Go for it!

An end of an era - Samsung beats Nokia for handsets sales

2012-04-27T09:50:00.000+01:00

Samsung beats Nokia to become the number 1 handset manufacturer with over 92.5million shipped in Q1 this year. Nokia will not only be saddened by coming second, as they have held the No 1 crown for 14 years since, 1998, but additionally they will be crying into their breakfast cereal as shipments declined a crushing 24% annually.

Nokia, who came to dominate the 2G era with its Symbian operating system are being squeezed at both ends of the market, as low-end feature phone shipments in emerging markets stalled and high-end Microsoft Lumia smartphones were unable to offset the rapid decline of Nokia’s legacy Symbian business. (Quote from Strategy Analytics: Samsung Overtakes Nokia to Become World's Largest Handset Vendor in Q1 2012)

I still hold out some hope for Nokia, as the third world markets grow and they should be well positioned to leverage their brand - and the operating system costs have surely been amortized by now.

Global Handset Shipments slowed with Year-over-Year Growth % declined from 19.4% (Q1 '11) and 3.3% (Q1 '12).

Apple comes third with 9.5% of the market - with sales of iPhones holding up well in the US and Japan (the latter being surprising given the number of sophisticated phones in Japan).

However, Samsung will unveil the latest version of its Galaxy range of phones on 3 May in London. This BBC report mentions that the phone is being accompanied to its launch in London by 10 security guards.

India's impressive Unique Identity Scheme

2012-02-15T22:13:00.001Z

India's UID scheme forges ahead - see this BBC video report.

India is undertaking a massive citizen identity scheme. To provide a scale of the project - and the scale of its success, here are some numbers:

12 months ago, 1 million year ago had been registered
This month, 110 million unique identities (UIDs) have been issued. In total, 200m people have enrolled in the scheme.
By the end of January, 400 million are estimated will have their UIDs - this is one third of India's population

These figures are mind boggling - particularly when you consider India notorious bureaucracy.

Below is an interview with the Economist's South Asia's Bureau Chief explaining the system.

Problems? See http://www.economist.com/node/21542763

What are its success factors?

A combination of interrelated factors

1) Limited and defined scope

This scheme has been set-up to address the gross inefficiencies in the distribution of welfare subsidies to the poor (distribution of fuel and grain to the poor is cited). These subsidies amass to 2% of India's GDP, so the scale of the problem is huge, meaning there's massive cash savings to made if a marginally more efficient system is implemented. The scheme is aiming to limiting the huge scale of theft by middlemen and waste within the system.

2) Defined and limited aim
Secondly, the aim, at this stage at least, is simply for government purposes. Further research reveals that this isn't quite true. Identity allows the poor to verify who they are and the eligibility for welfare grants. As a result, bank accounts can be opened to allow the receipt of money. I assume that banking facilities will open a flood of consumerism?

This Economist article, Reform by numbers reports an easy win:

Last week Karnataka state claimed that by paying welfare direct to bank accounts it had cut some 2m ghost labourers from a rural public-works project.

3) Scheme is voluntary

4) Addresses the needs of those 'at the bottom of the pyramid'

As a result of these two factors, it is pretty compelling.

Negative Factor - Privacy Regulation
One negative factor is that privacy laws in India are weak and haven't kept in sync with the scale of this project.

However, if you are a member of the disenfranchised poor, living 10 to a room with little possessions, concern about privacy pales into insignificance when faced with feeding a family until the end of the week.

The Future
The expectation is that 400m people will have signed up by the end of 2012: 1 third of india's population - what an amazing achievement

Updated: How to hire a product manager

2012-01-02T13:11:00.000Z

I have reviewed / refreshed / updated my thoughts on 'How to Hire a Product Manager' with updated Product Management Networking groups and some updated stats.

User Profiling in Internet Advertising

2011-11-02T07:07:00.002Z

There's fascinating article on The Register, How websites use your browser to sell you for cash. It explains some of the many techniques that internet advertising uses to profile users as they surf across multiple sites.

.... [we] came to the conclusion that with some minor tweaking, that firm is sitting on software nearly capable of delivering a Minority Report level of personalised advertising.

Below is the well-known clip from the Minority Report which demonstrates the future of Personalised Advertising - it's here already.

Do read the article, there are numerous links to other fascinating articles, such an explanation of a evercookie.

