Archive for January, 2005

Home networking: is it the value prop or the business model?

by eleanor on 31 Jan 2005 @ 3:11 pm in Geek | Life-Culture-Play   ++

When my little old dad moved to CA in the beginning of December, I joined the ranks of the tech support generation. This is not a post about how my dad, who spends prob 8 hours a day on the internet, installs a Chinese Yahoo! toolbar that keeps him from yahoo.com or how he keeps trying to print things out at a higher magnification (thinking “view bigger” translates into “print bigger”). Now it’s all very cute and comical, and is really helping my patience quotient, but that’s not what I want to ponder here.

This post is about a most curious piece on the saturation of the home networking market I just saw at TechDirt this afternoon. Well, in my adventures in getting my dad situated in his new home touched on home networking this weekend in a way that offers a flash of glaring insight into the question of what it is and if people want it.

So here’s the story: My dad wanted a cellphone only, so that he could have it with him whereever he goes and have only one phone number (and one bill). That ruled out the easy choice of connectivity , which in my experience has been our idiotproof SBC DSL line. Ever so reluctantly I called Comcast to get details on cable internet. It’s like $50/month, which is just surreal (Comcast’s services — at least here in NoCal — are fabulously expensive). Fortunately my dad does enough browsing to go some way towards justifying that cost.

The rub really came when my dad wanted to move his desk away from the wall with the cable jack. He wanted it on the other side of the room. The obvious answer was to get him wireless. So we got a new router (the one benefit of tech support is the ability to upgrade and foist older-but-still-working kit off on the less savvy) and I ebayed a dongley thing for his pc. I planned to get this working over New Years.

Well, it didn’t work - and there was no how-to on the Comcast site. Nothing meaningful in their message boards or forums. Nothing I found while searching. I call up Comcast and am told that what I’m looking for is their “home networking solution”. This package required a special combined modem/router and an extra monthly charge (like $12/month on top of their exorbitant normal charges). As if I would give them more money for the god-given right to take their box and put other boxes behind theirs to add value to my network. I was inches from calling SBC.

There are important questions that Comcast just glossed over as they metaphorically just closed their eyes and held out their hand for more money. Did I want home networking? What does it mean? Why would it be worth spending extra money to get? Is it home networking when a dad wants to move his computer across the room without rewiring, when he still just has one pc? If you are going to compare systems, most homes have more phone jacks than cable drops — we have to question if it makes any sense that the least flexible service - cable, with its more complicated installation and heavy cording - would actually charge customers more to be rid of the cables.

The fascinating answer to that last question is that, economically, the answer is yes. In the abstract, cable wires are more of a pain and therefore customers might be more willing to pay extra to be free of them. They’re just capturing consumer surplus. But if you take a step back and say, well, it’s not just optimizing for cable — DSL is most of the time cheaper. It’s cheaper and the cording is less of an issue. So DSL attracts more price sensitive customers, and DSL providers (might, this is trying to make sense of Comcast’s craven profit-motive) would not feel as confident as Comcast in slapping on an extra charge. Therefore, we see the world where it is very easy to add a wireless network under (at least SBC) DSL and where I was unable to get an answer to simple questions like what configuration do I need to set up to get my router talking to your box.

But take that one “yes” and look again at the other questions, and you see it’s not so simple. I was determined to get this to work as-is, with no special router or additonal charge, or I was going to move him to SBC DSL.

When I was first thwarted, Mike, our third tier tech support (I’ll give the net 2nd tier status) was at his parents, and it was only this weekend that I got him to give it a go. He spent about 20 min on it, hitting some of the same walls I hit. Finally he changed the MAC address on the outgoing side of the wireless router to be the same as the PC MAC address. And yay! It worked.

This is especially interesting to me since a couple years back I worked with a company that was trying to get in Comcast as a value-add service in support of this program, so I was familiar with how keenly Comcast viewed the home networking market. They were most interested in enrolling value-added services to amplify the value of this home networking service (which speaks directly to Mike Masnick’s TechDirt frontmanpoint, that it’s not what a home network is, but what it enables that is important).

So yeah, it’s really easy to get to a “fully saturated market” when your prices are too rich. That market is, very simply, inherently smaller.

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Wordpress weirdness today

by eleanor on 28 Jan 2005 @ 4:22 pm in Geek   ++

Between user error, moving back and forth between networked and not, and what seem to be system errors, a bunch of my posts are not showing up in bloglines. I’ll play with it later - but if you see this, you might be missing others….
?

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Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: Autism in our times

by eleanor on @ 4:16 pm in Life-Culture-Play   ++

Back on Monday, I was finishing up Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Blink, while the guys were over for the mobility homebrew hackathon. That was pretty geeky, and linked in quite well with a key thread in Gladwell’s book - autism and its impact on the world (guys, you know it’s true).

Having finished the book, it’s the parts about autism which have been turning about in my head this week, and elsewhere too - like in December’s Wired article on BitTorrent and Bram Cohen, its creator. Maybe it’s the new ADD pop-psych diagnosis.

