extent FourSquare aware and engaged folks are representative of the demographic of any particular establishment’s customer base is probably up in the air but at least at the current moment, I doubt they are very representative. Also part of the information is already gleaned from the cash register of course and I don’t know to what extent users of Foursquare or like minded products will allow anything “private” to be divulged to the venues they visit.

Representative or not, as the location service increases in breadth whether through the likes of Foursquare/Gowalla or by other Local sites ie Yelp comes to mind adopting this as a platform feature , over time the collected data will be more then about just the early adopter, wiz-bang type of person.
What will drive mass adoption? I don’t believe that mass adoption will occur until the act of checking in is instrumented to be so easy and automatic that one doesn’t even think about it. Often times I start checking in while waiting on line , say at a Starbucks which is notorious for long lines especially in New York City, and I have still not completed the checkin process by the time I have reached the barrister to place my order. It should be like E-Z Pass , the automated toll collection system spear-headed in New York City for the traffic choked toll lines across all the river crossings. You go through a special lane and the rest is done via transponder on the E-Z Pass side and conceptually the same for the “Checkin” side.

But now I am back to the crux of the question,

what is in it for me?

From a social networking perspective, I am more selective of the “friends” chosen. They represent people I have known personally for some time and in all likelihood interacted with them on a social basis including outside of work. That selectivity can be powerful especially compared to the “whoring” that goes on on Facebook where it appears the concept of Friends is severely deprecated. Foursquare doesn’t put any limitations on the extent of my social graph but the nature of the service makes one more hesitant to just accept anyone as a “friend”.

I imagine the selectivity in growing one’s Foursquare network is not just innate to myself but will be a generally accepted principle. If that turns out to be the case the usefulness of that network will be magnified. In it’s most simple venue based extension, I can learn about or take as recommendations establishments I should try based on my own network’s frequenting of those establishments.
Or better yet, as a business establishment looking to extend my reach I can tap into a customer’s Foursquare network (with their permission of course) to make offers available that would entice potential new customers.

Though I can see lots of potential in the limited network of my Foursquare friends. it is also possible to intersect with a feature that allows things/events to be “pushed” to me depending on what specific locale I happen to be at the moment. A totally made up and unfathomable example, a theater’s ticket sales are lagging as showtime nears at 8pm on Broadway. Why not blast out a last minute appeal to those that may be enticed and in the area with discounts or other inducement to fill the seats that may otherwise go wanting.

I was communicating with an ex Software Engineer report of mine the other day asking how things were going in my old company. Without going into much detail about extraneous things, he volunteered that “most of the work was moving to India” , that he and the rest of the team stateside didn’t have much individual responsibility or work to do but that they were spending most of the time hand-holding the people they were collaborating with in India. He used the ratio 60 to 1 (60 hours to do what he could do in one hour).
That ratio in my estimation is a wild exaggeration but it is not totally off in certain respects.

The biggest problem in my experience with productivity of software engineering outsourced to India is in the realm of managing towards overall effectiveness not solely the metric of cost. Of course, outsourcing a high wage activity such as software engineering to a much lower wage rate location will reduce gross engineering costs at least in the short-term. Accomplishing that is as deterministic as anything within the raft of different resourcing options any company has at it’s disposal.
If that metric is the sole determinant of success, the company following this approach will be measuring success or failure on a metric that anyone with a calculator or the most basic business sense can appear to succeed at.

The true measure should be similar to how employee investment Rate of Return is determined stateside or anywhere else in the world. What am I getting in terms of value for my investment? And since in this particular case I am talking about the Web business, how is the time to market impacted in outsourcing these critical activities to bring goods to market?
Software Development is an esoteric craft or at least treated that way by many folks who have decision making or sign off authority for outsourcing this important function. The cost in time and opportunity lost by the Stateside developers having to support in numerous ways

• providing business context
• providing elaboration usually nuanced on product requirements
• reviewing for standard implementations

the effort from India as well as trying to do their job is rarely a point of consideration.

From the aforemetioned one would assume I am against outsourcing to India. The fact is I am not, I have had success with it (and some quite bumpy rides as well) and if done for the right reasons

• abundant supply of of young Software Engineers
• a timezone that coupled with Timezones within the USA can result in a follow the sun iteration (this is not for the faint of heart. It is easier said then done)
• Better context of what works in the India or Asia Pacific Rim if the product is being tailored for that market
• And of course, a positive cost benefit for your efforts

A criterion for Success is to make the India team especially it’s India based management strictly accountable for the efforts of the India based Development staff. That may seem obvious and it is but usually for reasons of expediency a Program manager or a stateside liaison is the point of contact obscuring the true accountable parties for success of an India Development center.