This article is fine for sophisticated web users, but what about Joe Public?
Legalisation (and enforcement) in this area is miles behind. The BBC reports on New net rules set to make cookies crumble:

European e-Privacy directive came into force in the UK in May this year. It mandates that users should be fully informed about the information being stored in cookies and told why they see particular adverts. This provides to gives some initial policy and some user protection from the use of behavioural advertising.

As part of its work to comply with the directive, the IAB - an industry body that represents web ad firms - created a site that explains how behavioural advertising works and lets people opt out of it.

It should be no surprise that regulators are struggle to keep up, but a BBC article (admittedly from March this year), Governments 'not ready' for new European privacy law, indicates that they aren't even trying.

European rules aimed at giving consumers more control over how their web browsing is tracked will not be enforced come May, experts have said.

No European government has yet drawn up the guidelines for how the ePrivacy directive will be enforced.

The UK's Information Commissioner has indicated that it wants the industry to work out best practice before it starts wading in. From the same BBC article, Ed Vaizey, minister for Culture, Communications and the Creative Industries, said:

"Therefore we do not expect the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to take enforcement action in the short term against businesses and organisations as they work out how to address their use of cookies," he added.

OK, but when?

Ofcom Report provides pretty maps of Digital Britain

2011-11-01T20:38:00.003Z

The UK telcoms regulator Ofcom provides its 3 year report on the state of consumer telecoms. It reports on fixed broadband, local TV, mobile base stations, digital TV, mobile coverage and digital radio, all displayed on maps. The level of granularity only goes down to the County level - a more local would have been more interesting.

To see the maps

Some nuggets of interest

British households download about 17 gigabytes of data on average every month over their home broadband connections, suggests a report.
About 900,000 premises cannot get 2G signals from all the UK's operators and 7.7 million UK places do not have 3G signals from the five operators that offer it.
72 per cent of mobile calls are still made on 2G networks (except on Three, which doesn't have a 2G network);

Thanks to a summary from The Register, here's a diagram which shows who is providing broadband services: look at the market strength of BT: to be anticipated, I suppose, given that it was formerly a monopoly.

Steve Jobs - the world's greatest Product Manager and Product Marketer

2011-10-09T22:16:00.003+01:00

The world mourns the loss of Steve Jobs who died on Thursday.

Remarkably, I have never owned one of his products, but without doubt, many of the pieces of technology that I use daily and are the tools of my trade have been profoundly impacted by him, his designs and his passion for user experience.

He is the world's best, best known and most successful product manager. All others follow in his wake.

He was so insightful to his users and their requirements that he relied on his own intuition rather than asking what they wanted.

His great gifts were an ability to second guess the market and an eye for well designed and innovative products that everyone would buy.

"You can't just ask customers what they want and then try to give that to them," he once said. "By the time you get it built, they'll want something new."

(From the BBC coverage of his death)

Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak will remember Mr Jobs for

"knowing what made sense in a product ..... what wasn't going to sell and what wasn't .... when to lead the market and when to follow."

From a BBC interview with Steve Wozniak.

THAT is the sign of a product manager who has utterly internalised his markets and phooey customer-led design.

UPDATE: Some late night surfing uncovered this gem of an article from the NY Times describing Edwin H. Land, the genius of Polaroid Corporation and inventor of instant photography, who was Job's hero and demonstrates the value of market research for real 'break-through' innovation (to use a Clayton Christensen expression).

There was no way to do consumer research on it, so I [I = Steve Jobs] had to go and create it and then show it to people and say, ‘Now what do you think?’”

The worldview he was describing perfectly echoed Land’s: “Market research is what you do when your product isn’t any good.” And his sense of innovation: “Every significant invention,” Land once said, “must be startling, unexpected, and must come into a world that is not prepared for it. If the world were prepared for it, it would not be much of an invention.” Thirty years later, when a reporter asked Jobs how much market research Apple had done before introducing the iPad, he responded, “None. It isn’t the consumers’ job to know what they want.”

Enterprise software is much more valuable than B2C Internet

2011-09-07T07:27:00.004+01:00

The Register writes a great article, Memo to kid coders: Enterprise software exists. Having recently gone back into B2B software as a product management consultant, it has been refreshingly interesting and challenging.

If you live or spend time in Silicon Valley, it's easy to forget that enterprise software exists, or that it still drives $245 billion in annual revenue.