Both before and during the sections on autism in our time, Gladwell discusses the work of psychology researcher Paul Ekman, bringing in Ekman’s core research in the display and perception of emotion on human faces. It’s deeply ironic that I recently read of the good doctor in a CIOMagazine article on How To Be A Mind Reader, which featured in their “Advanced Communications” section. I had quite a chuckle at this piece (which did not mention autism, but did have me thinking of Milton, the red Swingline stapler-obsessed geek from the film Office Space). I marveled at how surprisingly x3Cstrongx3Epracticalx3Cx2Fstrongx3E the piece was for tech managers. To be fair, I also made a mental note to pick up Ekman’s interactive training cd. Alas, my face is far too often a mirror of what I think, not very politic and horrible for poker! I just ordered the Ekman cd. I’ll let you know how it goes. Hopefully you’ll be able to ’see’ the difference&.

In Blink, Ekman’s work supports Gladwell’s hypothesis that in the mode that Gladwell characterizes as broadly “autistic” - we lose our ability to process the important metadata we get from human expressions. Metadata is a hot topic now, one many are intensely focused on, defining how we bring more of the richness of multi-contexted human experience to the web. Gladwell’s book is all the more timely for weaving these disparate concepts together to give more understanding into why we crave the kinds of interactions we do. We can see here why people strive to inject clumsy emoticons or emotion states into their chatter, why videoblogging (in my view) will end up being more relevant than podcasting. Text is efficient, but it is nice to inject into the system some of the metadata we require for full human processing.

This is broad strokes, consciousness stuff, but that’s how we change the way we see the world. It’s an interesting behavioral pattern to examine. Reading the book, I could see a lot of myself in the depictions of situations. My habits are often characterized by periods of hyperfocus where I block out details - even faces - to concentrate on the “important” stuff. Other times I’m hopelessly scattered, capable of darting between ideas and schemes; that is where I do my creative work. Arguably, it is during the autistic waning that I get the bulk of my work done, but it’s the fuzzy time that fuels the fire.

It seems wrong to simplify the world down to use medical diagnoses to encapsulate elemental human behavior, but I can appreciate the fact that it shifts the focus to the way in which we dehumanize things for processing simplicity. I have to believe that there’s more here that’s applicable for how software is developed. Are developers guided to make sure their coding decisions are linked back to the human factors?

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BoingBoing’s Image Ads Gone from Bloglines Feed? Yay!

by eleanor on @ 1:41 pm in Emergent | Life-Culture-Play   ++

I searched this out before posting, but I’m not that good at finding stuff like this. Maybe Bill Flitter at Pheedo would know about this - it’s his bread and butter.

I am almost completely sure that there were image ads carried in the Bloglines feed of BoingBoing at some point before today. I can recall them maybe 2 weeks ago, when I last checked.

Now they are gone. And I love it.

Why? Because of the content of those ads. I almost went so far as to blog about how much it irritated me to to see the decidedly borderline “Work Unsafe” Suicide Girls ads on the BoingBoing site. I rationalized that they gotta eat (both BB and SG), and I could just as easily read the feed with Bloglines and escape the ads. But my plan didn’t work — I still saw the same ads for the saucy vixens.

I thought about posting that I just didn’t think that mode of advertising is kosher for the kind of experience I want to have on BB or during my daily news crawl using Bloglines. But why take the trouble just to sound prurient, overly sensitive, and cranky-feminist? I just stopped reading BB and suffered through being a little less cool.

But it is worth the trouble to throw out an “atta-boy” - especially while these models are still developing (no pun on the SG chix was orig intended, but now I think it’s funny — even though most of them look my age). We all know that pR0n in all its forms sells, and SG is just a bit more defenisible because they’re part of the culture. But given how boy the culture is - having the most obviouys representation of female contrbution being some girl’s luscious cleavage is not a positive thing.

So I don’t know if this was something Mark Fletcher at Bloglines did, or if the folks at BoingBoing stopped it, or even if it is just a temporary glitch. Two thumbs up from me.

I have no idea what other feedback these guys have gotten, how extensive a debate this has been either internally or externally. I just know that I withheld my feedback, and just happened to notice you fixed the thing that had kept me away. This is a decent lesson in “take the feedback you receive seriously, because it likely represents the thoughts of a lot of people who don’t bother”.

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Resources from Steve Blank’s talk to NorCal BMA on Wed

by eleanor on @ 1:09 pm in Events & Happenings | Strategy-Marketing   ++

Steve Blank could almost be said to be my hero. It’s too bad I already did my MBA and that I’m no longer itching for an Econ PhD, because I’d otherwise go over to Haas to sit at his proverbial feet.

It sounds hyperbolic, but this guy has done more to address the mind-numbingly repetitive and crushingly destructive “common wisdom” around how startups start up than anyone else I can think of. He’s got a book, which he calls a pamphlet (my world won’t encompass pamphlets at 200 pgs), which you should own. It’s called Four Steps to the ePiphany - a “private joke” no doubt riffing on Steve’s experience co-founding enterprise sw company ePiphany. Get it at CafePress while you’re up there getting your Creative Communist stuff, or whatever geek wear you’re after. Get it and read it.

