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Government could make monetization even harder for online ad networks and publishers

jeremyliew — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 14:01:54 PDT

In the last few years, behavioral targeting has gone from being an interesting experiment to core to the success of many ad networks. Many networks are using data collected from one site to improve the targeting of advertising on other sites. But in the past two months, both the FTC and some members of the House have discussed limiting the ability for online advertisers to do behavioral targeting.

Businessweek notes about the new FTC Chairman:

Leibowitz wants to terminate—or at least rein in—… delivering ads to individuals based on the Web pages they visit and searches they carry out. Appointed by President Barack Obama in February to run the country’s top consumer watchdog, Leibowitz has made so-called behavioral targeting a top priority.

Leibowitz is not content with advertising industry self regulation:

… Leibowitz hints that he’s growing impatient with marketers’ efforts. “It’s not clear that they’re moving far enough or fast enough, even though they’re making some progress,” Leibowitz says. He supports the controversial approach of making more of the targeted ads on the Internet “opt-in”—meaning they would require consent from Web users before collecting data—and is in talks with members of Congress intent on drafting legislation for online ads.

The member of Congress that he is talking to are members of the House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, who are also keen to limit behavioral targeting. Businessweek again:

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Va.), who chairs the House subcommittee on communications, technology, and the Internet, has stated publicly since February that he plans to draft legislation on targeting practices this year. He says sites should maintain plain-language privacy policies, visitors should be able to opt out of data collection, and any third-party companies working with publishers must obtain permission from Web users before acquiring or using their information.

This position has bi-partisan support. Notes Paid Content:

His counterpart on the committee, Rep. Joe Barton (DR-Texas), also said he appreciated the relevance of targeted ads, but he was dismayed at how much information is collected about him on the web without his knowledge. Barton: “I hit the delete button every week and erase the cookies on my computer. I’m always amazed at how much information is taken from me. I think I have the right to know what information websites are gathering about me and what they’re doing with it. And poll after poll shows that the public agrees with me.”

The current FTC guidelines on behavioral advertising call for the principle of “Transparency and Control”:

Every website where data is collected for behavioral advertising should provide a clear,
concise, consumer-friendly, and prominent statement that (1) data about consumers’ activities
online is being collected at the site for use in providing advertising about products and services
tailored to individual consumers’ interests, and (2) consumers can choose whether or not to have
their information collected for such purpose. The website should also provide consumers with a
clear, easy-to-use, and accessible method for exercising this option. Where the data collection
occurs outside the traditional website context, companies should develop alternative methods
of disclosure and consumer choice that meet the standards described above (i.e., clear,
prominent, easy-to-use, etc.)

This princple is reasonable. But as noted in italics in the quotes above, what Boucher and Leibowitz are talking about is to move beyond this principle and essentially establish an opt in process for third party cookies (which would include the cookies for all ad networks).

This is an impossible position. For a start, ad networks typically don’t have space on a publisher page to even ask for an opt in. But in any event, opt in use of cookies will mean that very few users will allow themselves to be behaviorally targeted because defaults are almost always dominant.

Taking away the ability to do behavioral targeting and retargeting would reduce overall industry eCPMs. This would impact both publishers and ad networks by reducing their revenue. It would make it harder for advertisers to target their customers, resulting in overall higher customer acquisition costs. And it may even lead to more advertising in general as publishers try to make up for lower eCPMs with more ad units, which will have an impact on user experience.

Companies who rely on contextual targeting and content adjacency to sell their advertising have little to worry about as they do not use much third party data today. Examples include well know brands (e.g. NYTimes.com) and sites with endemic advertisers (e.g. WedMB). The big portals (e.g. Yahoo) and search engines (e.g. Google) who see a high enough proportion of all web users to be able to use first party data for targeting will also have little to worry about. TBut many ad networks, and the publishers who rely on ad networks for a substantial proportion of their revenue, should be closely watching the positions of both the FTC and the Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet.

Email Marketing Primed For Massive Disruption

Jeff — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:52:43 PDT

I just had a great conversation with a friend that covered, among many things, email marketing and how broken it really is. Then I come home and open up my email, finding this.

Email marketing is so fundamentally broken that it defies the imagination. Single digit response rates are considered a great success and not pissing off your market is a good day. Companies in all market segments turn to email marketing knowing full well it is not an optimal solution, meanwhile email service providers and software companies actively develop solutions that defeat email marketing. Users have been conditioned to avoid “unsubscribe” links because they serve primarily to validate email addresses purchased from lists, while legitimate unsubscribe links often do not work or take up to 30 days to remove you from a list that took a nanosecond to add you to.

Obviously the biggest problem with email marketing is the lack of effective targeting technology. Current generation solutions use blunt force instruments for targeting and the result is that prospects are rarely matched with information and offers that appeal to them. This also explains why the takeup rate is so low.

There simply has to be a better way to do this, whether it be tapping into activity streams and feeds, affiliate arrangements, or location based services. Something… anything has to be better than what we have today.

What is the difference between a good product and a good company?

jeremyliew — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:36:18 PDT

Insightful tweet from Charles Hudson:

Good products create value. Good biz models capture value. Good companies have both

If a company has a good product but does not have a good business model it is usually because it has not been able to figure out a way to benefit from the value that they create themselves. There are a number of common reasons for this:

1. They don’t create enough value for each user. If the value created for each user is small, it is hard to capture much of that value because of transaction costs.

2. It is hard to identify who will get value from the product or convince them of the value. Even if a lot of value is being created for each user, costs of sales may end up being too high.

3. Many other products create the same value. Competition and substitution limit the amount of value that you can capture from a user to a “market price” which can be lowered by too many alternatives. This is obviously much worse if they create MORE value than your product does.

4. Users expect the value for free. Sometimes this expectation come about because of industry norms (e.g. online content) and other times this expectation is created by early decisions that the company makes.

It is rarer to find a company with a good business model that doesn’t create value. One notable class of such companies are focused on arbitraging new marketing channels, often with a lead gen or direct response back end. These companies often feel more like “projects” than companies in that there is a natural end of life for them when the arbitrage opportunity closes. These can be terrific projects for individual entrepreneurs, but because they don’t create enterprise value in the long term, are not necessarily good investments for venture capitalists.

I prefer to invest in companies that are both creating value and capturing some of that value for themselves.

Do readers have any other thoughts on ways to create value without capturing it, or capturing value without creating it?

Agile development, startups and government policy

Joi — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:26:05 PDT

When I visited Chicago last, John Bracken and Brian Fitzpatrick aka Fitz from Google organized a very interesting meeting with people from The MacArthur Foundation, Google and various communities including some folks involved in government.

During the meeting, I talked a lot about my thoughts on innovation in the context of newer software development practices and frameworks like agile development and Ruby on Rails. As Reid Hoffman often says, if you're not embarrassed by your the first release of your product, you've released too late." The release early, release often ethos of linux combined with the amount of actual "real work" you can do in one week with Ruby on Rails and other languages and frameworks totally changes the game for early stage consumer Internet investing.

Generally speaking, it's probably cheaper and faster and more effective to make a prototype than to make presentation deck. It's also probably easier to test something on real users than to do lots of marketing and guessing. My recommendation to just about anyone with an idea is to just build the thing, iterate until you have some user traction, then pitch angel investors based on that traction. This is very much in line with the old IETF motto of "rough consensus, running code."

In agile development, you concentrate on doing short iterations with input from your users constantly feeding back into the next iterations.

The "opposite" of agile development is a long process of deciding what to do, anticipating the problems, writing an RFP, work with a contractor until the project is completed, debug it, and then maintain the thing.

The problem is, in the real world, things change and by the time you're done, you're often pretty far off the mark and usually the first version isn't right anyway - so you end up making something 2 years late and a hundred features off target. With agile development, you test, evolve and stay in tune with your users and let them guide you. You can also test and refactor more easily because each "story" or feature is smaller, tested and easy to isolate and remove/change. (Or should be.)

It was very interesting to me that the government folks perked up when we got into this discussion. I remembered a comment by someone at an conference (sorry, I can't remember who said this). The idea was that in big software and in government policy, it was easier to add features (lobby for things to be added into a law) than to remove features. Everyone has their favorite feature that needs to be added. There was very little incentive to remove features and complexity once it was in the law or the code. You end up with things like Windows, some modern cell phones and many of our government policies, turning into bloatware that's huge, too compliated for normal people to understand which doesn't really even do well what it was originally intended to do. I think that keeping units small, proper test suites (accountability at the object level), and agile development can help mitigate some of the causes of bloatware that loses touch with why it exists in the first place and ends up sucking almost all management energy into process.

Also, the idea of floating government policy and iterating rather than taking ALL of the inputs before starting some humongous project also probably makes sense if you have the right kind of structure and discipline. I think there are a lot of things that agile developers have figured out that make sense to look at when thinking about policy and other work.

1 - Extreme programming. Work in pairs on the same screen so that you're checking each other and you're learning each other's productivity and other tricks. Swap partners every iteration. This is a very good knowledge sharing technique.