Here's a gem of a quote from Aaron Levie, founder and CEO of Box.net (reported at Business Insider)

Why most startups are focused on consumers. "When you're 22 years old or 25 years old—the Y Combinator demographic—you have no context for the enterprise. If you're in your early 20s and you're hanging out with a bunch of other people in their early 20s, nobody has a sense of the kinds of problems that 'real workers' run into every day. They're running into a completely different set of problems like 'what's the party going on right now that I should be going to? What are my friends looking at on the Internet that I want to read? How do I share photos and videos?' That's their frame of reference for life."

Here's another great quote (from the Register report)

All of which means we may be starving the enterprise of the industry's best developers. It could also mean, as former Facebook research scientist Jeff Hammerbacher once said, "the best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks."

I couldn't agree more!

Mobile Internet penetration nearly at 50%

2011-09-01T09:05:00.002+01:00

In a widely reported report from the Office of National Statistics (see BBC report), mobile internet usage has risen from 31% in 2010 to 45% in 2011.

Home usage represented 77% of households, up 4%. Has the market saturated? Very likely, but I strongly suspect there is another effect going: mobile substitution for fixed line internet connection at home. Why bother paying for two internet connections, when smart phone users can tether their home internet requirements to their phone.

Mad as a box of frogs (to quote a former colleague of mine), operators are still permitting unlimited internet connection on their phones. For the sanity of the industry and to protect their future, they must cap this to 500Mb or 1Gb per month (for example). Relying on reasonable use clauses in contracts is insufficient to protect the operators from data hungry customers. More importantly, operators set the correct paradigm: this resource isn't infinite and if you consume more of it, you need to pay more for it.

Internet not needed here

Among the 23% of the population who remain offline, half said they "didn't need the internet."

The ONS report is the first since dot-com entrepreneur Martha Lane-Fox was appointed as the government's UK Digital Champion, with a brief to increase internet uptake.

In a statement, Ms Lane-Fox said: "That so many offline households don't see any reason to get online reinforces the importance of the digital champions network that the Raceonline2012 partners are creating."

Bless Martha, what an evangelist, I'd be quite happy with reaching 77% of the population with total addressable market of 88%. Of the remaining 12% of the market, I would assume that they might have additional ways of getting on the super information highway (eg at work)??

Other Tidbits

While 71% of 16 to 24-year-old who went online said they used mobile broadband, just 8% of internet users aged over 65 made use of the newer technology.

Only 71% of 16-24 year olds??? I find this figure unbelievable, at face value. This doesn't (shurely) indicate their usage. I suspect that this democratic borrows internet connectivity from others (eg the library or internet cafes) rather than owns the internet connection themselves.

The ONS survey also found a dramatic rise in the use of wifi hotspots - a seven-fold increase since 2011 - suggesting that the rise of 3G has done little to slow demand for free and paid-for wireless access.

7 fold increase??? Really? I need to do more research, because I'm not seeing an order of magnitude increase. Comments anyone?

Google Plus - familiar territory

2011-07-30T13:20:00.001+01:00

I had a look at Google Plus. (Here's their tour.) My initial reaction is: hmm, all sounds very familiar. Midentity (social software start-up that I co-founded that ran between 2002 and 2006) had many of the attributes of Google Plus.

A key concept of Midentity was the ability to divide one's network of contacts into sub-groups. Midentity believed that you shared different content about yourself, based on the identity that you presented to them: Business, University friends, close buddies, tennis club, in-laws, etc.

In this way, you could share content appropriately and selectively with others in a way that is relevant to your connections. ie Google Circles.

Midentity's go-to-market service was a group text messaging service called Circles (text your message to your Circle's number, then the service delivered your message to all participants; if a participant replied, the reply went to all). ie Google's Huddle.

And yes, we were heavily focussed on mobile (the name Midentity stood for My Identity and Mobile Identity) and we experimented integrating with some instant upload features using early version of Shozu's phone software. ie Google Instant Upload.

Techcrunch carried an article, When Google Circles Collide, about how the author, Rocky Agrawal, uses multiple products to selectively share his content with his followers.

Do scroll down the article to heading 'The unsolved social network problem' in the article.

Streams of Content

The biggest unsolved problem in social networking remains unsolved with Google+: separating signal from noise. Twitter, it seems, doesn’t even want to try.

One person I follow on Twitter actually tags most of his posts. I’m interested in his content on tech, business and aviation. But I couldn’t care less about his Chicago tweets

I totally agree that this has become one of the pains of social networks – finding the updates that matter.