Here’s a story for you to illustrate how much sense this stuff makes:   I once gave a photocopy of the first two or so chapters to a salesguy. Now, that’s usually pretty foolish since, having been responsible for thousands of pages of content for sales guys, I know they hardly ever read stuff (not a slam, most of what marketing gives them is not immediately useful - a criteria I respect). Well, in this case, I came upon this salesguy reading this book — with — get this — a highlighter. I almost fell over. Note that this sales guy is now doing very well with happy startups.

So here are Steve’s materials from the NorCal BMA main event luncheon held on Wed: the presentation that he gave (not all of which he had time to go through, so I’m especially happy to have this), and an electronic copy of his booklist, which replaces the printout that I actually thought of scanning in.

Thanks to Steve for coming out!

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Thinking thru AttentionXML before EBIG SIG next week

by eleanor on @ 12:38 pm in Events & Happenings | Emergent   ++

Next week, the EBIG Blogging/RSS SIG will focus on AttentionXML. It’s important and useful. Come and find out what it’s all about. This time we’ve got Steve Gillmor to share his view on this tech, where he thinks it’s headed, and what it means.

I’m still learning about AttentionXML, so my impressions may change. I’ve played with Technorati’s demo and haven’t learned all that much. I’d like to take a more customized approach to AttentionXML rather than follow the simple (haha) Technorati approach of ranking by links. That reflects both my work as a researcher (seeking out the new, or at least not the fully-processed) and a sort of renegade sense of populism.

Yes, populism is different than popular; we need to be democratic rather than exclusive. This is especially the case when we are discussing systems that make information decisions for us. Humans are best at surfacing ideas; systems are best for counting mentions. I will depend on algorithms really only for the stuff that I don’t care about. My usage of Google News is a great example. I can safely say that it’s changed my life: I now have that modicum of Hollywood and sports info I need to pass a social Turing test.

It may be my own barrier, but so much of blogging seems to be referring to the popular kids. That’s nice, but I only need to see Engadget or TechDirt once a day (which I typically read there), not endless links without real commentary, just pointing out what Russ happened to post today (when I started writing this at 8:00am I discovered his site was hacked this AM by Spanish apemen. Very cute! I mean, Poor Russ! I saved a copy here) .

For my purposes, I am interested in cursory understanding of what’s new and “in play”, but mostly on my interest du jour. And when I’m tracking along, I’m looking for perspectives and kernels of thought. I worry that using the model of popularity to fuel AttentionXML will turn it into a hype machine. AttentionXML has to do more than the Technorati-counting-mentions approach. It has to cover not just the huge spikes of the daily churn, but also (if I am ever going to trust it) to point to things that I, given my interest and aims, should pay attention to. I really hope it doesn’t end up being some sort of blogoid “Daily Planet”, some dynamically generated version of that Tony Perkins AlwaysOn blog magazine - my nominee for dumbest idea of the year (info via Jason Calcanis’ blog). The Technorati tags take us a big step in this direction (though I still have to begin applying them beyond category tags).

These things have to be architected with attention to both how we use the blogosphere now, and how people will want to use it as it matures (because it’s not right now). Buzz tracking centered around *who* is talking about it is just one use case.

For my work, the most critical use case is freshness of the information on a topic. Finding out what people are saying *right now* about a given topic is what I seek almost every day. This is independent of the “authority” of the person and the current buzz (another use case is to graph this over time). For example, that’s how I use Feedster’s blog search for that. It’s true that Mike now works there, but I gave the same input to Kevin Marks of Trati back at the Dec SF geek dinner. I’m not certain, but my ideas might have flowed into their search changes made the next week, but it didn’t seem to do what I wanted, and I’ve never had a chance to follow up with Kevin.

Yet another use case (one I find particularly worthwhile) is to integrate something like AttentionXML with social networking so I can tell what my friends are interested in. For mobile, I have a certain group of friends who would, through their browsing behavior, unearth really neat things. Same for my friends who sew. I would like to trust my network to help me browse and read, in a way that is more than just reading their blogs.

That’s the sort of reason I could see going into the thinking behind SixApart buying LiveJournal : LiveJournal makes the community aspect easy. Perhaps somewhere in there they can come up with a way to atomize the inherently stream of consciousness, multi-topic nature of blogs so individual posts can be linked back in to some metaphorical discussion list. Some people do this now and are really good at this. But I find this distributed conversation hard to manage.

I’m happy the concept of Technorati tags seems compatible with the del.ico.us model. Del.ico.us is important and I keep steadfast hope I can ever get in the habit of using it. It’s either going to be a million entries for me - a real link blog, or it’s going to be the cream of the crop. I guess it will have to be everything because my desire to only make meaningful entries (which already go here, most of them) has just held up the process. Another thing to do today.

So amusingly, just after my autism post (written yesterday, but was unable to reach network), we might be watching the switch from the think and stew to me actually doing work. That and my antibiotics kicked in.

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IBM surveys perception of On Demand mktng message

by eleanor on 20 Jan 2005 @ 12:46 pm in Enterprise IT   ++

Last week I received an invitation to a survey offered by Meta Group on IBM’s OnDemand program. It didn’t seem to work the first time I tried it, but apparently I misread a question (bad survey design!).

