2006 September

Game changer?

September 14, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Discovered today that Spikesource has closed a Series B round of financing for $24M. They’ve shifted their “open source stack certification and indeminification” focus to a new one: Business Ready Open Source Solutions (for small to midsize businesses).

Their new focus is one that I cheer, especially since upon leaving Lawson Software last December this was a need I saw crying to be filled and strongly considering pulling together the resources to fill it. With the stellar Spikesource board (including former Oracle Pres/COO, Ray Lane, and former Sun CTO, Bill Joy) and management team of veterans, this is a group that will fulfill that mission in spades.

They’ve basically taken the sweet-spot of applications (Drupal content management; SugarCRM; email, business intelligence and more) and have put ‘em in a box selling, servicing and supporting them through a channel of resellers.

This is a big deal development since, as you probably know, open source software has been the bastard child in business due to a lack of a support infrastructure. Could be a game changer.

Filed Under: Open Source

Taking ‘authenticity’ too far in the blogosphere?

September 13, 2006 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

For over a year I’ve enjoyed reading Robert Scoble‘s Microsoft blog and was certainly aware that his work there provided a public, trusted face to a previously (and arguably) untrustworthy and monopolistic company. No question he helped sway me a bit that Microsoft was, in fact, working hard at changing the culture of their organization.

He also co-wrote a blogging book which I’ve enjoyed and heartily recommended, Naked Conversations, so much so that I felt compelled to post a parody called Hot, Naked Geeks.

I find he’s a guy I’d undoubtedly instantly hit it off with and would certainly find alot of common ground. This is a man that has laid bare much of his thought processes, real-time thoughts about the death of his mother while living that experience, and many other aspects of his personal life so much so that it makes me think about how far one should go with authenticity and making yourself human via a blog. But this baring of the essence of himself makes me like and root for the guy while otherwise I might’ve turned him off after leaving Microsoft (now I’m curious as to how he capitalizes on his new opportunity…more below).

Since he’s so remarkably plugged in with numerous people at the epicenter of next generation internet (due to his connection with Microsoft), it seems as though having his level of access, being able to vett thoughts and ideas by experienced, accomplished and thought leading people, would provide him with an acceleration of confidence that would come through in his blog.

It doesn’t appear to be so sometimes and occasionally I sense hand-wringing and sheepish self-esteem musings…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blogosphere

What’s your Contact Perception?

September 11, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

In 2005 I attended an executive leadership forum (put on by Spencer, Shenk, Capers (SSCA) where the essence of it was based on the work of Dr. Taibi Kahler and his Process Communication Model (good overview of PCM here as it’s used in astronaut selection).

One of the key precursors set forth by SSCA (in order to understand how we each process communications) was something called "contact perception." The easiest way to think about it is that the way you think, your experiences, your personality type and your knowledge does, obviously, provide you with the lens on how you view and think about everything. It colors your communications to the extent that the forum ultimately helped each participant understand our own individual perceptions and how they impact our worldviews and ultimately how we communicate with others as leaders.

I’ve been reflecting on PCM while involved in strategic level discussions, developments and direction-setting with clients. It’s amazing how difficult it is to get people in synch with one another, to understand motivations, direction and then discover the optimal method for us to communicate with one another and get on the same page.

Next I’ve been thinking about my friends, Craig and Patricia Neal, who offer a variety of deep, thought leading seminars, workshops and meetings and specifically around something they offer which I’ve experienced several times: The Art of Convening (AoC).

This method of authentic, respectful, meaningful communications brings an emotional, human face to the left-brain analytical information provided by PCM. AoC helps one to understand, for example, how to move away from what I’m certain we’ve all experienced in business meetings: the person that shouts the loudest, has real or perceived power, or is the best persuader wins…vs. the best idea or truth. Without understanding human perception and how to give credence to alternative views — and a respectful venue and context so they can emerge — the end result is that power wins.

What does all of this have to do with my blog, Connecting the Dots, and why should you care? The internet has accelerated access to the masses’ contact perceptions and ways for us all to collect, comingle and interact on social sites, in blogs and virtual worlds. You’ve got to be aware of people’s contact perceptions AND that authentic, meaningful, respectful communications (i.e., no bullshit) MUST be how you approach what you develop, market, sell or, quite frankly, create with any value you provide to the world.

Power is shifting rapidly as virtually everything that has been "spun", "messaged", "PR’ed", and "driven" in the past is being dragged out of the shadows and into the light by emergent demand-side media like blogging, podcasting, vlogging; comparison web sites that call out obvious spin or bad offerings; social software sites where like-minded people can connect; and thus virtually anything can be found-out or pointed-out.

