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Content Doesn’t Matter Without the Package

2009-09-17T03:25:17Z

In response to the launch of Google’s Fast Flip, I observed that Google is correctly focused on creating a new user interface for news, when most media companies are not. A lot of people responded that Fast Flip is not an innovative or effective UI for news — which may be true, but that misses the point entirely.

It doesn’t matter so much whether Google succeeds or fails with this particular experiment. What matters is that they are trying to solve the right problem.

The challenge for media companies is not to figure out what to do with their content — content in and of itself doesn’t matter. It never has.

It’s all about the package.

Newspaper articles don’t matter without a newspaper. Magazine articles don’t matter without a magazine. TV shows don’t matter without a broadcast or cable channel.

Newspapers’ inability to generate the same revenue online as in print has nothing to do with content. It’s because on the web they are no longer in the business of packaging content, and that’s what the newspaper business, like every other media business, has always been about. Instead, media companies put their content on the web and let search and other aggregators package it.

An individual content item on the web, without a package, has marginal value approaching zero — and attempting to charge for an individual item of content is unlikely to change that. What you CAN charge for is the package.

Media companies need to be doing what Google is doing — experimenting with new ways to package content, which in a digital media world means new UIs and new ways to aggregate.

The nature of innovation is that many experiments will fail along the way. The key is to be aimed at solving the right problem.

Focus on the package. Whoever controls the package wins.

Ask newspapers. Or Google.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject of Fast Flip, lots of people overlooked one of the key words in the product name — FAST. Why does fast matter? How long does it take to get a result when you search on Google? Not long at all. In fact it’s darn FAST. (You can even see how long your Google search took in the blue bar across the top of the search results page.)

That’s why it matters — to the tune of $20 billion. Here’s Marissa Mayer on the importance of being fast. Google has the most successful UI and content package in the history of the web, that created one of the most lucrative business models in the history of media, so don’t write them off too quickly.

What Google Understands About the Future of News and Publishing That Publishers Do Not

2009-09-15T00:37:14Z

Google knows a lot about the future of news — more than many publishers. It’s evident in Google’s new product, Fast Flip, which allows news consumers to “flip” through news stories. What’s striking about Fast Flip is that Google is innovating precisely where publishers used to lead innovation.

Fast Flip is a new package for news.

The publishing business has always been about packaging content. Newspapers. Magazines. Newsletters

In digital media, on the web, the news package is now a function of software — which is why Google is innovating precisely where publishers are not.

Fast Flip is, more accurately, an attempt to create a new UI for news — a better way to consume publishers’ content than publishers provide on their own sites.

Most publishers are focused on how to charge for news. But there’s very little talk about how to innovate the packaging of news, much less a new UI for news. There’s very little talk about how people consume news on the web, about the value of aggregating articles from multiple sources, about solving consumers’ problems rather than publishers’ problems.

That’s why Google is taking the lead on figuring out how to create the new news package, and why they will continue to control the lucrative front end of distribution, while publishers are left with far less profitable back end of content creation.

Google is sharing revenue with publishers because Fast Flip goes way beyond linking to actually partially reproducing entire web pages. And publishers will have to be content with the revenue that Google shares.

Unless they finally decide to compete on the real playing field that will determine the future of news and publishing.

Why Left to Right Punches Are More Aggressive, Powerful and Shocking

2009-07-13T00:31:48Z

Shared by Elias Bizannes
Western culture has a left to right bias in everything due to the influence of language.

Reading and writing from left to right is a skill so well-practised, so ingrained in language, that it's easy to ignore. Yet, according to some research, the direction in which language flows could have implications that spread into many other areas of our experience.

Consider that people are often found to envisage time flowing in a line from left to right; to look at objects like art works from the left to the right; and to imagine numbers from 1 to ∞ laid out from left to right.

There is even something about the very movement from left to right that grabs the attention and holds it. Research finds that people or objects moving from left to right are perceived as having greater power (Maass et al., 2007):

Soccer goals are rated as stronger, faster, even more beautiful when the movement of the scorer is from left to right, rather than right to left.
Film violence seems more aggressive, more painful and more shocking when the punch is delivered from left to right, compared with right to left.
Cars in an advert are rated as stronger and faster when they are moving from left to right, rather than right to left (take note advertising executives!).

Perhaps it's no coincidence that athletes, cars and horses are all usually shown on TV reaching the finishing line from left to right.

Subject, verb, object

It seems likely that this left to right bias has its roots in language (although not everyone agrees, cf. Chatterjee, 2001). Evidence for this comes from people who speak languages written from right to left like Arabic or Urdu who, sure enough, display the same bias, but in the opposite direction.

There is another left to right bias in the basic syntax of language: the vast majority of languages describe events in the order subject, verb, object (with the notable exception of the passive tense).

Together these two facts mean we not only look to the left first, but we also expect the subject to be on the left, and the object to its right. Subjects are by definition active 'do-ers' while objects are the passive receivers of the do-ers' actions.

Adam and Eve

This led Dr. Anne Maass and colleagues at the University of Padova, Italy to a number of fascinating predictions (Maass et al., 2009). First, they said, people will tend to see objects or people that appear on their left as having more 'agentic' properties - in other words the left is associated with power, decisiveness and action, while the right-hand-side less so.

Second they thought that males stereotypically - and I stress stereotypically before the hate mail flows - have more agentic properties than females. Therefore if they examined pairs of men and women pictured together, the man would be more likely to appear on the left side of the picture and the woman on the right.

Searching Google Images they tested the theory with pictures of a well-known couple: Adam and Eve. Their prediction was borne out as Adam was on the left in 62% of pictures, suggesting he was seen as more agentic than Eve.

Marge and Homer

But what about couples where stereotypes begin to break down? To test this 134 people were asked to give agentic ratings to three more pairs of famous fictional couples: The Flintstones, the Simpsons and the Addams family. Here's what they got:

Fred and Wilma Flintstone came out about equal.
Marge and Homer Simpson also came out about equal.
Gomez Addams was perceived as more agentic/active/decisive than Morticia Addams.

So unlike Gomez Addams, Homer Simpson and Fred Flintstone are not seen as old-fashioned patriarchs.

When they searched for pictures of the couples it turned out that both Fred Flintstone and Homer Simpson were no more likely to be depicted to the left of their wives than to the right. But Gomez Addams appeared on the left in 82% of all the representations found by the researchers. This supported their theory: being on the left did show a relationship with the perceived agency of the characters.

Ping pong

The problem with the research so far is that there are all sorts of uncontrolled factors. It may be that Adam and Gomez Addams tended to be depicted on the left of the picture for a reason other than agency. Therefore Maass and colleagues carried out another study to test their theory.

