Is this what self sustaining means

Kiko one of the Web2.0 calendar start ups called it quits recently. Interestingly, they liquidated their assests on eBay; in essence they sold the company on eBay. I guess you could call it staying true to their zeitgeist. They still made real american money on eBay so I assume it all connects with the real world somewhere eventually.

Meet my friend the interaction designer

This is kind of like interlacing your fingers and stretching your hands palm facing outwards so that your fingers do the popping thing.

I just returned from my honeymoon this past weekend (thank you, the wedding was beautiful indeed). Aspen is gorgeous in the summer! I thoroughly enjoyed not having a laptop, having my phone turned off for most of the week and getting my daily news fix courtesy USA Today and the WSJ. It was fantastic! But that was then and this is now. I really don't feel like I have much worth blogging about but I do want to start posting again just to get back in the habit I guess.

So I give you Kevin Cheng. Kevin and I worked together for a few years at Trilogy. I lost contact with him when he moved to UK to pursue a graduate degree in Usability and IxD (apparently that is how you say Interaction Design). I have not done a good job of keeping up with him at least not to the extent I would like to.
I have been following his life from afar and have learnt a lot about interaction design from his blogs and such. It is actually a really fun and curious area of research and impact each of us directly. Have you wondered why Yahoo maps looks the way it does or why the dashboard in your car has the cup holder in that particular spot. It is not random (or it shouldn't be), there are people like Kevin who spend time and energy solving these questions :-). So get to know Kevin,

Kevin's blog.
Kevin and Tom's web comic.
Interview with Kevin that gives a little introduction to usability

Ouch! This has to hurt us

I am Indian and like most Indians who live in the US, I have been following the sea change in Indian attitudes, culture, education and life styles avidly although from afar. The past decade has created deep generational chasms that continue to grow wider and the country is trying to come to grips with meritocracy, entrepreneurship, "the world is flat", international visibility, growth, etc. India is currently on the fore front of countries straddling the new economy while trying to preserve cultural heritage and traditional way of living.

The main reason for the paragraph above was to give a context (extremely vague and unspecific as it may be) to the link below.

India was recently ranked 6th in a poll result published by Reuters. The listing is of the most dangerous countries in the world for children. The countries that share this prestigious top 10 list along with us are Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, Myanmar, Sudan, Congo, Uganda and Somalia.

So, what can I do to help us get out of this list. I want to help......

My mind is like UDP

As I was stepping out for lunch from my office, I ran into a lady in the hallway. I say "how are you doing" because I am a pleasant kind of guy and was in an agreeable mood. She was happy with my civility and replied "Great, how are you?".

My response was "Thank you. (uncomfortable long pause) I am good".

Now it is a little deal but I was bemused by my utterances. I clearly said the right stuff but the order was some how reversed when I spoke them and I was not sure why. I am not good at letting things go unresolved in my head. This does not mean that I can explain all events around me, it just means that I have to fool myself into thinking I have a good enough explanation.

So I ended with UDP. UDP stands for User Datagram Protocol. It is a fancy sounding way of describing a low level plumbing on the internet that is used to move your files across computers, etc.

Think of it this way. Assume your text (email, pictures, blog entry, what not) are passengers in this train (UDP).

This train moves all of its passengers from one station to another. Say from your computer to your friend's.

You would think this would be straightforward. Leave station A and pull into station B. Turns out that it is a little more complicated. For efficiency, the instant the passengers are fully loaded. The train is locked and all the carriages are disconnected and hooked to whatever train will take them to station B sooner*. But to retain the illusion, the carriages are all reconnected to resemble the train just before it reaches station B and the passenger disembark. You see where I am going with this....

Anyways, UDP unfortunately does not ensure that the carriages are all reconnected in initial order before the passengers disembark. This leads to some awkward situations such as Don who is ever punctual and was aboard the train 30 mins. before Liz ends up arriving after Liz much to his chagrin.
This is why emails you send to your boss show up out of order and get you fired because he received your expense report before your explanation for why that trip to Vegas was good for the company. And yes, there is a better behaved brother to UDP called TCP who ensures the ordering (this is why web pages load in order**). But that is a discussion for another day.

All I wanted to say is that I think my brain is a slave to efficiency like UDP and so once the actual phrases were figured out, namely "I am good" and "Thank you". They ended up spoken out of order for sake of efficiency. So don't feel sorry for me.