Actually, this is the reason why I purchased this stream121 domain – as I envisaged the problem in 2005 – the problem of filtering everyone else's content that's relevant to an individual. ie Google Sparks.

With that said, I have never gone out to solve this problem....... An opportunity lost? Yes for sure, but I always believed that the identity problem was a more fundamental one to solve.

(Apologies that this entry was so long in the making - it was stuck in draft mode for some unknown reason.)

LinkedIn's IPO and Lumpy Bubbles

2011-06-13T12:43:00.001+01:00

The LinkedIn IPO on NY Stock Exchange (not the NASDQ) on 20th May generated a frenzy of debate on the front page of business sections. Here are the bare bones of the story:

The company had hired Morgan Stanley and Bank of America’s Merrill Lynch division to manage the I.P.O. process. After gauging market demand — which is what they’re paid to do — the investment bankers priced the shares at $45.
The 7.84 million shares it sold raised $352 million for the company. For this, the bankers were paid 7 percent of the deal as their fee.
The price soared on the first day to $120 in intra day trading. The price has remained above $70 per share since then.

(Source: Google Finance)

I, like others eg NY Times' Joe Nocera think that LinkedIn's were (embarrassingly) poorly advised by Morgan Stanley.

This first day trading spike generated lots of chatter about another bubble. Here's the graphic from the Economist article: Welcome to IPOville - Social-media firms see champagne; others see bubbles

My view from this side of the Atlantic is much more conservative. There are pockets of frothiness, but it isn't across multiple sectors or sustained. Some companies will generate a disproportionate amount of interest (and column inches), but outside of that one company under the spotlight, there isn't tremendous demand pushing up prices across multiple companies.

I agree with this sentiment expressed in the Register: There is no big Silicon Valley tech bubble, says VC king in early May.

Forget what you may have heard: there is no massive tech bubble in Silicon Valley.

Instead there are hundreds of little bubbles, and they're set to begin popping at the end of this year. That's according to investor and "co-maintainer" of the bubble-blowing AngelList, Naval Ravikant.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures expressed it well at the end of April this year in a blog post, The Word Bubble:

But I am equally sure that we are in the glass is half full part of the cycle. Investors are focusing on the upside and ignoring the downside. That part of the investment cycle lasts for a while and then things change and investors focus on the downside and ignore the upside. Markets are defined by greed and fear. We are in the greed mode right now.

Unfortunately, all these column inches will distract lots of people which will self stoke the entrepreneurial / VC sectors into investing in some very questionable businesses and markets.

I envisage danger down the line.

El Reg pans Orange + Barclaycard's NFC implementation at launch

2011-06-03T10:43:00.001+01:00

The Register, that caustic IT news service (motto: "Biting the hand that feeds IT"), gives Orange + Barclaycard's new pay-by-phone service called 'Quick Tap'.

Quick Tap is enabled at 50,000 stores in the UK and for purchases under £15. Here's the official press release and their overview page. The introductory video is below.

The Register gives the service a hammering (El Reg pays by phone – mmmm, free cookies! - a strange headline, but it appears that although the Register's journalist munched the cookies, there was no sign of the transaction in Barclaycards's transaction log!).

The poor reviews doesn't fault the payment process (which appears to be seamless /magical), but the initial setup and configuration of the payment mechanism on the phone and then the ongoing account management.

In conclusion, El Reg reports:

It will be a few months before anyone else commits to using the system, and we're not convinced the infrastructure is quite ready yet despite the point-of-sale process working so well. Proximity payments from phones will happen, and Quick Tap is the first in the UK, but like most first movers it's more than a little rough around the edges.

Product Management – who cares?! A VC speaks

2011-05-29T15:06:00.001+01:00

Cambridge Product Management Network's keynote event this year will be held on Wednesday 29th June. More information at CPMN's website.

Who needs product managers anyway? Don’t they just stifle innovation? Don’t they get in the way of building stuff?

Having co-founded nCipher, a successful Cambridge IT company, and now an active entrepreneur and one of the team at Amadeus Capital, Alex van Someren has a view. Now’s your chance to hear it.

Alex is a General Partner in the Seed Fund at Amadeus Capital in Cambridge, UK.

Alex has worked in the technology industry since the 1980s. He co-founded ANT Ltd in 1990 to produce networking products, including Web Browser software licensed to the Oracle Corporation. ANT plc was listed on the London AIM market (AIM:ANTP) in 2005.