In this one 40 participants were asked to draw female and male teams playing each other at ping pong, basketball, draughts and volleyball. They also completed questionnaires that tested their endorsement of stereotypical beliefs about men and women.

What they found was that people who thought women were more agentic than men tended to put the women's team on the left while those who thought men more agentic tended to put the men's team on the left. This is further support for the idea that we associate the left with decisiveness, action and productivity, and the right less so.

It seems that this effect is not just about men and women either. In another experiment Mass and colleagues used pictures of young versus old people, predicting that young people would be seen as more agentic, which is exactly what they found.

Best cheek forward

The left to right effect is usually quite subtle but it can probably be spotted in all sorts of contexts, such as how we present ourselves to others. One neat study by Nicholls et al. (1999) analysed paintings of scientists and found that when they were posing 'as scientists' they presented their right cheek, thereby creating a left to right dynamic for the viewer of the painting. But, when posing for a family portrait, they presented their left cheek, reversing the trend, perhaps trying to create a more passive, domestic image of themselves.

Collectively these studies, if correct, suggest that the left to right bias from language influences how we perceive the world, how we depict others and perhaps even how we present ourselves.

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10 Rules That Govern Groups

2009-07-01T13:28:16Z

Much of our lives are spent in groups with other people: we form groups to socialise, earn money, play sport, make music, even to change the world. But although groups are diverse, many of the psychological processes involved are remarkably similar.

Here are 10 insightful studies that give a flavour of what has been discovered about the dynamics of group psychology.

1. Groups can arise from almost nothing

The desire to form and join social groups is extremely powerful and built into our nature. Amongst other things groups give us a most valuable gift, our social identity, which contribute to our sense of who we are.

Just how readily people form and join groups is demonstrated by Tajfel et al. (1971) in the so-called 'minimal groups paradigm'. In their study boys who were strangers to each other were given only the slightest hint that they they were being split into two groups. Even without knowing or seeing who else was in their group they favoured members of their own group over the others. Group behaviour, then, can arise from almost nothing.

2. Initiation rites improve group evaluations

Existing groups don't let others join for free: the cost is sometimes monetary, sometimes intellectual, sometimes physical—but usually there is an initiation rite, even if it's well disguised.

Aronson and Mills (1959) tested the effect of initiation rites by making one group of women read passages from sexually explicit novels. Afterwards they rated the group they had joined much more positively than those who hadn't had to undergo the humiliating initiation. So, not only do groups want to test you, but they want you to value your membership.

3. Groups breed conformity

After joining a group and being initiated, we have to get a feel for the group norms, the rules of behaviour in that group. Group norms can be extremely powerful, bending our behaviours in ways we would never expect.

One of the most famous experiments showing how easily we conform to unwritten group rules was conducted by Asch (1951). He had participants sit amongst a group of other people, judging the length of a line. The trick was that all the other members of the group were confederates of the experimenter who had been told to lie about which line was longer. Incredibly 76% of participants denied the evidence from their own senses at least once, just to conform with the group. Afterwards people made up all kinds of excuses for their behaviour. Most popular was a variation on: "that many people can't be wrong". Oh yes they can.

4. Learn the ropes or be ostracised

Group norms are extremely pervasive: this becomes all the more obvious when we start breaking them. Garfinkel (1967) had adolescents return to their families and behave totally out of character, i.e. speaking only when spoken to, being polite, acting formally—but only for 15 minutes at a time. Rather than being delighted their parents were shocked and angry, accusing their children of being selfish and rude. Break the group's rules and you'll know about it soon enough.

5. You become your job

Although groups have norms—rules that apply to everyone in the group—people have roles within groups and corresponding rules that apply to just their position. The most well-known demonstrations of the power of roles is the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Psychologists put young men into a simulated prison environment, making some prisoners and others guards (Zimbardo, 1972). After only 6 of its planned 14 days the experiment had to be stopped because participants conformed all too well to their roles as submissive prisoners or domineering guards. Some were emotionally disturbed by the experience. Even the experimenters were succumbing to their 'roles' as prison superintendents before the plug was pulled on the whole experiment.

6. Leaders gain trust by conforming

A high-profile, high-status role in any group is that of its leader, but where do leaders come from? In some groups, they are appointed or imposed from outside, but in many groups leaders emerge slowly and subtly from the ranks.

A study that has much to teach was carried out by Merei (1949) who observed children at a Hungarian nursery school. He noticed that successful leaders were those who initially fitted in with the group then slowly began to suggest new activities adapted from the old. Children didn't follow potential leaders who jumped straight in with new ideas. Leaders first conform, then only later, when trust has been gained, can they be confident that others will follow. This has been confirmed in later studies (with grown-ups!).

7. Groups can improve performance...

The mere presence of others can make us perform better. Social psychology pioneer Norman Triplett noticed that racing cyclists with a pacemaker covered each mile about 5 seconds quicker than those without (Triplett, 1898). Later research found this wasn't all about the effects of competition. The presence of other people seems to facilitate our own performance, but more so when the task is relatively separate to others and can be judged on its own merits.

8. ...but people will loaf

In other circumstances, though, people in groups demonstrate a tremendous capacity for loafing. Another social psychology pioneer, Max Ringelmann, found in the 1890s that participants in a tug 'o war only put in half as much effort when they were in a team of 8 than when they were on their own. It seems that when hiding in the group is easy, for example when tasks are additive and each person's contribution is difficult to judge, people will slack off to an impressive degree.

9. The grapevine is 80% accurate

Intelligence, rumour, gossip and tittle-tattle is the lifeblood of many groups. It travels at a tremendous pace in big organisations because people love a good bit of gossip, but what are 'they' talking about and can you believe what 'they' say?

Simmons (1985) analysed workplace communication and found that about 80% of the time people are talking about work and a surprising 80% of the information was accurate. Other studies have come up with a similar figure, suggesting that while details are inevitably lost along the way, the grapevine is mostly accurate.

10. Groups breed competition

While co-operation within group members is generally not so much of a problem, co-operation between groups can be hellish. People may be individually co-operative, but once put in a 'them-and-us' situation, rapidly become remarkably adversarial.

Insko et al. (2001) had participants playing a classic game called 'the prisoner's dilemma' which they used to measure competitiveness. When on their own people were competitive 37% of the time but when they were in a group of three this increased to 54%. People easily become suspicious of other groups, reasoning that while their individual members may be 'alright', the group as a whole cannot be trusted.

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McCain Wants Predators to Provide Wi-Fi for Iranians [Iran]

2009-07-12T01:07:58Z

Shared by Mike Cannon-Brookes
God bless America!

