Mark Sigal's Blog - The Network Garden

Apple, the 'Boomer' Tablet and the Matrix (Guest Post @ O'Reilly Radar)

I have written here, here and here about Apple’s inevitable assault on the Tablet market. What I hadn’t factored until recently is how symbiotic such a device would be for Baby Boomers.

Why Baby Boomers? Well, for the same two reasons that this demographic is unlikely to embrace the palm-sized iPhone en masse.

One, such a bookish-sized tablet device – I’ll call it the Boomer Tablet – would be tailor-made for home Wi-Fi setups, thereby obviating the mobile access costs associated with iPhone, a significant barrier for a generation that is programmed to keep mobile bills within a tight spending range.

Two, because a larger-form factor device would offer Boomers a bigger viewing screen and “lifestyle” settings, like fatter keys and a more forgiving keyboard to ease input, and wizard-like shortcuts to simplify recurring tasks.

This is key, because with the onset of age, Boomers’ motor skills have become less precise; their vision has become poorer; and their eyes get tired easier.

As such, the premise of them plugging away on tiny keys and peering into the tiny screen of a mobile device like iPhone/iPod touch is a non-starter.

By contrast, the Boomer Tablet offers a superior input, viewing and playback environment for accessing your iTunes library, personal media, syndicated content services, iPhone Apps and presumably, Mac Apps; something that the 70M+ Baby Boomers in the US who are aged 53-73 would likely find compelling.

Moreover, if Apple put a video camera in the device – not a stretch since they are doing it in the iPhone GS – it could make video conferencing and VOIP ubiquitous in a relatively short time (Skype already has a client for the iPhone/iPod touch). What better way to stay connected to distant loved ones?

Read the rest of the post HERE (at O'Reilly Radar).

UPDATE 1: Good Article in Fast Company looking at how Amazon is attempting to play its cards right with respect to Kindle.  Check out 'Amazon Taps its Inner Apple.'

UPDATE 2: My post on the (baby) Boomer Tablet computing device was referenced in today's New York Times. Very cool.  P.s., yes, I noted that the author misspelled my name.

Related Posts:

1. Start in the Middle: The "Jobs," "Outcomes" and "Constraints" Innovation Model
2. Apple, TV and the Smart Connected Living Room
3. iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems
4. Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry?
5. Analysis: Apple WWDC Keynote - Punishing the Wizard, Part Two

The Nine Essential Truths of Entrepreneurial Success

I am blessed in that I get a lot of entrepreneurs reaching out to me for advice on their startup; namely, to sound board the efficacy of their idea, a key strategic decision that they are facing, or a milestone that they are working towards. 

Having been around the block a few times, I put together this primer of nine key lessons learned from doing eight startups (four as co-founder, four liquidity events – exits to IBM, Apple, Wind River, Zoom):

1.      It’s About Who, Then What: We love to fall in love with great ideas, but you know what, the most  basic truth is that the key strategic decisions are usually less about the industry, the products, the pricing, the message, the sales channel or even the technology, and MOSTLY about the people.  It’s the proverbial ‘Who, Then What’ dynamic at play. As such, it is never too early to define your ideals, establish your culture, and commit to actually living it. This will lead you to hire builders who think like owners, who operate with strong values that are aligned with your own, who are long-term thinkers, data-driven, and who want to build stuff that matters (not just make money).

2.     Say Goodbye to the Tyranny of the ‘All or None’: Details matter, but often the bigger challenge is reconciling all of the paradoxes and tradeoffs that come with starting and growing a business.  Human nature is to attempt to reduce these paradoxes down to either/or, black and white decisions.   My experience, however, is that success is a by-product of reconciling the nuance, and embracing the ‘AND.’ As such, always be asking yourself, “How might I approach the solution differently it I were embracing paradoxes, as opposed to avoiding them?”

3.     Be Use-Case Driven: It amazes how many solutions are built with a completely generic sense of the user, the use-case and the workflow required to satisfy their needs.  It’s okay to be wrong, but it’s not okay to be confused, so make sure that your product planning process is defined in a way that codifies specific use cases supported by clear workflows (in terms of click steps), backed by wireframes that express same.  This is the ultimate ‘rubber meets the road’ moment when you realize that you are either talking the same language with your constituency of co-workers, customers, partners and investors, or not.

4.     Spell out the Jobs, Outcomes and Constraints That Your Product or Service Addresses: When thinking about specific use cases and user workflows, I subscribe to the jobs, outcomes and constraints  “outcome-driven” innovation model. It assumes that your target user "hires" your product or service to enable them to achieve a specific set of outcome goals, relative to the constraints that they face (e.g., budgetary, ease-of-use, integration, etc.).  Hence, in thinking about your product or service, always know what jobs you are focusing on, how they enable the outcome you are pledging to deliver and how they stick within the constraints your customer faces.  This drives a level of specificity that enables crisp decisions of what the product is and isn’t, and equally important, enables you to test that value proposition with customers and partners.

5.     Know What has to go Right for You to Succeed: Too often, a plan fails to address binary assumptions, like required adoption by a “king maker,” such as a standards body or a major enterprise; the essentialness of a major distribution deal; changes in consumer behavior; or the competition opting not to pursue certain markets.  Not only is it integral to know what has to go right for you to succeed, but at the moment you identify the greatest risks to being successful, those risks should be front-loaded into the market research phase of your efforts.  Front-loading risk assessment will save you from finding yourself heavily invested in a given path, only to discover (too late) that it’s a dead-end road.

6.     Sanity Check the 1.0/3.0 Paradox: The 1.0/3.0 Paradox spotlights the indelible truths that must be navigated to achieve an initial beachhead in the market.  Specifically, most startups are born of a 3.0 sense of what the company’s business will look like when the product or service is mature; a time when they have achieved market penetration; and thus, can set the terms with customers and partners, so to speak. The paradox is that at the 1.0 stage of business life, you can only deliver 1.0 functionality, and consumers buy based upon their "selfish" 1.0 needs.  Moreover, history suggests that 1.0 is usually “good enough” to get to 2.0, and by 2.0, you are legacy, which is hard to dislodge.  Hence, the wedge into new markets comes from solving a compelling 1.0 problem.  

7.     Always Have an Official Plan of Record: This one seems obvious, but entrepreneurs can so fall in love with the big picture that they avoid sweating the details on things like audience size, metrics of success, major milestones, market segmentation, and go-to-market thinking.  Bottom line: you need a model of the moving parts in the business, and the inputs and outputs generated by same to know if you are on the right path.  In the early stage of a business, the model doesn’t have to be super specific; it just needs to be intellectually honest and supported by a clear narrative.  