* if no other train leaves sooner then this train leaves with its carriages and carriages from other trains. Yeah this analogy stops working at some point because, well.... it really is more complicated than trains isn't it?

** yes sometimes images load before the text or vice-versa. Well that is because it really is more complicated than toy trains.

How do you create a market for this

I came across USABlackSocks.com today. They sell sock subscriptions. Yes, you read it right. They let you buy subscriptions which guarantees you new socks on a regulated frequency throughout the year.

How hard (or easy for that matter) is it to change the sock buying behaviour of the american public?

On long tails and long noses

The Wall Street Journal online edition for today has a review of Chris Anderson's new book. The author of this piece raises some hard questions about the connection between long tail theory and profitability. Makes you wonder if some where along the way Mr Anderson stopped bothering to collect data to back facts.

10 things you thought were stupid but wished you had done anyways

I came across this article today about 10 business ideas that sound dumb but appear not to be in retrospect. Your definition of "dumb" notwithstanding it still makes for an interesting read.

My top picks are SantaMail and LaserMonks. My personal favourite is SantaMail, as Hugh MacLeod is wont to say "The market for something to believe in is infinite...". It is a simple concept with clear execution and focuses on building up dreams. Very powerful! :).

Have you ever forgotten how to give up

This trip to Greece sounds like one of those stories to me.

Step outside and take a walk away from your opml

I do not know about you but I routinely open bloglines first thing in the morning. I have my 120 odd feeds to catch up on and I do enjoy well written posts first thing in the morning. Of course the best part of this whole deal is that these feeds are tailored to my tastes and preferences. My opml file reflects my priorities from a professional perspective (if not all my life) rather well.

Sometimes a little too well and that is not so good. I can use technology to try to create a reality in terms of what is important to me instead of letting reality define what is truly important. When push comes to shove reality always wins of course. Health, financial issues, relationship issues, etc., have the ability to bring reality back to the front with jarring abruptness.

I am talking about the other times when the world is going through big and interesting changes and my opml file does not do them justice. I am talking about

1. A foundation created in the past 20 years. A foundation that doubled in size over the past few days when the world's second richest man decided to help the world's richest man. A foundation that has unprecedented potential in terms of impact across history. Pretty cool eh ;-)
2. A 40 billion dollar international steel company potentially in the making. Apparently this also signifies a struggle between the old European forces and the new world economy. Forty billion, definitely not chump change.
3. Japan under threat from N.Korea. Iran says 'whatever' to the west. A long awaited Hamas government in Palestine sits on a powder keg as a rogue group takes an Israeli soldier hostage. Interesting times indeed.

What is your opml file not doing justice to?


Btw, I purposely did not link to any of the news items. Maybe this will force you to take a stroll away from your blog reader ;-)

Is the rifle better than the shotgun

Rifle is the single shot should work approach, shot gun is the spraying pellets approach. FogBugz and Vault are examples of the rifle approach. Gmail was the rifle approach but the rest of the stuff from Google such as froogle, picasa, gtalk, ... seem to follow the shotgun approach. Now we have Zoho's product suite .. 60 products in 9 years. Is this a pure shot gun play?

I started working on this post a few weeks back and moved away from it. Recently I came across Dead2.0 and this scathing report on Zoho. I am by creation not that scathing or cynical but I sure did enjoy the write up :-)

Maybe this post is just because my intuition is refusing to deal with facts but something about building and releasing 60 products (yes they call them products not features and no apparently there were no acquisitions) over just 9 years seems a little too much to me. Craig talks more sense and reason in his latest post here.

I agree the cost of making mistakes is getting lower but that does not mean we should stop being intentional with our time and effort.

This is all I wanted to say

[This right here i.s. a.l.l. I wanted to say]. Thanks Jeff for putting words to my thought.

Be remarkable or not....

Seth Godin has a few books on it. The purple cow, the big moo, etc. Tom Peters thinks it is inevitably change or die. Guy Kawasaki has his own spin on it. They all speak their own version of the truth.*
They all have very specific ideas on how to build a lasting brand/product/company/legacy.

In the current incarnation of the technology industry it revolves a lot around ajax, folksonomies and few other terms lay people hardly use or think is rather silly**. The term "beta" has been redefined by Google to mean "non supported but feature rich product that will scale very well", specifically in the context of web based software and typically consumer software (as opposed to enterprise software).