Reportedly, Senator John McCain wants Predators to provide with uncensored Wi-Fi coverage to the people of Iran. I don't know if this is even technically possible, but its so preposterous and fantastically cool that I love the idea:

During the Cold War, we provided the Polish people and dissidents with printing presses. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube are the modern-day printing presses. They are the way to spread information and keep the hope of freedom alive amongst the Iranian people

Of course, the Predators—or whatever other method—could be taken down with missiles or fighter planes, but the basic idea is spot on: Give everyone free access to information at any cost.

Free dissemination of information is one of the keys to the independence and freedom of citizens everywhere. Actually, I wish there was some kind of global Wi-Fi system—one that will allow any citizen in the world to access information freely, without intervention of dictators and authoritarian figures in China, North Korea, Iran, or Cuba.

Maybe some crazy nerds with loads of money could work on something like that. You know, like Paul Allen putting a buttload of money, Steve Wozniak leading a new space-based Wi-Fi hardware standard, and John Carmack providing with cheap rockets to launch satellites. [AFP]

Cultural suicide

2009-07-01T02:50:00Z

There should be a law limiting the sale of any book to ten thousand copies. This would throw the literary market open to new talent, fresh ideas and non-commercial writing. If people were forbidden to buy a million copies of the same piece of trash, they would be forced to buy better books.

These are the words of looter Balph Eubank - a character in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Things in Australia are not nearly so bad, but the same principle applies.

The Productivity Commission has been investigating parrallel importing of books in to Australia. Here is the argument for a ban an parallel importation of books.

As the law currently stands, Australian publishers have a window of 30 days to bring out an Australian edition of a book once it has been released anywhere in the world. If they do so, then Australian bookshops have to sell the Australian version, and can’t import the book from overseas. This can mean that books are more expensive - and harder to get hold of - in Australia than they are elsewhere, but also allows the country’s local publishing to flourish, rather than forcing it to compete with a flood of cheaper-priced editions from overseas.

In an impassioned response to the review, which looks at the potential for reform of the law, the Booker prize-winning [Peter] Carey argued against making any changes. “As long as we have a territorial copyright our publishers have a commercial argument to support Australian literature,” he said. “They will battle for the sake of our readers and our writers, even if their owners have no personal commitment to the strange loves and needs of Australian readers, or the cultural integrity and future of the Australian nation.”

Today in the Australian Tim Wilson debunks this argument.

When the Howard government removed import restrictions on compact discs in 1998, it was accused of gutting the music industry and jeopardising the income of musicians. But industry data shows royalties increased from $81.8million in 2003 to $108m in 2007, and the number of performers receiving royalties also increased. Meanwhile, the average price of a CD album has fallen by 32per cent.

Similarly, New Zealand’s removal of parallel import restrictions on copyrighted works in the same year also points to benefits. Jobs in the publishing industry have been lost on both sides of the Tasman, but the NZ industry has not lost nearly as many.

Part of the reason for slower job losses in NZ is that, without protection, publishers focused on being internationally competitive and increased their exports. It is similar to the experience of Australian industries following the liberalisation of tariff barriers in the 1980s and 90s.

The Australian voices telling Australian stories argument is simply rent-seeking and doesn’t stand up to empirical analysis. We’ve heard these arguments before. One of my RMIT colleagues, Jonathan Boymal and I argued that the USFTA wouldn’t destroy Australian television and got some serious hate mail.

Tim Wilson also deals with a far more interesting argument.

But the most absurd claim is that easing import restrictions would water down the exclusive rights copyright confers. In a book there are two property rights: one relates to the physical book and the other to the copyright text. Import restrictions are designed to protect the former and don’t affect the latter.

Although parallel import restrictions exist for the three main branches of intellectual property - copyright, patents and trademarks - they are inconsistent and unnecessary for copyrighted works. Patents and trademarks need parallel import restrictions because the property rights afforded are not automatic. They need to be registered with a government agency country by country. But they rarely are because of the cost involved, and as a result there is no guarantee that royalty payments will be made to the right holder on an import.

Copyright, on the other hand, is automatically conferred to the right holder and it is protected in all countries that are signatories to the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic works. Royalties are paid to copyright holders when their works are published in those countries, based on the laws of each country. The only justification for import restrictions for copyright is to guard against counterfeit products.

Australia’s parallel import restrictions may be included in the Copyright Act, but they are not a part of IP protection. They are a trade barrier disguised as IP protection.

I don’t think it’s fair to call this claim absurd - it is very clever and sophisticated, but wrong as Tim suggests. A longer discussion of the issues can be found here.

Update: Chris Berg reminds me of some hate mail he got in response to an op-ed on the very same issue. It’s from Shane Maloney - a giant of Australian literature.

CHRIS Berg is absolutely right to demand that Australian authors be dunked in acid (The Sunday Age, 15/2). These parasitic bludgers have been getting a free ride for far too long, hiding behind arty-farty notions such as “literature” and sticking their ink-stained fingers into the pockets of “the punters of Narre Warren”.

It is thanks to self-serving emotional blackmailers such as Maurice Gleitzman and Matthew Reilly that our kids can’t read. The sooner these spongers are put out of business, the better. Australia doesn’t need its own publishers and printers. It certainly doesn’t need fancy-pants international successes like Peter Carey and Tim Winton.

Australia should go down on its knees, open wide and think of Peru, correctly identified by Berg as the go-to place for cheap books.

So what if authors don’t get royalties? Bloated fat cats like Kate Grenville should be happy to work for nothing.

And consumers with a yen for fiction can always subscribe to the IPA Review, where the right is right, cartels are invisible and an acid bath is a prescription for good health.

Rambling about creativity and capital and content and frames (via feedly)

2009-07-03T06:41:59Z

The tragic death of Michael Jackson has dominated much of the news this past week, even overshadowing the Iran situation in some quarters. Strange but true. Jackson’s death has had some unusual consequences, as people try and deal with their own reactions in different and creative ways. While the original story broke, I believe, on TMZ, Twitter was the river that carried the news to the world.

And Twitter was overwhelmed. Which meant the arrival of the much-loved Fail Whale:

Which led someone to come up with this:

This concerned a small number of people, who were worried that the image may cause offence. Which in turn led someone else to this:

And so it went on, as people sought more and more creative ways of expressing their emotions and paying tribute to Michael Jackson. Wallpaper downloads. Posters. Photographs. Videos. Collages and montages. All in double-quick time. For me the most creative was this mashup:

BillieTweets. Where someone has taken a Billie Jean video and made the lyrics visual using tweets where the relevant word has been highlighted. Follow the link to see how it works. [Thanks to the Scobleizer for the heads-up. And safe travels.].

All this is part of the magic of the web, the value that is generated when people have the right access and tools and ideas. Human beings are so incredibly creative.

