Tangent Thought Gallery

Turning adversity into opportunities

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:43:44 +0000

Shopping carts—that everyday fixture for every online store—has its origins in overcoming failure.

1934—the pitch of the depression. An entrepreneur named Sylvan Goldman bought several bankrupt Southern grocery stores. It was a risk. How to mitigate?

The new owner studied his customers shopping habits and observed: women (yep, back then men didn’t do it) shopped until their hand carried baskets were full. Then they checked out. Not folding in to frustration, inspiration struck. He built a solution (from 2 baskets, a folding chair, and several wheels). If you’re thinking of something reminiscent of a contemporary Japanese shopping cart, you’re there.

Testing, he placed several in the store. Nothing happened. Shoppers continued to carry the hand baskets. Creatures of habit, don’t you know?

Sylvan didn’t give up. He hired people to go in to the store, play the part of shoppers, and push around the carts full of groceries. Adding to this, he had employees offer in-coming shoppers the carts. He struck gold. Not just in incremental sales, though. Goldman garnered a fortune as he established the first shopping cart manufacturer: the Folding Basket Carrier Corporation. Personally, I’m glad the common name shifted to shopping cart; folding basket carrier would be a terrible online metaphor.

Not only did Goldman’s ingenuity make him a millionaire a number of times over, it also made possible retail business models not previously possible, such as super markets and big-box retailers. Hard to picture those as successful with clientele restricted to totting their purchases in hand held baskets.

So where has this guy been?

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 21:40:16 +0000

Okay, it has been quite a while since my last blog post. I’ve got valid excu … eh… reasons. Number one on the list is a new gig which I started in May (as you can imagine, shifting focus there in the early going has afforded a little less time for blogging). After many years in captive, in-house IT and internal ecom/ebusiness shops I’ve moved into full time consulting. Contrary to past suspicions, I’ve found that I’ve not moved over to the “dark side”. Far from it; it’s actually been rather enlightening and liberating.

Not too long ago I was at a very large client (who shall remain nameless; hmm…to avoid inferences, let’s consider them fictional. Yeah, that’s the ticket—let’s consider them fictional!). I found them to be in actuality a very innovative organization. However, due to their sheer size more than anything, they don’t have the integral agility of a more svelte operation. Herein lays the beauty. Without reorg or disruption, in my new role I can step in as a consultant and operate without attachment to their organizational weight. I can do what they cannot.

Empowered to provide optimal solutions without the constraints of internal political agendas—I’m lovin’ it!

BlackBerry Bold — How bold is it?

Mon, 12 May 2008 16:40:24 +0000

Remember the PC hardware world back about 10 to 15 years ago? You were continually compelled to buy bigger and better systems to keep pace with your new software’s CPU, peripheral, and memory requirements. Consequently the hardened techies and gamers among us were salivating over every batch of “new and improved” desktops/laptops as they rolled off the line. Thankfully, for the vast majority of home and office PC users, we reached a point of relative sanity some years ago—e.g., Office XP would run on the same system as Office 2000, the latest Sims expansion pack, “The SIMS 2 Running for Re-election”, or “The SIMS 2 Retirement Party”, ran fine without major hardware reinvestment. Now we typically replace systems or components when they’ve stopped working reliably. Much like a washer or dryer, they’re home and office computing appliances.

The question bouncing around in my head this morning is this: Are we approaching a similar point of utility with mobile phones?

Research in Motion just announced their first major product release in about a year, the BlackBerry Bold. Now, I’m a long time BB user. I’m now on my 6th BB (seriously), a Curve model, and I’m starting to suspect I’m joining the jaded group that just isn’t going to jump because a vendor blasts a trumpet. (Are you thinking “Microsoft Vista”?) With my current phone I can take pics, movies, play MP3s, track my calendar, do SMS messaging, GPS/maps integration, play games, set alarms, create/answer email, and, oh yeah, make phone calls. The newest BB will do exactly the same. It does boast a higher resolution screen, but they don’t bother to mention it’s about 1/8 inch shorter. Are we starting to reach that point of “communication appliance” utility?

Sure, there will always be a niche market for those users impassioned about fashion and prestige, but I suspect that market slice will experience either stagnation or continued decline. The novelty of the iPhone interface will become dated someday. The children of the 2020’s will roll their eyes if you mention how cool this was back in 2008. I wonder what RIM and Apple will be doing to try gain market share then. I wonder if they’ll still be in business. I wonder how many BB’s I’ll have burned through by that time.

Trapster.com: the truth is out there

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:59:28 +0000

If you’ve not heard of Trapster.com you may soon. Trapster is the online and mobile phone based application to warn drivers of speed traps (still in beta, according to the Trapster site’s info). It’s the virtual equivalent of flashing your lights as a neighborly warning that “There’s a cop with a Wookie sized radar gun pointed in your direction over the next hill!”