To be continued….

Outsourcing Software Development Part One

If understanding Data is the true measure and worth of collecting it in the first place, what is now standing in the way at a minimum of the capability to crunch the data using a slew of tools adapted for that purpose? The answer is nothing , well kind of. With the publicly available services in the Cloud such as Amazon’s MapReduce, the inherent capability it there for all but the most uninitiated to make sense of the mountains of data point collected by a typical high volume website.

Of course one can just plugin Google Analytics onto their website and they are good to go with a robust solution that captures, aggregates ,slices and dices and presents pretty reports via a web form about a host of activity on a website. Nevertheless there are always instances where the need to unlock additional understanding inherent in all that data requires some additional processing and some additional tools.

One of the biggest costs for large scale data processing has usually been the need to have an operational infrastructure in place to excise, collate, aggregate and slice the mountains of data that are generated by your typical website or application usually measured in gigabytes and terabytes. Of course all that operational infrastructure is always bound to some strategic and business critical processing leaving precious little horsepower available for for those extraneous random questions that come up on a recurring basis for any business. By the time the request for that question to be answered is queued up and delivered by the typical IT group ,it is highly likely someone more nimble somewhere else has already answered the question and gotten a lead on adapting their business with the answer in hand.

With the wide availability of Cloud Services such as Amazon’s Map Reduce, the timeline to answer the question can be markedly reduced. Admittedly you still need Technologists either in house or outsourced that understand the components of Map Reduce and how to actually leverage it’s power for the needs of the business but the need to wait for precious cycles on the IT’s host complex, partnering Software engineers and Operational Admins to make the environment available with the hosts and necessary software and connectivity to actually run jobs can be short circuited to almost zero time.
You also need the Analysts that can come up with pertinent questions specific to the business they are in and with an understanding of the data elements and relationships between them that are currently captured or can be captured and can help answer specific questions. The technology is not smart enough to do it by itself.

A non technical question , are mature companies with a long standing streak of being in business availing themselves of this form of Cloud services computing? I would not expect them to have the same drive to operate on a shoestring as the majority of startups do but are Cloud services of viewed as an valid option by most IT groups in mature organizations?

Yes, more then a handful of companies outsourced their Development but especially Networking over the course of the past few decades leaving those esoteric functions to entities like MCI that had scale and a knack for staying on top of the evolving technologies shuffling bits around.

For two hours on Wednesday evening February 24th, I and a group of other interested and hopefully entrepreneurial folks were treated to a discourse on Angel Investing – the when and how to ask for money from an Angel by David Rose, a dean of the art in New York City .

For those that have an interest in the presentation, here is a link to the audio.

The event was hosted by New York University’s Stern School of Business and the packed house seemed to be filled with mostly young and hungry NYU business students. The invite was not limited to just students but open to all that could reserve a spot which is how I got in.
I did take a front row seat with my polished Apple , spitting distance from Mr Rose and plopped myself down for what ended up being an enchanted two hour presentation.

The crux of the presentation was tailored around the protocol of enlisting angel funding for a startup. I won’t redact the entire two hours into this post , what I will concentrate will be on what I got out of it as singularly important.

• Have your elevator pitch

As the saying goes, you should be able to describe what problem your business attempts to solve in the short period of time that you may be in an elevator with someone, Ok, let’s assume you are in a New York City high-rise but notwithstanding, you have 30 seconds or at most if you are lucky 1 minute to provide the thrust of what your business strives to accomplish and be.
That is much harder then it seems and takes considerable thought and work to get it right and then practice to be able to deliverable at any time planned and most importantly unplanned. You never know when you will be presented an opportunity to deliver the pitch. For example , at the tail end of the 2 hour presentation, 3 people were selected at random to deliver their startup pitch to David Rose. The ground rule was you got two minutes and nothing more to present. Being concise but thorough enough to enlighten someone you have just met with the pretext of your business so that they come away with a general understanding and more importantly a desire to learn more is key if you want to successfully navigate the avenues of angel funding Remember, though quite naturally one is the most important person in their own universe or mind, the full universe is full of countless others who feel the same and thus the competition for attention is intense. Get your message tight and have it fit within that veritable 30 second window. imagine you were given 30 second spot during the Super Bowl.

• Craft a Business Plan

Even though David Rose admitted the likelihood of an angel spending time combing through a business plan was low, the strong expectation is the entrepreneur would expend the time and energy tailoring a business plan with a time horizon of 3 to 4 years. Anything out further then 4 years is dismissed as pure fantasy.
There is a recognition that even a 3 to 4 year horizon will be liable to be off and require constant recalibration. Nevertheless the act of preparing the plan gives evidence to a necessary discipline that is important for the budding business itself as well as an artifact that demonstrates to those you want money from that you have applied a degree of rigor to how your business purports to operate.