It’s worth it though because it offers a glimpse into IBM’s marketing and insights that 1). they’re perceptive enough to suspect (and willing to spend money confirming) that their marketing is missing its target, and 2). that there’s conflict within IBM groups about which message should be most prominent. Take the image below, for example, which I captured out of their survey. This question presents seven perfectly reasonable interpretations of what IBM’s OnDemand initiative means:

-

Now, I can make a guess (until they share survey findings as promised) which option ends up being the most popular (#1), and the option IBM’s marketing honchos really want to see (#6) - but what’s truly interesting is the small, yet important, differences in what each interpretation means. Each bullet lists an empirically strong value proposition, which is clearly targeted to a particular functional group in the enterprise. So, this survey is a test to see if the right message resonates with the right functional area (the survey requests role and position). That’s very good marketing execution and perfectly valid.

However, if you take a step back, and look at how different the value propositions are within each of these, and how each value propositon really points to a different level of integration and reliance upon IBM - we see exactly how confused one can get about just what IBM is supposed to bring.

If IT is looking at IBM as an infrastructure provider, and the board is looking at this as a business model intiative (which I think is pretty hard to swallow), and the procurement guys see this as a sourcing model - things get pretty convoluted when you roll all these projects up, never mind the fact that each group is convinced that their idea of IBMOnDemand is correct.

We’re all guilty of relying on high concepts such as On Demand to sell products and servics - but in this case I actually think what IBM and HP and even Gartner are doing in this space is dangerous. IBM has its version of IBMOnDemand, which is both vague and big enough to safely cover all these attributes mentioned above. HP has “Adaptive Enterprise”, which, to my mind, is even less clearly articulated than IBM’s. Then we’ve got Gartner selling their “Real Time Enterprise” which, when I can parse their texts on the matter, seems to be an even higher conceptual model of this same vision of provisioned/billed-when-needed, autonomically-managed, integrated-via-components model.

This model itself is sound - it will be a cheaper, more efficient, more robust way to operate. The migration demanded by this vision is enormous though, as is the implicit flexibility demanded of these systems. I’m troubled by the monolithic approach of IBM and HP (check out this ITWorld webcast they sponsored with Gartner for an example - site registration required) in this space. Sun seems to get it more with their talk (well Jonathan’s is the only stuff worthwhile) of Solaris 10 containers for virtualization - that seems to offer a middle path, namely in migrating currently-running applications without modification.

What’s missing here, I feel, is the simple recognition that any of these utility schemes seem to involve significant engineering, along the rough equivalent of putting in a new electrical system in a house. Why would you want a proprietary wiring system? This sounds basic, but I’m not convinced that IBM and HP (and even Sun) get that these utility infrastructures need to be open standards and portable. Customers will sign up for service contracts, but it will be very difficult (as both HP and Sun have found) to get them to rearchitect their environment to work only with their products.

So the final question of the survey was to comment on both the good and bad of all this. I shared the following with Meta, which I’ll share with you here. I absolutely think that IBM’s amoeba-swallowing-approach is dangerous to what is a genuinely important next step in enterprise architecture, even though I do admire them for cooking up discrete and compelling value propostions for each of their constituencies. It’s a heck of a marketing campaign; it’s just not particularly helpful to the ecosystem.

Question: What is the single biggest thing IBM is doing right at this time?
My Answer: The words “on demand” capture what businesses need to be doing HOWEVER…. (see mistake - next question)

Question: What is the single biggest mistake IBM is making at this time?
My Answer: The IBMOnDemand (please note - it is one word, IBM’s version of this otherwise useful phrase of OnDemand) offering pollutes the concept of flexibility and modularity that should be inherent to any given generic OnDemand solution. The IBMOnDemand framework is all IBM [ed. note - not absolutely true, but it is WebSphere everywhere] - and thus very expensive to implement given the fact that we all sit here with heterogenous infrastructures that we cannot afford to rip out and replace with a beautiful greenfield solution delivered by cheerful and skilled IGS consultants. This mistake is potentially crippling, not just for IBM, but for the whole enterprise IT market. With this mistake they are in serious danger of destroying the positive mindset around SOA, components, utility, modular systems: component-based is supposed to mean the end of the need for (not, please note, the end of the desire for - there’s ample room for selling) large IGS-style projects. IBM pushes the world-altering nature of this under the rubric of “let IBMOnDemand be your new… business model” - surely you and IBM can see how crazy sounds for enterprises. It just doesn’t seem realizable (because, as we are reminded in the ads, IBMOnDemand is a perfect state) and it’s not something that you can meaningfully implement incrementally. Lastly IBM is on thin ice with this emphasis on providing business models to enterprises. I would never want IBM to drive my business model; they might help enable me to create my own, but buying IBMOnDemand is not buying, as you said in survey, “a way of designing business models and processes”. I’m all in favor of selling at the board level (I have a great tech analyst presentation here that counsels selling to “board level” - I’ll do up a post on it one of these days), but IBM’s marketing message is just too rich here.