In 1996 he co-founded nCipher to develop internet security products using advanced cryptography. The company became a world leader in IT security, counting major banks, finance companies and governments among its customers. As CEO at nCipher he raised a total of £14m ($25m) in venture capital funding before he led the company to an IPO on the London Stock Exchange in 2000 (LSE:NCH) at a £350m valuation. nCipher plc was sold to Thales SA in 2008.

Alex lives in Cambridge, UK and is married with three children. He was appointed an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge in 2005.

Microsoft overpays for Skype

2011-05-14T12:10:00.000+01:00

Microsoft acquires Skype for $8.5bn, becoming MS's largest acquisition. Quick history (with big numbers) associated with Skype:

Skype was founded in 2003 by Swedish entrepreneur Niklas Zennström and Dane Janus Friis
In October 2005, EBay outbid Google and Yahoo! Inc. for the loss-making company and paid $2.6 billion for the privilege. (I thought that was madness then!)
Zennström and Friis fell out with Ebay about patent licensing of some of the key technology in Skype (Truly incompetent due diligence from Skype - surely the IP should have been bundled into the acquisition?!?)
In 2007, EBay wrote down the value of Skype by $900 million.
EBay's CEO, John Donahoe, sold 70 percent of Skype to a consortium of investors (Silver Lake Partners, CPPIB, Andreessen Horowitz) in November 2008 in a deal that valued Skype at $2.75 billion.

Today

Skype has 663 million global users (145m active users in an average month)
Windows Live Messenger has 299 million accounts worldwide in June 2010. (Source: Microsoft by the numbers)
Skype is the largest international voice carrier and owns 13% international call market share (Source: Skype Commands 13 Percent of International Phone Calls)

The Deal

Microsoft pays Skype for $8.5bn
This marked a 300% increase in value for the company in the three years since the eBay write-down in October 2007.
The price Microsoft agreed to pay for the company is 32 times Skype's operating profits
EBay said it will reap more than a 50% return from the company’s $2.6 billion investment in Skype Technologies SA six years ago. (Source: Bloomberg)
$14.70 is what Microsoft paid per user for Skype. When eBay bought Skype back in 2005, they paid $45.60 per user. (Source: 14 And 116: These Two Numbers Explain Why Microsoft Dropped $8.5 Billion On Skype)
116 is the number of days until Microsoft makes the money back in operating cash flow. Microsoft had $26 billion in operating cash flow last year. So $8.5 billion works out to around 116 days of cash flow for Microsoft (Source: 14 And 116: These Two Numbers Explain Why Microsoft Dropped $8.5 Billion On Skype)

Was the deal over valued?
Lots of respected analysts think that this was a fair investment by MS - given all the possible synergies between so many of Microsoft's products (Windows Phone 7, Kinect, Lync, etc.), but in my opinion they overpaid.

MS are no novices in any of this technology. Skype does have some advantages - intelligent routing for one (see Skype's explanation of its technology)

I think there are two logical reasons for this acquisition:

User Base 166m users making international calls. By plugging Skype into WinMobile 7, it gives MS a way to get a bunch of well connected users making premium international calls from their mobiles. (IMHO, people avoid making international calls from their mobile phones because of its outrage expense.) This gives a neat way for operators whose users on WinMob phones to take voice calls off 3G data network and onto 2G voice network (See my post on 3 launches X-Series for how this could work.)
Keeps Cisco from getting its hands on Skype Apparently Google came knocking, but was told the starting price was $7bn, but I think this would have muddied Andriod's strategy. An acquisition by Cisco could have seriously dented MS's interest in the enterprise unified communications market now and in the future. (Note that Skype's CEO Tony Bates is a former Cisco execs appointed in October last year.)

Some great blog posts on reasoning:

UI Challenges of Paperphone and Snaplet

2011-05-09T11:32:00.001+01:00

Researchers at the Human Multimedia Lab at Queen's University, Canada have developed two functional paper computing devices: Paperphone and Snaplet. What's novel is the use of bending the flexible displays to provide input. For example, bending the top corner of the paper phone is 'go to next page' when reading an e-book.

However, what made my mind boggle was the UI challenges for the Snaplet. If it is bent around your wrist, it acts as a super duper watch / media player / calendar, etc. If you take it off your wrist and it is flat, then it converts to a note-taking tablet.

Here's a video of switching between the two modes.