This is all good. This is innovation and this is progress that is pushing the industry in new areas. But it is good to keep in mind that the core qualities of "being remarkable", "create/sustain/defend value in your customer's life through your product" and "either adapt to the changing market or die" are not about trying to join the herd and duplicating other's successes. Being remarkable is a lot about purposely not duplicating an older established success mechanism.

The bell curve is a ruthless arbitrator. Hang in there with me as I try to explain my thinking.

The nouveau management thought process is all about value on the edge (which i agree with btw). A lot of the speakers try to steer you away from the fat middle portion of the bell curve where all the products look identical and compete similarly. Seth Godin talks a lot about being bold, taking risks, not being afraid to fail, i.e. being in the 3rd standard deviation set apart from 95% of the population. He is right.

Which is why, it makes it all the more interesting when you run into success stories that fall into the outer 5% of people who are very successful and whose story line does not involve copy, paste and tweak. It does involve being remarkable but in an non obvious way. Here is a story about a single man who built a so-so dating site, watched it take of and is making 5-6 million/year on adwords.
The best part is, his website is not at all hip in the web2.0 sense of stuff. Isn't that sweet? Of course he rode a great wave, so trying to replicate him would be a foolish thing to do and that is exactly the point.

Being remarkable is not about studying remarkable people endlessly. It is about learning enough to realise that being remarkable is a lot about questioning things, taking risks and enjoying the essence of being remarkable more than the success it might bring.


* obviously there are a lot more names such as Tara Hunt, Kathy Sierra, Doc Searls, Umair Haque, Scoble, Jeff Jarvis who all tweak this theme a little differently.

** I work in a non software company and I had a hard time convincing my peers that a serious software could have the name 'wiki'

If chaotic systems do not produce chaos what good are they?

I believe this is how a niche knowledge sector begins its path towards exclusivity. When a technology breakthrough leads to, a small group of people redefining the meaning of a word(s). Before you know it, the word has a different meaning that has spread through word of mouth communication. By the time the real world gets to hear about it, the space is filled with TLA's(three letter acronyms) and other only-members-of-the-club-dig-it jargon.

Case in point, this company Gainesville, FL working on a chip with reconfigurable circuits. What is so cool you ask,

Existing reconfigurable chips, called field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), contain programmable interconnects that can be rewired to perform different functions. But FPGAs are relatively slow to reconfigure, typically taking milliseconds for each rewiring, or about one million times slower than ChaoLogix's chips

Hey! bang up job. I really hope this works so I can have a toaster that is also a clock/radio/wifi receiver. All right so realistically the technology is far from proven and might not succeed as history can attest to. But to me what is most interesting is the statement below,

The common notion that chaotic systems are unstable and unpredictable is not accurate, says Ditto. Such systems can be extremely sensitive to changes, and it is possible to produce desired states reliably and reproducibly provided you ensure only minor changes are made to the inputs.

Can we maybe call it something other than chaos then?

Note: It turns out that this is a long standing disconnect between the popular usage of the term and its scientific implications. Wikipedia has more on it (as always *smile*)

How often do you question your assumptions

Talk about a marketing nightmare. This article refers to a hunting gathering tribe that lives in the forests of Brazil. They number about 310-350 in population. So far so good, nothing extraordinary here. Then it gets interesting, this is a tribe that does not have numbers in its language, they do not have a system of counting, they do not have a way to distinguish past from future, they always live in the present. Mothers do not pass on fairy tales to children and to me the most fascinating part is that they do not have a creation myth.

For all practical intents and purposes they seem to have curiosity, they just exist. They do not try to learn from their past, they do not seem to plan or build towards their future. Where do they fit in with our world view. Now the assumptions part, I assumed every human being was created with a burning desire to more the exist/survive, I am not sure anymore. Thoughts.... ?

Are you sitting on a market waiting for disruption

It was only a matter of time before the real estate market got shaken up. There has been a lot of interest in it lately. Interesting convergence actually.

Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner brought it notoriety with their coverage of real estate commission practices in freakanomics. You have companies like one percent realty trying to get rid of the inefficiencies in the market without alienating their brotherhood. You have companies like zillo and zooven try to create user friendly web sites using "web2.0" tricks but not really going all the way.

Finally Redfin decided to bite the bullet and challenge the brotherhood. It is covered in this write up by mister web2.0 himself (sorry for the sarcasm *grin*). Some of the quotes are interesting, for instance...

Everything isn’t rosy for Redfin, though. They’ve been operating in Seattle for a number of years and have numerous war stories to tell about threats, stalkings and other disturbing behavior towards their employees and some customers from, apparently, angry real estate professionals. Hopefully things won’t get out of hand as they continue to disrupt this stubbornly inefficient market.