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iPass CEO at Stanford’s ETL

by eleanor on @ 10:49 am in Events & Happenings | Mobility   ++

I’ve had a hard time getting a bearing on just what iPass does. Their site is rather complex and detailed, so I went to hear their CEO explain his business to Stanford undergrads yesterday. Their CEO, Ken Dunman, spoke to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series on entrepreneurship and how iPass carved out its path. Ken gave an excellent summary of the company’s history, direction, and strategies during his hour long talk. Below are my notes . His slides, when available, will be posted here (or check the ETL site).

iPass has 400 people worldwide, with 15+ locations. 2004 saw $160M of revenue. They were founded 1996, based on the experiences of one of the founders while working in Japan and trying to connect back into the US headquarters IT systems. He was seeking a local connection with remote authentication, and that’s what they built. They initially targeted the globetrotting road warriors who needed access internationally no matter what the local conditions were. In their approach to building the company, the founders realized that they needed both a platform (the core purpose of the system) and scalability (to handle growth cost effectively and deliver excellent quality of service).

The service they enable off this platform is essentially firewall tunneling through to the corporate network to provide transparent access to the applications, data, communications (VOIP) and infrastructure as if the user was in the office at a price of $9.95 [ed. note - price per connection?? there is no upfront data on website, he says later all pricing done through corporate contracts].

They currently have as customers 237 out of the Fortune 2000, and 2300 customers in total. They do different deals for each customer, customized to their needs and their size, and with a duration of 2-3 years. On the buy side (where they buy access and capacity), they cleverly renegotiate every 6 months, pressuring carriers to lower their prices. Thereby they are able to create a nice buffer of profit and able to manage their bottom line.

Their core strategy relies on the theme that the only global network is internet. Incumbent carriers own the individual networks, but it is the value of the networks put together that is what will power the next generation of innovation. These carriers are still not tracking this market, so that is where iPass identified an entrepreneurial sweet spot (this was for the students, continuing the theme of entrepreneurship). iPass took a different approach than the carriers, putting everything into software that could be updated and expanded as necessary. They started with a software based approach to authentication, not the systems approach common to the carriers. From there, as they shifted to target the enterprise, they built out the software to flexibly work behind firewalls to handle the heterogeneous systems common to enterprise environment. They knew they had to work with everything agnostically because they lacked market power or size. To make this easier, iPass participated in standards bodies - contributing their ideas and helping to form the emerging standards. They coupled this with engineering, and several times pre-built a prototype solution, which they then sold to large customers - then they went to the standards bodies with a solution that already had the backing of customers. With this sort of presales commercialization, they were able to both craft standards that ensured their access (so they wouldn’t be locked out by proprietary solutions) as well as get a jump on having working code to implement the standard.

Ken summarized their current strategy, which I captured verbatim: “iPass has deployed a software-based global platform that enables it to solve the challenges of enabling, securing and managing mobility.” From my view, that shows that iPass is moving towards being able to support the sort of device-independent data access that I have been tracking as a theme. He then reviewed the shifts in iPass’ strategy over the years, that it was first focused on consumers (individual users), then moved to the enterprise (selling remote access across the enterprise) and finally to their current focus on building a comprehensive network where they can orchestrate secure access as employees move around.

Turning to explain the system behind the service, Ken went over how the device works in a graphical slide, similar to this graphic from their website.

I’ll sketch it out quickly since the slides are not yet available. They have client software on the devices. There are 300 network providers each with iPass Network Server software (running on an appliance?). A client connects with one of these network providers, and the request is authenticated and passed via SSL to the iPass network core transaction centers & clearing houses (of which there are 10+ worldwide). iPass authenticates the user and then contacts the hosted corporate data site of the client enterprise, which has the iPass RoamServer software running (on an appliance?). The successful authentication all around establishes an IP VPN between the remote user and the enterprise. I’d summarize it as a AAA ‘man in the middle’. Interestingly, on top of this, iPass can provide policy–based authentication where you define authentication access requirements - making it possible to send devices not up to spec (without updated AV files, if compromised, etc) into quarantineand there perform policy-based mitigation (update AV, clean, alert IT security).

They’re building their product line with a focus on the shift from securing communications and bits, to securing endpoint integrity. The question becomes ‘are both the device and the user allowed on the network?’. They’re looking to bring policy-based value-adds to deliver value over networks they don’t own (nor do they want to, they are a happy service provider). They’re looking forward to supporting technologies that serve a model where every new device is sold with wireless access. They want to integrate access to private corporate networks and the public internet via the 802.1x authentication standard. Following on this strategy, they acquired the Israeli startup Safe3W which has patent on device component fingerprinting. They create hash using the data (registration, serial, driver numbers) off the specific components present in a machine to create a unique fingerprint of its last known-authenticated state, and use that as the basis upon which to allow authentication. Personally, I wonder if that would include memory sticks, USB drives, and ancillary hardware (iPod, external drives) that tech-savvy users are increasingly adding on themselves to help them in their work (disabling this doesn’t work for power users, as Microsoft proved).

