2007 November

Replace One Face-to-Face

November 30, 2007 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

If you’ve been in a coma for the last couple of years you might have missed the emergence of an enormous awareness of global warming and a focus on being “green”. What may not be as apparent is the shift that has occurred in the strategic vision and mission of most companies and how to capitalize upon green is on the lips of most business people. This is occurring while simultaneously there has been an increasing concern about business continuity in a day of terrorism, avian flu and accelerating gasoline prices and, most importantly, an explosion of innovation and disruption of business status quo causing leaders to re-think how people collaborate, create and innovate.

There are so many incredibly simple things you can do to make a personal and positive change in your impact on being green: turn off lights and replace your incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents; conserve water; don’t drive around if you don’t have to or carpool; recycle; stop the herbicide and pesticide use; and so forth.

Businesses are made up of people (who are obviously negatively impacted by global warming) and are increasingly buying green products and services from others and pressuring companies to become more green. One could argue it’s in every firms best interest to be green, deliver green products and services, and help their employees become more so in order to be more profitable and be good corporate citizens. As long as what companies do doesn’t “dilute shareholder value” most senior leadership will react and many already are going green and profiting from doing so.

But what if making less of an impact was good for the bottom line and could also become part of helping employees be more productive and, most importantly, turned out to be a fabulous way to mitigate risk, ensure business continuity in the event of a catastrophe and sparked creativity and innovation through collaboration?

As always, what I’m about to argue isn’t a magic bullet nor is it a research paper on business continuity, collaboration and being green. It’s just a couple of dots I’ve connected that you might find worthwhile.

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Filed Under: Technology

Oops. AT&T CEO becomes the Grinch that stole the iPhone Christmas

November 29, 2007 By Steve Borsch 4 Comments

Without question, THE most important thing any company can do is to ensure that they don’t muddy the waters with pre-announcements of items shipping AFTER the holidays and goof up the Christmas selling season. They call the day after Thanksgiving "Black Friday" since retailers become profitable (i.e., "in the black") at that time and many make 60% of their yearly revenue in this critical time.

So imagine what a huge faux pas it was for AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson to reveal that a faster 3G iPhone is coming in early 2008. Will people delay an iPhone purchase until next year? If my wife is any indication, yes (she asked me at lunch today to not get her one this Christmas until "they’re faster next year").

Just a guess based on that Bloomberg article referenced above, but this comment by Stephenson was certainly intentional to keep people from going back to Verizon or not coming over to AT&T at all (though the latter logic wouldn’t work IMHO), "AT&T, owner of the largest U.S. mobile-phone service, is using the iPhone to lure customers from its closest rival, Verizon Wireless, which announced a plan this week to open its network to any phone or software maker that meets technical specifications.

Stephenson called the Verizon Wireless plan “overblown.” “The industry’s headed that way,” he said. `We are probably one of the most open networks in the world, not just the U.S.”

The iPhone is great but the AT&T network is becoming increasingly painful to use. I’ve been breaking my own rules and logging on to ANY wireless network that pops up since it takes too long to load pages with AT&T’s EDGE network. Of course, by the time a 3G iPhone ships next year I’ll be ready to buy one since I too want to go faster.

Filed Under: Innovation

How are these related? Google rats out a blogger. House passes HR1955.

November 28, 2007 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

After learning about Google turning over the IP address of an anonymous Israeli blogger, I realized I needed to understand the facts before forging an opinion and went out in search of other articles and more information. Within hours I had also came across the passage in the House of Representatives of a bill, HR1955, entitled the "Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007" — which, curiously, I’ve seen absolutely nothing about in the mainstream media and it’s on its way to the Senate where it will undoubtedly pass immediately.

How are these two connected?

First go and read the bill (it’s quite short) and pay special attention to Sec 899B wherein "Congress finds the following:". If you don’t come away with the impression that all of these points are amazingly vague and that this bill could easily be gamed by any current or future Administration that, for example, severely compromised habeas corpus or wiretapped domestically without warrants, I’ll eat my hat.

One passage has caused uproar amongst geeks and the blogosphere. Sec 899B, #3, states, "The Internet has aided in facilitating violent radicalization, ideologically based violence, and the homegrown terrorism process in the United States by providing access to broad and constant streams of terrorist-related propaganda to United States citizens." I don’t know about you, but I never see "streams of propaganda" and this smacks of how some in the Justice Department seem to use child pornography as a catch-all for moves to control cyberspace and accelerate tracking mechanisms (who among you could possibly be for child porn? Or terrorism, for that matter? Got something to hide?).