Product Management Interview Questions

2011-05-06T16:52:00.001+01:00

Ken Norton, Senior Product Manager at Google, formerly at Yahoo!, Jotspot, Inktomi (see LinkedIn profile), wrote a fantastic article, How to hire a product manager. It was originally published in June, 2005.

The article is a great read. Unfortunately, the author has chosen to prohibit any derivative works (see license), so I unable to precise the article and highlight my favorite parts.

Instead, I point my favorite parts out. Do read the introductory section in which Ken compares Product Management in a large company vs PM in a small company.

Ken's article divides his hiring requirements in six major attributes:

Hire all the smart people
Strong technical background
"Spidey-sense" product instincts and creativity"
Leadership that's earned
Ability to channel multiple points-of-view
Give me someone who's shipped something

My only modification to this list is modify (5) Ability to channel multiple points-of-view.

I would like to rename it: "Have a good nose to appreciate and understand how other business functions operate".

Ken highlights the point that a Product Manager plays a devil advocate role and representing all (or as many as possible) interests in any discussion. Ken lists pre-sales engineering, support, developer relations, business development, legal, or customers. Of course there are many more.

A product manager has to have a good nose to understand the impact of their decisions on other functions, as product decisions impact many other business functions and processes. For example, choosing to sun set a product (a product management decision ultimately) might have a radical impact on one sales person's commission (sales and sales operations). Before you announce that PM is jettisoning a product, has the impact to that sales person / manager / director / VP been thought through?

Key Questions:

Are you familiar with the Pragmatic Marketing Framework? How was it / have you applied it in your previous career history?
What business functions did you do that were missing from the Framework and why?
Can you describe an example of unintended consequences of one of your decisions? What could you learn from it?
Can you give me an example of how you achieved an objective at the second attempt?

Migrating from Hosted to the Cloud - my case study

2011-05-04T17:41:00.003+01:00

Here's a case study that I did with Rackspace (who provided the Cloud) and Webmetrics (performance monitoring) about moving from hosted to cloud environment.

Key

Amazon's outage questions Forrester's explosion in cloud usage

2011-05-03T09:00:00.004+01:00

Amazon Web Services, the pin-up of the cloud industry, suffered a serious outage (read The Register coverage: Amazon: Some data won't be recovered after cloud outage).

Four days later (with Amazon struggling to put everything back in place), Forrester Research publishes an optimistic report entitled, Sizing the Cloud, about SaaS usage.

Here are some quotes taken from Silicon.com: SaaS spending to rocket in next five years:

Revenues from SaaS will increase from $21.2bn today to $92.8bn in 2016, by which point SaaS will account for roughly 26 per cent of the packaged software market.
After 2016, however, the market will come closer to saturation, and SaaS growth will be far less impressive between 2016 and 2020.
Revenues from SaaS will help the global market for all types of cloud services increase from $40.7bn in 2011 to $241bn in 2020.
However Forrester analysts predict that not all cloud-based services will see uninterrupted revenue growth to 2020: The infrastructure as a service (IaaS) market [Arthur: ie Amazon Web Services) is expected to grow from $2.9bn to $5.9bn between 2011 and 2014, before shrinking to $4.8bn in 2020.

Competition in the IaaS space is intense, with over capacity and competition driving down costs leaving only those with massive scale (eg Rackspace) with the deep pockets and the clout to compete.

Continued differentiation in IaaS and SaaS is essential.

GroupMe - Group SMS, teleconferencing and more

2011-04-28T17:08:00.006+01:00

GroupMe does Group SMS, presumably much like my own startup, Midentity, did MiCircles in 2003 - hard to think that was 8 years ago! (Click here to see the MiCircles home page on the Way Back Machine.)

GroupMe adds more though teleconferening. Once you're connected with others, then you can share your location or photos.

The analogy that I like to use is that once you have established a washing line between two people, lots of information can be put on the line and winched over.

Getting connected only the first part. The big question is what happens next.

Facebook have determined that other people's content is the most important thing - sharing photos. Hence why they want people to make public as much information as possible.
LinkedIn wants to make money out of Job Ads
etc, etc

However, I think the real value of being connected, is easing individual to individual communication: uniting (into one common interface) all of the communication protocols that we commonly use would be hugely beneficial (across all devices): a single address book for email, phone calls, SMS, IM.....

Anyone got any product suggestions for this? Or should I pull out my copy of the Midentity business plan (circa 2002) and re-do it all again??