In closing, Ken emphasized the importance of architectural choices, that the architecture you lay down both liberates and limits; with startups, it must be cost effective initially, and then it needs to scale. He drew an analogy to the hedgehog concept from Good to Great - a book which he said he was sure all the student have read already (I have not, but consider this a strong recommendation). He highlighted iPass’ ability to integrate and coordinate diverse software systems over the internet, a middleman position with a lot of opportunity for value creation. He stressed the need to build in to the infrastructure and design the capacity for periodic reinvention (so you can respond to changing conditions). He also noted how important it is to provide integration points for partners because no one does it all on their own. He said that interfaces are not, and should not be afterthoughts, but be consciously designed.

Then the audience asked questions, which were mostly of a personal development nature. It was a good session.

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Happenings this week

by eleanor on 17 Jan 2005 @ 1:05 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

So this week, I have a product management/marketing roundtable on Tuesday am, held thru the NorCal BMA. It’s a breakfast (yes that does mean early in the morning) meeting at Scott’s in Palo Alto from 7:30-9am. They put the coffee on the table and the conversation is always great - come wake up with us! This month’s session brings Steve Mezak, serial entrepreneur and seasoned product guy (CEO of Accelerance) to lead the discussion on the thorny issue of ‘how do you build customers what they want when you’re doing something new and they don’t know what they want yet’ - which Steve nattily summarizes under the real title of “Building Products for Naive Customers”. It’s sure to be an interesting morning. For details or RSVP info see here.

There are other things going on Tuesday, but I’m abstaining. I’ll look for blog reports on the VLab event on Open Source and Churchill Club’s event looking at the brightest new leaders in the valleya.

Back to things I will be at - this week there are the twin Stanford sessions (blogged previously) on Wednesday. This week I’ll be at the iPass session at ETL. I’m interested in hearing Ken Denman speak on their business model and company evolution (I find I’m always surprised when I hear their name, it comes from an element of their work that I did not expect). However, for some of you the session at SHL with Paul Hartzog of panarchy might be the cat’s meow.

After that, but still on Wednesday, we have Malcolm Gladwell, author of Tipping Point, at Books Inc. in Mountain View (301 Castro) to give a reading from his new book, Spark Blink (sorry I had KQED’s Spark program on the brain. A bunch of us are meeting up to hear him and then get Mexican food at some nearby restaurant afterwards (will update with name when get it back - hopefully it will be the little one on Dana Street).

Now that the Future Salon moved its Digital Identity session to 28 Jan (was to be this Friday), my week looks a little less cluttered.

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Further indications things are back on track

by eleanor on 13 Jan 2005 @ 9:24 am in Events & Happenings | Datapoints   ++

I came home last night from the Steve Case/Walt Mossberg discussion at the Computer History Museum to find a final datapoint that things are getting better: Mike and I have to renew our lease and this is the first year that our rent has not actually gone down! It hasn’t gone up, and our two options (12 mos and 6 mos) are priced at parity, whereas before there was a slight discount to the 6 month lease. I always thought that reflected optimism on the part of our landlord that he could quickly ratchet it up once the good times came rolling. We’ve been here 3 full years now, and the spread between the two got wider, only to disappear completely this year.

The second stream of indicators come from all the events and happenings. Last night there was the CHM thing, which was pretty good, but not quite the thing to hold my concentration after a day with my sick dad. Afterwards, a bunch of us went out for pizza - Mike, Niall, Brendan Wilson and his wife Ashley who works at PayPal, and Micah Alpern. It’s kind of like you can find or make a “party” where ever you go.

Tonight, a chick group that I belong to is having a party - SFWOW is basically a mailing list with random discussion and tech stuff. It’s free or $3 depending on how full they are, at Cafe Metropole in SF. Afterwards, I get to get some art with the IronVJ battle at 1015 Folsom in SF, which should at least make me laugh.

Hope to see some of you there.

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Competing free classes at Stanford on Wednesdays

by eleanor on @ 9:11 am in Events & Happenings   ++

You know, I don’t think Google works as well as it used to. I searched last week when I heard about Howard Rheingold’s class at Stanford (the one everyone’s talking about). After a bunch of digging, I found that Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leader’s session is running - same time, same campus. Tomato-tomato right?

After significant confusion, as I ask folks if they’re gonna head to the JBoss session (26 Jan) and ask how interested were people in the “How to be a VC” session from yesterday — a chat with Niall Kennedy provides the final clue. They’re different entities altogether.

So maybe you’re as busy or scattered as I can be, but given the fact that Google still didn’t deliver the goods today, I thought I’d put up both links and put them both on my events calendar.

Howard Rheingold’s course, hosted by the Stanford Humanities Lab, can be found here . Next week’s speaker is Paul Hartzog, developer of panarchy - which I hope I don’t demean by calling an experimental crucible for ideas about governance.

In extreme contrast, we have the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders sessions which have a distinctly more business feel. Next week’s speaker there is Ken Denman of wireless sw company iPass.

To the extent that I am capable of taking a break each Wednesday afternoon for a class (guys, evenings are so much easier to dedicate time to), I hope to bounce between them. I was over at Stanford yesterday, with my elderly dad at the hospital - while VC reminiscences weren’t enough to draw me away, Peter Kollock ’s discussion would have been. Too bad!

