Mike Speiser, Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures, has an interesting post on GigaOm today.  An excerpt:

Self-Service Nation: Why Targeting Small Business Is Good Business

While the 80-20 rule can be very powerful, the reality is that many of the costs associated with building, supporting, distributing and selling technology products have dropped dramatically in the past decade. Yet many enterprise technology executives are operating as though the cost of distribution hasn’t changed since the early 1990s. In the coming years, I expect startups to increasingly target the massively underserved small- and medium-sized business (SMB) segment by taking advantage of the arbitrage between actual and assumed costs of sales. Self-service sales models will be a key element of these startups that will forever change the face of the enterprise technology business.

As he further explains in his post, there is a significant nascent market at the small business level that has, up until now, been left for Microsoft to dominate. Smart SaaS players, as well as others that do not have legacy enterprise software DNA, are best positioned to successfully target this market in coming years. I think companies like 37Signals are already flourishing here, and serve as a great source of ideas and experience for anyone looking to tap into a greatly underserved market.

Navi Radjou has an interesting post on how Microsoft approaches it’s global R&D over at the Harvard Business blog, excerpt:

Microsoft Reinvents Its Global R&D Model – Navi Radjou – HarvardBusiness.org

What impressed me most about TEM is its staff members’ multidisciplinary backgrounds. In addition to computer scientists and engineers, TEM also includes experts in the areas of ethnography, sociology, political science, and development economics, all of which help Microsoft understand the social context of technology in emerging markets like India. For instance, we met with Aishwarya Ratan, an associate researcher trained as a development economist, who is exploring the delivery of financial services to poor and low-literate clients using mobile technologies. Another researcher, Nimmi Rangaswamy, who has a background in social anthropology, is conducting ethnographic research in urban slums to identify the socio-economic needs of micro-entrepreneurs there — many of which can be addressed with technology.

By leveraging its multidisciplinary talent, TEM has developed some amazing solutions designed for emerging and underserved markets, both in rural and urban environments. For example, it has developed the MultiPoint mouse, which allows a single computer to be shared by multiple children in developing nations. My personal favourite is Digital Green (which I nicknamed “American Idol for Farmers”), a Web 2.0 initiative which tapes progressive farmers to disseminate their best practices across agricultural communities. Digital Green just won the 2008 Stockholm Challenge Award in the Culture category.

Undoubtedly Microsoft is pioneering the R&D 2.0 model that I discussed in my last post — an organizational model that relies on anthropologists and development economists to first decipher the socio-cultural needs of users in emerging markets like India and then use these deep insights to develop appropriate technology solutions. And it’s telling that Microsoft picked India as the epicentre of its global R&D transformation.

I don’t think Microsoft is alone in taking this approach in India or elsewhere, but it is notable that Microsoft recognizes that technological advancement alone will not lead to greater success in the future – particularly in emerging markets.

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A few months back I wrote about the need for Amazon to begin ’socializing’ the Kindle.  Another item of frustration that I forgot to mention in that post was the inability to pull my notes and highlights from the kindle via the web.  I As of this morning, however, Amazon has enabled web access to notes and highlights.  Techcrunch notes:

Kindle Notes And Highlights Now Accessible On the Web

While this opens up all sorts of possibilities, Amazon is taking a very conservative approach. You can’t share your notes with others. You can’t even edit them in your browser. All you can do is read them.

I just logged in to check on my Kindle books, and can only find highlights and notes for two books. Hopefully all the notes will be online soon so I can, at minimum, cut and paste them into Evernote or another application.

This is progress, but Amazon still needs to socialize the entire book reading experience!

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For all the buzz that Tata’s release of the Nano received last year,  the long term impact of the company’s new venture may be even greater.  The sprawling Tata empire, loosely held together by Ratan Tata, recently announced a plan to build affordable housing for India’s burgeoning middle class.  Here’s an excerpt from BusinessWeek:

Tata’s Nano Home: Company behind world’s cheapest car to sell $7,800 apartments – BusinessWeek

Tata, the Indian company that made worldwide headlines with its $2,000 Nano car, now plans to build 1,000 tiny apartments outside Mumbai that will sell for $7,800 to $13,400 each. The company plans to roll out low-cost projects outside other major cities.

Tata’s housing division is targeting a segment of the market that was largely overlooked during the housing boom. India’s builders were concentrating on building shiny new high rises and mansions on golf courses. Builders were after profits, but they were also trying to justify their fast-accelerating land costs, especially in and around Mumbai (formerly known as Bombay) and other major cities.