This stinks of "last resort" behavior from a caged beast. Whatever happens to Redfin, the real estate agents better wake up and realise that things will never be the same again and as a prospective home buyer all I have to say to that is Amen :-)

You got them trapped so what do you do

Continuing my theme of Time Warner posts. I realized that every time I powered my DVR it always tuned to channel 3, i.e. the Time Warner channel. This was not something I could customize. In other words they have it rigged (see comments) set up so that every one of their subscribers saw their channel the first thing on powering the box by default.
I don't know their subscription size but this is a pretty sweet marketing channel. So what do they do with it....

NOTHING!

All I see are insipid and uninspiring spots for TW digital phones and cable installation. TW seems to view this as just another way to plug their own services and products and not really as a revenue stream. I think they are missing big time. What would you do?....
[follow up]
Kim pointed out to me that this can be changed. Makes me question even more on what can TW do to prevent its subscribers from moving away from that default channel.

Do not do this with your company.

I live in Austin and we have been experiencing harsh weather for the past few weeks. This past Thursday, the city took a beating and large parts of the city lost power. My Time Warner DVR decided to join the party. The box would reboot itself spontaneously without warning (sometimes during the last few minutes of the 4th qtr of a spurs or suns game).
I moved recently and so I am a new subscriber. They have already had to come in and change the box once because of hardware failure. The only options I get are either drive over to the time warner office myself and swap the box or wait for a phone call and leave work in the middle of whatever you are doing to let the time warner rep. in to swap the boxes. This would be the second replacement within 20 days.
Given that my only cable choices are time warner or "no" cable. I get the feeling time warner really does not care if its customer service policy makes the customers life easy or hard. Anyways I was annoyed and ranting about the bad effects of a local monopoly till this morning....

Derrick was the time warner representative who stopped by today. Derrick is good at what he does. Amongst the other problems, the remote had been misconfigured by the previous agent. I did not know this and so when I said the remote was malfunctioning, he (Derrick) diagnosed the problem. Not only did he fix it but when he realised I was curious, he actually walked me through what he did and told me how I can do it myself if I wanted to. It was not rocket science but good customer service, the ability to listen and respond as necessary. I was not so mad at time warner any more.


So I ask Derrick if there is a quick and easy way for me to give positive feedback to his supervisor at time warner. Guess what, call the customer service line and wait for 19minutes before you can talk to someone. Are you kidding me!?! Timewarner is burning good will created by awesome field people like Derrick. What are you doing with your front line people?

To recap

• Do not abuse your monopoly to create unfriedly and obstructive customer service policies.
• Enable your good customer facing employees to make a difference and do not hold them back.
  

So, how is your company being run?

Caring 101

Do you want to enjoy what you do? Do you remember any of the fire brand idealism and vision you started out with?
It is good to mature and grow with time but not necessarily good to stop believeing that you can change the world. One of my favourite quotes is from Gandhi who said, "you start by being the change you want to see in the world".

(thanks to flickr and dan taylor for sharing the image)

Returning to reality, I am a fan of Kathy Sierra and I higly recommend reading both these posts from her. Read it, chew on it, distill it and then see if you can apply it.

• Can marketing be honest AND motivating?

And remember, it's almost never about making them more of an expert on your tool, it's about helping them get really good at whatever it is they do with your tool. Nikon's tutorials aren't about making camera experts, they're making photography experts.

• The myth of "keeping up"

So... it's time to let that go. You're not keeping up. I'm not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you'll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, "Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band..."

I try not to just plug other posts with no purpose but these are well worth your time. Trust me.

Does the long tail affect me? (Part 2)

The quick answer Y.E.S Part of the trick here is to realize that the long tail cuts horizontally. It is not tied to a single industry or a specific kind of product.
I wrote about what the long tail (is) and how it is actively affecting us in the last post. I want to get into "so why do I have to give a rats rear end" in this post.

• Do you feel like you speak a language that the rest of the world does not?
• Do you feel like you could learn better if only your teachers can present the subject differently?
• Do you feel like you know the exact couch you want in your living room but are constrained by the availability at your local jim's hardware and the cost of a custom made couch?
• Do you feel like you know the exact guy/girl right for you but that everybody you have met so far is messed up somehow?
  

Well, the long tail is your answer. Except for the last question, there you are screwed and need to grow up (sorry about that).