8.     Is Your Solution a Vitamin, Aspirin or Penicillin?: A Vitamin Solution is one where the target customer knows they SHOULD use it, like vitamins, but it's not like they are going to get sick or die tomorrow if they don't.  An Aspirin Solution addresses a major, major headache for the target user. They may not die if they don't embrace a solution like yours, but the pain and suffering will be ever-present until they do ‘something’ about the headache.  The target customer NEEDS this type of solution very SOON, if not NOW.  A Penicillin Solution literally keeps you from an untimely demise. When you need penicillin, you NEED it TODAY.  Stating the obvious, it’s better to be a Penicillin or Aspirin Solution than a Vitamin one, at least on the scale of essential-ness.

9.     Be a Detective, an Anthropologist, Sociologist, Psychologist and Zen Master: My favorite quote here is from technology pioneer, Carver Mead, who once implored would-be innovators to “Listen to what the technology is telling you.”  Thus, it helps to have scenarios that drive the way you think about enabling technologies, new products and emerging markets; it’s critical to understand that it is as lethal to be too early as it is to be wrong; and as a friend of mine puts it, sometimes the big idea is looking at a solution which today is applicable to only a small fringe (10%) of the market (e.g., blogging) but with some re-thinking and/or re-factoring, could capture much closer to 100% of the addressable audience (e.g., Twitter).

If you are an entrepreneur looking for some pro bono guidance relative to your venture, reach out to me at LinkedIn by clicking HERE. 

My only request is that I need to really understand the specifics of what you are trying to do and what type of assistance you are hoping for to give you actionable feedback. 

Related Posts:  

1. Pattern Recognition - SupportBot and The Spiral Model
2. The Goodness of Artificial Milestones

Pattern Recognition: Makers, Marketplaces and the Library of the Commons

“There's something happening here;
What it is ain't exactly clear.”
- For What It's Worth, Buffalo Springfield

Creative destruction is upon us.  Print media has gone from toll bridges to soup lines seemingly overnight.

It seems inevitable that the ripple effect of this transition will be nothing less than a full re-boot of the print advertising business. 

Meanwhile, the big box retailer (think: Circuit City, Sears, Comp USA) and the record store (wither, Tower Records) are relics of a bygone age. 

Add to that an auto industry that is clearly at a crossroads, not to mention the carnage from a financial market crash that has wiped out 20-50% of most people’s portfolios (via home equity depression, stock portfolio depression, unemployment), and our sense of the known and predictable is under assault.

But with entropy and systemic destruction, a fertile, creative ground promulgates, and we see tangible signs that "something" renaissance-like is bubbling up. 

How else to reconcile that at the same time we see a consolidation within the agriculture, meat and dairy producing industries, we are also seeing a rise in organics, small lot artisan producers and farmer’s markets?

Exhibit A: Maker Faire
Envision a Public Market meets County Fair with a touch of Burning Man. 

That’s Maker Faire, the offspring of Make Magazine (dedicated to the DIY - Do It Yourself – lifestyle).

Like its parent, Maker Faire celebrates the organic, the homemade, the customizable, the non-conforming, the technical and the eclectic. 

The Maker constituency is a jambalaya-like melange of purveyors, artisans, kit builders and DIY’ers in areas devoted to: robotics and electronic gizmos; arts and crafts; fashion and music; food and drink products; and vehicles and installations that defy description.  (Okay, I’ll try – “Look, that’s a treehouse on wheels, and the mechanical giraffe just passed me on the left.”)

Maker by the Numbers
If I were to ask you how many people you thought attended this year’s two-day Maker Faire in San Mateo (on May 30-31), what would you guess?  5,000 people?  10,000?  How about 78,000 people (a 20% increase of the prior year’s event)? 

For some relativity, that’s slightly more attendees than a San Francisco Giants baseball game in terms of average daily attendance.  In other words, if numbers don’t lie, the Maker constituency has mainstream type of audience numbers.

Six Degrees of Demographics 
Prior to the event (where I led a presentation and demo of an iPhone powered universal remote control application/platform), I had never heard of Maker Faire, so I was pretty surprised to find the proverbial six degrees of separation at work in terms of Maker attendees within my social and professional universe. 

In attendance at Maker were: a family from my son’s kindergarten class; two members from my book club; and another two friends from my professional circle. 

Needless to say, it punched a hole in my reductionist “this is the Burning Man crowd” theories.

Another AHA was how many women were Makers, a welcome sight, inasmuch as we often default to associating events like these with single, pimply young males, although there were plenty of them, too.  A label-defying social broth in attendance, to be sure.

Mass Customization: On-Demand, Open & Shared
The advent of the laser printer presaged the rise of desktop publishing.  Blogging turned the web into a printing press for the masses.

The iPhone is mobilizing media, communications and information sharing, while facilitating all sorts of rich application spaces to emerge (50K apps, plus 1B downloads and counting).

Everything is getting Digitized and Cloud-ifed.  There is an implicit Library of the Commons between YouTube videos, Flickr pics, Twitter tweets, social bookmarks, Wikipedia entries, Amazon product pages and the Google-sphere. 

The trend towards open APIs for customizing and composite-ing the data flow in and out of Facebook, Twitter and Google, among others, suggests a river of third-party apps, web sites and web services washing away the legacy ways of communicating, connecting and buying, leaving in their place a social fabric that is organic, networked and fundamentally, shared.

Dovetailing this trend, all sorts of new-fangled design, fabrication, assembly and output solutions are getting cheap, precise and easy to use. 

At its most basic, folks like CaféPress and Zazzle are making DIY custom t-shirt/poster/mug creation easy.

Similarly, at Maker I heard story after story of how the value chain had moved to a place where robotics makers could build a high degree of sophistication without having to re-invent the wheel (as there was/is a robust ecosystem of third-party robotics sub-system makers they could leverage), which is emblematic of what has already played out in the technology industry, suggesting that there is something metastasizing that crosses social, societal, professional and logistical lines.

Consider Amazon, which has overrun many a brick and mortar industry segment by building and executing a better mousetrap; namely, an end to end logistics footprint that includes vast product listing data stores; a phenomenal customer relationship management (CRM) system; intuitive, rich product discovery tools (powered by the wisdom of the crowds, no less); and the ability to interstitial-ize "Ships from" and "Sold by" between Amazon.com operating buckets and third-party operators that plug into the Amazon ecosystem.

Not one to rest on its laurels, Kindle, Mechanical Turk and Elastic Compute are all reflective of Amazon’s ambition to lever logistics, digital generation systems and a loosely-coupled marketplace model to foment a new kind of entrepreneurial engine for the Mobile Broadband Era.

The moral of the story is clear; once-exclusive domains and fortress-like silos are becoming open, and the barriers between disciplines are falling.

Bringing this trend to my backyard, at my local Farmer's Market, food entrepreneurs of every stripe can formulate and launch new health drink concoctions and fine-tine them with taste trials from one weekend to the next; they can go direct-to-consumer on a tikka masala "heat and eat" line with a nominal capital outlay; and/or cultivate brand advocacy by doing "meet in the street" activities to promote a popular gourmet sausage line.

When Gravity Becomes Your Friend
There is an S-curve in nascent markets, a time when gravity shifts from being your enemy to being your friend.