As a Cornell trained architect, Ratan Tata clearly understands the value of creating spaces that foster a sense of being and community.  Like the Nano, the Shubh Griha community probably won’t attract the well connected, wealthy Indian, rather it is meant to serve as another building block for the rising Indian middle class.  This is the real growth market in India, this is the market that will truly shape the India of tomorrow.  Ratan Tata gets it.

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I can’t believe it’s May ‘09 already.  You’ve probably noticed that this weblog has been pretty silent over the last three months.  This has to do with several significant changes for us.  Those of you who follow my twitter feed know that I’ve actually been very busy during that period.  The short story, we’ve moved to the San Francisco Bay Area after I accepted a great position with RightNow Technologies.  So, now I’ll explain a little bit more as to what the change means and why I’m excited to be in the valley and at RightNow.

From a work perspective, the last four years or so were some of the most interesting, and challenging, in my career.  I was fortunate to have learned so much from the bright people at Serviceware and Knova.  After four years, however, it was time to move on.  My original plan was to go independent and explore the next phase of emerging technologies, with a particular emphasis on understanding the impact of social media on large organizations.  Late last year, however, I found myself speaking with an ex-Knova colleague about these ideas and he recommended that I speak to the team at RightNow.  I did, and over the ensuing months became convinced that the RightNow platform, management and culture were a great fit for the next stage of my career.  So, I accepted the position of Customer Experience Strategist at RightNow.

The company also asked that I consider a move to Silicon Valley, the center of the action.  An interesting side note, for those of you who may not follow RightNow, is that the company is actually based in Bozeman, MT (picture of the Bozeman area above).  While I wasn’t exactly interested in making a move to Montana,  the fact that the company had a powerbase outside of the valley bubble was intriguing.  To me this was an interesting combination, and one that felt right.

What does this mean for this blog?  Well, I’ll be back writing about the things that interest me.  I’ll also spend more time working through ideas and thoughts on how the next phase of technology will impact companies and their customers.  Over the next few days, however, look for several book reviews.

Now that I’m based in the valley, I hope to be involved in many more industry events and I will be writing about those experiences as well.  I hope this blog will continue to serve as a journal through this next phase of my career.

• The Social Software Value Matrix
  (tags: socialnetworking wikis blog)

• The Broken Promise of Software Maintenance Fees
  Great look at the relationship between maintenance fees and R&D at the large enterprise software vendors.
  (tags: erp crm enterprise_software maintenance_overpricing)
• Sugar CRM reduces prices across the board, looking for broad adoption | Irregular Enterprise | ZDNet.com
  (tags: sugarcrm saas hosted pricing)

• The FASTForward Blog » Dominos – Crosssing the Rubicon for Corporates in Social Media: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary
  (tags: blog social_media enterprise2.0)
• Determining the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 | Enterprise Web 2.0 | ZDNet.com
  (tags: enterprise2.0 roi Web2.0 productivity business collaboration software enterprise)
• The FASTForward Blog » ROI of Enterprise 2.0, Hotly Debated: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary
  (tags: enterprise networking productivity social web enterprise2.0 network km roi)
• The Enterprise System Spectator: Enterprise software: who wants to be the low-cost leader?
  (tags: saas cloudcomputing enterprise_software maintenance_overpricing)
• More about pricing: open source and commodity services | AccMan
  (tags: opensource enterprise pricing software)
• 63% of Businesses Fear That Social Networking Endangers their Corporate Security – ReadWriteWeb
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• Official Google Enterprise Blog: What we talk about when we talk about cloud computing
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• Starter Kit: Social Media and Social Networking Best Practices for Business at Consulting, Online Communities, and Social Media: Fast Wonder Blog
  (tags: socialmedia socialnetworking Web2.0 business blogging twitter facebook marketing)
• Is Twitter Revolutionizing CRM? | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
  (tags: twitter crm socialmedia media corporate business marketing service customerservice)
• Are social networks the next-gen commerce, CRM hubs? | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com
  (tags: crm social_crm)
• Corporate Blogs and 'Tweets' Must Keep SEC in Mind – WSJ.com
  (tags: twitter socialmedia blogging ebay government media social legal corporate compliance sec)
• Friarminor :: Cloud Sustenance: Spreading the Gospel of Social CRM
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• Facebook Does Some Science, Concludes Redesign Is Good for Ads | Technomix | Fast Company
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• Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn't Tweet – Advertising Age – DigitalNext
  (tags: twitter socialmedia blog advice communication community list tips)
• Engineering the Future: A TED Talk Before-and-After | Duarte Blog
  Great before and after post. Many can learn from this…
  (tags: presentation presentations PowerPoint keynote)
• Press75.com » Blog Archive » Urban Elements
  (tags: themes wordpress)