In this context of creativity and web, Jonathan Zittrain, or JZ as he gets called, made a number of critical points in his excellent book The Future of the Internet And How to Stop It

One of those key points is to do with the “generative” web, the phrase he uses to describe the open and innovative and creative aspects of the web; JZ spends time articulating the rise of locked-down devices, services and whole environments as a direct response to the ostensibly anarchic nature of the generative web, with its inherent vulnerabilities and weaknesses. [If you haven't read the book, do so, it's worth it. ]

The implied tension between “generative” and “secure” that is to be found in JZ’s book, resonated, in a strange kind of way, with some of the ideas in Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital:

The book remains one of my all-time favourites, I’ve probably read it a dozen times since it was published. And given away many many copies, something I have done with a very small number of books, including: The Social Life of Information, The Cluetrain Manifesto and Community Building on The Web.

The resonant piece was this: One of Perez’s seminal findings was the difference between financial capital and production capital.

In Perez’s view, financial capital “represents the critera and behaviour of those agents who possess wealth in the form of money or other paper assets….. their purpose remains tied to having wealth in the form of money (liquid or quasi-liquid and making it grow. To achieve this purpose, they use …. intermediairies …. The behaviour of these intermediaries while fulfilling the function of making money from money that can be observed and analysed as the behaviour of financial capital. In essence, financial capital serves as the agent for reallocating and redistributing wealth.

Perez goes on to say that “the term production capital embodies the motives and behaviours of those agents who generate new wealth by producing goods or performing services.

Through these distinctions, she clearly delineates the differences between the “process of creating wealth and the enabling mechanisms”; these distinctions are then played out through a number of “surges” or paradigm shifts. An incredible book.

For some time now, I’ve been wrestling with the connections between Zittrain’s generative web and Perez’s production capital, and formed my own views of the progressive-versus-conservative tensions that can be drawn from such a juxtaposition.

All this came to the fore again in the context of copyright and content, as I read Diane Gurman’s excellent First Monday piece on Why Lakoff Still Matters: Framing The Debate On Copyright Law And Digital Publishing

I give the abstract of the article here:

In 2004, linguist and cognitive scientist George Lakoff popularized the idea of using metaphors and “frames” to promote progressive political issues. Although his theories have since been criticized, this article asserts that his framing is still relevant to the debate over copyright law as applied to digital publishing, particularly in the field of scholarly journals. Focusing on issues of copyright term extension and the public domain, open access, educational fair use, and the stewardship and preservation of digital resources, this article explores how to advocate for change more effectively — not by putting a better “spin” on proposed policies — but by using coherent narratives to frame the issues in language linked to progressive values.

Reading the article took me back to Perez and to Zittrain. Our Lakoffian frames of “strict father” and “nurturant parent” are in many ways congruent with the generative-versus-secure and production-versus-financial continua described by JZ and Carlota. As Gurman says:

Lakoff’s nurturant parent embodies values of equality, opportunity, openness and concern for the general welfare of all individuals. Under the progressive economic model, markets should serve the common good and democracy…. The strict father frame, on the other hand, centres on issues of authority and control. The moral credo expresses the belief that if people are disciplined and pursue their self-interest they will become prosperous and self-reliant. The favoured economic model is that of a free market operating without government interference.

A free market operating without government interference. Hmmm I remember those.

Despite the credit crunch, the economic meltdowns, the rise in fraud, despite the socialisation of losses and the privatisation of gains that ensued, many things have not changed. And they must. We need to move to a generative internet production capital world. And for that maybe we need to think about what Diane Gurman is saying.

We need to frame our arguments around our values rather than just on the facts and figures; we need to weave a coherent narrative based on public benefit via empowerment and access.

We can see the implications of this divide in many of the arguments that are being had in the digital domain. For example, the recent announcement by Ofcom of its intention to enforce regulated access to premium (and hitherto exclusive) content is a case in point, where the same arguments prevail.

The response of the incumbent, while understandable, is benighted. You only have to look at the public benefit implications, particularly those to do with human progress and innovation.

The returns expected from production capital differ from those expected out of financial capital for a variety of reasons; the most important reason is that when you’re in the business of creating value and wealth, rather than redistributing it, the returns tend to be somewhat less than astronomical.

F-22 Raptor Breaks Sound Barrier On Camera [Planelopnik]

2009-07-01T21:30:00Z

U.S. Navy sonar technician, Ronald Dejarnett captured the beauty and sheer power of a single U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor as it hit supersonic speeds over the Gulf of Alaska. [Gizmodo via US Navy]

Baby Name Fail

2009-04-15T22:56:30Z

Shared by Rob M
This is nowhere near a FAIL. It is clearly a WIN!

Submitted by Dom K

The Web of Objects

2008-12-14T22:01:48Z

For more than two decades, we’ve seen a succession of attempts to “connect everything”. One of the real fathers of the Internet, not Al Gore but Vint Cerf, once graced the cover of a geek magazine wearing a t-shirt with the now famous slogan: IP on Everything.
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He was and is right. The destiny of every meaningful object in our lives is to have sensors, actuators some time, and always an IP stack for wired or wireless communication. Destiny is the operative word here, because we haven’t made as much progress as we hoped. In 1986, Mike Markkula, one of Apple’s early backers and leaders, started Echelon. The idea was to make chips so small and inexpensive they’d be everywhere, even inside a light bulb socket. Thus, using the electric wires as the network, the Echelon chip would monitor the lamp and report the condition (healthy or soon to fail) of its filament, for example. Same idea for industrial or home furnaces, security systems, meter reading and the like. Here and there, we see experiments but no broad use, not in the sense of personal computers, WiFi, cell phones or GPS units.
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A not-too-helpful explanation combines cost and complexity: sound idea but it adds too much to the price of the devices to be so managed and the lack of standards combined with buggy technology still get in the way. In other words, we don’t have a target date for managing all these devices from a browser on a PC or smartphone, anytime, anywhere in the world.
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But there is hope. We have cars and cell phones. Today, a good bet is 90% or more of cars on the road have a cell phone inside. Tomorrow, another good bet is 90% or more of these cell phones will have a GPS function. Now, picture something not requiring much in terms of user action, something much simpler than interconnecting furnaces, lamps, alarm system sensors, personal video recorder, video cameras inside a house. Picture all cell phones reporting their position all the time – anonymously. I know, the latter clause is an issue, we read stories of government agencies secretly activating the GPS tracking function of phones for covert surveillance purposes. But bear with me, let’s assume we can trust our government to keep position data anonymous. Most of the time. Now, the continuous position data are passed on to a benevolent company such as Microsoft, Yahoo! or Google, a company with server farms able to absorb and digest such volume of data.
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We have the data streams and the server farm. What could be done for the private and public good?
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We can reduce traffic congestion, save energy and, most likely lives. For example, the servers can start by building a history of traffic patterns on freeways and smaller roads as well. Then, detect variations, see congestion or even accidents: lots of cars here and little or no traffic downstream. Imagine the little car positions dots on a map. Push the results to a URL for a series or real-time maps allowing drivers to move around trouble, or, at least, to see how late they’re likely to be if they’re trapped.
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Of course, one will point out to today’s solutions monitoring traffic and reporting on the radio or feeding back information to navigation systems or to Google Maps. But none have the fine granularity and real-time data offered by a swarm of GPS-enabled cell phones.
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Most of us won’t like the next step contemplated by government big wigs: with computers knowing where every car on the road is, wouldn’t it be more efficient, safer, to leave the driving to computers?
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Closer to our timeline: as we speak, the Netherlands is issuing RFPs (Request For Proposals) for a countrywide system where each car would have a transponder and each road would be equipped with sensors at suitable intervals. No surprise: the idea is to reduce congestion, improve energy consumption and, this had to happen, price road use according to time of the day and other conditions. Everything being connected, drivers are billed electronically and money withdrawn directly from bank accounts.
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I can’t wait to see what hackers will do with this. – JLG
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Numbers to keep in mind