We are on the cusp, a fortnight from it being easy to source and assemble new and custom products on-demand, leveraging open know-how and a free market of services that combine inter-disciplinary substrates across once-impenetrable mechanical, electrical, chemical, math, communications, computer, media and manufacturing boundaries.

The tyranny of the "All or None" is ending, and the dawn of the Meta-Maker is upon us. The Golden Age awaits.

Related Posts:

1. Overview of my Maker Faire Presentation: The Universal Remote Control Platform
2. Built-to-Thrive - The Standard Bearers: Apple, Google, Amazon
3. Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
4. Googling Innovation:  On strategies to Seed, Select, and Amplify new ideas
5. Kinkos, Ritz and CaféPress: We’re in the Output Business

Analysis: Apple WWDC Keynote – Punishing the Wizard, Part Two

Some time back, I wrote a post where I asserted that Apple (and Steve Jobs) has done such a good job of teaching us to expect magic that when they merely execute, we hammer them because…well it isn't magic.

I called this knee-jerk response, "Punishing the Wizard" since, where I come from, discipline, execution and proof of same are to be celebrated (what's not to like about -- Step One: make great products; Step Two: wow your customer/developer base; Step Three: print money; Step Four: repeat Step One?), but that's not how we think when it comes to Apple.

Thus, it is with little surprise that I find myself dubbing today's keynote, "Punishing the Wizard, Part Two." 

Consider the general tenor of blogosphere analysis on today's event, which ranged from "F-ck AT&T" (well-deserved, IMHO) to "Yawn" to "Uh, oh, where was Jobs?" 

Now to be fair, part of this is simply our culture of "buying on the rumor" and "selling on the news," which is to say that today’s announcements (essentially, Snow Leopard, new MacBook Pros, iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone 3GS, $99 iPhone 3G) had largely been discussed, disseminated and re-assembled into a series of plausible best guesses well in advance of the event, so the shock and awe was less than it might otherwise have been.

Hence, some of this disappointment is akin to reading a "spoiler" in a movie review immediately before watching the film; gums up the element of surprise.

But, there are several nuggets from today’s keynote that underscore strategic narratives worth pondering in the days, weeks and months ahead:

1. Apple is Playing Block the Kick with Focused Intensity: iPhone is the unquestioned leading device platform and ecosystem in terms of delivering a best of breed Mobile Broadband experience, albeit with Palm Pre and Google Android offering their own bits of goodness and differentiation.  By preemptively: A) Upgrading iPhone OS 3.0 and SDK (see my analysis HERE); B) Replacing iPhone 3G as the flagship with iPhone 3GS (faster CPU, adds video support, better camera); C) Dropping the price of iPhone 3G to $99 to capture the low-end of the market; and D) Adding the ability to purchase movies, TV shows directly from iPhone to better leverage its iTunes Media portfolio (versus requiring download & sync from Mac/PC, as is the case currently); Apple is doing everything humanly possible to remain on offense, and prevent the competition from finding its footing; namely, a market wedge/niche that can serve as the beachhead to slow down Apple's momentum. Plus, the $99 entry point on 3G appears to be the lower margin product that Apple had alluded to months back in discussions about not leaving a pricing gap for the competition to outflank them.
2. Pushing OS X Snow Leopard as a $29 Upgrade is Recognition that its 'Halo Effect' Opportunity Window (may be) Closing: Vista has been a debacle for Microsoft, and it has opened a door for Apple to grow OS X powered systems from 25M users in 2007 to 75M this year (inclusive of iPhone/iPod touch devices). But, Windows 7 is getting closer to release (October 2009), and in the interim, Microsoft is intelligently bifurcating their strategy and messaging between being the enterprise standard (we support everything, we're legacy, legacy never goes away, there is no "serious" enterprise alternative) and the consumer standard (we're cheaper than Apple, ubiquitous and "good enough") as a way to stop the bleeding. My guess is that Apple sees their ability to meaningfully differentiate on the desktop as a window that is closing, and as such, need to make Snow Leopard ubiquitous, presumably both to drive converts (esp. as the economy improves) and as part of a push to go after securing new Mac developers before Windows 7 ships (iPhone developers not currently developing for the Mac represent the low-hanging fruit).
3. AT&T and Apple – This Can’t End Well: While there is no question that the exclusivity deal with AT&T provided the launch pad for Apple to create the afore-mentioned wizardry with iPhone, and of course, the rich subsidy is heroin for consumers and Apple alike, there is also no question that the relationship can't end well (or is highly unlikely to). Why? One, today's announcement spotlighted the liability side of the AT&T relationship; namely, a great phone on a crappy network with an iffy track record of customer care, not to mention, a carrier and supplier who are at strategic cross-purposes. Case in point, the audience booed the moment they realized that a touted tethering feature, which allows you to seamlessly use your iPhone as a broadband modem for your Mac/PC, won't be supported by AT&T; and another feature, MMS support, will ship later than with other carriers. Two is the simple fact that the way people buy mobile devices is through their carrier, and as long as Apple is selling exclusively through AT&T, that means that the Verizons, Sprints and T-Mobiles of the world have to sell something other than iPhone, which is the number one way Android and Pre will find its initial market. As was the story with the PC, at some point, mobile becomes a units game, so Apple must counter this one as soon as humanly possible, lest the volumes accrue to the carrier independent device makers.
4. The (Hardware) Matrix is Coming: What is The Matrix? Envision a world where the Mac, Apple TV, iPhone, iPod touch, iPod HD Tablet (rumored) and iPhone Nano (rumored), respectively, can leverage a common SDK, plug into the App Store and integrate with Mobile Me (in addition to iTunes), and you understand that this implies all sorts of hardware abstraction decisions. No less, this implies Apple partitioning the platform that supports these form-factors between device-specific functions, open PC-like layers (i.e., download apps from anywhere), and managed/closed runtime layers (App Store is THE marketplace with a singular SDK, APIs, etc.). This is The Matrix, a potential hornet's nest of technical, user experience and ecosystem decisions. Connecting the dots, I believe that Snow Leopard is the conduit OS where these things converge, but that's a total guess, based on the assumption that derivative form-factors are a given; that App Store and iPhone SDK are the best practices approach with the biggest developer ecosystem; and that Apple's best way to win in the Mobile Broadband Era is by making their products work together in a unified, but more than the sum of the parts, fashion. This would be another reason to push Snow Leopard NOW at $29; namely, so that when The Matrix emerges, and there's a requirement that all interconnecting devices run Snow Leopard to work together seamlessly, it's less disruptive of a proposition than it might otherwise be. And more to the point, it offers developers the largest potential installed base to develop for (i.e., the 40M iPhone/iPod touch owners PLUS the ~35M OS X powered Mac owners).

Looked at from this perspective, today's keynote may come to be known (with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight) as the keynote that was The Calm Before the Storm.  Stay tuned.