2 - Test suites. Assume everything will fail. Test what happens when what you have built fails and how it affects the other objects around it. Make sure you will always know when something fails and why. Build system to be robust against human, network, financial, computer failure of the object and build backup systems. Test suites also help you figure out what breaks when you make changes to the system and helps you later when you want to change, remove or refactor stuff.

3 - Small. Keep the teams small, break big problems into small problems. Break the small problems into "stories" or short tasks that a very small group of people can do.

4 - No proposals, specs, RFP's. Use a tracking system like Pivotal Tracker for tracking the tasks, but don't do huge project sheets or try to decide everything before you get started. It's more important for each of the small groups to share their local context and that each small part works correctly and doesn't screw up the stuff around it.

It may seem counter-intuitive, but I think that having a lot of small groups focused on being robust and agile and relatively independent makes it easier for the higher level decisions to be made and retain focus on the mission. Micromanaging is huge and inefficient. Each small group provides inputs to the system and feedback from the "users". Unbundled and small groups makes the whole system much more flexible and "agile" and changes can be made quickly without breaking things and allows focus on context instead of structure.

A lot of my thinking in this area has come from watching Jay Dvivedi and his team at Shinsei Bank and also working a a little with the Pivotal Labs folks. Having written this rambling blog post, I'd still like to say that I'm still rather new to the whole world of agile development, but I think there are a large number of practices that are being developed that can be applied to many other fields including but not limited to government policy development.

MEDIA RELEASE 3rd August 2009 INDEPENDENT DIGITAL MEDIA TO LAUNCH WEDDING SITE...

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:42:19 PDT

MEDIA RELEASE
3rd August 2009

INDEPENDENT DIGITAL MEDIA TO LAUNCH WEDDING SITE THEKNOT.COM.AU

Independent Digital Media (IDM) has announced a significant step in the creation of its high-quality women’s lifestyle portfolio of websites with an innovative, one-stop wedding site, TheKnot.com.au, set to launch in October 2009.

IDM has entered into a license deal with the world’s #1 wedding website TheKnot.com, which has an average of 2.3 million unique browsers globally per month, to…

The Steve Jobs method

Eric — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 05:00:00 PDT

Image via CrunchBase

It's been a long time since I did a post that was primarily a link to another blog with commentary, but I came across something today that I really want to share. One of the most common questions I get about the lean startup methodology is, "but what about Steve Jobs?" When I try to unpack what people mean by the question, here's my best take on what they are asking: "Look, Steve Jobs doesn't go out and ask customers what they want. He doesn't put out crappy, buggy products and then ask for feedback. And he doesn't shy away from big-bang launch events. He tells customers what they want, and he gets it right. So how do you reconcile his success with the lean startup, which seems to suggest the opposite?"

I rarely give a satisfactory answer to this question, because I don't know Steve, nor have I worked at Apple or Pixar. So I can't speak for what happens on the inside. Luckily, neither can most of the questioners who pose that conundrum to me. We all seem to have a mythical sense of how Jobs works, based mostly on speculation and our very human desire to believe in heroes.

My normal answer is that I don't really think that's how Apple products are built. Plus, the premise of the question misunderstands the lean startup, too. Like any good pundit, that lets me pivot back to talking about something I do know about.

So imagine my delight when I saw this blog post with excerpts of a Steve Jobs interview. Here's the key quote:

Steve Jobs on why Apple doesn’t do market research - Bokardo
It’s not about pop culture, and it’s not about fooling people, and it’s not about convincing people that they want something they don’t. We figure out what we want. And I think we’re pretty good at having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it, too. That’s what we get paid to do.

The key phrase for me is "having the right discipline to think through whether a lot of other people are going to want it." That's what so many techniques that I advocate are all about: customer validation, minimum viable product, vision pivots, and even throwing away working code. Getting customer feedback is emphatically not about abandoning your vision or abdicating responsibility for innovating. Instead, it's about testing visionary ideas against reality, to discover what really works. Put another way, feedback's not about you - it's about them. When a customer tells you how they feel about your ideas, that doesn't tell you anything about your ideas. It tells you something about what that customer thinks and feels. Figuring out whether and how to incorporate that new information into your vision is your job. As Steve says, "That’s what we get paid to do."

Now, I can't speak to what process Steve Jobs uses to get his team to do this market assessment. Maybe they do it at the whiteboard. Maybe they just have great gut instincts. Or maybe there is the occasional potential customer or early prototype involved. But I'm willing to make some guesses. Here's how I make sense of their success. From here on out, this is strictly my imagination talking. To be clear, I don't know if Apple really works this way.

First, note the important use of work-in-progress constraints (kanban). As Steve says in the source interview:

Apple is a $30 billion company, yet we've got less than 30 major products. I don't know if that's ever been done before. Certainly the great consumer electronics companies of the past had thousands of products. We tend to focus much more. People think focus means saying yes to the thing you've got to focus on. But that's not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.

Having so few products means Apple can dedicate enormous resources to each project once it gets the green light. But it also means they have to be very careful kill projects if they are not trending towards something great. Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs. This is a version of the andon cord technique from lean manufacturing. Steve describes it like this:

At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar. "We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film.

These two principles combine to free up tremendous resources for raw R&D and innovation, because so few people are stuck working on "death march" internal projects or maintaining low-success released products. What do all those other people do? For one, capacity development. Apple has a track record of creating lots of interesting enabling infrastructure, like Quicktime and Bonjour, which sometimes become key to their products and othertimes not. My guess is they have lots of people constantly working on interesting new tools for their designers to play with. Those new capabilities must translate into a constant stream of prototypes - most of which turn out to be utterly bad ideas.

The real question is: how do they evaluate a prototype to know if it's a good idea? If they were an unknown web 2.0 startup, they could release the app and see how customers respond. But that would be a disaster for Apple, so whatever testing they do has to happen in secret and behind closed doors. (For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) Regardless, they must cull a lot of bad ideas for every one that we hear about. Holding his team to a high standard for what constitutes a great idea is what I imagine to be the most value-creating part of his job.

Most executives, especially in startups, don't have the courage to hold their teams to a high standard for new products or features. Just because something looks pretty, or feels like a good idea, or has a lot of sunk cost in it, does not mean it should be pursued. Not even if it's generating revenue. The only efforts a new product team should be expending are those that lead to validated learning about customers. Here's hoping Steve will share those techniques with us someday. In the meantime, I hope some of you will find the lean startup a helpful framework.

Overall, here are the lessons I take from (the imaginary) Steve Jobs:

Hold your team to high standards, don't settle for products that don't meet the vision, iterate, iterate, iterate.
Be disciplined about which vision to pursue; choose products that have large markets.
Discover what's in customers' heads, and tackle problems where design is a differentiator.
Work on as few products as possible, keep resources in reserve for experimentation.
Start over (pivot) if you find yourself with a product that's not working.

As I said, applying these principles in a startup is different from a very high profile public company. I've tried to abstract them a little so we can examine them at a level where they might translate. So far, everything I see is compatible with what I believe. So thanks, Steve, for the inspiration, the great products, and the great advice. Here's hoping future innovators who will follow in your footsteps are reading today.

Time for me to sign off - my Macbook Air is really burning up my lap. Hey, Steve, seriously, this viable product is a little too minimal...

Don’t Delay! Now is the Time to Start Your Web Startup.

Collis Ta'eed — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 02:30:40 PDT

Back in the summer of 2001 when I was in my final year of university, I had a part-time job at an internet cafe. It was in a dingy old pub with prehistoric computers and a barely-better-than-dialup connection shared amongst fifteen computers. Because it was such a crappy internet cafe no-one ever really went there. So I found myself with plenty of time to learn Photoshop, HTML and to dabble in PHP.

At that time the Dotcom Bubble had recently burst and though there were some ragged survivors like Amazon, the majority of the high flying, aeron buying, dotcom elite had come and gone. I used to sit in my internet cafe waiting for the nonexistent customers and think, “If only I had gotten into this web stuff five years ago, then I could have been part of all that excitement!”

In my youthful naivete, I was convinced that the time for web startups had passed and I’d missed the boat. Sure it was a boat that eventually crashed at full speed right into the docks, but what a ride it must have been!

Fast forward five years, and after two jobs as a web designer and a stint as a freelancer I found myself at the dawn of that second great web era – Web 2.0. This time around I discovered I was suddenly at the right place at the right time with the right skills. Yes, it’s missing the crazy hype and some of the premature enthusiasm and energy of the Dotcom bubble, but ultimately it has turned out to be a better time for little startups like mine.

In his fantastically readable book “Outliers – the Story of Success“, Malcolm Gladwell illustrates how there have been ideal times to be working in particular industries. He shows that programmers like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were not just brilliant entrepreneurs, but that importantly they took advantage of being around at a particular time with a particular set of skills and opportunities.