It’s always been time to be real. The kicker is that with today’s internet connectivity and enabling "truth" tools, you no longer have the choice to be lacking in reality, substance or genuineness.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Brain/Mind, Conversational Marketing, Innovation, Open Media, Podcasting, Vlogging, Web 2.0

Big, crazy, off-the-wall idea

September 7, 2006 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Seth Godin has a post today about, “I’m not asking your advice because I need help coming up with a tried and true, predictable, safe or proven idea. No, I’ve already tried all of those and they didn’t work. I’m asking your help in finding something creative, untested, unproven, off the wall, risky, fashionable and challenging. Don’t let me down. Don’t hesitate to share your crazy idea… it might just be the one.” (UPDATE: Godin must’ve been slammed with people like me throwing up ideas…and did a humma, humma about his request being hypothetical. The more I think about this though, the more I realize that an open-ended query like this could be amazing and I’d like to see the ideas sent).

I love ideation (and it’s one of my strengths). On many occasions, I’ve been with people around focused brainstorming (i.e., ideation) and if the lights were off, you could see my synapses firing like flashbulbs at a concert. If I’m with other people that have ideation as a skill set or strength, it’s like a couple of people dying of thirst in the desert that see a real oasis. Better get the hell out of our way ’cause we’re heading there for a drink!

OK Seth….here you go…

We all know the hot trend is the participatory culture that has exploded as the world has increasingly become internet-connected. Wikipedia is one excellent manifestation of the collective consciousness of humankind either participating or contributing to this collection of knowledge. Others are MySpace, YouTube and all the other next generation internet products and hosted offerings that have proliferated.

Daniel Pink’s book “A Whole New Mind” summed up why the creative class emerging (in my opinion enabled by all the enabling tools to participate and connect with others via the ‘net) is going to connect dots in new and innovative ways. The collective effort and thought leadership is going to astound even the most optimistic people.

Companies are finally groking that they should enable the collective to help innovative. “It was clear to us that our invent-it-ourselves model was not capable of sustaining high levels of top-line growth.” (a case study about how Proctor & Gamble has leveraged and harnessed the collective energy of employees, suppliers and customers is in this Harvard article here).

I could go on-and-on about the trends…but am saving it for an ebook I’ll deliver in this blog soon. Now to the idea…

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Innovation

Irony of Katie Couric’s CBS debut

September 6, 2006 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

It’s been at least five years since I turned on a national evening news broadcast. The irony of Katie Couric’s debut on the CBS Evening News was not lost on me — specifically since it was complete serendipity that I saw most of it last evening.

My bride was in Europe and I picked her up at the airport late in the day. After arriving home and getting settled in, I flipped on the tube to go to CNN. Just so happens that it was about 5:45pm and the default channel when my PVR fired up was the CBS affiliate in the Twin Cities and Couric was on for her first night.

Couric did a fine job. My wife did, however, asked me sarcastically "Was there any news?" as the human interest story wrap-up was occurring at the end of the show. I remarked how this was a show. All of these news programs are shows…designed to gain viewers, advertisers and increase viewing while adhering to some sort of journalistic standard of hard news. Since news is usually sensational and focused on atypical events many viewers find bothersome, producers focus on ‘leaving the viewer on a high note’ with a happy story to end the show.

The irony of Couric’s debut is that it occurred as nightly news television viewing continues its steady decline and secondarily since my bride and I — smack dab in the sweet spot of demographics as people who still consume traditional media in droves — find evening news shows like this one irrelevant to how we get our news and far too limiting in scope to truly gain any depth of understanding of issues and events.

We read the local Minneapolis StarTribune, The Wall Street Journal (nice balance of left and right, by the way), The New York Times and watch CNN, but the lion’s share of both of our news consumption comes from the plethora of online news sites we go to daily. It’s highly unlikely I’ll turn on the CBS Evening News again for, say, another five years.

The challenge for the CBS Evening News, all other national news shows (as well as the local affiliate news programs) is how to remain relevant when people increasingly consume on-demand, asynchronous news vs. the "I gotta be in my chair for a half hour" news programs. As choice continues to explode, few people are willing to invest the time necessary to view any given news program…

…and hoping for serendiptious viewing like I experienced isn’t going to stem the decline.

Filed Under: Current Affairs

Connecting the Dots podcast

September 4, 2006 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Mention of Getting Things Done by David Allen; a fair amount about Skype; advertising in-game and in-world (placing ads inside video games and within virtual world’s like
Second Life) and NOT interfering with game play; and a mention of an article in The Register about Google listening and advertising to you based on your conversations.

Listen to or download this week’s podcast

Filed Under: Podcasting

Disruptive Innovation with Skype

September 3, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Last year I listened to a podcast of a speech given by Clayton Christensen, author of the Innovator’s Dilemma (and other publications) as well as being a Harvard Business School professor (and a guy with his own flashy web site). In this speech, he talked about how disruptive innovations go through three phases: first they’re "crappy" and established companies ignore it; then they’re "less crappy" and early adopters grab ahold of it and new markets emerge; then they’re "good enough" and that’s when industries flip upside down and companies go away.

I submit that Skype is right between "less crappy" and "good enough" right now.