Related Posts:

1. Punishing the Wizard: On Apple and Jobs
2. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
3. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
4. Built-to-Thrive - The Standard Bearers: Apple, Google, Amazon
5. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
6. Holy Shit! Apple's Halo Effect: How and why gravity has become Apple's friend

3D Glasses: Virtual Reality, Meet the iPhone (Guest Post @ O'Reilly Radar)

A light flickers from two distinct points in time. As a child in the early-1970s, one of my toys was a View-Master, a binoculars-like device for viewing 3D images (called stereograms), essentially a mini-program excerpted from popular destinations, TV shows, cartoons, events and the like.

Flash forward to the present, and we are suddenly on the cusp of a game-changing event; one that I believe kicks the door open for 3D and VR apps to become mainstream.

I am talking about the release of iPhone OS version 3.0.

Read the rest of the post HERE (at O'Reilly Radar).

Related Posts:

1. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
   
2. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy

Catch my Presentation/Demo of The Universal Remote Control Platform at Maker Faire THIS Sun (5/31)

What is Maker Faire?

Maker Faire Bay Area 2009, the World's premiere DIY (Do-It-Yourself) event, is returning to the San Mateo Event Center this weekend May 30th - 31st, which is officially Maker's Weekend as proclaimed by the county of San Mateo. With more than 600 Makers scheduled to show off their inventions including robotics, rockets, crafts and food, organizers are expecting record crowds with attendees from across the state, country and beyond for this one of a kind event.  (Last year's show had 50K+ attendees).

Produced by the folks who bring you MAKE Magazine, Maker Faire celebrates things people create themselves -- from James Bond-worthy electronic gizmos to Martha Stewart-quality "slow made" foods and homemade clothes. Inspiration is ubiquitous at the festival and there are surprises around every corner for people of all ages.

What I Am Presenting (from Program Guide)

Imagine a universal remote control device that controls your home entertainment center, home alarm system AND functions as your interactive programming guide.

This presentation, by digital entrepreneur Mark Sigal and Square Connect (doing the demo) will discuss the hardware and accessories that you need to build an iPod touch/iPhone powered universal remote control “touch pad.”

It will show you the necessary wireless signaling protocols that you need to control your home entertainment center, activate and deactivate your home alarm, turn on, off or dim lights, and more.

Finally, premised on an objective of making media more interactive, Mark will introduce an framework (lifecycle) for thinking about social, metadata and services overlays and interconnects.

When I Am Presenting

Stage C , Sunday 11:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Stage A , Sunday 4:00 PM - 4:30 PM

For more details, click HERE.

I hope to see you on Sunday.

Built-to-Thrive - The Standard Bearers: Apple, Google, Amazon

When you think of companies that are not only built to last, but rather, built to thrive – in boom times and tough times; in times when incumbents rule and times when disruptors rule – what companies logically sit at the top of the pyramid? 

Equally important, what should be the criteria for assessing them?

Beginning with the second question, let me propose a straw man for assessing the "Built-to-Thrive" bunch:

1. Differentiated Products: the company’s core offerings are not commoditized relative to the competition, which gives the company pricing power.
2. Diversified Revenue Sources: the company’s aggregate revenue is split up across multiple lines of business.
3. Depth of Product Pipeline: the company’s R&D engine is healthy, delivering with regularity and predictability not only new commercial-grade products, but also new revenue sources that favorably impact the bottom line.
4. Quality/Depth/Durability of Management Team: the company’s management team is high-caliber, the "bench" is deep, and top management tends to stay at the company for the long haul.
5. Operating Margins: the company exercises stringent fiscal controls and operates within prescribed operating margins.
6. Profits: the net effect of the above is a highly profitable business.
7. Cashflow: the business generates positive cashflow and lots of it.
8. Cash Reserves: the company has ample cash reserves to weather storms, accelerate R&D, up marketing spend or M&A activities as needed.
9. Healthy Balance Sheet: The balance sheet is not weighted down by debt, uncollectible receivables or other financial engineering that hobbles the company.
10. Well-defined Corporate Culture:  Employees know what the company stands for, how that drives decision making, prioritization thinking and it serves as a unifying force within the company.

Based on the above criteria, the following are my Gold, Silver and Bronze standard-bearers:

Apple is the Gold Standard
It should be no surprise to readers of this blog, that I put Apple at the top of the pyramid, inasmuch as they do spectacularly well on all of these criteria, save for a perceived dependence on Steve Jobs (gut: we’ll find out soon enough if perception is reality) and an uncomfortable (for me) proclivity to mislead/abuse press, partners and investors on fringe items (Exhibit A: matters pertaining to health of Steve Jobs).

Google is the Silver Standard
From Search to Keyword-based Search/Display Advertising to Gmail, Maps, YouTube, Earth, Desktop and Maps for mobile, Google does very well in a lot of categories, has achieved a dominant position in a couple of others, and runs a very profitable enterprise.  Some recent brain-drain and a failure to materially diversify revenue sources must be counterbalanced by a strong corporate culture, the courage to dive aggressively into new markets (e.g., mobile devices via Android) and a recent increase in fiscal discipline; most notably, the maturity to feed the winners and starve the losers product-wise.

Amazon is the Bronze Standard
Amazon has so totally reinvented retail, and its model is (somewhat) category independent that, combined with a relentless focus on customer satisfaction, their foundation is solid.  No less, Bezos and company have built a platform that enables third-party merchants to plug into their technology infrastructure, their consumer base and their physical fulfillment capabilities.  Plus, they are pioneering cloud services (via Amazon Web Services -  Elastic Compute, Mechanical Turk) and reinventing the book for the digital age (via Kindle).  Finally, they have a very strong, healthy culture, subject to the caveat that Jeff Bezos so overshadows his executive team that they are in a similar bucket to Apple with Jobs, and their fiscal discipline seems to ebb and flow based upon real-time reads of the market.

Cisco: Close, But No Cigar
While Apple, Google and Amazon regularly swing for the fences on the innovation front, all the while protecting and nurturing their core businesses, Cisco tends to “talk” about swinging for the fences; namely, wholly new services that combine voice, data, video and information.  In practice, however, they feel more like they are in the "ingredient" business when they need to be in the "recipe" business.  In other words, while they are the unquestioned leader in networking gear, have a tremendous sales organization, and are aggressive on marketing spend and on the M&A front (e.g., Cisco’s Consumer unit bought Pure Digital, makers of the consumer-friendly, Flip Video video camera), they seem to be more rhetoric than revolution these days. They are IBM, which has its merits, but the downside is that they no longer feel like a game-changing company.

Am I Showing a Consumer Bias?
Maybe I am showing a pre-disposition to favor consumer-oriented companies in my Gold, Silver and Bronze selections, but that is also a reflection of a core belief that post-tech bubble, innovation flows from the consumer realm back to the enterprise, and not the other way around (i.e., the enterprise is a follower, not a leader, in adopting technology innovation). 

As a result, this tends to make companies focused on the enterprise segment less dynamic in terms of their cultural and operational DNA.  This obviously can change if and when enterprises embrace technology innovation with greater fervor than they have in recent years.