2008-12-28T20:52:31Z

This article is part of an occasional serie featuring interesting raw data. Use the tag “numbers” to see the previous entries.
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No predictions for this last 2008 issue. We all know what’s ahead: a difficult year, with double-digit drop in revenue for newspapers. A year that will see many news outlets simply wiped out. There will be opportunities, though. But for different types of organizations: smaller, leaner, and more agile. Flexibility will be a key factor. It will favor small companies or business units able to focus their reduced investment on what matters and cut the rest. Big organizations will stay absorbed in navel-gazing restructuring ruminations; their old-fashioned managements will keep forgetting that, even more in hard times than in good ones, speed is essential. We’ll come back with facts and figures next year. Today, I just want to offer interesting numbers, worth keeping in mind for the rough times ahead.
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40%. For the first time, the Internet ranks higher than newspapers as the prime source for news. According to the latest Pew Research survey, 40% compares with 35% for newspapers and, still, 70% for television. The latter medium remains the leading source for news, all generations compounded. Even more interesting is the trend we can discern from the following: among Americans below 30, exactly the same proportion (59%) mention television and the Internet as their n°1 source for national and international news. All by itself, this shows how doomed newspapers are — as a medium, not necessarily as a news provider (as long as they are able to mutate).
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15.586 + job cuts. 2008 has been a terrible year for the journalistic profession in the United States. These job cuts in the newspaper industry (layoffs and buyouts), represent more than seven times the 2007 number of staff reductions (already a record high with 2185 people being axed), according to the blog papercuts. Altogether, the US Department of Labor estimates job losses in newspaper industry at 21,000 (editorial staff and others). And losses in the magazine industry are extra.
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30 big newspapers for sale. That is for the US market. Problem is, even at bargain basement prices, there are very few buyers. The Financial Times says newspaper valuations have gone from 8-10 times operating cash-flow a few years ago to 4-6 times now. And with ad revenue falling by 15% to 20% in 2008 and comparable declines in sight with –17% for 2009 and –7.5% for 2010 (as forecasted by Barclays Capital), the notion of positive cash-flow is fading away. No market will be spared: Deloitte is expecting a loss of 20% in ad revenue for UK newspapers. For many papers, says the report, staff reduction won’t be sufficient, and they will be forced to reduce print frequency.
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22% of operating costs. If the New York Times cut its operating expenses in half by abandoning print entirely, its online advertising revenue would cover only 22% of remaining expenses (based on Q3 2008). Even though we can hope for more stable online economy in the long run, this 22% number shows by how much such a big journalistic cathedral will have to shrink.
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1:10. For the worldwide newspaper industry, the 10-to-1 rule applies in two ways: in revenue terms, a Web reader is worth one tenth of a print customer; each extra dollar (or euro) of revenue on the Internet translates into 10 dollars (or euro) lost on paper advertising. This is verified worldwide. 2009 is likely to change these ratios for two reasons: first it seems that, even on the Internet, ad revenue growth is coming to a halt ; and as net ad dollars and euros migrate to search (more targeted, cheaper for brands, and controlled by Google), the revenue stream is likely to be affected negatively.
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91 years. That’s how old the Pulitzer Prize award is. In 2008, it took a major step by opening the competition to non-newspapers outlets. It will be interesting to see how pure players do. The most likely outcome is foreign news reporting will remain in the hands of the traditional newspapers, but two fields are likely to be affected: politics and businesses in which pure players are thriving (and will hire some good pros laid off from print).
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#4 ranking. Drudge Report. The gossipy/ breaking news political website outranked the New York Times during the Nov. 4th election night, according to Hitwise. The three sites ahead of the Drudge Report are all TV related ones: #1: CNN.com ; #2: MSNBC.com : #3: FoxNew.com. Hitwise uses questionable metrics (market share), but still, it shows the power of specialized blogs such as The HuffingtonPost or The Politico. Those blogs are manned by 50-80 people with high journalistic standards while The Drudge Report is more like a two-persons outfit (read this interesting profile of Matt Drudge in New York Magazine).
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$260 a month. That’s how much the average US household is spending each month on digital services that did not exist a generation ago. They include: mobile phone, broadband access, cable or satellite television, personal video recording. This number comes from a survey by the Center for Digital Future, a department of the University of Southern California. Even more interesting is the amount of money spent by the poorest households: their monthly bill of digital services isn’t as low as one would imagine: $180. This suggests two thoughts: one, these services are no longer a luxury but have become as basic as a car; two, given this amount of money, hoping to squeeze a few dozens of dollars more per month for content services is unrealistic. Except for highly specialized premium services (almost never paid by the end-user), editorial on the Internet is very likely to remain free. European spending is lower, but catching up. — FF
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Present.ly: An 'Enterprise Twitter' Worthy Of The Name

2008-12-25T05:44:41Z

Shared by Elias Bizannes
Microblogging still evolving. Not there yet, and certainly not for the large enterprise, but good to see so many people innovating

I decided to take a close hands-on look at Present.ly, another of the legion of would-be 'Twitter for the Enterprise' competitors that have emerged in recent months.

The bottom line: Present.ly appears to be ready to meet the challenges of a streaming application for the enterprise.

A Deep Dive

As my recent report on QikCom demonstrates, assessing a would-be enterprise microstreaming application involves a lot of work.