Now I’m no Gates or Jobs, but I do know that this is a golden period for the web. These are the years that our future selves will look back at and say “Boy that was an exciting time online!” There are simply so many opportunities for people with the skills to create great products. The barriers to entry are exceedingly low allowing developers, designers, bloggers, and all manner of people with particular enthusiasm, skill and drive to build successful businesses online.

But it won’t last. Over time the more obvious opportunities slowly dry up and the barriers rise. To get in on the action you have to be increasingly advanced, well funded and creative.

I would argue that the web right now however is still wide open. Just look at how Twitter has come out of left field to become a massive internet phenomena in just three short years. There are still many, many untapped opportunities.

So I’ll end this post to say that if you’ve wondered whether you should make a go of a particular idea you have, I say yes! If you’re going to go for it, go for it now! Sure we won’t all be Twitters or Facebooks, but that doesn’t mean we can’t build some neat little startups, grow sustainable businesses and live to tell the tale of how we helped build the internet in the heady days of 2009!

Getting Comfortable With People Who Make You Uncomfortable

Mike Speiser — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 00:00:05 PDT

If you’re out to create something truly great, you’ll likely need to challenge some widely held — but incorrect — beliefs. Challenging conventional wisdom is much harder than most people realize, and those that do make us uncomfortable. Which is why it’s so important to learn how to identify and embrace people who see the world differently than you do.

Evolutionary Biology and Conformity

Imagine our ancient ancestors out on the savanna in search of food. Chasing a large group of hunters who were running after something out of view was probably a better survival strategy than pursuing animal tracks that may or may not have led to food. Gregory Berns argues that mankind’s propensity to follow the crowd is at least partially a result of evolutionary biology.

Such a propensity is so ingrained in human nature that we will go to ridiculous lengths in order to adjust our beliefs to those of a group, as proven in the series of conformity experiments run by Solomon Asch in the 1950s. According to Wikipedia:

In the basic Asch paradigm, the participants — the real subject and the confederates — were all seated in a classroom. They were asked a variety of questions about the lines (which line was longer than the other, which lines were the same length, etc.) The group was told to announce their answers to each question out loud and the confederates always provided their answers before the study participant. The confederates always gave the same answer as each other. They answered a few questions correctly but eventually began providing incorrect responses. In a control group, with no pressure to conform to an erroneous view, only one subject out of 35 ever gave an incorrect answer. However, when surrounded by individuals all voicing an incorrect answer, participants provided incorrect responses on a high proportion of the questions (36.8%). 75% of the participants gave an incorrect answer to at least one question.”

It’s very challenging to make decisions based on your own information and logic when everyone disagrees with your point of view. We have an urge to conform, as we learn again with each economic boom and bust. Unfortunately, as David Hirshleifer describes in ”The Blind Leading the Blind: Social Influence, Fads, and Informational Cascades,” “If there are many individuals, then…with virtual certainty a point in the chain of decisions will be reached where an individual ignores his private information and bases his decision solely upon what he sees his predecessors do.”

Weird Ideas That Work

The inspiration for the title of this post came from the book “Weird Ideas That Work,” in which Robert Sutton suggests hiring “people who make you uncomfortable.” He argues that employers typically hire people like themselves and that most interviews are more about the social fit between the candidate and interviewer rather than the candidate and the job.

So what can you do to embrace those who make you uncomfortable?

1. Identify your heroes.

Chances are that the historical figures you hold in high esteem made those around them uncomfortable in their day. Einstein did. Gandhi did. Jefferson did. Apple’s “Think Different” campaign was as much about communicating what the company stood for to its employees as it was about selling Apple products to its customers. An organization that embraces unconventional thinkers has an unfair competitive advantage in a world governed by conformity.

2. Adjust your hiring process to focus on what really matters.

Jeff Cordova, a former Yahoo colleague of mine, puts all engineering candidates through a code test before he determines cultural fit or the like. He literally sits down in a room with a candidate and spends a few hours coding up an application with them. At the end of the test, he has a very good idea of their software engineering skills and often asks other members of his team to drill down in a particular area of expertise. It’s only after qualifying their skills as an engineer that he allows his team to determine their “fit” within the organization.

While software engineering is relatively easy to test, you can apply a similar type of testing process for just about any role to reduce the impact of social bias in hiring. Microsoft notoriously put candidates through case study interviews (I don’t know if they still do), as documented by William Poundstone in “How Would You Move Mount Fuji?”

Spend more time thinking about interview-based experiments that you can run on candidates to test what really matters for the role and you might find yourself hiring a different type of person.

3. If you have a negative reaction to an idea, use the 5 Whys.

The 5 Whys is a method to get at the root cause of a problem. When you hear an idea, before you immediately respond, try to understand the underlying reason for your knee-jerk reaction. You may find that your reaction is more about protecting existing orthodoxy or the source of the idea than it is about the merits of the particular approach at hand.

4. Consider increasing organizational diversity.

The true benefit of diversity is that it has the potential to produce better results. Diversity along the lines of age, gender, race, religion and sexual orientation has the potential to make an organization more resilient to conformity. Different people from different backgrounds bring in different biases. And groups that have experienced greater prejudice may have a membership inoculated from group think as a matter of self-preservation — that is, when everyone hates your group, you tend to hold a differing opinion.

It’s not easy working with one of the rare people who is deeply nonconformist. But if your goal is to be innovative, to create something great and to make a difference in the world, you should be prepared to make those around you uncomfortable and recruit others who do the same to you.

Mike Speiser is a Managing Director at Sutter Hill Ventures. His thoughts on technology, economics and entrepreneurship will appear at this time every week.

Brutal Simplicity

(author unknown) — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:09:33 PDT

Why I only speak one language

bgroundwater — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 16:22:51 PDT

Ah, English. The universal language. The lazy man's language.

Find yourself lucky enough to be born into an English-speaking family, and you're set for life. Relax, get yourself a hobby. Build model train sets. No need to bother with languages.

That's the way we, at least in Australia, tend to think. It's hard to find the motivation to learn a new tongue when your closest neighbour just speaks with a silly accent, and the others (who are freaken miles away) speak something so foreign to our way of talking that all seems a bit too hard.

There's no better way to make yourself feel like a Neanderthal than to travel around Western Europe. "What's your second language," everyone asks. Um... Australian?

There, if you speak two languages, you're average. Three, and you're nothing special. If you've got four down pat you're doing quite well, although there are people around with five. (My mate Danny was born in Luxembourg, and used to speak four languages until he went to Brazil for a few months. Now he speaks fluent Portuguese, too.)

But it makes sense in Europe. There, you travel a few kilometres and there's every chance you'll be in another country. If you live in Switzerland, you don't even have to cross a border to find everyone speaking a completely different language.

So the motivation, and the opportunities to practice, are definitely there.

In Australia, it's easy to get lazy. For starters, we speak the language that, really, is the universal tongue. International business is conducted in English. Scientists write all of their papers in English. Most people around the world choose English as their second language.

Then there's geography. We're miles away from anyone else who speaks another language, which isn't an excuse in itself, but it does make it difficult to find the motivation to learn, say, German in school when you know you'll have to fly 24 hours to even get the chance to practice.

Asian languages make much more sense, but we're only just catching up on that front. You could take Japanese when I went to school, but not Mandarin, or Indonesian, or Thai.

So there you go - those are my excuses for Australians being known around the world as some of the laziest linguists going. Travel anywhere and if you can hear someone shouting, "DO YOU SPEAK ENGLISH?" at a confused shopkeeper, you can pretty much guarantee they'll be Australian or American.

The reality is, you can get away with only being able to speak English in most countries. It may be slightly rude and definitely lazy, but most countries cater to English speakers, and most people under 30 around the world speak at least a little bit of our language.

I'll readily admit that I'm useless with languages. I don't pick them up quickly, and I probably don't try as hard as I should (I started a Spanish course a few months ago, but gave up when we started conjugating verbs - I don't think I can even do that in English).

It's partly to do with the way I like to travel. I'm not the sort of person who likes to spend a few months in one country. I want to see as much as I can in the little time as I have, so I tend to flit from place to place.

It makes it almost impossible to pick up much of the language. And, like when Homer Simpson took a wine appreciation course and forgot how to drive, whenever I learn a few words of a new language, it pushes all the words from the last language out of my brain.

I can usually say hello and goodbye. I can usually say thank you. I try to be able to ask, "Do you speak English" in the local tongue, but that doesn't always work out. Sometimes I can read a menu, or ask where the toilet is, or swear hilariously. I can read words in our alphabet, and a little bit of Cyrillic (actually, I've probably forgotten that by now), but any foreign script makes as much sense as a pre-schooler's finger painting.

And yet, I've managed to get by all around the world. Is that so bad?

Do you try to learn a language before you visit a place? Do you take a phrasebook? Or just rely on someone being able to speak English?