Who Else?  Who Did I Miss?
Did I miss anyone obvious, especially outside of tech?  Who looks better than these three companies on a long-term basis in terms of differentiated products, diversified revenue sources, depth of product pipeline, quality/depth/durability of management team, operating margins, profits, cashflow, cash reserves, balance sheet strength and strong corporate culture?

Guest Post @ GigaOM: Is the iPhone Platform Destined to Disrupt the Packaged Software Industry?

A recent report (by mobile app/game ad network, Greystripe) confirms what a lot of iPhone/iPod touch owners already know; namely, that the lifespan of a typical iPhone App is short, real short.  In fact, the average iPhone App is used a mere 20 times before it is sent out to pasture.

In restaurant-speak, Apple has cornered the market on “fast food” (and by inference, short order cooks), but has yet to find the model that drives fine chefs to create white tablecloth, extended dining experiences.

My sense of same led me to assert in my analysis of Apple’s Quarterly Earnings Call last week (using a different metaphor) that “Apple needs to segment its approach between how it works with ‘99 Cents Only’ types of developers versus how it works with ‘Nordstroms’ type of developers.”

Read the full post HERE.

Related Posts:

1. Apple Quarterly Earnings Call: When No News is GREAT News
2. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
3. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
4. Surplus, Scarcity and the iPhone App Store: Is WalMart or Amazon the Right Analog?
5. The Chess Masters: Apple versus Google

The Goodness of Artificial Milestones

A friend of mine in startup-land had a really important meeting with a prospective investor, partner, customer (read: any and/or all of the above).

Knowing the one-shot nature of these things, he literally moved mountains in just a few days, achieving a transformational milestone for his fledgling, early-stage company.

How Did He Do It?

He re-framed his story and made it more crisp.  He zeroed in on the experience that he's delivering to customers.

He took an earnest swag at better codifying the financial inputs and outputs of the specific type of business that he is pursuing (which, at the early stage is often the best that you can do).

What dazzled, though, was that he did a live demo that showed that this stuff actually works, including a couple of "AHA" moments that spotlighted how it would delight customers. 

As a result, he passed the sniff test with a choice mix of "steak" and "sizzle." 

Looked at from on high, the event of a big meeting had resulted in a whole bunch of things coming together simultaneously and equally important, very rapidly; all in the name of a great cause (securing a great and game-changing partnership).

That's a snapshot of the power of coalescing around an "artificial" milestone.

What's An Artificial Milestone?

An artificial milestone, unlike a schedule-driven milestone, uses an external event as the driver for an orchestrated sprint by the team to reach a specific plateau.

Because the milestone is driven towards a specific target audience within a fairly short time frame, it tends to force a team to simultaneously: re-think the definition of the situation; look at the problem holistically; and (equally important), functionally collapse the traditional boundaries between sales, marketing, development and operations (at least until the event milestone is reached).

In other words, it's a great driver of out-of-the-box thinking that is nonetheless highly targeted at achieving a specific outcome.

With that as a backdrop, consider leveraging the following artificial milestones, which are jam-packed with affirmational and transformational goodness potential:

• Meeting with a key strategic business prospect, like a sales channel, technology partner or a conduit into an existing installed customer base
• Pitching a specific customer (or type of customer) why they should embrace your product or service
• Presenting to an investor and showing them a compelling reason to invest
• Selling your vision/strategy to a "reach" hire (i.e., an "A" player whose signing on would signify that you have reached the next level)
• Doing a marketing or training seminar with your constituency base (customers, VARs, ISVs)
• Exhibiting or presenting at a trade show or other industry event

Action Item: Really ponder, then document, your answer to the following; If you fully concentrated your efforts in a relatively short sprint based upon one of the above-referenced artificial milestones, what might your outcome look like at the finish line?

Related Posts:

1. Innovation, Inevitability and Why R&D is So Hard
2. The Pitchman: Must Read for "Product Nuts"
3. Metrics of Success: You can't improve what you don't measure
4. The Paradox of Developing New Products and Services
5. Product Sanity Check: Vitamin, Aspirin or Penicillin?

Apple Quarterly Earnings Call: When No News is GREAT News

“We are extremely pleased to report the best non-holiday quarter revenue and earnings in our history,” said Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's CFO.

So much for the recession prompting consumers to stampede away from Apple’s "high-end" products, as the prognosticators predicted (and the stock market priced into Apple’s stock).

For a company that only surprises when it delivers less than good news, no news is GREAT news.

And Apple’s earnings (you can read the full detail dump HERE) don’t event reflect the $900M of quarterly non-GAAP revenue that fails to show up due to Apple’s highly conservative subscription-based accounting model, which, were it to be counted, would drop an incremental $460M to the adjusted net income line.

So what’s the moral of the story here, other than no news is great news?

1. Apple’s supposed Achilles heel of consumer orientation has proven to be (once again) its strong suit.  In fact, interim chief Tim Cook explicitly affirmed that consumer spending is actually holding up better for Apple than the business and education segments.  This is great news, inasmuch as recent history shows not only that it’s consumers – not businesses and schools – who are willing to pay a premium for differentiated products, but innovation increasingly flows from the consumer segment to the enterprise, and not the other way around, as was the case before the dotcom bubble.
2. The best way to navigate a downturn is not to head for the bunkers, but rather, to innovate.  Nowhere was this truth more evident than when Cook noted that in 17 out of the last 18 quarters Apple has exceeded the market rate of growth, adding that Apple’s product pipeline is fantastic.  While the call offered nothing provocative (read: new) in terms of what they are baking, know that the forthcoming iPhone 3.0 OS is a big deal, something that I blogged about HERE (analysis of OS 3.0 developer preview) and HERE (3rd party hardware accessories impact).
3. Apple’s platform/ecosystem play underlying iPhone/iPod touch is materially ahead of the competition.  Not only are the “show me” numbers the crap your pants, “YOWZA” variety (installed base of 37M combined iPhone/iPod touch units, 1B app downloads, 35K apps released vs. 15K just one quarter ago), but the company is light years ahead of the competition.  Don’t be fooled by the me-too storylines on Google Android, Palm Pre, MS Mobile and RIM Blackberry.  Apple is rocketing into the stratosphere while the competition is still (mostly) in diapers in this all important differentiation area, something that I blogged about in, ‘iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems.’
4. Having a Diversified Channel Strategy is as Important as having Great Products.  We all know the potency of iTunes and App Store as virtual sales channels, and the call underlined yet another great quarter delivered through those channels.  But Apple now has 50K retail storefronts pushing its gear across the planet, including Wal-Mart, third-party retailers, mobile partners’ retail storefronts and their own 252 Apple Stores (the touch point from which 50% of the Mac sales are first time Mac owners). The only potentially negative data point captured from the detail here is that “same store” year-over-year sales numbers in Apple Stores dropped from $7.1M (in the year ago quarter) to $5.9M this quarter.  Apple explained this as a hybrid of weak economy + third-party channel expansion but it certainly bears watching, as having your own retail stores is “game changer” when it works and a “costly albatross” when it doesn’t.
5. There is no substitute for good old fashioned “boring” execution.  One thing is clear from Apple’s earnings calls, their product planning, roll outs, marketing events and the sheer audacity of pursuing a platform play that marries hardware, software, service, media and developer tools.  These guys sweat the details, walking the talk as well as they talk the talk, down to the level of sound commodity component sourcing controls, operating margins, cash, inventory management and conservative financial accounting. They are the exact opposite of the analog of not wanting to know “how sausage is made.”