In the case of Present.ly, I was interested at the outset whether the tool would allow me to invite users with arbitrary email addresses (since Yammer does not). Present.ly does indeed support arbitrary email address for invitees, but it goes further. Invitations can be open for any with the company's base email address (the 'domain' option, below), a code can be created and distributed to a group of people to speed up invitations (the 'access code' option), the account can be totally open so that anyone can join (the 'open' option), or it can be closed, requiring the administrator to invite users one by one ('closed'). In my circustances, I opted for closed.

Present.ly - Create Your New Present.ly Account, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Messaging

The principal activity in a microstreaming is reading and writing messages, but in the case of an enterprise solution with an open context, and the possibility of closed groups, there should be a clear differentiation between different sorts of messages. As shown below, messages created in or directed to a closed group ('Open Enterprise 2009' in this case) are highlighted in pinkish orange, as are direct messages, which are supported by the 'd username' convention of twitter. The '@username' convention is adopted from Twitter for posting a message in the open for the attention of a specific person.

Edgewards - Stowe Boyd's Home [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

On the right of the screenshot above you see that the short 140 character messages can have a functionally unlimited text field attached, and this text can be marked up or managed in various ways, like formatted text (conserves line breaks, but not other formatting at this time), textile and markup, or as various sorts of programming code. The variety of code types suggests that Present.ly is targeting its solution toward the development community.

I tried formatting attached text in textile, because I have used that feature in the past with Backpack and Basecamp, especially for simple lists, bolding, and tables. In this text I used the '|' notation to make simple tables; much easier that the HTML equivalent:

Edgewards - Stowe Boyd's Home [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

The result wasn't that wonderful, though. There should clearly be better styling of the table so that more padding is provided.

Edgewards - Stowe Boyd's Home [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Perhaps much more powerful is the option to attch files to posts. Here's a message with a graphics file -- my avatar -- attached:

/Edgewards [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Once attached, there isn't much you can do with files: there is no Files tab where they can be managed, deleted or updated, as you can in Basecamp, for example. And at the moment, they can't even be deleted. And neither can messages, it tursn out. You can delete users, and you can delete groups, but not individual messages. This is a major glitch. You also can't edit messages, or the attached text objects, at the moment, which is a major annoyance converging on bug status.

There is also an button to shorten URLs, but it turned 'http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/stowe-boyd-front-man-for-.html' into 'https://edgewards.presentlyapp.com/s/at' which is only slightly shorter. I think I will stick with Bit.ly (they may want to integrate it).

Groups

Creating groups is straightforward: there can be open to any users in the company account, or closed, meaning people have to be invited. Also, groups can be published in the company directory of groups or not. So secret and closed groups are possible.

/Edgewards [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Once groups are created, messages can be directed to them using the '@groupname' or 'd groupname' approach. I tested it and a user who is not a member of a group can send a dm to one, which raises some questions: since the group in question was nomincally closed and secret, it might be better if a 'no such group' error message was returned, even if in fact the message is sent.

In general, however, this means that a users can be working in the default 'Home' feed, and create or respond to messages for groups that they belong to, as in 'd oe09 @olivermarks How about lunch on Tuesday?'. This last example is a good one because it demonstrates a few subtle features. The 'd oe09' directs a private message to the 'oe09' group. Once within that group, the '@olivermarks' denotes that the message is directed specifically to olivermarks, although any other members of the group can see it as well. Lastly, the question mark is picked up by Presnt.ly and handled in a special way. A message with a question mark in it is considered a question: a special sort of message. Present.ly also treats a few other sorts of messages specially: tagged messages, system broadcasts, and urgent messages. Each of these has its own subtab under the 'Browse' tab, and each has different sorts of use.

Questions

Questions, with the distinctive question mark in the background, are supposed to lead to answers. If you look at the question a few down in the list below, you will see that a question posted by @stoweboyd awaits an answer from the user I had logged is as, @junior.

/Edgewards [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

If @junior answers @stoweboyd's question, and then clicks on the 'view' link in the post, the following sort of threaded presentation is shown:

/Edgewards [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

In this case, @junior answered the question publicly, but also answered a second time, privately. This sort of private/public answering of public questions is very rich. Note that questions can be private, or one-to-one, as well.

Urgent

Any message that ends with '!!!' is treated as urgent, with a distinctive exclamation mark in the background.

System Broadcast

Any message starting with 'b ' is a system broadcast and is shown to everyone, as well as appearing the that tab under Browse.

Tagged Messages

Present.ly has adopted the hashtag convention from Twitter, so all posts with hastags, like '#planning' or '#tasks' will show under the Tags tab. All tags are search tools, and clicking on them shows all messages that share the clicked on tag. At this time there doesn't seem to be a place to display or manage tags, aside from a tag cloud in the Tags page.

People

Users have short profiles, and the following/followers model is carried over from Twitter.

Twitter Cross Posting

A limited form of Twitter integration is supported: any message with 't! ' at the start -- like 't! going for lunch and a long walk' -- will be posted to Twitter once you have set up your settings to login on your behalf.

Here's an Update -- a simple way to post a new message no matter where you are in the app -- cross posting to Twitter.

/Edgewards [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Strangely enough, the post in Twitter did no refer to Present.ly at all, saying it had been posted 'via the web'.

Notifications

In principle, Present.ly will notify users of various sorts of things in various sorts of ways. Most importantly, there is an interface for SMS, but try as I might, I could never get it to send the verification message to my phone. I did get IM notifications working however.

/Edgewards [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Here's my Gtalk alerts:

gopresently - chat, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

Desktop Clients

The website doesn't have much to say on this topic, although I did find this post at the Present.ly blog which shows how you can make a version of Twitterrific that accesses the twitter api that Present.ly supports. I did it, and, presto:

Twitterrific, originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

And the round trip works as well: I posted from the Twitterrific client back to Present.ly, no problem.

Conclusions

I haven't played with Present.ly long enough to say anything about performance or scaling. But aside from a few small glitches -- notification via SMS to my phone just doesn't happen, for example -- the app works in obvious, straightforward and sensible fashion. I didn't encounter very many issues that I would consider bugs, except for the SMS bottleneck.

It will take longer to determine if I can use Present.ly in a productive fashion for my sort of usage pattern -- lots of long-term projects, very firewalled, with non-overlapping groups of people from differen companies. But I think I am an edge case, and the normal pattern of use is one in which a great deal of activity will be taking place in the Company stream, not 99% in closed private groups.

Nonetheless, I believe that Present.ly will be ready for enterprise use, at least for businesses of hundreds of staff, and maybe for larger ones, by the end of the 60 day evaluation cycle for any one signing up today. I am betting that they will figure out how to delete messages, and support editing of messages and text attachments, all in short order.

