I know I am thrilled with this idea. There are two reasons. 1) I just personally love the idea of playing with data. 2) I can only imagine good things when this comes to business opportunities. Suddenly, there will be an larger market for smart devices and such tech stuff. For what I am alluding to, take a look at the interactive feature on another article on WSJ.com.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
energy and obama
On WSJ.com, an article on energy appears on its most popular list. Prez O is going about the country and talking big about energy policy. In this specific article, he talks about smart grids. From various readings on smart grids, it looks as though a smart grid is essentially a "connected" grid. I use the word connected here in the sense of information. Just like your mobile phone is always connected to the network, this grid will always stay connected to some network and relay information back and forth about its load characteristics, surges, troughs, consumption patterns by type of consumers and such. For example, it can relay information about how a town uses its electricity when everyone is at work in factories or offices vis-a-vis how it uses it during thanksgiving or Christmas. That, in my opinion is a really good way to think about electricity. Since the time human kind started distributing energy in the way it is distributed today, this will be the first time that we will actually try to measure how we use it. So far, we simply measured as to how much we used at the end of a certain period. That enabled us to budget for a certain energy import bill (whether we were buying coal or crude). That also enabled consumers to manage general usage by active action such as switching off lights when leaving a room and such. If the smart grid actually provides the type of information that I imagine it can, then it paves the way for a large potential for devices that can automagically or actively monitor and control energy usage. Thats where the good stuff starts. Do you use anything like Quicken or Money? If you do, you probably are thankful to it for the reason that it can micro categorize all your household expenses and help you manage finances in a way that you cant manage with paper and pen. Now imagine what happens if all electronic devices in your house report back their power consumption patterns to your personal finance management software. You will suddenly be able to budget and plan your energy usage just as you can manage money usage, retirement plans, investments and such.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
no bells
O! Bummer! No bell for me! Who is saying that today? the other 120-something nominees for the nobel peace prize award this year. By now, everyone who is reading this knows that Prez Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace prize. Its surprising, but still apt I would say. I don't think any other president so far (except Carter) has taken a stance as bold as Obama. So its a good international approval of what he wants to do. Hope it helps him and everyone else achieve peace goals. After all what do we all want? "World Peace" right?
Here is a link to a phone conversation between CNN and the chairman of the Nobel selection committee...
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2009/10/09/bpr.obama.nobel.prize.jagland.cnn
Monday, July 20, 2009
easy & opensource products
This morning, I relived an old pleasure with open source technologies. I am used to using all kinds of commercially available software programs to manage projects. I am used to having our CRM system setup to manage marketing campaign work flow. There used to be a neat little project management tool to setup new projects, calculate them ROI's and track completion of activities. In my new world, I am starting up a business on my own and I really dont have the cash to burn on software. Thats when I turned to open source again after many years. The last I depended on open source for actual work was when I was in college. Between then and now, I have used plenty of open source tools to build my own products, but have almost never used a product that is totally open source. That in itself is a little bit of an oxymoron. There are thousands of companies using open source technology to create their proprietary products. For example, there is a whole suite of technical tools available to download at www.apache.org. Companies use these tools all the time to create commerical products. However, they balk at using customer facing open source products due to only one reason: "They are open source and hence there is no performance guarantee". Its true, many IT managers find it risky to use open soruce products because there is no guarantee of performance.
The fact is, that there is no guarantee of performance for any software product period. I mean a technological product can fail and will fail on some aspect or the other. What really is missing is the accountability. I think what managers really want is the comfort feeling that when something goes wrong, they can call a third party who is said to be an expert at a specific technology. They like the fact that there are legally binding contracts which make vendors liable for performance failures. This is a very valid point. I will find it very hard to communicate to my clients that there are no bigger business risks with open source technologies than there are with proprietary technologies. However, once there comes a critical mass of vendors who can support products with legally binding contracts, the playing field will become very level and open source could compete with proprietary technology pretty fairly.