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Girl Vs. Ipod Shuffle

by eleanor on 12 Jan 2005 @ 12:04 am in Life-Culture-Play   ++

I’m a pc user. I’m a pc user who wears black and attends art stuff, maybe a bit cooler than others, but not much. For some reason, probably innate stubbornness, I’ve retained the view that Mac users are (outside of the arty types who do it because they have to) people who enjoy paying more for some cult product. It’s lame and petty, but the whole Mac fad has triggered every contrarian instinct in me.

But I have been taking a closer look at Macs lately, spurred by the encouragement of hacker friends and by my desire to have a consumer-usable Linux install (I covet multiple desktops with separate themes, a la Enlightenment). But I’m not there yet - Mac hardware is still clunky, and the default interface has too much squish and distraction, and it still seems like a fanboy thing. I’m still hoping I’ll get rescued by some sleek japanese toy or else maybe a no-name whitebook.

Tonight I’m sad to report that my personal rapprochement with Apple took a giant step back. I was presented by my thoughtful boyfriend - in the form of the flying-off-the-shelves cool iPod Shuffle. I love presentings, but this didn’t go so well.

I looked askance at it at first because I’ve been thinking big. Like the adorable (and festive) Creative Zen might not be big enough. So right away there is a disconnect, but based on Mike’s enthusiasm, the accolades of the Macheads, etc, etc, we persevered.

The box said to make sure you install the iTunes software first, so we tried. My ultraslim Japanese laptop has a dvd thing… but that sits in the office, so we tried the install on another winlaptop (laptop2), which went ok. Not great. Being a Mac newbie, you’ll have to forgive my naivete when I confess I was astounded that the damn software demanded the serial number of the device to install. I’m personally surprised that I made it past that point - this stuff is not Adobe’s Creative Studio, that demand is ridiculous. But putting that objection aside, the install went ok — although by that point I wanted to handle this already DRMy toy with tongs — but the now iTunes-ready-laptop2 failed to see the device. Nobody home.

Then I said: “Der, this is a USB drive! Just like my dumb Duex from 3 years ago (128 mb - $99)!” I plugged it in to laptop1 and it was recognized immediately. I moved over some songs (SF industrial band Gridlock, perhaps my current favorite), which worked. But gosh were we ever stumped when the files wouldn’t play.

And what could the device tell us? Flash flash orange green. Which the manual translated into error error error. I’m almost as baffled by the lack of a LCD display (think calculator here guys) as I am the totally anti-viral approach of the iTunes install (newsflash - you want random people to install your software - they, poor souls, might like it).

Now, I’m no consumer electronics maven, and I don’t want to come off as ranting. 90% of the people I know probably have iPods. Deep, deep down, I’m a joiner — I want to love all things Mac just like all the other cool kids. Help me get it. I know I probably shouldn’t have been as stumped that it wouldn’t work without iTunes - but I was. What’s the rationale here? I’m really curious because if there’s value here, I’d like to understand.

I’m on a pc (for the foreseeable future), use MP3, have prob a 30GB store of files, a large assortment of playlists, and want to stay in that mode. I don’t buy songs by the song, but by the CD (and it’s pretty fringe too - there are no hit songs on albums from the likes of Winterkalte, Boards of Canada, and Casino vs. Japan — I just plain like most of the songs anyway). One application where I would have considered iTunes (actually my mind turned to a temporary subscription to Rhapsody) was during my seasonal craving for U2’s Boy and October albums - but a trip to Rasputin’s used bin before the geek dinner in December fixed that problem for a cool $16. Maybe it would behoove me to pick up some more normal music, but hey - the pricing structure and strings-attached don’t swing the balance in Apple’s favor here.

Sell me, guys. It’s got to be about more than iconic advertising.

So I’m left here, feeling more alienated than ever, and just plain puzzled why I would much rather dig out this lame little Duex (which was pretty buggy itself - but which I’ve seen reincarnated as a thing called a Rover) rather than deal with manipulating some software from Apple. One consolation from a market efficiency standpoint is that I was obviously on the right track in coveting the Creative devices, rather than attracted to the mainline iPods. It could be said that I’ll buy anything in bright orange though.

One thing I will be interested to find out is if their emphasis on ‘chance’ in the Shuttle ad campaign links to a more effective randomizing algorithm. Someday I need to dig into that for Winamp.

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Wireless Communications Alliance Meeting and Expo Tomorrow

by eleanor on 11 Jan 2005 @ 5:39 pm in Events & Happenings | Mobility   ++

On the topic of wireless, tomorrow the WCA is having their annual thing at the San Jose Fairmont. A general session meeting with a panel of VC’s talking what’s hot/not, followed by a stroll thru the cocktail and hors d’oeurvres of expo-land. A good deal for $10.

I attended last year and it was a nice view of the industry. No time this year though.

Here are directions to get your discount from the WCA’s email:

****Registration to Exhibits****

1. For your convenience, please complete the exhibit registration form which can be downloaded in pdf format here. [ ed. note: as I recall they had those on hand should you forget/be without printer]
2. Under the heading $450 value write in WCA in bold letters.
3. Turn the completed form at the Exhibits Registration station for a complimentary pass to Exhibits and Reception.
4. Then proceed to our WCA registration table to sign up for our panel discussion [ed note: pay $10 admission] and to receive two complimentary drink coupons for the reception.