Ubuntu targets disgruntled Windows users

2011-04-28T16:53:00.000+01:00

I mentioned Linux Mint in a blog post a couple of months ago, Linux Mint - Desktop OS that should have Microsoft a little worried.

Ubuntu - the operating system on which Mint is built on - has released version 11.04 (code named 'Natty Narwhal'). See Ubuntu's What's New.

Canonical marketing manager Gerry Carr says
"We focus on people who are likely to switch to Ubuntu," he said. "We think it's people who are moderately tech-aware, who – presented with an alternative – are likely to use an Android phone rather than an iPhone, [who are] more likely to use the challenger brand rather than the main brand. The majority of these people haven't just not heard of Ubuntu, but haven't considered an alternative to Windows outside of Mac."

Source: The Register: Ubuntu seeks Android-packin' Windows deserters

Note that the Reg slammed the beta of this release, Worst Ubuntu beta ever
Bugs aside, the reviewer did NOT like the new Unity interface which replaces GNOME.

The real problem is that Unity can't do half of what GNOME can do.

On the surface Unity looks good. In fact, Unity will most likely one day trump GNOME in many ways - it's noticeably snappier than GNOME, works well at just about any screen resolution and even appears to be designed with touch-based devices in mind. Eventually, come Ubuntu 13.04 or so, Unity will seem like a brilliant move, but the transition is going to be bumpy.

LocalMind wins O’Reilly Where 2.0 Startup Showcase

2011-04-22T14:19:00.001+01:00

LocalMind wins O’Reilly's Where 2.0 Startup Showcase. Here's the video of the interview with Robert Scoble.

Here's an outline of LocalMind:

Localmind gives you the ability to send any question you want to someone that is at a location you are interested in. That person (who is either a Localmind user or one of your Foursquare friends) receives the question to their phone and responds, in real-time.

Lenny was my Engineering Manager whilst I was the Product Manager at Webmetrics. He was a very sharp guy - with wisdom (not merely knowledge) beyond his years. From a product manager's perspective, he was a highly adept project manager, meaning that I didn't have to do low-level project management or run sprint / scrum meetings - a massive relief.

Lenny was a star at Webmetrics - the man deserves to do well with LocalMind!!

Update: Scoble posted this earlier: LocalWhat’s the best SXSW app? So far, for me, it’s LocalMind. Here's a great video interview with Lenny explaining the service:

Some good but tough questions for new ventures

2011-04-20T14:21:00.001+01:00

I don't recall how I landed on this article about willingness to invest in web 2.0 start-ups, written by Tom Shields, managing director at the Woodside Fund, a venture capital firm.

He asks some great questions for any business idea, but particularly for Web2.0 ventures. Worth paraphrasing I thought:

1) What gives you an unfair advantage?”

Most likely that takes the form of deep technology, proprietary content, or an exclusive business deal.

2) What is your business model?

One thing technical founders often do is put the product or service out for free, planning to put in the business model later. Often, however, the business model needs as much rapid development as the feature set, and can take quite a while to emerge.

3) Are you a feature or a product?

If your service depends on another service or community, like MySpace, then you’re going to face questions about why MySpace wouldn’t just duplicate your functionality. There is a fine line between “boiling the ocean” (trying to do too much) and being just a feature, and that’s where you want to position yourself.

Finally, there are a couple of characteristics that will definitely help your case. One is a clear understanding of your short-term direction, and the specific milestones you are trying to reach – e.g. number of visitors, downloads, etc. Another is a culture of rapid prototyping and fast learning.

Social media marketing should sit alongside traditional marketing techniques not replace them

2011-04-14T08:59:00.000+01:00

In this Cambridge Network article, "Is using cheap social media a cop-out for marketers?", Simon Carter from Fujitsu eloquently makes the point that leaping from product concept to social media marketing misses out critical steps in the marketing process:

Junior Brand Managers think social media is a great way of getting their message out to a wider audience at virtually no cost. The problem is that it’s cheap churn and too often, the stuff we as marketers are taught in the classroom about targeting; about the right message; about good creative and the proposition and so on, are forgotten.”

I couldn't agree more: SOOO many times I have seen the splurge to social media when the product and business proposition is poorly thought out.

The whole Agile development movement with its iterative development enables (I won't say encourages!) the 'chuck it out and see what happens and we'll respond quickly' approach.

Marketers need to stop and think and go back to the basics before opening their mouths and preaching something that hasn't been thought through.

Stopping and thinking logically (with an external perspective) is a lot of what I do for my clients: I call it market analysis and product roadmapping.