• Personal investment is key

It’s your business! If you don’t put some of your own funds on the line, how would you expect someone else to take a chance?
That seems very self evident but was hammered home at length. The absolute amount of personal investment is not the key factor as that will depend on multiple factors. Are you actively investing your own capital? How about Friends and Family who are the people who know you best? Even better, is there already a revenue stream from customers who are voting affirmatively using your services or products. If the answer is no to all above, fat chance you will have a willing angel investor.

These represent some of the things I took away from the two hours. It is a major distillation of what was a broad based educational presentation of how to interact with a potential angel investor if that is the path that makes sense for your startup.
Now that I have gotten myself on a magical listserv, I was also invited to an event this coming Monday March 1st 2010 to review the finalists of NYU’s Stern Business Startup Showcase. Starting with over 170 entires, the group has been whittled down to 40 semi-finalists in a content to garner from a pool of over $175,000 in capital for the winning ideas. I suspect I will be privy to a slew of more social networking or aggregation sites which seem to be in abundance as startup ideas but I hold out hope that doesn’t end up being the case.

At least in the technical realm, the noise around cloud computing has become a veritable roar with all of the usual hype associated with the promise of alleviating some of the more difficult aspects of operationalizing the assorted services that constitute the web as we know it. In many respects the hype is legitimate and is making technologists’ potential to concentrate on the core feature set and leave the operations to someone else that much greater.

It the context of this post I will differentiate between Cloud Applications like Flickr or Delicious and countless others that provide product functionality directly to a consumer requiring precious little if any technical acumen and Cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services that provide a set of fundamental building blocks to build products.

Before I move on, a Cloud application I have recently started using that leverages Cloud services namely Amazon’s is Backupify. As the name implies, it backups various well known applications such as Flick, Delicious, wordpress blogs etc and the backups are persisted via Amazon’s Web Services. So here is an Cloud application that uses Cloud services to flesh out it’s features. The power of this model of crafting products is enormous. The time to market is considerably reduced as the purveyor of services can quickly spin up a set of functionality without much regard to establishing a data center/rack space and all that is involved in operationalizing something of this sort. Also, the vendor of the service is able to manage costs and attendant risk during the hectic startup period. They generally only have to pay for as much service as they consume which is governed by the adoption rate of new customers. This makes the operational costs almost entirely variable instead of fixed which provides the necessary risk mitigation especially for new startup like businesses. If the adoption rate is low and the service does not win out in the marketplace, there is no need to sell equipment at fire side sale prices to wind down an unsuccessful business. Conversely, growth can be managed in a more balanced manor by only tapping into the services needed. Also, for those particular instances where one has to deal with spikes in usage , the need to have an operational footprint large enough to support the anticipated spike ends up revolving around tapping into extra services from the Cloud to support the spike and when the spike is over, the horsepower is made available to whomever else out in the cloud when need the capacity.
This makes history of the scenario where one would need to manage fixed operational infrastructure sufficient to deal with the highest volume of usage but where that infrastructure is often left under-utilized save for the few instance of spikes.

If we outsource our Software Development , we can save considerable labor costs. For each USA based employee we can have 4 or 5 based on current ratios of India development resources.  True, if the disparity between where the resources are currently located and where they will be outsourced to is large, you will save some personnel costs but is that the sole determinant whether it is a good idea or not?
Dispersing technology development/support (or operations) throughout the world has benefits besides cost and based on labor rate differentials. If you have a large enough inventory of sites to support that operate 24/7, having a team of System Administrators that overlap various timezones should improve the responsiveness when things inevitably go wrong. Also allows for system maintenance during the slow hours in whatever market the particular site has it’s lull.  Also, you can smooth out the demand and supply imbalances  in actual engineering resources that make acquiring engineering resources problematic regardless of what the pay scale is in certain markets.
On the other hand, if you are working in a domain that is subject to large amounts of uncertainty and market pressures in leap frogging features, what does a lower labor rate coupled with the latency inherent in time differences and maintaining context get you except 2nd , 3rd or further down in timely meeting the market need?
I have worked in situations where design is in the Eastern Time Zone and Web development on India time. A change in design would easily take 48 hour turnaround just to get the correct understanding of what the feature represented and how it fit into the rest of the product/design flow before anything could possibly be engineered.  Given that Frontend Web development is relatively low technology this minimum latency is dysfunctional and has an attendant cost in frustration on the part of the involved product team including executive management as well as missed opportunities in the marketplace.

The aforementioned should not be cast as a criticism of engineering in India as those engineering teams are  thrust into a position where success is not achievable.