It’s insanely simple and elegant but it does require a few tech pieces to work.

A GPS aware mobile phone
A Trapster account
Other drivers similarly equipped

In theory this should work very well and it also should work, I’m assuming, with a GPS aware laptop. It’s got an API tie in to Google Maps and there’s even a BlackBerry specific version; get the instructions here: http://www.trapster.com/bbinstructions.php.

There’s a lot of blog debate about the viability of the service, particularly if it should become illegal. What? Could this become the first illegal mobile phone application? Perhaps in Canada, which seems to have intensely Draconian views toward traffic violations. But how could anyone technically detect that someone was using the mobile service? Not that this couldn’t happen, but talk about Orwellian visions!

I understand that there will continually be a battle between traffic policing and countermeasures. If the law enforcement community was smart about this, rather than Byzantine or intrusive legislation and straining resources to enforce those questionable laws, wouldn’t it be smarter to swim in the same pool? If I’m running a county traffic program, why don’t I just get numerous Trapster accounts myself, pass these along to my staff, coordinate the “dummy”traps (places where we have *no* intention of actually monitoring traffic), and set up literally dozens upon dozens of false reports? Two things are likely to happen:

1. Trapster’s data integrity would be severely threatened, if done right, so people would be less inclined to trust it and less inclined to use it.

2. There would be so many ‘hot spots’ listed in the Trapster reports, some real and some not, that the county becomes much more placid from a traffic perspective (and this would be the end goal anyway).

Or maybe law agencies outsource this? Hmmm, do I smell a business opportunity here? Not for me, personally; I like to play on the ethical side of games. But it does demonstrate a particularly intriguing maturation and inherent vulnerability in social networking. Value depends on truth.

Online marketing brilliance seems rare

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:42:40 +0000

How many sites have you seen in your lifetime? How many stand out among that crowd? You know, I couldn’t even begin to guess at the number of sites I’ve seen but I can guarantee there are precious few that rise above the rest.

One that whacked me up side the head this week was Burger King’s stroke of marketing brilliance in support of last year’s Simpson’s movie: SimpsonizeMe.com. I had seen a few Simponized avatars/icons around the web and had suspicions that there was some tool to do that but hadn’t found it until last night. The Simpson’s have been on screen (broadcast and DVD) quite a bit in our house over the years—definitely not my wife’s favorite, I think she’s got it pegged a few rungs down from the Three Stooges, and although I believe the writing had gone downhill some years ago, I just had to try this online toy.

So, after a little while, my wife comes down into my office and asks “What are you up to?” Caught!

“Well, er, I was kinda burned out on the tech issue I was wrestling with and found this, uh, site.”

She, moving closer to my desk, asks, “Oh really; anything interesting?”

Me, feeling like a 9 year old with his hand in the candy jar, “eh…yeah, well, it’s this site that lets you make a…” (I’m thinking, “Might as well say it, Kolb”) “…a Simpson cartoon character out of your uploaded photo.”

I quickly add, “But it doesn’t really look like me though.”

Zooming in for a closer look at the screen she bursts out laughing, “No, it looks ‘exactly’ like you!”

Now I feel like a 6 year old because my son comes in, takes a quick look and, laughing as well, agrees with her.

I’m over it.

But the site, IMO, is brilliant. It couples a Flash application, a configurator, a commerce engine, personalization, plus enough eye and ear candy to make it seem like an amusement park “A” ride online, and makes it all easy to use. You then can buy personalized merchandise like hats, shirts, etc. And that’s not even the purpose of the site. It’s to promo the movie and subtly blast Burger King’s image into your mind while you’re playing and buying stuff.

There are few sites of that caliber that can capture not only their customer’s attention but also their inner child.

Oh, BTW, Happy April 1st!

LinkedIn network stats via RSS

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:02:22 +0000

It’s almost fascinating to see the ongoing direction and advancement taking place at LinkedIn (LI). For professionals of any stripe, this community, along with its attendant tools, is continually stepping to the front of the line for both its usefulness and relevance.

LI just announced that your personal network stats will now be available via an RSS feed. I’ve been using RSS feeds to a few LI answers categories for a while now, which is a great place to view the collective cognitive ebb and flow on specific business and technical topics. They’re great. The LI feed on your personal network is a welcome addition.

Google, 10 years old this year

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 03:46:19 +0000

Back in ancient times, oh, let’s say around 2001, the repertoire of Google apps was much more humble. “Earth”, “Trends”, “Analytics”, “Maps”, and a host of other well know tools had yet to be prefaced with big G branding. But they did have search. Make that Search, with a capital S. As the world knows, that’s done nothing but continue in stride.