Stop press
Hope you're enjoying the Backpacker blog. As I'm currently doing what all good backpackers should be doing - travelling - there may be a slight delay in comments being published. Please be patient - as the telcos would say, your comment is important to us, and will be attended to as soon as possible. In the meantime, if you're bored, you can follow my trip here, or email me the sports results/topic suggestions to bengroundwater@gmail.com.

Gaming business models: Freemium beats advertising

jeremyliew — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 15:24:06 PDT

Dan Cook has a great post about business models for flash game developers over at Lost Garden. He says:

Ads are a really crappy revenue source

For a recent game my friend Andre released, 2 million unique users yields around $650 from MochiAds. This yields an Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) of only $0.000325 per user. Even when you back in the money that sponsors will pay, I still only get an ARPU of $0.0028 per user. In comparison, a MMO like Puzzle Pirates makes about $0.21 per user that reaches the landing page (and $4.20 per user that registers)

What this tells me is that other business models involving selling games on the Internet are several orders of magnitude more effective at making money from an equivalent number of customers. When your means of making money is 1/100th as efficient as money making techniques used by other developers, maybe you’ve found one big reason why developers starve when they make Flash games.

His solution?

Ask for the money

When game developers ask for money, they are usually pleasantly surprised. Their customers give them money; in some cases, substantial amounts. I witnessed this early in my career making shareware games at Epic in the 90s and I’m seeing the same basic principles are in play with high end Flash games. Fantastic Contraption, for example, pulled in low 6 figures after only a few months on the market. That’s about 100x better than a typical flash game and in-line with many shareware or downloadable titles.

I think his conclusion is right not just for Flash game developers, but for all sorts of game developers, including MMOGs, iPhone games etc. dan runs through some steps that game developers should take to maximize their chances of being able to make a living from designing games, specific ideas about what to charge for, and responses to common objections to getting users to pay. For new or aspiring game designers, it is worth reading the whole thing.

Freemium and Freeconomics

Fred — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 05:26:23 PDT

This week we saw the release of Chris Anderson's book Free and reviews from the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell) and the Financial Times (John Gapper). I'd like to talk a bit about the firestorm that freeconomics (fed by Chris' book) has unleashed but first we need to clarify something.

The FT piece says:

The most plausible contender for an "entirely new economic model" made possible by the internet is what Fred Wilson, the New York venture capitalist, has dubbed "freemium".

There was no dubbing by me. In March 2006, I wrote a post called My Favorite Business Model in which I outlined the freemium concept and I asked the readers to help me give it an easy handle. The word Freemium was not coined by me. It came from Jarid Lukin, who at the time was working for Alacra, a company I am on the board of. Fortunately, we've got Wikipedia which has got the story straight.

Now let's talk about freeconomics. I don't believe everything will be free on the Internet. There will be plenty of paid business models. For example, if you want to watch Major League Baseball games live over the Internet, you'll pay for that. If you want to use services like the FT and the WSJ frequently (more than 10x per month), you'll pay for that. If you want to watch HBO over the Internet, you'll pay for that. If you want a Twitter desktop or mobile client, you might pay for that too.

But we also must recognize that the cost of delivering many services over the Internet has decreased significantly from what it cost to deliver them in the analog world. The marginal cost of delivering a piece of content is approaching zero. But the total cost of delivering content on the Internet is far from zero. My partner Albert wrote a great post about this last week. He said:

The price of watching a stream on Youtube is zero. With marginal cost zero and marginal benefit zero, from a perspective of maximizing total social (net) benefit, free is the right price because it does not preclude any video that could possibly have benefit from being viewed. That does not mean that free is sustainable because it obviously doesn’t help cover the total cost.

And, as Albert recognizes at the end of his post, this debate is not entirely about economics. It is about the value of various participants in the content ecosystem.

Gladwell got pretty negative on Anderson and his book in the New Yorker piece. He said:

It would be nice to know, as well, just how a business goes about reorganizing itself around getting people to work for “non-monetary rewards.” Does he mean that the New York Times should be staffed by volunteers, like Meals on Wheels? Anderson’s reference to people who “prefer to buy their music online” carries the faint suggestion that refraining from theft should be considered a mere preference. And then there is his insistence that the relentless downward pressure on prices represents an iron law of the digital economy. Why is it a law? Free is just another price, and prices are set by individual actors, in accordance with the aggregated particulars of marketplace power.

These are the anti-freeconomics arguments we hear from the likes of Andrew Keen and his ilk. Lambasting file sharers and entrepreneurs who rightly recognize that free is the right way to build market share on the Internet might be fun and make certain people feel good. But it's ignorance of a fundamental fact. And that fact is that free, ad supported media works best on the Internet. We have seen it again and again. I'm not going to even give examples.

Once you have built that audience, you can deliver upsells via freemium models, you can monetize it via advertising and you can branch out into other services which are easier to monetize. This post by Silicon Alley Insider on Facebook's revenues this year is instructive:

Earlier this week, we spoke to several sources who each have some insight into Facebook's financials (none of them know precisely). Taking the sources' input together, we'd estimate the company's expected 2009 revenue this way:

$125 million from brand ads
$150 million from Facebook's ad deal with Microsoft
$75 million from virtual goods
$200 million from self-service ads.

These numbers are similar enough to others that I have heard that I feel comfortable republishing them here. Facebook has 200mm+ monthly active users worldwide. Let's say they are doing $50mm per month in revenue. That's a revenue per monthly active user of $0.25. Low for sure, but enough to operate at breakeven. And I expect the self service ads and the virtual goods revenues to grow strongly in the next year, more than making up for the likely loss of some of the $150mm from the ad deal with Microsoft.

And the next move for Facebook is to generate transaction revenues with its payment service and off site ad and transcation revenues from its Facebook Connect service. I'm pretty confident that Facebook can take its revenue per monthly active user to at least $0.50 and maybe higher in the coming years.

Facebook is a perfect example of freeconomics at work. A woman who works for a major media company was in my office recently. She quoted her CEO as saying "why doesn't Facebook just charge a monthly subscription fee, they'd be making money hand over fist?". Well I believe that if Facebook did that, they'd be vulnerable to other networks offering a free service. And certainly not every one of those 200mm+ users are going to cough up a monthly subscription. But by offering a friction free service, they have built a powerful and growing network that they are now starting to monetize in various ways and that they will monetize even further in additional ways. And they are super hard to compete with because they are free.

I like to keep my posts short, so I'll end here with the observation that the Internet allows an entrrepreneur to enter a market with a free offering because the costs of doing so are not astronomical. And most entrpreneurs who take this approach will maintain an attractive free offering of their basic service forever. But that doesn't mean that everything they offer will be free. That's the whole point of freemium. Free gets you to a place where you can ask to get paid. But if you don't start with free on the Internet, most companies will never get paid.

UX Is The Beating Heart Of Tech

Stowe Boyd — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 12:01:50 PDT

[via satori, ai]

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

Eric — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:20:00 PDT

In the lean startup workshops, we’ve spent a lot of time discussing the technique of Five Whys. It allows teams to diagnose sources of waste in their development process and continuously improve, reversing the usual trend of teams getting slower over time. With Five Whys, teams can accelerate, even as they scale.

In a previous post, I outlined the benefits of Five Whys: that it allows you to make large investments in infrastructure incrementally, takes advantage of the 80/20 rule to free up resources immediately, and helps organizations become built to learn. Today, I want to talk about the mechanics of Five Whys in greater detail.

First, a caveat. My intention is to describe a full working process, similar to what I’ve seen at IMVU and other lean startups. But as with all process changes, it should not be interpreted as a spec to be implemented right away. In fact, trying too much is just as dangerous at not doing enough. Just as the lean movement has taught us to build incrementally, it has also taught us to attempt process changes incrementally as well. You need to transition to a work flow of small batches – in small batches.

Five Whys involves holding meetings immediately following the resolution of problems the company is facing. These problems can be anything: development mistakes, site outages, marketing program failures, or even internal missed schedules. Any time something unexpected happens, we could do some root cause analysis. Yet it’s helpful to begin by tackling a specific class of problems. For example, a common place to get started is with this rule: any time we have a site outage of any duration, we will hold a post-mortem meeting immediately afterwards.

The first step is to identify three things about the meeting: what problem we are trying to solve, who will run the meeting, and who was affected by the problem. For the problem, it’s essential to hold the meeting immediately following a specific symptom. Five Why’s rarely works for general abstract problems like “our product is buggy” or “our team moves too slow.” Instead, we want to hold it for a specific symptom, like “we missed the Jan 6 deadline by two weeks” or “we had a site outage on Nov 10.” Have faith that if a large general problem is really severe, it will be generating many symptoms that we can use to achieve a general solution.

Always explicitly identify the person running the meeting. Some organizations like to appoint a “Five Whys master” for a specific area of responsibility. For example, at IMVU we had masters appointed for topics like site scalability or unit test failures. The advantage of having an expert run each meeting is that this person can get better and better at helping the team find good solutions. The downside is the extra coordination required to get that person in the room each time. Either way can work. In any event, nobody should hold a master position for too long. Rotation is key to avoid having a situation where one person becomes a bottleneck or single point of failure.