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Huge turnout for mobilemondays Jan event

by eleanor on @ 11:21 am in Events & Happenings | Mobility   ++

The MobileMondays event last night was huge . At least it stopped raining by the time we left.

Here is the presentation I gave with my conspiracy theories on what it will take to get mobility into the enterprise.

From conversations with attendees after, it’s clear there’s money to be made - but there’s still work to be done in figuring out how to put the pieces together and sell the value prop. The hard stuff - but we’ll figure it out.

If there’s real money flowing out of millions of little pockets for diversions, games and fluff - I am absolutely certain people will pay real money for access to apps and tools that make their lives and businesses more efficient.

So thanks to the guys from mobilemondays - Russ and MikeR and Romain from Orange and Eric Weitzman (who didn’t make it) and Michael O’Rourke from dimension7.

As a side social note, MikeR and I are planning on checking out dimension7’s media event Thursday night - IronVJ - a multmedia bakeoff with live voting by sms.

test modification

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Creative Commons 2nd Anniversary tonight

by eleanor on 6 Jan 2005 @ 8:03 am in Events & Happenings   ++

Headed to the Creative Commons 2nd anniversary party tonight. Maybe see you there?

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EBIG RSS Sig ‘Corporate Bloggers’ and notetaking

by eleanor on 5 Jan 2005 @ 12:41 pm in Events & Happenings   ++

Yesterday Elisa Camahort presented at the EBIG SIG on RSS, run by Bill Flitter. It’s been blogged by Steve Tennant and Eric Rice, which give useful summaries. It was a good session which points to the need for some commonly accepted blogger newbie resources. These are good - I always point to Mary Meeker’s review of blogging and rss (pdf).

Now, among the writeups, Steve Tennant’s post - notes taken in Word and posted in pdf - raises an interesting question. How have the output, and the tools we use to capture that output changed? What are the expectations of our audience?

I sympathize, and can say “I would like to be able to use the tools I prefer in the mode to which I’m accustomed”. For me, it’s not Word (but I do like their spellcheck and autocorrect). I find myself taking notes in Vim. The interesting thing though - the way in which I see my usage pattern changing - is how often I find I’d prefer to use something like a post slug, like my little WordPress posty program here. I’ve got my quicktags, which with usage get handier (though it is true some of the same commands result in same formatting in word et al.) I’m thinking of doing up a vim with .vimrc to enable some of this - but you know, I’d really like the same structure as a blog post. Too bad I find JavaScript inscrutable - I’d like to add some tweaks here. Embarrassingly, this is the one area of WordPress I have been able to do nothing with.

It’s kind of a cyclic argument, one of those tailchasers that drive me nuts. Part of what got this post delayed (but shamelessly backdated - I have a chronology to maintain here guys) was what turned out to be a futile search for this tech. I looked at Anconia’s RocketPost and Ecto (thanks to Niall for the reco), but neither really did what I wanted. Ever pragmatic, I found I achieved the best results by just saving off a html of the “post” screen. Change some of the links, open up a few tabs, and it seems I can type, then post when I am back online. Dirty, but so far effective. Much better than trying to install the LAMP stack on my overtaxed Windows laptop.

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New integrated blog up and running

by eleanor on 4 Jan 2005 @ 11:26 am in Geek   ++

It’s been a while, but now I have an external blog to which I will be publishing regularly - if not absolutely chronologically. I’m still working on the right side stuff - final css tweaks, import blogroll, etc. but we’ll just muddle through for now.

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Last geek dinner of 2004

by eleanor on 1 Jan 2005 @ 1:26 am in Events & Happenings   ++

So amid the frenzy of rebranding (moving and integrating blogs), I took time out to attend the Geek dinner on 30 Dec with Scoble and the gang. I actually got there first, and rolled my eyes when Wordpress showed the heart and hospitality that only a youngster can muster (and you can still make him blush). It was too bad Mike was in NY with his parents.

This event has of course been thoroughly discussed elsewhere , but there’s a bit I want to air. Not 14 hours after the event, I lunched with Elisa Camahort, a buddy of mine who I tried to drag along. She didn’t venture out, but having attended to the important stuff in life earlier that morning, knew all about what happened. Even more so than I did. We talked about it, and I guess I can go either way on the now-famous Scoble’s Angels photos. Mostly I think it was lame. There are so few chicks at any given tech event this was a questionable way to commemorate the event. I said yes when Renee Blodgett came over to whisper her plan - yes before she finished because I thought she was going to propose just a chick group photo, not some sort of pseudo-sexual pandering. Now, it was a party, and from one view it was a fun parlour game. On the other hand — where meaning dwells — it has significance. Paraphrasing what a blogger who’s determined not to comment on this matter said to me - the context turns us into party favors, decorative accoutrements which go to the most famous guy in the room.

Now, I’m not a cranky person, not a poor sport, but nor do I often participate in misguided schemes. This just affirms that strategy - especially in light of the fact that there was zero chick bonding.

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