At any given time I notice five million or more active Skype users and they claim 100 million software downloads (always a suspect number though). Podcasters are using Skype for recorded interviews that rival what I hear from mainstream radio stations. Telephony use alone is nothing short of phenomenal and it’s tough to adequately describe how "near zero" telephony costs — coupled with high quality audio — simply removes any anxiety one might have related to the costs of communicating and how effort and straining to listen melts away. Here’s an example…

Yesterday I was in southern Minnesota driving with my son and daughter when my wife called on my mobile phone. She’s in Paris and was calling via SkypeOut. Instead of spending nearly $2 per minute calling from her mobile phone, it was $.02 per minute using SkypeOut minutes.

This morning we had to deal with some future planning stuff with my daughter who is down in Rochester, MN. Again, my bride is in Paris and I first called her Skype-to-Skype; then I called my daughter on her landline; then I connected us in a conference call and we had a nice, pretty relaxing conversation (with audio quality that was delightfully good). High quality audio, coupled with costs so low they were a non-issue, allowed us to instead focus on the essence of our communication.

Skype’s features are geared toward items that enable their users to qualitatively enhance their communications. Even my Vonage line in my office provides me with incredibly useful capability (and is even better quality than Skype but is turning out to overall be less useful). For instance, I can set up SimulRingâ„¢ so my Vonage line will simultaneously ring my office, mobile and SkypeIn numbers so I can answer calls regardless of my location.

To this day — and with all the resources at their disposal — I have to call Qwest to make simple changes to the features they offer me on the one landline I still have (my home phone). We keep it for a bunch of reasons, but I’m as stunned by Qwest’s lack of innovation in the same way that I am with Microsoft’s vs. Apple’s (since the former spends billions more than Apple on R&D). Guess in both cases innovation isn’t necessary when you have gignormous cash flow.

Telephony companies are on life support (and arguably have been for years) but their death may never come even though they may be in a vegetative state for decades. The voice over IP (VoIP) disruptive innovation is going to continue and, in my opinion, accelerate as always-on, ubiquitous wireless internet connections proliferate. So when is the right time to short telephony stocks?

Filed Under: Innovation

Ebooks kinda, sorta took off when I wasn’t looking

September 2, 2006 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

Reading an article in New Scientist this morning sparked my dormant interest in ebooks and I decided to take a moment to poke around a bit and get a sense of what was happening in this space.

There’s alot going on…more than I’d imagined.

Ebook reading on-screen has failed due to the low resolution of computer displays (72-130 pixels per inch (ppi)) while even a cheap laser printer can output 600 dots per inch (dpi) on a printed page (dpi and ppi are not roughly equivalent, but you probably know intuitively that it’s damn tough to read on a computer even when you have a high quality, digitally driven LCD display).

Ebook readers have attempted to address that shortcoming with ambitious technologies and devices. Take a peek at e-books.org, a group dedicated to being a resource for reading appliance research, and view the “Products” tab or the submenus of handheld devices, tablets, webpads and software. This list is certainly NOT comprehensive and complete as I can see at-a-glance that many device-types are missing (like my Treo 700p, MIT’s $100 One Laptop Per Child or Microsoft’s Ultra-Mobile PC).

But the lack of ebook success goes much deeper.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Innovation

Advertising driven models: How much is too much?

September 1, 2006 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

According to an article in the Washington Post, “Game publisher Electronic Arts Inc. announced yesterday that it has inked deals with two ad companies that will stream live advertising into its games.“

I’ve been intrigued with in-game and in-world (i.e., virtual worlds like Second Life) advertising for quite some time, knowing that as attention shifted away from traditional media sources advertisers would flock to the places where the attention was focused.

My teenage avid gaming son and I talked one day as he was playing Halo2. I asked him specifically about the “What if that spot over there had a Coke or Pepsi machine? Or if there were company logos slapped onto signs in the hallways?” His response was, “I don’t care as long as it doesn’t interfere with game play.“

He and I were at a Vikings game on the 50 yard line last season. I swear to God the ONLY thing that wasn’t sponsored by someone was the urinal! (Though I did think when I was standing in the men’s room how funny it would be to have audio chirping, “Grab hold…let it out…feel the relief! Your urinal experience today is brought to you by Denny Hecker’s Apple Valley Ford“).

Certainly urinal support by an advertiser is ludicrous…or is it? There are SO many ads screaming at you in the Minneapolis Metrodome that to me, it truly detracts from the game itself and I tend to tune them out…but I know where my attention is when I’m at a urinal. Advertisers are constantly on the hunt for ways to differentiate themselves, place their message where they’ll be seen, and especially in places where there is little else to do. It wouldn’t surprise me to find it when I’m at the next game in mid-September.

Baseball has become too boring and football games — with the constant clock stopping to allow TV advertising — is quickly making the latter boring too. To me, the Vikings are allowing too much advertising and even my son was turned off since the Metrodome and TV advertising interfered with game play and, especially, the overall experience.

My advice to the game companies, Web 2.0 startups and others pushing to garner eyeballs so as to monetize their offerings with advertising: be careful and make sure you don’t interfere or take away from your core value proposition.