The long tail makes is possible for you to be exposed to alternatives other than what you are used to seeing. It is not a panacea but it is giving power back to the buyer in a way not seen in a while. As seth says

All as a way of telling you that an epidemic of amnesia is sweeping our land. Armed with a blog and a following (I have 2,000 [or 2 million] daily readers... wait till they hear about this!), or with a frequent purchaser card or even just a credit card, millions of customers are now your most powerful customers. And as powerful customers, they want you to know, to recognize and to reward them for their power. If you don't know 'who they are', they're going to hit the road. Angrily.

For instance, I am a big fan of passion and not giving up on your dreams and I keep trying a lot, failing a lot and try some more. So, I am a big fan of hugh's work . That lead me to a lot of places and amongst them thingamy. I had a online meeting with Sig yesterday and we had a good time (at least I think so, he might think differently). The cost was the time invested on both our parts (the most expensive thing). We use skype and vnc and had a great meeting. I am not yet sure if thingamy is the right tool for me. But I will tell you this, I am sold on his passion for thingamy and for creating a new idea. In fact so much that I want to make this work for him. I want to find ways to be an end user for his product without compromising on my responsibility for my company. I would like us to have a customer like me (hubris aside)....

Blogs (a part of the Long tail saga) attract the right kind of people to your product/idea/vision. It is a better lead filter than the best automated marketing tool you got.

So, what is your product? What do you have to say about it? Why do you love it? Why do you think it will really change the world? .......

remember

(thanks for letting me link to this hugh)

Does the long tail affect me? (Part 1)

This post will be a brief and non-academic introduction to the long tail. We will then look into how it affects you.

Nerdy definition (thanks of course to wikipedia).

The phrase The Long Tail (as a proper noun with capitalized letters) was first coined by Chris Anderson in a 2004 article in Wired magazine [1] to describe certain business and economic models such as Amazon.com or Netflix. The term long tail is also generally used in statistics, often applied in relation to wealth distributions or vocabulary use.

It is a soft corollary to the pareto distribution. In simpler terms, if you think of the x-axis on the graph above as representing the different products and the y-axis as quantities of the product sold. The long tail says that the products in the brown portion of the curve sell a lot and the products in the yellow portion of the curve sell very small individual quantities. What is interesting is that the yellow portion extends for a while (a long while). If we can keep selling products from the yellow portion cheaply, the cumulative revenue from the yellow portion will eventually start to match and rival the revenue from the brown portion of the curve.

In other words, hot wheels are amongst the top 10 hottest selling toys in terms of revenue. On the other hand you also have the "The Gauss Rifle" (i am not even sure if this technically a toy). I am guessing you are lucky if you can sell 5 of these a year. The challenge till recently was how to make a profitable business selling stuff like the gauss rifle.

In other words till recently (amazon, netflix, ebay.. came along) we did not know how to develop, market and distribute the long tail end of the product space without incurring losses.

Then came rss, peer production, blogging and as we all know by now a means for the mavens and connectors to reach widely and make their influence felt in a powerful way. Highly recommend reading Malcolm Gladwell's tipping point for more on how mavens and connectors are changing the world.

Quick definitions:

maven: A maven (also mavin or mayvin) is an expert in a particular field, usually one who is self-appointed and who seeks to pass his knowledge on to others.
connectors: Those with wide social circles. They are the "hubs" of the human social network and responsible for the small world phenomenon.

So, now we have an easy way to search for information, publish information and spread expertise in a cost effective manner that was not possible before. This is mainly thanks to the community effect which brings economies of scale to a long tail marketplace.

So the main costs now are manufacturing costs, support and shipping costs. Companies like Amazon, eBay are making the storage costs negligible using economies of scale. With marketing costs continuing to go down, the possibility that a viable business can be established using the long tail is starting to look more and more likely.

So what next,

1. Think about this and send me your comments. These are thoughts of mine and obviously not scientifc thesis. Think about what this means to your life (social and professional). I will talk about how it affects my life in the next post.
   
2. If you want a more detailed thought provoking academic treatment of the subject, read Umair Haque's latest entry.
   

The genius of these models is that they tap the space where expertise and heterogeneous production preferences intersect - something that almost never happens in firms, despite big bonuses, nasty bosses, and the other nice things about the rat race.

If the above statement looks like something that makes you get excited about the future, read the entire post and get rolling. Have a great weekend, I am going to be here !!