The person running the meeting does not have to be a manager or executive. They do need to have the authority necessary to assign tasks across the organization. That’s because Five Whys will often pierce the illusion of separate departments and discover the human problems that lurk beneath the surface of supposedly technical problems. In order to make Five Whys successful, the person running the meeting has to have the backing of an executive sponsor who has the requisite authority to back them up if they wind up stepping in political landmines. But this executive sponsor doesn’t need to be in the room – what matters is that everyone in the room understands that the person running the meeting has the authority to do so. This means that if you are trying to introduce Five Whys into an organization that is not yet bought-in, you have to start small.

In order to maximize the odds of success, we want to have everyone affected by the problem in the meeting. That means having a representative of every department or function that was affected. When customers are affected, try to have someone who experienced the customer problem first-hand, like the customer service rep who took the calls from angry customers. At a minimum, you have to have the person who discovered the problem. Otherwise, key details are likely to be missed. For example, I have seen many meetings analyzing a problem that took a long time to be diagnosed. In hindsight, the problem was obvious. If the people responsible for diagnosis aren’t in the post-mortem meeting, it’s too easy to conclude, “those people were just too stupid to find the problem” instead of focusing on how our tools could make problems more evident and easier to diagnose.

A root cause analysis meeting has a clear problem, leader, and stakeholders. The most important guideline for the meeting itself is that the purpose of the meeting is to learn and to improve, not to assign blame or to vent. Assume that any problem is preventable and is worth preventing. Problems are caused by insufficiently robust systems rather than individual incompetence. Even in the case of a person making a mistake, we have to ask “why do our tools make that mistake so easy to make?”

The heart of the meeting is the analysis itself. For each problem, we want to ask “why did that happen?” and “why wasn’t it prevented by our process?” We do that iteratively until we have at least five levels of analysis. Of course, the number five is not sacrosanct; it’s just a guideline. What’s critical is that we don’t do too few levels, and we don’t do too many. One hundred whys would be overwhelming. But if we stay stuck at the technical parts of the problem, and never uncover the human problems behind them, we’re not going far enough. So I would keep the meeting going until we’re talking about human problems, and preferably system-level problems. For example, a site outage may seem like it was caused by a bad piece of code, but: why was that code written? Why didn’t the person who wrote it know that it would be harmful? Why didn’t our tests/QA/immune system catch and prevent the problem? Why wasn’t it immediately obvious how to fix the problem?

Pay attention to whether people are comfortable “naming names” in the meeting. If people are afraid of blame, they’ll try to phrase statements in vague, generic terms or use the passive voice, as in “a mistake was made” rather than “So-and-so failed to push the right button.” There’s no easy fix to this problem. Trust takes time to build up, and my experience is that it may take months to establish enough trust that people are confident that there won’t be retribution for speaking up candidly. Stay patient, and be on alert for blame-type talk or for post-meeting revenge. I recommend a zero-tolerance policy for these behaviors – otherwise our Five Whys meetings can descend into Five Blames.

Another common issue is the tendency of root causes to sprout branches. Complex problems rarely have only one cause, and looking for the primary cause is easier in theory than in practice. The branching of causes is also a prime target for so-called “anchor draggers” – people who aren’t really on board with the exercise in the first place. An easy way to derail the meeting is to keep insisting that more and more lateral causes be considered, until the team is running around in circles. Even well intentioned people can wreak the same havoc by simply staying over-focused on technical or ancillary issues. Try to stay focused on just one line of inquiry. Remember, Five Whys is not about making an exhaustive survey of all the problems. It’s about quickly identifying the likely root cause. That’s why it’s more important to do Five Whys frequently than to get it exactly right. It’s a very forgiving practice, because the most wasteful problems will keep clamoring for attention. Have faith that you’ll have many more opportunities to tackle them, and don’t get hung up on any particular solution.

Once you’ve found approximately five levels of the problem, which includes at least one or two human-level issues, it’s time to turn to solutions. The overall plan is to make a proportional investment in each of the five levels. The two major guidelines are: don’t do too much, and don’t do nothing. Almost anything in between will work.

For example, I often cite a real example of a problem that has as its root cause a new employee who was not properly trained. I pick that example on purpose, for two reasons: 1) most of the companies I work with deal with this problem and yet 2) almost none of them have any kind of training program in place for new employees. The reason is simple: setting up a training program is seen as too much work to be justified by the problem. Yet in every situation where I have asked, nobody has been tasked with making a realistic estimate, either of the impact of this lack of training or the real costs of the solution. In fact, even the investigation itself is considered too much work. Five Whys is designed to avoid these nebulous arguments. If new employees are causing problems, that will be a routine topic. If those problems are minor, each time it happens we’ll budget a small amount of time to make progress on the solution.

Let’s imagine the ideal solution would be to spend six weeks setting up a training program for new employees. You can almost hear a manager now: “sure, if you want me to spend the next six weeks setting this up, just let me know. It’s just a matter of priorities. If you think it’s more important than everything else I’m working on, go right ahead and find someone else to take over my other responsibilities…” This logic is airtight, and has the effect of preventing any action. But Five Whys gives us an alternative. If we’ve just analyzed a minor problem that involved a new employee, we should make a minor investment in training. To take an extreme example, let’s say we’ve decided to invest no more than one hour in the solution. Even in that case, we can ask the manager involved to simply spend the first hour of the six-week ideal solution. The next time the problem comes up, we’ll do the next hour, and so on.

In fact, at IMVU, we did exactly that. We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. As we kept doing root cause analysis, the list grew. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. Soon, each new engineer was assigned a mentor, and we made it part of the mentor’s job to teach the curriculum. Over time, we also made investments in making it easier to get a new engineer set up with their private sandbox, and even dealt with how to make sure they’d have a machine on their desk when they started. The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process. Five Whys simply helped us eliminate tons of waste by building one.

Returning to the meeting itself, the person running the meeting should lead the team in brainstorming solutions for each of the problems selected. It’s important that the leader be empowered to pick one and only one solution for each problem, and then assign it to someone to get done. Remember that the cost of the solutions is proportional to the problem caused. This should make it easy to get buy-in from other managers or executives. After all, if it’s a severe problem like a site outage, do they really want to be seen as the person getting in the way of solving it? And if it’s a minor problem, are they really going to object to a few hours of extra work here and there, if it’s towards a good cause? My experience is: usually not.

There are no fixed rules for what constitutes a proportional investment. As teams get experience doing Five Whys, they start to develop rules of thumb for what is reasonable and what isn’t. To restate: the key is that all parties, including the non-technical departments, see the investments as reasonable. As long as we don’t veer to either extreme, the 80/20 rule will make sure that we don’t under-invest over the long term. Remember that if something is a serious problem, it will keep coming up over and over in these meetings. Each time, we’ll get to chip away at it, until it’s no longer a problem.

The last element of a good Five Whys process is to share the results of the analysis widely. I generally recommend sending out the results to the whole company, division, or business unit. This accomplishes two important things: it diffuses knowledge throughout the organization, and it provides evidence that the team in question is taking problems seriously. This latter point can eliminate a lot of waste. I have been amazed how many teams have severe inter-departmental trust issues caused by a lack of communication about problems. For example, engineering feels that they are constantly being pressured to take shortcuts that lower the quality of the product. At the same time, the very marketing people who are applying that pressure think the engineering team doesn’t take quality seriously, and doesn’t respond appropriately when their shoddy work leads to customer problems. Sharing Five Whys can alleviate this problem, by letting everyone know exactly how seriously problems are taken. I say exactly, because it may actually reveal that problems are not taken seriously. In fact, I have seen people in other departments sometimes catch sloppy thinking in a Five Whys report. By sharing the analysis widely, that feedback can flow on a peer-to-peer basis, quickly and easily.

Most organizations are unaware of how much time they spend firefighting, reworking old bugs, and generally expending energy on activities that their customers don’t care about. Yet getting a handle on these sources of waste is hard, especially because they are dynamic. By the time a tops-down company-wide review figured out the main problems, they’d have shifted to another location. Five Whys allows teams to react much faster and then constantly adapt. Without all that waste in their way, they simply go faster.

(If you’re new to Five Whys, I’m eager to hear your feedback. Does this help you get started? What questions or concerns do you have? Leave your thoughts in a comment. If you’ve tried Five Whys, please share your experiences so far. I’ll do my best to help.)

A beautiful piece of targeted advertising:

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:54:35 PDT

A beautiful piece of targeted advertising:

What Drives Consumer Adoption Of New Technologies?

Fred — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:19:38 PDT

I'm participating in a panel discussion this morning during the offsite of a major media company. They sent me a list of questions in preparation of the event. One of the questions was the title of this post; "What drives consumer adoption of new technologies?".

It's an interesting question and one I've never tried to answer directly in writing. But it's also a question we attempt to answer every day in our firm as we evaluate thousands of new startups every year.