• The Crisis of Credit Visualized on Vimeo
  Pretty solid visualization of the imploding financial system
  (tags: video visualization crisis economy economics money finance animation mortgage)

• Apple – Safari – Introducing Safari 4 – See the web in a whole new way
  I'm going to switch to Safari 4 from Firefox for the next few weeks to see if it makes me more productive.
  (tags: safari browsers internet web mac browser windows software apple osx)

• How To: Hackintosh a Dell Mini 9 Into the Ultimate OS X Netbook
  Gotta try this myself.
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• PHP News Script – GentleSource.com
  News Script allows you to write articles for your website. It supports search engine friendly URLs and features a WYSIWYG editor which makes writing an article easy.
  (tags: Web2.0 webdesign news cms publishing)

• Mind Map: Cloud Computing Players – MindMeister
  A good mind map of the players in cloud computing
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• 10 Tax Deductions Freelancers Can Make – FreelanceSwitch – The Freelance Blog
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• This is why Richard Branson is so successful – Holy Kaw! (as in "Holy Cow!")
  Customer service matters, and Branson understands that.
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• Twickie – Login
  Tool to pull down threads from Twitter
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My Google Reader link stream for January 28th through February 16th:

• When SSBNs Collide –
• Obama Talks Himself Into and Out of Bank Nationalization –
• US Airways And Delta Duel Over The Phone For Most Incompetent Airline Ever Award [Reservations] –
• Twenty Theses for Government 2.0, Cluetrain Style –
• Safir Engine Component Contest [3] –
• Defense Tech in Enemy Hands! –
• Time for India to think of carrots too, not just sticks –
• Is the Relational Database Doomed? –
• Buy a House, Get a Visa –
• Kashflow vs Sage: SaaS Battles in the Tornado –
• Best Practices for Branded Twitter Accounts –
• 10 Bud Commercials That Made Bob Lachky’s Career –
• First F-35 Squadron Plans Detailed –
• Sage shows why bigcos can’t be trusted with SaaS –
• Send a text, catch a bus with Port Authority pilot program –
• Lovely Charts Creates Polished Diagrams [Flowchart] –
• Social Media Consultant or Snake Oil Salesman? –
• The “$10 Laptop” and Radical Ignorance –
• Allies, not friends –
• Slumdog MBA –

Here’s a picture of the three envelopes I received in the mail from PNC yesterday:

PNC's pick an envelope campaign

If you can’t tell from the small picture, one envelope says I qualify for an introductory APR of 0.99%, another says 1.99%, and a third was blank on the cover, but opening it revealed a surprise – only 4.99%!

Last week PNC called me to see if I was interested in a home equity line of credit.  Well, I might have been, you know, if I actually owned a home!

I’m not sure if this is poor customer data management or just a bank that is trying to show congress that it’s eager to lend.

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Image via CrunchBase

If you’re a Gmail user like me, 2008 seemed like a lost year.  Google did give us the Google Labs features, many of which were nice tweaks, but there wasn’t a significant improvement to the core application.  2009, as you know has been quite different.  We’ve seen the addition of many significant features, with offline sync being the most important.  Google added another ‘missing link’ in the communications hub with a task manager, which in its current state is a bit underpowered – but we can always hope for improvements.

One of the most frustrating parts of Gmail’s communications hub has been Contacts.  When first introduced (I believe last year), Contacts seemed to add all sorts of random contacts from inbound emails that I received.  When I dug around to find where they were coming from, many of these new ‘contacts’ were plucked out of emails that had large lists of people attached to them.  Most of these folks weren’t really my contacts, but Google thought they were.  This was just one of many frustrations I had with Google Contacts.  Just as with the core Gmail application, however, Google has begun to remedy shortcomings in Contacts in 2009.  A few days ago, Google announced true Contact (and Calendar) syncing with many smartphones.  Along with that announcement has come a steady set of changes to Google Contacts.  Today, Google has added four more, very significant, improvements to the Contacts function.  Here are two of my favorites:

Official Gmail Blog: Four changes to Gmail contacts

3. Remove people from My Contacts
You can finally move contacts out of the My Contacts group — especially useful if you’re planning to sync your contact list to your phone. Prune the contacts you don’t want synced to your phone from My Contacts (click “Groups” and then “Remove from My Contacts”), and they won’t get synced.

4. Search across all contact fields
We’ve heard you loud and clear, and contact search now works much better: instead of just searching contact names and email addresses, it now includes phone numbers, notes fields, and mailing addresses as well. So, if you’re visiting the Bay Area and looking for friends to catch up with, you could try typing “650″ or “415″ in the contact manager search box.

Contacts, it seems, are finally becoming useful. Along with the Activesync feature that went live a few days ago, I can finally consolidate my contact information to a single source and not have to maintain a separate list for my iPhone and Gmail. This is great news!