While the outrage over Yahoo turning over a Chinese dissident and now Google turning over an anonymous Israeli blogger’s IP address is understandable, unlike what Yahoo did and AT&T did (by actually first violating the law by implementing wiretapping without a warrant), Google at least waited until an Israeli court order was given.

Here’s what I think is really going on…

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Filed Under: Blogosphere, Current Affairs

Brightcove: Betting your business is a crapshoot

November 27, 2007 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

One of my favorite video platform plays, Brightcove, clearly was torn for some time between going elephant hunting (trying to capture big media players) vs. the user-generated YouTube-type crowd (with Brightcove.tv) and the rest of us just lost:

Beginning December 18, 2007, we plan to end support of direct consumer uploads to Brightcove.TV. As a result, you will not be able to upload new videos to Brightcove.TV after December 17, 2007. But videos you have already uploaded to Brightcove.TV will remain available on the site and through your Brightcove.TV channel. Videos you have embedded in other sites and blogs will also continue to play. (Read more in this writeup at ReadWriteWeb).

Here’s the problem: If you’re a startup, small or even medium sized business unwilling to spend "thousands per month" for a platform play (as Brightcove has repeatedly told me in response to my inquiries about their business accounts) who do you bet your business on in the video space? Veoh? Kyte? Mogulus? As it stands now, I wouldn’t trust any of them to provide an "on ramp" to build a video-centric business unless my client had deep pockets and could enter into an agreement guaranteeing a service level.

This is too bad since there are a lot of content producers searching for a platform upon which to build their businesses or expand their current ones. It’s also unfortunate for the Brightcove’s of the world since there’s a dwindling supply of elephants to hunt.

Filed Under: IPTV

Washington D.C. “amusements” are not what they seem…

November 26, 2007 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Over the Thanksgiving holiday, my wife, kids and I headed to Washington D.C. for a family vacation to do what we do best: cram our brains full of information and knowledge while having fun and great family bonding time. The side benefit was to enlighten our 19 and 13 year olds about the history of the United States.

What I absolutely did not expect was that this would be an educational event for my wife and I too and one of the most troubling trips I’ve taken since Germany in 1997 to connect with my ancestry and realizing my extended family were Nazi soldiers — albeit grunts brought into service as infantry — but needing to at least consider what my grandfather and father would’ve done had my great, great grandparents stayed in Germany.

We saw many things and experienced more — the Mall memorials: Lincoln, Washington, WWII, Vietnam were especially impactful — but there were four that turned out to be profound events:

1) National Archives: Viewing the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Bill of Rights. To gaze upon these documents, deepen our understanding of what our Founding Fathers went through to create this Republic, the people who’ve fought and died sense to preserve our freedoms and rights and how our current age of so-called "terrorism" has allowed the amazing erosion of both through, for example, warrantless wiretapping, brought home to me the absolute imperative that we all stay alert and take steps to ensure we elect representation that will fight for and protect our freedoms…and win the battles.

2) Holocaust museum. I’m sad to report that I rolled my eyes in disgust when this museum was first announced since — at the time before I was "more awake" as I am now — I thought there was no need for such a remembrance on American soil. I’m a student of World War II history and especially Germany as I’ve grappled for years with how the citizenry of this cultured country could have ever allowed the Nazi’s to gain power.

After touring this place and experiencing the step-by-step methods the Nazi’s used to seize power from a slumbering citizenry, dehumanize the Jews and support the coming genocide, instill such fear in to the people that millions felt powerless to resist, I sadly realized how simple it would be to do the same sort of thing in this country since most of my fellow American’s are fat, dumb and happy and not yet fully awakened to the slippery slope we’re sliding down as a nation. If we the people don’t stay vigilant, the powerful will continue to seize and wield power in ways I view as counter to the Constitution.

The last two places we went to were, however, the biggest surprises…

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Filed Under: Current Affairs

Happy Thanksgiving

November 21, 2007 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

Posting will be light for the next four days — or not at all — as I help my neighbor search for one of those dang turkeys, hang with family and think about something other than connecting dots.

Filed Under: Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness

Why we must touch, feel or experience products

November 20, 2007 By Steve Borsch 2 Comments

How can Amazon sell a kindle that no one can touch, feel or experience? Since Amazon doesn’t have storefronts or isn’t in the retail distribution channel in any fashion, how will people determine if they want to shell out $399 for a player and then read most of their subsequent books and publications with it?

It appears that their sole initial strategy is to rely on early adopters and influencers touting the merits of the device (which, IMHO, is why so-called A-list bloggers were included in the launch). Since there is monetary incentive to see it adopted, having these influencers buy one (if they weren’t just given one) and either sing its praises or show it off to everyone else is undoubtedly a great way to build buzz.