Google became a corporate entity 10 years ago this year. Remember Lycos, Excite, AskJeeves? How about Alta Vista? All of these former heavyweights had strong positions until rocked out of place. The early version of AskJeeves used to be my personal favorite until Jeeves staff mucked around with the interface and ruined it. I guess it was someone’s “good idea”, but that’s not how a lot of former AskJeeves aficionados judged the deliverable. We switched to G.

But even back then, in the pre-Blog days, the huge Google lever for me was Usenet (Deja.com) news group postings—all 500+ million of them at that time. You simply couldn’t match having the collective intelligence of all the thought processes and decades of collective thinking that went into all those questions and answers at your disposal—at your queried disposal, no less. This feature alone was worth the price of the internet. For a great compendium of Google milestones, be sure to check out http://www.google.com/corporate/history.html.

Moving forward to 2008, hopefully you’re already familiar with Google Analytics. One of the more intriguing features to be rolled out recently (mid-March ’08) within the Analytics space is Benchmarking. According to Google…

“Benchmarking is an optional Google Analytics service that shows how your website’s statistics compare against other industry verticals. In the beta version of this service, you are able to compare your site’s Visits, Pageviews, Pages per Visit, Bounce Rate, Average Time on Site, and New Visits data against benchmark data from categories of other participating websites. You can use this data to gain broader context for your site so you can identify additional opportunities to improve your site’s metrics.”

For the authoritative word on Benchmarking see: http://www.google.com/support/googleanalytics/bin/topic.py?topic=13909

To keep pace with the G can be daunting but one element that makes it a bit more approachable is their blog spaces. With several flavors available you should be able to find one suited to your taste:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ — the mother of Google blogs.
http://analytics.blogspot.com/ — one of my personal favorites. Be sure to check out Conversion University videos!

Last of all, another recently introduced API is Google’s OpenSocial, which is defined as “a common API for social applications across multiple websites. With standard JavaScript and HTML, developers can create apps that access a social network’s friends and update feeds.” You can test this out with an Orkut account (Orkut is another Google initiative). I believe a common API for social networking applications has huge potential and I believe Google has the horsepower to pull it off.

Welcome back “The Industry Standard”

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 17:20:29 +0000

Don’t know how many industry/trade magazines I’ve subscribed to over the years. There are some I definitely pick up and read or scan regularly and then there are the others that I wish did not have my contact info. There’s yet another category that can evoke varying emotions among us—those no longer in publication.

Among that last group there are a small subset that I miss; those which were stellar in their markets (e.g., “Business 2.0”, which bit the dust in October just last year), had consistently great article/authors, excelled at segment coverage, or maybe I just liked the way they made me think. The Industry Standard was one such mag; it did a phenomenal job of covering online business. Liked it so much I kept the final issue as a memento when it ceased publication some years back.

I was really pleased to get an email this week that the pub was back online as a beta. Here’s the mag’s elevator pitch:

“The Industry Standard features news and analysis that covers emerging technologies and companies, venture funding, acquisitions, site launches, and other developments in the internet space. Additionally, The Standard aggregates community knowledge in a quantified fashion, thereby ranking both the knowledge of the individual community members themselves, as well as the value of the information the community provides as a whole. This system is built as a prediction market, intersected with a reputation-based social network.”

So it looks like the new, web 2.0 incarnation will build more on the strength of its readership. It’s not the first community based prediction engine out there, but, if the caliber of readership is like it used to be, it has potential to be one of the best. This could be good.

http://www.theindustrystandard.com/

Web “version” cheat sheet

Sat, 02 Feb 2008 22:05:56 +0000

It’s no surprise that there’s still confusion about Web 2.0, as well as the distinctions between Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web 3.0. It’s a bit surprising, however, when firms in the industry don’t get it right (note the email that came in this week from the Web Buyer’s Guide and IBM—I really think they meant it to say “3.0″, not “2.0″). Since there’s still confusion out there, I thought I’d toss out a high level cheat sheet to help slice and dice your way through those distinctions.

Granted, these definitions are subjective. Also, it wasn’t easy to constrain each to 25 words or less, but I believe they’re fairly accurate. If you’ve got something better please let me know.

(Apparently) universal truths
An energetic consultant runs into your office and enthusiastically exclaims “This (web version) will enable you to develop rich user experiences, powerfully engage your customers, and transform your business as never before!”; to which specific web version would she/he be referring? Of course the answer is “all the above”. With the advent of each ‘version’, if you will, industry pundits, analysts, and especially vested software vendors have lauded the concept as finally enabling the use of the net as a platform. This was true back in the 90s and the choir hasn’t changed the tune yet. If there’s a Web 4.0+ to come, you can bank on the fact that the same will apply then as well. However, this does not mean the consultant will be wrong…some incredible things (have and) will be done.