Now, make Google Contacts (and Gmail) an interaction hub
Contacts would become substantially more powerful if I could see my entire relationship with a contact in that view.  Google lets you query recent emails interactions with a selected contact, but we know that entire relationships aren’t captured in emails.  I’d like the ability to add date stamped notes to each contact – so I can record other interactions with people.  I’d also like the ability to connect Google Calendar events to contacts.  And, while you’re at it, connect tasks associated with contacts as well.

So far, 2009 has been a busy year for the Gmail team, and it looks like we’ll see a steady pace of improvements for Gmail.  Hopefully, they see the value of extending Contacts beyond a simple electronic Rolodex and into a powerful contact interaction hub where users can truly capture many aspects of their relationships with their friends and contacts.

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Over the last few months, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, mostly on my Amazon Kindle.  I think it’s a great device in its current form, an will no doubt get better with the refresh that’s due out next week.  As an electronic book reader, the Kindle is definitely the leader of the pack.  All of the launch time reviews correctly stated that there is no eye strain, and I often forget that I’m using an electronic device (that’s a good thing).  Having multiple books in one compact device makes it possible to jumble my reading interests, without adding bulk to my backpack (I usually read 2-3 books at once, and often move between a business book, fiction, and/or current events stuff).  An added benefit for Amazon is that I’ve ended up buying books, literally, as they were mentioned in a meeting or on a TV show.  That’s another part of the puzzle that Amazon got right, a low friction transaction.  The first generation Kindle defined a market, in many ways, like the first generation iPod did.  And, based on the early, leaked photographs of the Gen.2 model, it looks like Amazon will address some of the awkward design elements of the initial offering.  While most of the coverage on Monday will be focused on the hardware, I’ll be really interested learning what Jeff Bezos and Co. have in store for the software part of the Kindle upgrade.

Reading has always been about community
I’ve found that I learn a whole lot more about a book’s meaning if I can share my thoughts and ideas with others.  I’m not really into book clubs, but Amazon does have a unique opportunity to extend the reading experience into a community experience with the Kindle.  The current generation software of the Kindle allows me to electronically annotate excerpts.  Sometimes I simply highlight interesting passages that I want to go back to, other times I’ll add a note that serves as a reminder to dig deeper into an area or ask another question.  Given the Kindle’s wispernet wireless connection, wouldn’t it make sense to connect those notes about books to a larger community?  I’m just wrapping up David Sanger’s The Inheritance, and I’ve got a ton of notes and comments that I’d love to share with other readers.  Shouldn’t each Kindle book have a ‘community’ wrapped around it?  In the case Sanger’s book, which is related to current events, the author could engage in that community and extend usefulness of his book.  For readers, instead of static reviews of a book on Amazon’s website, we’d have a dynamic community to share ideas with, argue or get deeper insight from the author.  I understand that Amazon doesn’t want the Kindle to become a ‘free’ way to connect to the internet, but wispernet could feed my notes and highlighted sections to a section of the book’s page online, and then I could continue the conversation via my computer connection.  This is one feature I’m really hoping Amazon announces on Monday…and they allow us first generation Kindle users to upgrade our software to enable this community.

Books are meant to be shared
The beauty of a physical book is that it can be shared, resold, or passed along to just about anybody without much difficulty.  As DRM slowly slips away in the music business, Amazon needs to define a reasonable model to- at minimum – resell books that I no longer want.  I believe there is a compelling reason for publishers to want a resale market to exist as well.  Unlike the aftermarket for traditional books, a market mechanism could be setup whereby publishers would get additional royalties for a resold book.  Amazon would benefit as a clearinghouse, and it would also drop another barrier for me (or anyone) to buy some ‘one-time use’ books.  For example, I’ve been hesitant to spend a lot on fiction on my Kindle.  Maybe it’s just me, but most fiction I’ll read once, and then pass it along to someone, or resell it (sometimes on Amazon’s website).  If I knew that there were a reliable aftermarket where I could resell these books, I’d be willing to buy them more often.

These are just two developments I’m hoping to see on Monday.  The Kindle is a revolutionary device.  It’s now time for Amazon to evolve the ecosystem around the device and extend the usefulness of their revolutionary product.  Amazon, it’s time to socialize the Kindle.

UPDATE: I just noticed that Amazon has hinted at the need to extend the kindle format to smartphones.  While this may be another market to chase, I can’t imagine doing extensive book reading on my iPhone.  Now, if Amazon modifies it’s DRM mechanism so I can use the same license on both my Kindle and my iPhone, I’d find it useful for those times when the Kindle isn’t in my bag.  My iPhone is always with me.

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