I’ve been in many conversations recently about the supposed death of retail in a day of ecommerce, the now obvious wisdom of Apple rolling out their own stores, how Dell has begun a shift to a retail distribution strategy and that as devices and products become more complex — and thus require more initial education of the consumer before a purchase — that having physical locations where people can touch, feel or experience it is more important than ever before.

Or is it?

Retail is a push-pull for me. On the one hand, like most people I like to go into a store to actually play with a product before I buy it. On the other hand I understand how it’s a physical impossibility for stores — even the size of a Best Buy, Target or Walmart — to stock anything more than the 60-80% of the mainstream products people will buy which often makes ecommerce all that more attractive.

So how realistic is it that new concepts or paradigms will be launched and need to be sold at retail? Are influencers and recommenders enough to launch a new product like Amazon’s kindle?

Amazon’s Kindle: Are you paying $399 for a distribution channel?

November 19, 2007 By Steve Borsch 5 Comments

UPDATE: Amazon has added several kindle areas since I posted (including a user guide ironically as a PDF which isn’t supported by the kindle) that make me admittedly eat some (but not all) of these words. Gizmodo has a good writeup, snaps and a Q&A session. Note to self: wait two hours before posting an opinion piece.

Amazon has officially announced their “revolutionary” electronic-paper device called “kindle.” But is this a device you’ll pay $399 for in order to have the privilege of buying products with little or no capability to have it deliver what you might actually want to read? Is the revolutionary aspect a more streamlined way of distributing printed material or a breakthrough way of reading content?

I’m going to reserve judgement until I can spend face-time with kindle and, most importantly, understand EXACTLY what that USB cable can do that’s packed in with the kindle reader. But after reading the Newsweek article, various bloggers, watching the videos on Amazon and comparing what this device does vs. the Sony Reader (which I’ve used extensively) or all the others currently shipping, there is no question that Amazon has absolutely hit the sweet spot of what a device like this can achieve. It’s likely I’ll buy one but I have deep and profound reservations.

Is hitting the sweet spot enough? Can it overcome the inevitable show-stopper realization that will come when people realize, “Hey, wait a minute! I have to PAY to get my own content on the device or read blogs!?!“ Even though any of us in technology understand the limitations of displays like this (they don’t do color yet; battery life requires tradeoffs in writing the screen once vs. multiple times per second for videos and animations) I think people will see no color, no audio, no animation, no video as severe, possibly deal-killer limitations.

I’ve been wrong before and what leans me to some level of success with this device is imaging myself carrying around this tiny device instead of schlepping books, magazines, newspapers and more with me as I travel. Same goes with my bride who travels extensively and is always carrying around a bag with her “reading heap”.

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Filed Under: Innovation

“Infinite” Flash. What could you do with this technology?

November 17, 2007 By Steve Borsch 1 Comment

Scanning my favorite 160 blogs today (via Google Reader, of course) I came across this amazing "infinite" Flash image compilation. Though I don’t know if it’s really infinite since I watched only five minutes worth, it was compelling and pretty cool (by way of Three Minds @ Organic).

I’ve often thought about how many opportunities there are for discovery and exploration that could easily be fostered with this sort of delivery. Could be a great way to surprise and delight your web visitors.

Filed Under: Innovation

Molding and Shaping Perception in an Internet Age

November 13, 2007 By Steve Borsch Leave a Comment

My daughter had a college paper to do and ended up doing it on, "Old and New Media Influence on Anti-American Sentiment".

What was fascinating was to read this report (PDF) from May, 2007 entitled, "The Communication of Anti-Americanism: Media Influence and Anti-American Sentimentâ€ by the Department of Communications at Cornell University and see that this massive research study focused on traditional media and completely left out new media!

They examined all sorts of statistics and variables in the report: country, age, income, media habits, and much more. The problem in leaving out new media is that most people under 30 have radically reduced their consumption of old media and instead are having their perceptions molded and shaped by exposure to all sorts of opinions and alternative new media forms.

Her argument was that negative perceptions of America were being molded and shaped by all media, not just traditional media. In an age when many globally are eschewing broadcast media for social network’s, YouTube, SMS, blogs, and shows like The Daily Show or even Al Jazeera offerings, there is no doubt that any thoughtful consideration and examination of public opinion and cross-cultural perception must include new media forms.

As I wrote this looking at that goofy picture of Ze Frank (which must frighten children and small animals), I thought about how tough it would’ve been for Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbel’s, to have done what he did for perception-controlling had the Internet existed in the 1930′s.

Filed Under: Blogosphere, Conversational Marketing, Current Affairs, Flash Mobs, Open Media, Podcasting, Vlogging, Web 2.0