So what else stood out (by not standing out)?

1. Steve Jobs Pledged End of June Return: To the question of whether Steve Jobs is returning as CEO at the end of June, as pledged, Cook and Oppenheimer were evasive, but when pressed, Cooked turned to Oppenheimer who stated, “We look forward to Steve returning to Apple at the end of June.”  What RETURNING means, and whether it is permanent remains to be seen (I am a skeptic).
2. Apple and Netbooks: While Tim Cook took this question head-on, me smells a wordsmithing exercise. What he essentially stated was that the space is not something that Apple would deem worthy of putting the MAC BRAND ON, alluding that they somewhat play in the space vis-à-vis iPod touch.  The addition by subtraction means that when they role out a device targeted at web browsing on steroids, it will be derived from iPod touch/iPhone, not the Mac.  Count on it.
3. A Verizon iPhone Future? Cook put the kibosh on this big time, saying that Apple’s strategy is to have one phone for the whole of the world and that means GSM, NOT CDMA, which Verizon's network is based upon.  As a Verizon customer (and a happy one at that), I am bummed but it speaks well to Apple’s understanding of the power of a unified platform versus a fragmented one.  This is a company all about raising the bar versus achieving ubiquity by lowering it.
4. Better App Discovery Tools with App Store:  One analyst asked whether Apple has plans to improve the discovery mechanisms within App Store along the lines of Genius Bar or something similar.  Oppenheimer deflected, saying that they have great tools like categories, popular, recommended, etc.  This one is enough of a "YEAH BUT" that I am dropping some detail below. 

Specifically, I would argue that while things look beyond rosy for Apple with App Store, the risk is that all of those roses can start leading to thorny situations.

Case in point, the low-pricing drivers within the App Store app visibility model (i.e., you pretty much need to be free, free-mium or 99 cents to gain Top 100 status) combined with an unpredictable app approval model/timeframe, combined with a lack of tools within App Store for vendors to communicate things like pending bug fixes to consumers combined with a lack of ‘review filtration’ tools (akin to the more utilitarian Amazon model - read four star reviews, read most helpful reviews, people who liked this, like that) creates a vicious cycle that is prompting some developers to conclude that “Apple is creating an ecosystem of the kind of customers I don’t want.” (read excellent post by iPhone app developer Garrett Murray on this topic HERE).

Now, while the knee jerk is to conclude “SO WHAT,” inasmuch as that, with 35K apps, there are plenty of eager developers to replace the disgruntled ones, the truth is more complicated. 

One is that at some point, Apple needs to segment its approach between how it works with “99 Cents Only” types of developers versus how it works with “Nordstroms” type of developers. 

Why?  First, some history.  When the PC industry was still in its infancy, what distanced the Mac from its DOS-based PC cousins was the emergence of Desktop Publishing as a force that uniquely leveraged the Mac’s graphical user interface, mouse based controls and print/output functions. 

My analog here is that relative to the Mac, metaphorically speaking, no one has created the game-changing equivalent of desktop publishing for the iPhone/iPod touch, and we/Apple need them to, but such a "swing for the fences" developer needs better ways to market, update and engage their constituency base than the (somewhat) one size fits all approach of App Store.

Two is that vis-à-vis the platform/ecosystem, Apple has created incredibly fertile soil for such a revolution to occur, but a core piece of this will be developing vertical segments (medical, industrial, point-of-sale, entertainment, enterprise), and these segments have their own channels, customer engagement practices and partner/value chains, requiring more elasticity in Apple’s approach than App Store alone offers.

Putting a bow around this last point, consider this.  Love or hate Microsoft, one truth is irrefutable.  In addition to (em)powering countless thousands of tiny ISVs, tens to hundreds of billion dollar companies have been built on top of Microsoft’s platform and tools. 

Five years hence, will iPhone/IPod touch be known as the engine of growth for tiny startups, billion dollar global-reach developers, or both? 

That chapter has not been written yet, so no news is…no news.

Related Posts:

1. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
2. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
3. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
4. Punishing the Wizard: On Apple and Steve Jobs
5. The Scorpion, the Frog and the iPhone SDK

Thought Streams: From the Analog to the Digital World and Back

Sometimes, the act of "seeing" requires an ability to shift modalities without missing a beat.  

In this posting of 'Thought Streams,' we move from the realm of flesh, blood and physicality to the realm of the spirit.

We then triangulate on three different instances of BEING DIGITAL:

Analog Manifestations

A juxtaposition is a multi-part overlay, an act or instance of placing items close together or side by side, esp. for comparison or contrast. 

I previously blogged about one particular juxtaposition (the one that President Obama must navigate), something that I reference here as a vehicle for grounding in the real-world the types of complex analog states that can manifest when various potentialities and actualities intersect.

Spiritual States

Someday we will have sufficient distance from this particularly chaotic point in time to appreciate the sheer wonder, confusion and terror of it all (relative to the go-go boom times that we have come to expect).

In Tibetan Buddhism, they speak of bardos, a series of transitional metaphysical states that exist between birth, life, death and re-birth. 

Before all is said and done, many of us will have experienced first-hand such bardo states, shedding skin and exposing raw nerves, knowing all to well what spiritual death feels like, albeit with the hopeful knowing that as one door closes, another (eventually) opens.

Digital Expression Engines

I have been reading an incredible book, ‘Founders at Work’ about the seminal moments of founders in the realization of their companies.  One founder featured in the book is Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple.

In a prior post, I shared my sense of how Woz’s mastery of hardware-software chemistry remains an essential part of the company’s DNA, all the more amazing since Wozniak left the company even before the Macintosh was born.

Looked at analytically, Apple’s instantiation of digital expressionism vis-à-vis iPhone and iPod touch platform is all about enabling loosely coupled hardware, software and service composites to be meaningfully coupled through systemic hybridization and highly procedural assembly call generation mechanisms.

Through such endeavors, Apple has created the first “native” mobility platform – from the tools to the hosted infrastructure layer to the core services and the device-level runtime environment. 

It’s a wonder to behold, and everyone else is in fourth place.  Seriously.

Growing Digital “Legs”

Recently, Apple announced plans to activate a third-party hardware accessory market for the iPhone/iPod touch platform.

I think that this is a BIG deal (as expounded upon in 'PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again').

Not only does it extend the capabilities of the device, but it broadens out the ecosystem and most importantly, drives focused engagement within specific market verticals (e.g., medical, sports, automobile, controller, data acquisition, playback, entertainment and finance segments).