The price point is reasonable, too --

/Edgewards [Present.ly], originally uploaded by Stowe Boyd.

-- although I got finessed in the process of evaluation. There is a 60 day free trial. I signed up for the free account, and relatively quickly had to upgrade to a larger account, because I invited more that five users. Next thing you know, I had to get out my credit card, and was charged $14 starting today! Basically lost the 60 days free trial. So be sure to sign up for a 60 day trial with a large number of users.

Talent is the bottom-up side of competence

2008-12-24T10:00:56Z

A friend of mine was making fun of the use of the word “talent” since he didn’t see in which way it was different from “ressource”, even if human. He was only seeing one more employer brand trick, a promise that only engages the one who hear it.

It’s true that HR marketing, as general marketing, likes to use new terms to value the people it talks to even if that doesn’t mean anything really changed in the workplace. But if we look into the subject, there is sometimes a true reflection behind all that and we can guess this will spread in the upcomming times.

Talking about talents in the workplace may seem being totally out of touch. It’s a term we often use for creative and artistic activities. We say talent for a singer, an actor, a football player, not for an employee for whom we say “competent”. Competence is something defined, straightforward, writen into official systems of references. Talent is not quantifiable neither it can be described : it only can be noticed and because it can’t be put in compartments it’s left away for entertainers.

Notice that we say talent for a football player, a tennisman, not for an athlete. Perhaps because the first decide, improvise and make choices in real time, facing situations that are not foreseeable, although the second run, jump, throws, but is mono-activity and always does the same gestures in sequences that are endlessly repeated and optimized. A race can be modelized, not a game.

Is that trivial ?

Competence is the ability to face a defined situation, make a defined work. Talent is the abality to face unforeseeable things, propose, take intiatives, organize and manage his network and his work at his own level.

If we assume that, in a modern organization, people must know how to do their assigned work but also to be autonomous and reactive, we can deduce that competence is about “pushed production” when talent is what makes it possible to adopt a “pull” mode. Talent development is the consequence of empowerment is what makes possible to move from a top-down only organization to a bottom-up one when needed. I say “when needed” because both are not exclusive the one from the other, on the contrary they are complementary.

From that we can imagine that a company that does its job well is “competences pushed” and a company that does outstanding this is “talent pulled”…

I like this sentence from Ed Catmull, Co-founder of Pixar : “If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they’ll screw it up; but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something that works.”

The BMW Winter Tyres MMS campaign earned 45 million - yes million in new business to BMW

2008-12-13T01:26:48Z

They ran a campaign of under 120,000 MMS picture messages. And that miniscule mobile phone campaign resulted in 45 million - million - dollars in additional business. Business that wes directly attributable - and accurately attributed - to the 120,000 mobile phone messages.

Must be them mad Koreans eh, or the weird and wacky Finns, or the simply different Japanese, eh?

No, this was in Germany. The company who made 45 million dollars out of a tiny messaging campaign was not a pornographer, or a crazy tones subscription provider, nor a phony voting scam on TV, nor some outrageously addictive social networking phenomenon.

It wasn't even a digital business, and the provider was not known for digital innovation. It was that ultimate driving machine company from Bayern, yes BMW. As conservative and "bricks-and-mortar" business as can be, in Germany, far from the leading edge of mobile telecoms.

We've blogged about this amazing mobile marketing campaign, and I have said many times that it is an excellent example of excellence in mobile marketing and advertising, and deserves to win awards this year. It is also a perfect example of engagement marketing, and shows you don't have to create a fantastic mobile social networking service like a Cyworld or Flirtomatic to be able to do engagement marketing well.

So now, our friend Ajit Jaokar, who blogs at Open Gardens, has done a nice analysis of the mathematics and economics of the campaign (with some help from the industry guru Romi Parmar, as well as some very intelligent discussions we saw at Forum Oxford). Ajit breaks it down like this:

The campaign went out to only those BMW new-car buyers who bought their Beemer in the summer season in Germany. Out of all cars sold in 2007, BMW sold 117,000 to private citizens in the summer period (anyone who bought a BMW as part of a fleet, would have bulk buyers for their winter tyres)

The campaign sent out 117,000 MMS picture messages. These cost a total airtime cost approx 60,000 US dollars

The BMW campaign received a 30% conversion rate (ie people actually showed up in a store, and made a purchase) - truly amazing, a brilliant number (internet advertising is happy if they get 5% click-through rates..)

The average cost of a set of winter tyres is 700 dollars, and average cost of tyres plus rims 2,500 dollars. Average customer would spend approx 1,300 dollars.

Multiply that by 30% of 117,000 and we get 35,000 customers who received the MMS message, who appeared at a registered BMW dealer, and bought tyres (or tyres and rims) for their new cars.

Total earned by BMW out of this campaign - 45,500,000 million dollars.

45 MILLION earned by one campaign that cost 60,000 to run.

The return of investment per single MMS ad transmitted was a stunning 758 dollars.

Check out Ajit's full analysis and calculations (and his related postings about the utility - and sometimes lack thereof - of MMS marketing)

But yeah, if you can make 45 million more business using a mobile phone campaign that had transmission costs of 60,000 dollars, then any CFO, CMO and CEO will suddenly question the sanity of running television campaigns that cost millions and newspaper and magazine ad campaigns that run hundreds of thousands, with no way to measure their effect.

Gotta love this business.

On Measurement Standards

2008-12-23T05:53:03Z

Shared by Elias Bizannes
Online advertising: so many measurement models, no consistency, holes in every model = holding back it's potential by billions I think

At the Interactive Advertising Bureau's Audience Measurement Leadership Forum this past Monday, its Audience Measurement Reach Guidelines document was released for public comment. This document, over 18 months in the making and a joint initiative between the IAB and the Media Research Council, goes a long way in helping sort out the differences in methods different sources use to count and report on Internet audiences.

Broken Business Models

2008-12-21T04:05:48Z

Shared by Elias Bizannes
Nice summary of broken business models

Newspapers: Elias Bizannes, Ryan Sholin via Virtual Economics, Louis Gray; Open Source Software: Business Week; Printing: EE Times; Retail: Marketing Week, Lean UK (pdf); Venture Capital: VentureBeat; All Of The Above: Robin Bloor ...

E-mazingly Eye-Catching: <b>Elias Bizannes</b> (Syd, NSW)

2008-12-21T03:35:57Z

Shared by Elias Bizannes
Hehe I'm being treated like a piece of meat - awesome

Businessman’s name: Elias Bizannes Job description: Consultant Business name: Silicon Beach Australia Location: Lower north shore, Sydney Find him online: www.siliconbeachaustralia.org/. Granted, we don’t yet have the budget to send a ...