Let's take ten of the most popular new consumer technology products in recent years (with a couple of our portfolio companies in the mix): iPhone, Facebook, Wii, Hulu, FlipCam, Rock Band, Mafia Wars, Blogger, Pandora, and Twitter and let's try to describe in one sentence or less why they broke out (feel free to debate the reasons they broke out in the comments):

iPhone - mobile browser with a killer touch screen interface
Facebook - a social net with real utility
Wii - gesture based user interface for gaming
Hulu - your favorite TV shows in a fantastic web UI
FlipCam - a video cam that fits in your pocket comfortably
Rock Band - everyone can be a rock star for a few minutes
Mafia Wars - a natively social game built for social nets
Blogger - a printing press for everyone
Pandora - drop dead simple personalized radio
Twitter - blogging everyone can do in less than a minute

In most of these cases, the breakthrough product or service delivered a new experience to consumers that they had never had before. Sure there were social nets before Facebook, but none allowed you to run your life the way Facebook does for my kids. Sure there were browsers on phones before the iPhone, but there hadn't been one that you could actually use like you use a browser on a computer. Sure there had been personalized internet radio services before Pandora but not one that was drop dead simple and delivered a great experience.

So it seems to me that consumers are driven to new experiences that are simple and useful and/or entertaining. It is not enough to be the first to market with a new technology. You have to be the first to market with a version of the technology that is simple and easy to use.

I'm curious to hear everyone else's thoughts on this. The sooner the better since the panel starts at 10am today.

The answers to the problems with paid search for SMB’s.

Dean McEvoy — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:58:15 PDT

A report was released to today by Borrell and associates showing the huge churn there is in small to medium sized business customers buying paid search. Greg Sterling and David Mihm gave some excellent analysis on the report but in short it said that:

The local search advertising market is huge and there has been some significant growth by industry players such as Yodle, Reach Local, and Local.com
Being a great sales force is one thing but re-sellers of the major paid search need to find ways to add value. This make sense as a smart business will always be asking what are they paying for and will eventually go direct if they dont see the value.
The biggest challenge for resellers is churn. Estimates are that 60% of customers leave every 12 months. The biggest reason is that the small businesses not perceiving a return on investment, particularly in the first 90 days.

The reason for this failure is the failure for the re-sellers to clearly understand the amount of business being brought to the small business and clearly and easily communicating that to the owner. To a business owner that has just made thier first purchase of search engine marketing campaign to expect them to immediately understand the value of a click is naive. If I own a local restaurant do my 500 extra clicks on my website per month result in a good investment of my $500 per month. When they read that i bet most owners dont think it does. If they can show it resulted in 50 new reservations, then it is so much easier for the owner to understand without having to be an SEM expert.

Tracking online reservations and calls sent to a business is the only way to determine the true effectiveness of a local search marketing campaign and until the business models and sales commission structures are based around that then there will always be some misalignment between the business, the local search directory and their users. The industry isnt there yet and its because half of the 100,000 sales people selling to these businesses are yellow pages and local newspaper people so its the history of those industries that are still leaving thier legacy.

If you are interested in learning how to re-align your online directories to be more inline with business owners and users get in touch with dean (at)bookingangel (dot) com or follow me on twitter

Weak US Treasuries and Strong Commodities - Here to Stay

Brad — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 21:19:13 PDT

Check out a piece in MoneyNews by Michael Carr entitled Fed Policy is Causing Inflation and Hurting the US Dollar. Here is an excerpt from that article:

Added together, there is about $20 trillion in cash and promised cash in the U.S. economy. The total production of the country, as measured by GDP, is about $14 trillion. More money is available in the economy than there is stuff to spend it on. The result is that those with money will be willing to pay more for the goods and services they want to buy. This is what economists call inflation.

The late, Milton Friedman in his classic book Money Mischief gives direct insight into how Obama’s reckless monetary policies will cause hyperinflation. Everything Obama, the Federal Reserve, and Congress are doing was predicted in startling detail almost two decades ago by Freidman.

Though he passed away in 2006, in his prophetic book, Friedman showed how, facing massive deficits, the U.S. government would dramatically increase the money supply; why foreign countries would stop buying US debt; how the Fed would start buying our Treasury bills; and why this would call cause massive inflation.

He even predicted that US officials would claim inflation was no problem at all. All of this is now coming to pass! The Obama administration is embracing massive inflationary deficit spending. In just 100 days, Barrack Obama has more than doubled the U.S. money supply . . . committed the government to at least $7 trillion in new spending . . . and warned the American people to expect trillion-dollar deficits for the foreseeable future. While the media has been falling over itself to praise Obama’s “bold initiatives,” the question no one has been asking is, “Where is all of this money coming from and what is the price we will ultimately pay for this?”

Decades ago, Milton Friedman answered these questions clearly and precisely in his insightful — and very topical book, Money Mischief: Episodes in Monetary History. In Money Mischief, Friedman even warned that the coming inflation could “destroy” the US. Here’s what he wrote: “Inflation is a disease, a dangerous and sometimes fatal disease that, if not checked in time, can destroy a society.” (Money Mischief, Page 191).

We believe that Obama’s massive deficit spending will doom the dollar and the US economy. If you want to find out what is really happening to the US economy get a copy of Milton Friedman’s book. Its insights are so relevant and shocking — it reads like it was just published for our times! Milton Friedman isn’t the only one worrying about the US deficits and the dollar……the US creditors seem very concerned:

June 2 (Bloomberg) — China’s former central bank adviser Yu Yongding will meet Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner today and tell him the U.S. shouldn’t be complacent about China continuing to buy Treasuries. “I wish to tell the U.S. government: ‘Don’t be complacent and think there isn’t any alternative for China to buy your bills and bonds’,” Yu said in an interview yesterday. “The euro is an alternative. And there are lots of raw materials we can still buy.” Yu is scheduled to meet Geithner at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Beijing today. China is the biggest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries with $768 billion at the end of the first quarter. Premier Wen Jiabao in March called for the U.S. “to guarantee the safety of China’s assets” and central bank Governor Zhou Xiaochuan has proposed a new global currency to reduce reliance on the dollar.

China is concerned that the U.S.’s spending and planned record fiscal deficit will eventually lead to inflation and a loss of confidence in the dollar, undermining the value of China’s Treasury holdings, Yu said. The deficit is projected to reach $1.75 trillion in the year ending Sept. 30 from last year’s $455 billion shortfall, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The U.S. should take China’s interests into consideration “so that your own interest can be protected,” Yu said. “You should not try to inflate away your debt burden.” China could still diversify some of its Treasury holdings into euros or commodities, Yu added. “Yes, some people say the euro is very weak,” Yu said. “Okay, weak is good, we’ll buy very cheap.” The best outcome for China would still be to negotiate with the U.S. and reach agreement on its Treasury holdings, Yu said. “The borrower should keep their promises,” he added.

Well we think that there is no hiding Yu’s thoughts and intentions…….we will follow on the back of these intentions (short USDs & US treasuries, and long commodities and commodity equities), the trends are clear and make sense:

We are long HAP, DBC, UDN and TBT…….we have a feeling that we will be so for many months!

OMG - No Investor Support

Sun, 31 May 2009 21:52:34 PDT

OMG - No Investor Support:

Fairfax’s MyCareer.com.au number of ads stands at 25,000+. Seek’s - 105,000+.

And it’s no wonder. Even the folks who should be supporting MyCareer aren’t advertising with them.

Fairfax NZ is…

The Best Way to Successfully Overhaul Your Life

Leo — Sun, 31 May 2009 14:44:15 PDT

I’ve done it before and I’m sure many of you have as well: decided I wanted to completely change my life, from diet to exercise to productivity habits to spending and career and family and more.

I’ve failed in the attempt to do this at least a few times.

I’ve also done it successfully. You might have read my story, but basically I went from overweight, sedentary, heavily in debt, overworked and stressed, unproductive, with no time for my family … to a runner, marathoner, exerciser, healthy diet, vegetarian, early riser, much more productive, debt-free, simplified life where I have time for my wife and kids.

And how did I do it all? One little step at a time.

Recently reader Christine asked:

I really want to be a positive, achieving, dedicated, in-the-moment, fun (& all the good traits you can imagine!) woman/wife/mother. How can I become that in my lifetime?

I want to be completely healed from past hurts, mistakes, doubts, failures, disappointments, pains, etc. I want to be free!

In short, Mr. Leo, I WANT TO CHANGE MY LIFE.

Christine, you’ve asked a lot of me, and I honestly can’t tackle it all in one answer, so I won’t try. Instead, I will give you the best suggestion I have:

Start small.

Don’t try to make all these huge changes, and change your entire life at once. It’s too hard, and overwhelming. You can’t do everything at once — you can only do one thing at a time.

So pick one thing to change — something easy. Don’t pick the most difficult thing — just the easiest. Something you can focus on for the next couple of weeks.

Be sure you’re going to be successful at it — again, it should be super easy.