Enlightened self-interest is an incredibly powerful driver in creating new markets, especially when you have the necessary tools to succeed within the market.

On that front, does anyone doubt that Apple has learned a thing or two about how to cultivate new markets? 

No less, they seem to still be on “offense,” driving new market innovation versus resting on their laurels.

Breadcrumbing the Digital Universe

Maybe it’s the geek in me acting out, but I think that what Apple is doing is pretty frickin cool so I blog about all of the piece parts that are coming together, and post it on the blog that I maintain at OReilly.com.

Long story short, Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly and Company, posts a tweet about my post, which leads to 15 re-tweets, and in a flash, 3500 people converge on my blog post. 

 Thinking this to be a pretty terrific example of the power of social propagation at work, I tweet the stats generated by O’Reilly’s tweet; O’Reilly sees them (the stats), re-tweets them and another 1500 people read my post.

And that my friends, is how digital sausage is made.

(Final note: I must say that in a pretty organic fashion, I have gotten a lot of love from the folks at O’Reilly; a not so subtle reminder that, digital, shmigital, it still comes back to surrounding yourself with good people.)

Related Posts:

1. Juxtapositions: Crisis Management, Complexity and Systems Thinking for the 21st Century
2. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage.
3. Crazy Wisdom as Rome Burns
4. PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again
5. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
6. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
7. How Social Media Works: It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations

PC 1.0, iPhone 3.0 and the Woz: Everything Old is New Again

This is a post on how the iPhone 3.0 is destined to accessorize our mobile future. 

But first, a little context is needed.

My old business partner, James Blaisdell (then: CTO/Co-Founder @ Rapid Logic; now: CTO/Co-Founder @ Mocana) lent me a really awesome book of stories about the early days of startups called ‘Founders at Work.’

The book, which is essentially a series of interviews, captures the lessons learned and the seminal moments in the birthing and maturation of companies like PayPay (Max Levchin), Hotmail (Sabeer Bhatia), Apple (Steve Wozniak) and a couple dozen others.

Because Jessica Livingston, the author of the book, is one of the founding partners of seed stage venture fund, Y Combinator, the framing and focus of the narrative is much more applied than a typical tell-all book. The nuggets contained within are insightful and actionable, and the reading is immensely enjoyable.

In any event, last night I was reading Jessica’s interview with Apple co-founder, Steve Wozniak. 

Serendipitously, my wife and I are regular 'Dancing with the Stars' viewers, giving us a chance to see another angle of the man known as the Woz, who is one of the Celebrity Dance Performers this season.

Reading Woz’s story, I was transported back.  To a time many years ago, when my brother and I were regulars at the Byte Shop in Santa Monica, one of the first personal computer stores; a time when the essence of a PC – smallish form factor, keyboard, monitor, graphics, storage/input mechanism (back then, a cassette recorder) had not yet been fashioned. 

When I first encountered what was to become the PC (circa 1977), companies like Altair and IMSI were beginning to bring computing to the realm of hobbyists, but frankly, it was an abstraction until I saw the Apple II. (Side note: We ultimately got a TRS-80, affectionately known as the “Trash 80”).

The Wozniak interview is a window into a time when the industry was completely and utterly dependent upon hardware innovation; before it became such a commodity at the hardware layer that the software could only be so differentiated.

That is, until iPod and iPhone.  More on that in a minute.

But first, consider this excerpt, which frames Woz’s decision to support 8 hardware expansion slots in the Apple II, a prescient decision, which enabled the advent of the floppy disk, printer and modem connections, graphics support and local area networking expansion:

Wozniak: We had a real argument over slots…I had designed a clever system on the suggestion of a friend—Allen Baum again— that decoded 8 slots you could plug little computer boards into. Each board had the ability to have its own programs on it running in its own addresses, and it didn't have to have all the normal chips to decide, "Well, if the addresses are such and such, I will respond to them." That was done on the main board…Every computer I'd ever seen, some of its greatest things came because of boards plugged into it…We had to have 8 slots. And it turns out that it was very important; it was very beneficial. Because we came out with a floppy disk. Not only that, other people came out with cards that put 80 columns of text on the screen so you could see more. People came out with extra memory cards, people came out with other languages in cards, people came out with cards that had CPM. People came out with cards to connect all kinds of equipment in the world, to operate your house over your power lines. It was just a world of cards. Many people had their Apple IIs filled up with cards, every single slot.

Read the entire interview with Steve Wozniak HERE, as Woz’s thoughts and experiences are beautifully articulated.

iPhone 3.0: Accessorizing our Mobile Future

Flash-forward, if you follow this blog, you know that I have written extensively on the iPhone/iPod touch platforms, most recently separate posts on:

1. The interplay of the App Store and the underlying developer platform with Apple’s ecosystem cultivation play in the success of iPhone/iPod touch (FACTOID: App Store is approaching a $1B run rate business for Apple);
2. An analysis of the iPhone OS 3.0 Developer Preview a week or so ago.

From my perspective, one thing that may not have gotten enough attention related to the iPhone 3.0 Preview was Apple’s opening up of the 30-pin connector at the base of the device for third-party hardware accessories (and applications that take programmatic advantage of the inter-connect).

Why do I say not enough attention? Well, the iPod accessory business itself is already a $2B market, and there has really been no such thing as “software value-add” to the hardware accessory itself. 

With iPhone 3.0, this changes.

Soon, a medical device manufacturer can build a blood pressure gauge accessory and associated software application that plugs into your iPhone or iPod touch and tracks your blood pressure over time, comparing it to a network of people with similar age/body/health types to give you a relative Wellness Score and underlying data in real time.

Could it be fashioned into an enabling engine for a Healthy Living Movement or a National Health Monitoring Service (ANALOG: Nielsen for Health)?

Similarly, a universal remote vendor can build a hardware accessory that generates the necessary signals to allow you to control your home entertainment center, home alarm AND interactive programming guide in one.

And why couldn’t some vendor build police enforcement agencies a handheld fingerprinting and optical scanning device that captures biometric data, cross-comparing the acquired information with a real-time central database?

I am just pulling a few different examples out of the air, but across the medical, sports, automobile, controller, data acquisition, playback, entertainment and finance segments, it sure feels like the accessories play for iPhone OS 3.0 is going to render the $2B iPod accessory number laughably small in comparison.

What is compelling is that this opens the door to all sort of interesting hardware innovations that, oh by the way, have built-in leverage across a large installed base (30M devices) and a potent developer ecosystem (25,000 applications, 800M downloads).

Bringing the Old Back to the New

I want to close by underlining a comment made by Woz that has been a cornerstone of my thinking throughout my entrepreneurial career.

When you solve the “right problem” a whole mess of unexpected advantages and upside surprises fall right into your lap.  Amen to that.