Going back to my experience this morning. I wanted to replace my old features management product with something open source and low cost (ideally free). On the features management function, what we do is we write "stories". Stories are nothing but an imagined day in the life of our customer (or our staff) that is written out in a easy to read format. This story then becomes a starting point for our staff to create software. This mechanism is part of the agile software development paradigm. I looked at a few vendors including our older vendor for this system. All fo them have great offerings. Many of them have free offerings that have the basic features or are bound to work only until a certain "trial period" ends. Then one of my friends suggested I take a look at bugzilla. www.bugzilla.org. I took a look at it and at first glance, it looked an awful lot like a software test support, bugs management tool. However, it was VERY easy to get it running. So I got it and installed it anyway. After a few customizations and some configuration, I had it running and I had almost identical features to what I had before. Now, I can write up my user stories, provide priorities on those and assign people to work on them. Admitted, it still looks a lot like a bug management product. It even says so everywhere it can say so. However, it works great, is easy to maintain and is zero cost solution. Works great for me in my little startup business.
The fact is, that there is no guarantee of performance for any software product period. I mean a technological product can fail and will fail on some aspect or the other. What really is missing is the accountability. I think what managers really want is the comfort feeling that when something goes wrong, they can call a third party who is said to be an expert at a specific technology. They like the fact that there are legally binding contracts which make vendors liable for performance failures. This is a very valid point. I will find it very hard to communicate to my clients that there are no bigger business risks with open source technologies than there are with proprietary technologies. However, once there comes a critical mass of vendors who can support products with legally binding contracts, the playing field will become very level and open source could compete with proprietary technology pretty fairly.
Going back to my experience this morning. I wanted to replace my old features management product with something open source and low cost (ideally free). On the features management function, what we do is we write "stories". Stories are nothing but an imagined day in the life of our customer (or our staff) that is written out in a easy to read format. This story then becomes a starting point for our staff to create software. This mechanism is part of the agile software development paradigm. I looked at a few vendors including our older vendor for this system. All fo them have great offerings. Many of them have free offerings that have the basic features or are bound to work only until a certain "trial period" ends. Then one of my friends suggested I take a look at bugzilla. www.bugzilla.org. I took a look at it and at first glance, it looked an awful lot like a software test support, bugs management tool. However, it was VERY easy to get it running. So I got it and installed it anyway. After a few customizations and some configuration, I had it running and I had almost identical features to what I had before. Now, I can write up my user stories, provide priorities on those and assign people to work on them. Admitted, it still looks a lot like a bug management product. It even says so everywhere it can say so. However, it works great, is easy to maintain and is zero cost solution. Works great for me in my little startup business.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
Intelligent web
What does the customer really want from your internet business? Answer that question for once and you can claim a permanent undisputed position in business management text books. As unlikely as answering the question may seem, it might actually be at least slightly more easier than you think. Admitted, all online businesses, great and bad, have tried hard to find an answer. Admitted, there are tomes and tomes written and debated. However, its only recently, in 2009, that all that is really starting to come together in a cohesive and widely available manner. Its a big secret of good online business thats written on the wall. This big secret postulation is that an intelligent website can probably learn more about your customer than most of your offline marketing projects while breaking all speed records. So what's new about that? What is new is that its only now that business managers are starting to actually need the things that engineers have been talking about since google was born. Its only a recent phenomenon that number of Internet connections has started surpassing the typical market share of a leading product of an offline business in a competitive market. It all sounds as though a mini-evolution of sorts is taking place in small pockets of the business world where people have started to answer the question successfully. They are finding out, in hard ways and easy ways, what their customers really want!
This hit home for me when I was contemplating my little web world. I am down with the techno talk and walk at the place I work. I do believe that our setup is fairly modern and capable. However, I had not seen any attempt to really find out what was going on with the website. We had the analytics and the KPIs; every now and then, I would log on to my analytics provider's application and see the green dots and arrows to see that all was well. It was satisfying to see that people were hitting us up. At times, I would see red marks and I would immediately swing into action to fix the problem. Wow! That would really be the time to exchange high fives and pat each other on the back. I really felt that we had it going. However, simultaneously, I had this deep down feeling that the tranquility was just a sign of ignorance. Our bounce rates were acceptable and comparable to competetion, but really high. Our length of visit was acceptable, page views per session were also good. However, we really had no idea what was ticking. It was as though many customers came to our little website, saw things, some left the site, some lingered and some bought stuff. All we could do was watch it unfold. It felt like other than doing what we already did, there was not a whole lot to it. I realized that we had not many concrete ideas on how to pro-actively influence customers or to get them to take favorable action on our site. We had the cool content, we had the humdinger campaigns, but we were simply a production shop with web being another distribution channel. Technology had to better than that! A little research led to ideas about what some people call the intelligent web. If you get the drift, that is what Amazon.com has mastered and is democratically applying it to all marketers who sell products on their website.