Another item that applies to each version: much can be said about the limits, extensions, and applicability of different technologies and standards to each. Truthfully, much of the inner workings of each use identical technologies. There are a few distinctions but not as many as one might think. This is why I’d contend the differences are more in the functional attributes rather than the underlying technologies. Sure, there are newer technologies, as well as maturation of older, highly reliable tools, but I’d still side with functional elegance as distinctive characteristics.

Fact vs. fiction
Web 1.0 works fine. Much has, and will continue to be, accomplished with these technologies. They will continue to evolve while others will mature. You don’t necessarily need a Web 2.0 site. If all you’re doing is successfully selling T shirts and toe nail clippers online, keep at it. It’s not broken. Can you benefit from 2.0? Quite possibly. But it’s equally possible that if you integrate 2.0 features you could be wasting your time with only a veneer of pay back. Like any feature, there should be solid potential for ROI before you begin writing development bits to disk.

How about 3.0? Here the ink is still too wet on the concepts to cash in. However, my take is there really is tremendous potential for integration with a *mature* semantic web, kind of like RSS on steroids. How long that takes to become a reality, to gain industry and enterprise wide traction, remains today’s exercise in speculation.

This all kind of suggests a question. Were dial-up bulletin boards the advent of Web 2.0 back in the late 80s and we just didn’t realize it? Of course I’m joking, but it just demonstrates that many of the concepts have been around for a while.

Finding the right web host (part 2)

Sat, 26 Jan 2008 14:39:08 +0000

Some things just aren’t as easy as you’d think they should be. If you’ve been involved with web hosting much, you know it fits that scenario well. Assuming you’ve gone over the info in part 1 of this series (which is a fairly high level view of things), let’s do a fly over still another upper level issue: “Precisely what type of hosting are you looking for?”

There are essentially three options:

Self hosting

External hosting

Blended (some degree of both)

I believe there are few instances where self hosting makes sense. If you think your business case is one of those unique situations that call for it, you’re probably wrong. Sorry. Please contact me and I’ll be glad to try to dissuade you.

Options with External hosting broaden the choices even further. At the outset, your basic hosting options are:
1. Shared—the hardware is transparent to you; you’re just buying a service level agreement (SLA); your site may be in the same hardware as Sally’s Muffin Boutique & Laundry or less socially innocent entities, however, that shouldn’t be a concern (the servers are probably virtualized at this point anyway—but that’s something you should check out)
2. Dedicated—the hardware is yours (leased) and yours alone; you needn’t be concerned with anyone else being on your hardware-BUT-you need to handle or arrange with your provider for all hardware contingencies such as DR, fail-over, hardware failure, etc.
3. Collocation—this can be interpreted as just space in a rack where part of the SLA is power, environmental (temp, humidity, security), and telco connectivity; it can also be expanded to include cages for your equipment at the hosting site, even rooms full of your equipment if your demands are large enough

The complexities swoop in almost immediately. Trying to make things simpler, however, in the next post of this series I’ll directly dive into the type of hosting in which 80%+ of most business are interested; if you’re looking to simply set up shop on the net with some added content management functionality and you’re looking for only a moderate investment and want to avoid recurring IT costs, stay tuned. I’m hoping to make that simple(r) for those in this camp. Until then, let’s take a peek at just a few (there are a lot more than those shown here!) of the tangent considerations with hosting…

Required service level (e.g., “four 9s”, or 99.99% uptime? More? Less? Perhaps better asked: “How much will that downtime cost my business annually?“)—be sure to read and understand what your hosting provider means in their SLA statement. You don’t want surprises, particularly if your revenue stream is coming through that channel.

Managed Services—this is where you can leverage your provider’s talent pool so you don’t need to staff up. Sure, you’ll want them to handle the hardware on the inside, especially if you’re not doing collocation, but to what extent? Backups, disaster recovery, etc.—to what degree are they involved? How about security patches? If you’re systems get a little trickier, let’s say with clustering and virtualization, what’s their involvement? There’s really a continuum here, from rudimentary hdw/OS admin support to comprehensive application support outsourcing. Get that nailed down clearly in any contract before signing; you don’t want confusion downstream. Also be sure you know how and who to call, along with who is empowered on your side to contact the provider and what type of support to expect.

Facility Access—this should only be a consideration for collocation or, upon rare occasions, dedicated hosting but you’ll want to understand the processes involved as well as which members of your team can get access, how they get access, and when.

Package Options—this can get tricky in its own right but basically, if you’re dealing with managed solutions, you have to determine what you’re leasing, from hardware to application software. It can all be accommodated for a price.

You should note that as the optional hardware, OS, utilities, and application packages mount up, so do associated costs for support. It’s still typically more cost effective than staffing for this yourself.

Almost a given in web hosting is that you’ll change your provider more than once and your model of operation more than twice so all this becomes relevant sooner or later. In the next post well cover shared hosting consideration since it’s probably the most popular.