Then clear everything else off your plate and focus on just that. Really put all your energy into making that change. You might try something simple, like smile more, or to be more grateful (say a prayer of thanks in the morning, and show gratitude to people throughout the day), or focus on slowing down as you do your work or chores.

Start small, and be sure to make this a success. Once you’ve had that success, use that feeling of success to leverage a second success — something small that you can win at, again. Keep repeating this, small successes, one after the other.

Small steps. That’s how you’re going to change your life. You’ll probably get impatient and want to do more, but trust me: this will work.
—
Read more about simple productivity, focus and getting great things done in Leo’s book, The Power of Less.

OMG – No Investor Support

Geoff Jennings — Sun, 31 May 2009 01:45:46 PDT

Fairfax’s MyCareer.com.au number of ads stands at 25,000+. Seek’s – 105,000+.

And it’s no wonder. Even the folks who should be supporting MyCareer aren’t advertising with them.

Fairfax NZ is advertising for a Acquisitions and Retentions Manager . Where did they place their ad? Seek.

Then there’s Online Marketing Group, the folks who boast in their job ad that “Fairfax Digital is a strategic investor in our company”, have posted a job for a Online Account Executive position. Guess they don’t have much faith in their investor. They chose to advertise exclusively on Seek.

The World’s 10 Weirdest Vending Machines

Drea — Thu, 28 May 2009 10:06:46 PDT

Vending machines have been around since the first century AD. By today’s accounts, even the first vending machine, which dispensed holy water to temple visitors, was weird.

The tradition continues. This month alone, Germans released a 24K gold bar vending machine, and an Italian entrepreneur exhibited a machine that makes pizza from scratch. These machines are featured along with 8 other oddities below:

Dog-O-Matic

Source: Slippery Brick

The Dog-O-Matic, an automatic dogwashing machine, is a hit in the town of St. Max, France. Inventor Romain Jarry wants to launch it in Britain next year, but claims that “at the moment people are still getting used to the idea,” according to the Daily Mail. That’s probably because the device looks like a canine waterboarding machine. “It doesn’t take long to wash the dog,” he said. “The longest part is the drying. The dogs don’t seem to get bored. They just sit there and they come out clean.” If your dog makes it through without trauma, your wallet won’t: It costs $21 to wash a small dog, $35 for a medium dog, and $49 for a big animal.

Instant Judaism

Source: Jacob Richman

This vending machine sits in Jerusalem’s central bus station, where it sells booklets on Jewish traditions and laws. The purpose of the sponsoring organization, Hadaf Hayomi, is to “spread Torah knowledge worldwide in a beautiful manner.” Not sure how beautiful vending machines are, but they’re certainly spreading the message. (From Jacob Richman’s blog).

Gold-to-Go

Source: Wirtschaftswoche

Online discounter Gold-Supermarkt.de launched the “Gold-to-Go” machine in May to address increasing demand for the precious metal within Germany. The machine sells 1 gram, 24-karat gold bars, and updates prices every 10 minutes. The company plans to install 500 machines in train stations and airports Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The tiny bars are hardly a good investment: Goldbugs pay 31 Euros cash for a bar worth about 21 Euros. But you can’t beat the bars for novelty points.

Pet Beetles

Source: PhotoMann

According to Doug Mann, who took the picture above, some Japanese kids like to keep rhinoceros beetles as pets. The roadside vending machine above sells them for 100-300 yen each. The males, which have long horns protruding from their heads, are especially coveted. Department stores in Japan also sell the bugs.

Call-a-Ball

Source: We Make Money Not Art

If the urge to play a game of pick-up soccer with your friends ever hits, Call-a-Ball will provide. This soccer ball dispensing machine spits out an RFID-embedded ball when you send an SMS with the vending machine code on it. You can also register to have the machine send a “challenge” message to your friends via SMS. When you’re done kicking, just pop the ball back into the machine.

Schoolgirl Panty Machine

Source: PhotoMann

No, it’s not an urban legend. Though Japan’s famous used schoolgirl panty vending machines were purportedly banned in 1993, individuals continued to report their existence around the country until at least 2001. The panties are supposedly worn by schoolgirls before they make it into the vending machines, where they sell for upwards of $50 a pop.

Rolls Royce-o-Mat

Source: NYTimes

Miami’s Mondrian South Beach hotel boasts one of the world’s fanciest vending machines. The specially designed Semi Automatic machine only takes credit cards. In return, it deposits a variety of luxury items, including 24-karat gold handcuffs, designer vases, jewelry, and a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow (rental only). According to the New York Times, an anti-recession T-shirt is among the machine’s bestsellers.

Marijuana To Go

Source: Geekologie

The pot vending machine featured above dispensed up to 1oz/week of prescription pot. Approved users could choose from five strains, which they would receive in a vacuum-sealed plastic capsule. The machines were installed in California in early 2008, then seized by DEA agents not long thereafter.

Let’s Pizza

Source: NowPublic

“Let’s Pizza,” a vending machine released by Italian entrepreneur Claudio Torghele, makes pizza from scratch in less than 3 minutes. All you need to do is choose one of four types of pizza, pay $4.95, and watch as the machine creates a fresh pie. The machine mixes and presses the dough, adds sauce and toppings, and bakes the pizza in an infrared oven. At the end of the process, you pick up the steaming pizza on a cardboard tray. If you’re a hygiene freak, or simply in a hurry, you could become fast friends with the “Let’s Pizza.”

Tie Vending Machine

(Source: SurferJerry.com)

Another Japanese vending-machine oddity, in case a paper shredder or cup of coffee gets the better of your old tie.

The Next Layer Of The Social Media Stack

Tue, 26 May 2009 03:37:23 PDT

The Next Layer Of The Social Media Stack:

Last week Seth Goldstein’s company Social Media put on a social media bootcamp for marketers and he asked John Borthwick and I to start the day off with a panel discussion around social…

Let’s make it happen

Tue, 26 May 2009 03:37:23 PDT

Let’s make it happen:

On Tuesday last week I was lucky enough to listen to an interesting range of cool people give 5 minute talks on the topics of their choice. (ok – only one person hit the 5 minute market exactly,…

The App Store Hype Gets A Dose Of Reality

Tue, 26 May 2009 03:37:22 PDT

The App Store Hype Gets A Dose Of Reality:

Yesterday developer Rick Strom wrote a blog posted titled “The Incredible App Store Hype“, in which he detailed some of the revenue stats he was seeing from the iPhone applications that he had…

The Printable CEO VIII: Day Grid Balancer

Mon, 25 May 2009 03:37:16 PDT

The Printable CEO VIII: Day Grid Balancer:

(the official page for the Day Grid Balancer is http://davidseah.com/pceo/dgb)

If you’re just joining the conversation, I’ve been thinking a lot about work-life balance the past / …

Online Publishers: Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow

Wed, 20 May 2009 23:27:06 PDT

Online Publishers: Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow:

One of the main themes of discussion here at the Web 3.0 Conference in New York City is how Web content is being digested. With the shift from destination sites to syndication through multiple…

When Being Rational Kills Your Business – Clayton Christensen

Hutch Carpenter — Mon, 11 May 2009 06:00:01 PDT

Last week, I attended the World Innovation Forum on behalf of my company, Spigit. One of the speakers was Clayton Christensen, Harvard professor most famous for his book The Innovator’s Dilemma. His talk was one I really looked forward to, and he didn’t disappoint.

The theme of his talk was Disruptive Innovation as a Platform for Growth. A good all-purpose title, but one that really didn’t do justice to the range of topics. Clayton delivered a lot of good knowledge and analysis. I tweeted most of his talk, and I wanted to pull it together in a blog post here. So let’s get to it.

Big Steel vs. Mini Mills

He opened with a discussion that one can find in The Innovator’s Dilemma. It’s the tale of how big traditional integrated steel mills lost market share to upstart mini mills over the course of several decades. To the point where the integrated steel mills have for the most part been shuttered.

Key to the story is this: The steel market could be segmented into different segments, from low-grade to high-grade steel. And profit margins improved as you sold into the higher grade markets. The big integrated mills produced all grades of steel, which meant the profit margins for the different segments averaged out.

Cue the disruptive technology, mini mills in this case. The mini mills initially were too small to utilize the then-current technology to produce high grade steel. But they could produce low-grade quite well, and at a much lower cost. This meant they could easily underprice the big integrated steel mills, and they gained market share in the lower end of the steel market.

Ultimately ceding the low-end seemed OK to the big mills. It meant dropping the lowest profit business, which made margins look better, as the graphic below demonstrates:

In the short term, this strategy was quite beneficial to the integrated mills. The next part of the story is where the disruption really kicks in. The low grade mini mills’ technology got better, so that they could produce increasingly higher grade steel at lower costs. This forced the big integrated mills to retreat to ever higher margin segments, until there was no place left to hide.

Disruptive technology. Steel in this case, but it happens everywhere.

Why Do Companies Allow this to Happen? They’re Being Rational

This is a wide open question, and it’s one that cannot be answered completely here. But Christensen provided some valuable points.