The "intelligent web" idea is very simple to build up. Starting at the very beginning, we could state it very simply: as a business, we should adapt to our customers needs. Lets add in a possible outcome namely "satisfaction" to this statement. For this article, lets define satisfaction as an observed positive change in a customer's behavior between successive visits. Thats heavily loaded! Note that we are adding two notions here: 1) the discrete nature of experience as far as visits to the website are concerned. 2) some kind of an outcome of the customer's visit that can be measured for positive or negative changes. For the first point: unlike a product that people consume privately over a long time after the initial purchase, in the majority of the online world, every visit is an experience that occurs in your shop and can potentially be managed with a white gloved hand. For the second point: the online world allows you to measure each and every behavioral minutae that makes sense. In the physcial world, as most of you know, you can only take samples and statistically prove theories. That is a huge opportunity right there! Further, lets talk a little about adaptation now. In a physical world, marketing cycles, store design cycles, product design cycles work really well to provide a satisfying consumer experience that also gets better over time. The beauty of software that powers websites is that it literally provides you the means of adapting to every single click on your website. So, in addition to your tool belt of marketing programs, you can code your website such a way that your store design and almost any other parameter can be changed with every visit to the site. In that light, we could re-state our initial idea to say that "our website should pro-actively adapt to every visit from a customer to provide constantly increasing satisfaction". Its a little complex, but it will do for now.
This hit home for me when I was contemplating my little web world. I am down with the techno talk and walk at the place I work. I do believe that our setup is fairly modern and capable. However, I had not seen any attempt to really find out what was going on with the website. We had the analytics and the KPIs; every now and then, I would log on to my analytics provider's application and see the green dots and arrows to see that all was well. It was satisfying to see that people were hitting us up. At times, I would see red marks and I would immediately swing into action to fix the problem. Wow! That would really be the time to exchange high fives and pat each other on the back. I really felt that we had it going. However, simultaneously, I had this deep down feeling that the tranquility was just a sign of ignorance. Our bounce rates were acceptable and comparable to competetion, but really high. Our length of visit was acceptable, page views per session were also good. However, we really had no idea what was ticking. It was as though many customers came to our little website, saw things, some left the site, some lingered and some bought stuff. All we could do was watch it unfold. It felt like other than doing what we already did, there was not a whole lot to it. I realized that we had not many concrete ideas on how to pro-actively influence customers or to get them to take favorable action on our site. We had the cool content, we had the humdinger campaigns, but we were simply a production shop with web being another distribution channel. Technology had to better than that! A little research led to ideas about what some people call the intelligent web. If you get the drift, that is what Amazon.com has mastered and is democratically applying it to all marketers who sell products on their website.
The "intelligent web" idea is very simple to build up. Starting at the very beginning, we could state it very simply: as a business, we should adapt to our customers needs. Lets add in a possible outcome namely "satisfaction" to this statement. For this article, lets define satisfaction as an observed positive change in a customer's behavior between successive visits. Thats heavily loaded! Note that we are adding two notions here: 1) the discrete nature of experience as far as visits to the website are concerned. 2) some kind of an outcome of the customer's visit that can be measured for positive or negative changes. For the first point: unlike a product that people consume privately over a long time after the initial purchase, in the majority of the online world, every visit is an experience that occurs in your shop and can potentially be managed with a white gloved hand. For the second point: the online world allows you to measure each and every behavioral minutae that makes sense. In the physcial world, as most of you know, you can only take samples and statistically prove theories. That is a huge opportunity right there! Further, lets talk a little about adaptation now. In a physical world, marketing cycles, store design cycles, product design cycles work really well to provide a satisfying consumer experience that also gets better over time. The beauty of software that powers websites is that it literally provides you the means of adapting to every single click on your website. So, in addition to your tool belt of marketing programs, you can code your website such a way that your store design and almost any other parameter can be changed with every visit to the site. In that light, we could re-state our initial idea to say that "our website should pro-actively adapt to every visit from a customer to provide constantly increasing satisfaction". Its a little complex, but it will do for now.
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