Related Posts:

1. ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy
2. iPhones, App Stores, Ecosystems: On Recipes for Successful Developer Platforms
3. "Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status
4. iPhone 2.0: What it Means to be Mobile
5. What it Means to be a "Social" Media Center: Boxee, Apple TV and Square Connect

Anatomy of a Post: Breadcrumbs, Tweets and Call Home Functions

Some time back, I wrote a post called 'Social Media - It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations' that was an attempt to show how mastered content (think: videos, blog posts, pictures) could become viral by being used as comment fodder in responding to other people's posts, discussion group threads and within social networks.

I built upon those concepts in a post called 'Why I Blog: It’s about Brand, not Bread' where I attempted to spotlight how blogging for most is less of a monetary source than a brand, identity, online visibility and conversational flow cultivation tool -- assuming that you have something substantive to say.

Now, thanks to URL shortening services, like bit.ly, you can get analytics visibility on which breadcrumbs generate what clicks (sidebar: I call a comment made in the comment section of another person's post that references a post you wrote, including the URL and a call to action, a breadcrumb).

With that as a backdrop, consider a post that I wrote last week called 'ANALYSIS - iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview: Block the Kick Strategy' which, as the title suggests, is an analysis of the iPhone 3.0 Developer Preview.

To promote it, I did a couple of separate tweets, posted a copy of the post on my O'Reilly blog, responded to articles on the Apple event with comments on 15+ blogs and major media pubs, referenced my post in status updates on LinkedIn and Facebook, and referenced the post in the comment sections of two different mobile discussion groups within LinkedIn.

What is interesting is that the majority of general purpose tech blogs generated less than 3% of the clicks; LinkedIn was about double (the groups were a big factor there); and the Apple-centric blogs, as expected, drove the biggest traffic kick.

Somewhat surprisingly, WSJ's All Things Digital generated almost as much traffic as the Apple-centric blogs.  Facebook and Twitter yielded me very little click goodness based on the data.

You can view the actual analytics data here: http://bit.ly/info/ANdMz or just check out graphic below.

Crash-Proofing the Economy: On Pre-Cogs, Black Swans and Scenario Plans

In Minority Report (an excellent Tom Cruise sci-fi thriller based on a Philip K. Dick story of the same name), crime is virtually eliminated in the future, thanks to an elite law-enforcing "Precrime" squad that uses three genetically altered humans (called "Pre-Cogs") with special powers to see into the future and predict crimes beforehand.

Now, staring at the rubble from our financial system meltdown, imagine putting the stimulus bill (or the bank rescue) through a massive computerized model of the economy to test out how the plan will play out in the future – before it hits the market, and our pocketbooks.

As Portfolio Magazine shows in ‘The Crash-Test Solution,’ mathematicians, scientists, and other experts in ecosystems and weather are at work developing such a model around the premise that the systemic equivalent of Pre-Cogs can do better than human intuition at ensuring that the boom/bust cycle of the past 25 years never happens again.

Here is an Excerpt: The idea is that by studying so-called complex systems—traffic flow, ecosystems, organisms, weather—we can begin to make sense of an increasingly unpredictable economic world. Didier Sornette, for instance, is a world expert on earthquakes. Now he’s heading up a lab in Zurich called the Financial Crisis Observatory, examining how frothy markets show the same signs of stress that the earth shows before an earthquake. Sornette’s group is trying to develop the ability to provide economic warnings, in part by monitoring the stocks of the 500 largest U.S. companies.

Two thoughts.  One is that the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry, a pithy quote perfectly underscored by Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “black swan” construct, which is an argument that it’s not the normal, mundane “white swan” events that drive socioeconomic history, but rather the magnificent outliers, the completely unexpected “black swans.”

In other words, no model, now matter how complete or anticipatory of all of the probabilistic scenarios, can predict (and thus prevent) the unpredictable. 

To think otherwise is to ignore the lessons of history.

Two is that, regardless of the inevitability of random chaos, there is a strong case for scenario planning; namely, building up models for anticipating the “type of outcomes” that might play out and delineating their implications from a (scenario) focus perspective to drive better planning and response optimization/mitigation strategy.

For example, what if the government built up a massive database of (near) real-time fiscal scenarios, underlying assumptions, probabilities of different outcomes and impacts from same, and made that data transparent, public and extend-able.

Is it reasonable to expect that the added transparency of data and the depth of analysis available in the public domain would provide a moderating function to our financial system?

What if there was a ‘prediction market’ overlay to the system (ala Intrade Prediction Markets) to enable amateurs and professionals to transparently put their money where their mouth is?  Would the visibility of such data act as a throttle on market volatility?

Interesting stuff, as I am both an advocate of formalized scenario planning methodology (read 'The Art of the Long View' for more on this topic) and a big fan of Taleb (although 'Fooled by Randomness,' his predecessor to Black Swan, is a better read).

Related Posts:

1. Getting Real: On Doomsday, the Demise of So-Called Experts and the New Arbitrage
2. Black Swans and Bank Runs: Why the financial crisis was predictable
3. Prediction Markets: Predictions, Markets and the Wisdom of Crowds

vSocial’s Virtual Roundtable Solution: Re-Inventing the Press Junket

Once upon a time, when the movie studios would come out with a new movie release, they would build advance buzz for the film by doing a Press Junket. 

Back then, this meant renting out conference rooms in major cities across the US to screen (some or all of) the movie; catering an expensive lunch for the press; and flying the movie’s talent far and wide for Q&A sessions with the media.

But, times are a-changing.  For one thing, what it means to be a member of the "press" is murkier than ever.  Correspondents often operate remotely from their mother publication, print media's well-chronicled struggles are changing the underlying news product itself, and the web is catalyzing a myriad of long-tail oriented new media models. 

More fundamentally, though, marketing budgets just aint what they used to be, and many movies (and virtually all DVD releases) just don’t warrant the marketing spend for a traditional Press Junket.

Enter the The Virtual Roundtable, an on-demand hosted solution that enables media operators to host and manage virtual media press junkets online.  

Powered by my social media platform company, vSocial, The Virtual Roundtable has now successfully been deployed across more than 20 virtual media junkets for DVD releases (distributed by vSocial client, Disney), such as Wall-E, There Will Be Blood, Lost, Sleeping Beauty, BOLT and Pirates of the Caribbean.

How The Virtual Roundtable Works

The way the solution works is that it features a role-based system with simple and intuitive management interfaces for Press, Talent, Moderators and Publicists to:

1. Present/watch video reels of any length (even full movies);
2. Participate in Question and Answer sessions;
3. Moderate Q&A between the Press and the Talent granularly and easily;
4. Do so securely, robustly and reliably.

The service automatically captures, shares and archives a transcript of all of the questions and answers between the press and the creator/producer/distributor of the media, maximizing retention and dissemination of the conversational flow of the junket.

Best of all, it’s inexpensive, customizable from a branding perspective and can be deployed very rapidly (such is the beauty of Software-as-a-Service).

For more information on The Virtual Roundable solution,visit vSocial on the web by clicking HERE.

Related Posts:

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2. The Serial Killer, Gustave and Creative Marketing
3. Social Media - It's About Breadcrumbs and Conversations