In pursuing the higher margin business and jettisoning the lower segments, companies are being eminently rational. Fighting it out over low-margin business is generally not considered a good application of corporate capital. Why? Here’s my personal take on Christensen’s disruption model:

Existing customers are not clamoring for your low-margin business
Current manufacturing and installed base do not support lower cost production or delivery
Return on capital for protecting the low-margin business is poor
Low-margin business is not strategic to customers, and does not fit long term company goals

Indeed, all of the above are rational and generally the right approach to the problem. Spending large dollars pursuing low-margin commodity businesses is something most of us would view as folly. Christensen, in describing the big integrated steel mills’ management, noted that he never uses the word “stupid”. They’re actually being rational.

In being rational, companies encounter a significant problem when it comes to innovation:

A business model hijacks an idea and forces it to change to conform.

The existing business model rides on a set of processes and principles. Anything new must work with that “innovation infrastructure” to get anywhere internally. But often, this requires changing an idea so fundamentally that it no longer works like it’s originator thought it would. Innovation takes a hit.

Who’s Next for Disruption? Oracle and Toyota

Christensen mentioned some specific companies at risk for disruption.

Oracle, the ever growing enterprise software behemoth, is at risk for disruption from Salesforce.com. I get that. Salesforce clearly has lower cost applications that can target Oracle. In databases, Oracle seems to have prevented disruption by MySQL by acquiring it.

Toyota was a surprise pick for disruption…by the likes of Kia and Hyundai. As Christensen explained it, Toyota has been putting resources into higher margin luxury cars and pick-up trucks. Meaning they’re vulnerable at the lower end.

That’s one thing with these disruptive technologies. It’s really hard to believe it before it happens.

Key Strategies for Addressing Market Insurgents

Christensen offered three pieces of advice to companies in dealing with market disruption:

Create separate units to deal with insurgents
Frame the problem correctly
Understand the job your product was hired to do

Separate business units. This advice is in his book, but it still makes sense. Essentially, the best way to handle disruptive technologies is to tackle them in a separate division outside the main corporate focus. Keys to this division:

Separate sales force
Leverage new technologies for cost-advantage, performance benefits
Be willing to cannibalize existing sales

Most companies do not do this. In the computer industry, Christensen cited IBM as the only company to successfully navigate disruptive technologies: Mainframe -> Mini computers -> PCs. Of course, they’ve jettisoned the PC business. I wonder if the next wave will be the mobile platforms emerging, like the iPhone.

Frame the problem correctly. Christensen believes the root cause for the inability to innovate is not framing the problem correctly. Companies do not understand what is happening with their customers as they use new technologies:

Expensive failure always results when disruption is framed as technological rather than business model terms.

There’s a tendency to view market competition through a technology lens, not a business one. A company will see a new technology, and note its obvious inferiority to what current leaders offer. It then becomes easy to dismiss it.

That’s the mistake.

Companies should think in terms of the business context for changes in their industry.Best way to do this?

Customers hire your product for a job. This was an intriguing way to put things. Christensen advises thinking in terms of “the job your product has been hired to do”. I heard this, and my initial instinct was…huh? But it really is a powerful way to understand how your customers use your products and services.

The crux of his point is that segmenting the market on demographics – e.g. urban hipsters, suburban soccer moms, etc. – is a way of performing marketing. But it’s not useful as context for product roadmaps or assessing new competition for your customers’ wallets.

Christensen referenced a Peter Drucker quote to bring this home:

The customer rarely buys what the company thinks it is selling him.

There’s an enormous amount to be learned when you consider your company’s product in the hands of a customer. In understanding the uses of the product, the job of the product, you increase the likelihood of framing diruptioon in business terms, not technology. One example he gave is Ikea. Ikea’s not a low-priced furniture store. It’s integrated to get a job done – to get your place furnished fast.

The Disruptive Potential of Green Tech

Green technology has emerged as an important driver of our future economy. There’s a lot of investment in the sector. Here’s where Christensen put forth an interesting observation.

He traveled to Mongolia to see his kid who was on a mission there. While walking through a market, he came across some cheap solar-powered TVs. They were miniature, and the solar panels were low-cost materials. The quality wasn’t great, but they functioned well enough for that part of the world.

He compared these little cheap solar devices to the larger green initiatives underway today. And in his view, disruption of the traditional power industry is more likely to come from things like cheap solar TVs than from big heavy investments.

Those TVs are closer to the job people are hiring for.

Electric cars are often in the news today. The biggest challenge for them is that currently technology requires a heavy battery onboard. This causes them to be slow, and they don’t go very far on a charge. So who might be interested in “hiring” heavy, slow cars that can’t go too far? Parents of teenagers.

The Power of Employee Ideas

I’ll close out this post with this note. Christensen was engaged by Intel to talk to its employees about disruptive innovation, and framing the problem correctly. Led by then-CEO Andy Grove, the company held a series of employee meetings to discuss new ideas for their markets.

Last year, ideas coming from those employee ideas amounted to $18 billion for Intel. Not bad, not bad at all.

Tagged: innovation, innovator's dilemma, wif09

Competition is not an excuse for failure

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:35 PDT

Competition is not an excuse for failure:

Mark McQueen points to a story by Reuters columnist Eric Auchard which was generally about the up and down of the tech IPO market. Mark called out one chunk of the Eric’s story:

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Hey, have you heard of Twitter?

Thu, 07 May 2009 04:00:35 PDT

Hey, have you heard of Twitter?:

Listen man, subscribe to our Twitter already. These brainiacs have:

You’ve been served.

Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here's YQL Execute

Sat, 02 May 2009 22:00:01 PDT

Developers: Never Mind the APIs, Here's YQL Execute:

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Customer Development Talk Startup2Startup

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Customer Development Talk Startup2Startup:

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Someone is Thinking Outside of the Hound Box!

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If Someone Resigns - Accept It!

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If Someone Resigns - Accept It!:

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Sequoia Capital on startups and the economic downturn

eldon@slideshare.net (eldon) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 22:58:52 PDT

Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to its portfolio companies about how to try to survive an economic downturn. Here’s the presentation

Going Fast on the Mobile Web

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Web Visions presentation on developing fast-loading web pages for mobile devices.

Brain Rules for Presenters

garr@slideshare.net (garr) — Mon, 19 May 2008 07:06:13 PDT

One of the best books I have read this year is Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. The applications for presentation are many. This is a book review of sorts, though I do not highlight all aspects of the book. I focus on the three rules that relate most directly, though all the rules have lessons. Just a fantastic book.

Best Strategy Is Speed (Startup2Startup May 2008)

dmc500hats@slideshare.net (dmc500hats) — Fri, 16 May 2008 05:21:26 PDT

"SPEED: The Ultimate Startup Weapon", presented by Mike Cassidy to Startup2Startup entrepreneur dinner (May 2008)

Startup Metrics 101: a Product & Marketing Workshop

dmc500hats@slideshare.net (dmc500hats) — Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:14:19 PDT

This presentation demonstrates a simple, actionable 5-step model for measuring startup metrics. The 5 steps are: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, & Revenue (AARRR!). The presentation also explains how to use the model to make better product & marketing decisions for your startup. Created by Dave McClure & Hiten Shah, presented at Web 2.0 Expo SF on Tue 4/22/08.

Startup Metrics for Pirates

dmc500hats@slideshare.net (dmc500hats) — Wed, 08 Aug 2007 11:03:16 PDT

This is a 5-step model for creating a metrics framework for your business & customers, and how to apply it to your product & marketing efforts. The "pirate" part comes from the 5 steps: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, & Revenue (AARRR!)

Innovation Strategy

nusantara99@slideshare.net (nusantara99) — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 17:58:09 PDT

Excellenr presentation slides on managing innovation strategy

Business Model Design and Innovation for Competitive Advantage

Alex.Osterwalder@slideshare.net (Alex.Osterwalder) — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:56:02 PDT

These are the slides I will be using for an executive workshop in Mexico on the topic of "Competitive Advantage through Business Model Design and Innovation"

New Product Development Strategy

nusantara99@slideshare.net (nusantara99) — Tue, 29 May 2007 22:24:06 PDT

Excellent presentation slides on new product development strategies

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nusantara99@slideshare.net (nusantara99) — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:43:22 PDT

Slides about blue ocean strategy

Improving Interface Design

garrettdimon@slideshare.net (garrettdimon) — Tue, 15 May 2007 09:38:00 PDT

Web Visions 2007 Improving Interface Design Workshop

Business Plan

vinaya.hs@slideshare.net (vinaya.hs) — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 03:17:32 PST

This presentation describes the structure of a business plan and the contents to put in each section.

Perfecting the Product Launch

sjhaines@slideshare.net (sjhaines) — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 15:56:24 PST

Most product launches seem to be troubled. Either we don’t hit the market window, we don’t take the right steps, or we don’t work with the right people. This presentation provides snapshot to help you perfect your product launches.

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