Broken Business Models

2008-12-16T19:12:00Z

iPhone on Wifi

2008-12-18T19:22:30Z

42% Of iPhone Data Sent Via Wi-Fi. Means that Apple's partnership with companies like Skyhook are more important than we originally thought. At least in the near term, until mobile data connections become good enough substitutes for wifi.

Previous post:
Skyhook Wireless Cornering Location Based Data

Strategy is Something You Can Learn

2008-12-03T21:03:15Z

Quite often when speaking I'm asked how we "came up with" Atlassian's strategy and business model.

(slide from Scaling Atlassian presentation)

For a long while, this question used to throw me. I'd answer something like "Uh... well, it just kind of evolved." or "Uhm... it was really just common sense?".

These answers of course aren't helpful to the person asking the question who is looking for some sort of learning they can build their own strategy on.

This post is my more thoughtful, updated answer.

Evolving Strategy

The simple answer of course is that we have built the strategy on a few points of initial knowledge, and then evolved it with what we learnt from customers, the market and other businesses over time.

Our initial hunches have proven to be correct. The internet has changed how software is distributed, the web has made it possible to be global from day 1, the cost of writing enterprise software has decreased.

The key point people miss is that we haven't stopped learning from other businesses in order to improve our own.

Too many people assume that your model or strategy for a startup is fixed. I believe it should be a lot more agile than that. The core values of your company shouldn't change, however strategies and models are there to be tweaked and evolved.

Learning From Others

I'm a big studier of other businesses. I think of it as strategy cross training. The chance to think about all manner of big, difficult challenges that other technology businesses are facing in order to evolve the strategic side of my brain.

Question like:

If I as running eBay, what on earth would I do now? What are my strengths and weaknesses?
Why did Apple release an iPhone? Is it really a "magic product" or did they put years of engineering into making it right before releasing it? Why did they invest so much?
Is Yahoo! truly screwed as Google keep eating their lunch? How do they get out of their hole? Can they? Is Y!OS a lock, or a big gamble? Is it their only gamble?
Can Google just sit back and rest? Have they already "won" the web? If I was Eric, Sergey or Larry - who would I be scared of?

Learn Don't Copy

It's extremely important to note that learning doesn't mean copying. There is no "one true" strategy, rather one that is the best for a given business at a given time.

Even if you think someone else has made smart moves and those moves would work for your businesses, they are extremely unlikely to work for you without modification to your own circumstances.

The "I Want To Be Apple" Fad

Case in point - I hear far too many people looking at Apple and making strategic calls on what they should do to their own businesses. Saying things like "We just need better design." or "We need to spend more on clever ads." without truly understanding Apple's business.

This is extremely dangerous!

To quote the man himself Steve Jobs:

"...when you start looking at a problem and it seems really simple with all these simple solutions, you don't really understand the complexity of the problem. And your solutions are way too oversimplified, and they don't work. Then you get into the problem, and you see it's really complicated. And then you come up with all these convoluted solutions. That's sort of the middle, and that's where most people stop, and the solutions tend to work for awhile. But the really great person will keep on going and find, sort of, the key, underlying principle of the problem. And come up with a beautiful elegant solution that works."

Or as Mark Rafter coined it - Jobs is striving for the simplicity on the otherside of complexity.

Apple is a fantastic company that's truly kicking goals. However, they're not just about flashy marketing, or shiny aluminium bevels. To point to these small examples trivialises Apple's strategy, smart thinking and understanding of its customers.

If you want to truly learn from other's strategies, you have to truly understand both their strategy, and your needs. Only then can you learn and improve your own business. Trying to blindly adopt what they've done, you risk oversimplifying the solution and failing.

You were blind to the complexity, this didn't reach the simplicity on the other side.

Where can I learn?

Books are a great start. As I'm writing this, I have a stack of 15 unread books on the left of my desk, a fair few stacks at home and I came home with about 4 or 5 new books from the bookstore last night.

But books are the slow-burn energy of learning. They're the mental complex carbohydrates your body needs for endurance (aka whole grains) rather than the mental simple sugars you need for a quick high (aka Coca Cola).

The internet provides plenty of simple strategic sugars for quick learning!

(Apologies for the overly metaphor loaded post here - I'm trying to get back into blogging and it takes a while to find one's voice again. Writing is like a muscle, you need to exercise it often to improve. Oh - and there I go again!)

Want to learn about Apple's strategy? Steve Jobs' Master Plan is a great post covering the last 10 years of Apple's evolution and a few ideas about where they are going next. Good sugar here.

Yahoo! Open Strategy? You can learn a lot about the evolution of their strategy by understanding Yahoo's competitive position and reading between the lines of their Y!OS launch. TechCrunch has a good set of live blog notes and a follow up post

How about the big G? French consultancy faberNovel today released a fabulous presentation summarising Google's strategy that I've embedded here. Google is a large and complex company, and this is a great attempt at simplifying all the large strategic moves their making. I learned a lot from it that I feel I can reuse (with modification!) at Atlassian.

To finish where I started - another question I'm asked often when speaking is "What advice I took early?". My answer is often the same. Someone once gave me this advice (apologies, I forgot who!):

"If you take everyone's advice, you'll do nothing new. Your role as an entrepreneur is to know what to ignore."

Beautifully recursive, smart advice - that I didn't ignore.

And remember, seek the simplicity beyond complexity!

Shameless plug: Confluence 2.10 was released today. Yet another evolution of the world's best enterprise wiki. See what's new (watch our neat new launch video for a good summary!) or read the release notes. Enjoy!

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10 Rules That Govern Groups

1. Groups can arise from almost nothing

2. Initiation rites improve group evaluations

3. Groups breed conformity

4. Learn the ropes or be ostracised

5. You become your job

6. Leaders gain trust by conforming

7. Groups can improve performance...

8. ...but people will loaf

9. The grapevine is 80% accurate

10. Groups breed competition

McCain Wants Predators to Provide Wi-Fi for Iranians [Iran]

Cultural suicide

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F-22 Raptor Breaks Sound Barrier On Camera [Planelopnik]

Baby Name Fail

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Numbers to keep in mind

Present.ly: An &#39;Enterprise Twitter&#39; Worthy Of The Name

Talent is the bottom-up side of competence

Related posts

The BMW Winter Tyres MMS campaign earned 45 million - yes million in new business to BMW

On Measurement Standards

Broken Business Models

E-mazingly Eye-Catching: <b>Elias Bizannes</b> (Syd, NSW)

Broken Business Models

iPhone on Wifi

Strategy is Something You Can Learn

Evolving Strategy

Learning From Others

Learn Don't Copy

The "I Want To Be Apple" Fad

Where can I learn?

Present.ly: An 'Enterprise Twitter' Worthy Of The Name