Voting on Social Network Users’ Bill of Rights

2011-04-13T12:04:00.001+01:00

SXSW panel kicked this off. Here's the voting on the each right - taken from Jon Pincus's Liminal States blog:

41 yes 0 no Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service

41 yes 0 no Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand

41 yes 0 no Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification

33 yes 4 no Empowerment : Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility

35 yes 2 no Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies

37 yes 3 no Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others

39 yes 1 no Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first

39 yes 1 no Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.

38 yes 0 no Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data

39 yes 0 no Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised

36 yes 2 no Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.

24 yes 13 no Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.

35 yes 1 no Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions

37 yes 1 no Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data

So it’s in general overwhelmingly positive: five rights are unanimous, and another eight at 89% or higher. The one exception: the right to self-define, currently at about 65%. As I said in a comment on the earlier thread, this right is vital for people like whistleblowers, domestic violence victims, political dissidents, closeted LGBTQs. I wonder whether the large minority of people who don’t think it matters are thinking about it from those perspectives.

Tiwtter hardens its API use

2011-04-13T09:47:00.001+01:00

In this excellent article on O'Reilly Radar, Mike Loukides is disappointed that Twitter has choosen to harden third party apps to access its API. A number of these provided little or no value-add on top of Twitter own interface - and these are the services that Twitter wishes to eliminate from its ecosystem.

Every service and brand MUST be able to manage its user base / user experience. Asking permission is a key part of playing in the ecosystem. Just because the end service to the user is free doesn't mean that some sort of throttle is morally wrong.

Personally, I think Twitter needs to focus on revenue: improving the quality and reducing the number of satellites will make revenue extraction easier. Arguably, it runs the threat of spurring users to churn to a competitor.

Competitors to Twitter
And, as I keep on saying, there doesn’t appear to be a viable competitor to Twitter yet – and I don’t know why: the service is deadly simple.

We, at Midentity (my own (now failed) start-up) , built Twitter in a morning out of the infrastructure that we had already built in 2003. We had developed a group SMS service, Micircles (here's our home page on the WayBackMachine . A little known fact is that Tweets are limited to 140 characters so that they could fit in an SMS message which is 160 chars max.We couldn’t see how we could make money out of the service – so we didn’t launch it.

Do believe that if a competitor arrives on the scene, then Twitter will fragment – as everyone will realise that it is the individual (ie identity) that is the important thing, not the service.

Google’s secret sauce

2011-04-12T16:11:00.002+01:00

Google's secret sauce - or rather one of them - is its operational expertise at deploying and managing vast (I mean really vast) numbers of servers in its operation.

Google’s Servers
It uses commodity computers with its own Linux-based Operating System (see Wikipedia), both of which have been tuned to Google’s requirements.

It is ‘reasonably’ estimated that it has 1 million of them - the largest server farm in the world by far. Here’s an eye watering graphic from Gizmodo: Google’s Insane Number of Servers Visualized (April 2010).

(Want to know who the other big server boys? see DataCenterKnowledge)

Google are notoriously secret about its hardware, so I think these figures are only ball park estimates.

Performance IS important
This operational horse power is a key competitive advantage is Google's business operation. For example, user responsiveness is critical. These stats are taken from the Velocity Conference 2009 and reported by its organiser, Steve Souders on his blog post, Velocity and the Bottom Line:

Bing found that a 2 second slowdown changed queries/user by -1.8% and revenue/user by -4.3%.
Google Search found that a 400 millisecond delay resulted in a -0.59% change in searches/user.
At Google, one experiment increased the number of search results per page from 10 to 30, with a corresponding increase in page load times from 400 milliseconds to 900 milliseconds. This resulted in a 25% dropoff in first result page searches.
At Shopzilla, a year-long performance redesign resulted in a 5 second speed up (from ~7 seconds to ~2 seconds). This resulted in a 25% increase in page views, a 7-12% increase in revenue, and a 50% reduction in hardware.

Google’s own dedicated network
Google itself has a massive internal network. If you think of all the crawling that Google does, then the spider will be want to shuttle that information back to its nearest home base. Given the number of sites that Google crawls, it’s a really good idea to have ‘home’ nearby.

Here’s one estimate for the volume of traffic:

60 percent of Google's traffic was being channelled through direct interconnects that link its massive data centres to one another.

Significance?
Given Google's secrecy around its operational expertise, then it should take note of Facebook open sourcing its data centre design recently.