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July 23, 2008
Relationship Providers
Businesses spend a great deal of time and money trying to identify their customers. By "identify" I mean not just get a name and credit card number, but find, learn about, and discover the attributes, preferences, and even desires of customers. They spend millions of dollars on "customer relationship management" (CRM) systems that are really "customer dossier systems" in a quest to manage the identity data they collect about customers.
In the same way, customers spend a great deal of effort identifying businesses. Which business sells the product that will meet my needs at a price I'm willing to pay? Which business will give me the best shipping, the best service, or even the most emotional lift when I buy from them?
Doc Searls has been talking about the need for the one-way "CRM" systems to become more truly about relationships for years--ever since I first met him. He's set up Project VRM at Harvard to focus on that effort. VRM, which stands for "vendor relationship management" was meant as a play on CRM, but is maybe too "user-centric" at this point. The real idea is relationships.
When Bob Blakely spoke at IIW about relationships, I don't think I really understood what he was saying, but I took notes and today when I was going back over them, the idea of relationships as the context for identity actually leaped out at me. (See also Drummond Reed's notes on this same talk.)
I've been thinking about this idea in the context of ecommerce lately and trying to understand the market that might emerge as ideas like VRM start to take hold. As Bob mentioned in his talk, this idea has real power when relationship intermediaries start to get involved.
The much used analogy to the credit card industry is applicable here. I can buy a TV at Best Buy on credit not because I have a direct credit relationship with Best Buy (although they'd love to establish one with me) but because I have a trusted relationship with my bank, they have one with their bank and there's a contract between those two banks (via the Visa network) that links them.
In a similar way, intermediaries could provide strong trust relationships that link merchants and shoppers. Here's a picture:
In this diagram the blue box labeled "RelP" represents a relationship provider. Not an IdP who provides low value authentication services, but someone with a strong trust relationship with various parties--shoppers and merchants in my example. The RelP creates a relationship context within which the identity data lives and is shared. Other RelPs through contractual relationships can federate to create relationship contexts that span a single RelP.
As a side note, this model doesn't necessarily envision the creation of a network for relationships like Visa, although you could imagine one. This was the reason Andre Durand started Ping Identity. 2002 was probably too early to get that gargantuan task accomplished, but the technology and thought processes around this area have grown up a lot in the last 6 years.
How might such relationships be created and managed? Drummond and the folks at the Higgins Project believe that relationship cards, or r-cards are the answer. They well may be. An r-card, perhaps slightly misnamed, offers the capability to instantiate an ongoing data sharing relationship that can be terminated at any time by either party. in Drummond's words:
An r-card ... exchanges a set of claims and associated policies that enables both parties to continue to share other information over time, e.g.:
- Updates to the initial values of the claims
- New claims
- Permissions and controls over communications via other channels
- Changes to the r-card itself
I'm still trying to understand all the details, but convinced of the necessity of this kind of thing. My work on reputation (PDF) was a start at understanding how trust relationships can be created online. I'll be writing more about this as I understand it more over the coming weeks.
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Using the iPhone Plugin for Movabletype
The iPhone apps for Typepad and Wordpress made me jealous. But I found that there's a plugin for MovableType that provides a servicable interface for the iPhone. Typing HTML on the iPhone keyboard isn't easy. But if you have to blog remotely, here it is.
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July 21, 2008
A Day Without a Laptop
I forgot my laptop at home today. Just drove off without it. Left it sitting in the garage. Ugh.
Fortunately, today wasn't a day that I was planning on spending the day coding. My development environment runs in Fusion on my MBP, so that would have been tough. I had a day of meetings and discussion and for that, my iPhone worked just fine.
For the most part, I take my laptop everywhere I go. This mistake has taught me that I could take it fewer places and get by.
What suffered? I couldn't pusblish today's show on IT Conversations from my iPhone very easily. I couldn't blog easily. As I mentioned, I was without my development environment. Other than that, life went on.
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July 17, 2008
August CTO Breakfast at UTOSC
A few days ago I said that we wouldn't be holding a CTO breakfast in August. I was wrong. In fact, we'll be holding the breakfast on August 28 in conjunction with the Utah Open Source Conference at Salt Lake Community College. Please mark your calendars.
If you're a regular breakfast attendee, I have discount codes for UTOSC that I can give you. Just send me a note.
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July 15, 2008
Saving Money by Slowing Down: Applying Technology
With the high price of gasoline, lots of people are looking for ways to save money on gas. The simplest method is simply to slow down. The drag on a vehicle goes up with the fourth power of the speed. That implies a very crisp knee in the curve.
Of course, the standard answer would be "lower the speed limit to 55MPH." But that would really be a bummer for people on long trips. We have better technology than in the 70's. Most people cruising down the highway at 75 don't know that they could slow down 10 or 20 MPH and save real money. Let's give them data. Here's my proposal.
Why don't cars come with a meter that shows how much you're spending right now on gas. Turn instantaneous mileage into instantaneous dollars and you'll see real behavior change. That leaves people free to choose and most will choose saving money when there's no compelling reason not to while leaving people the freedom to spend money to get where they need to be.
One step further: create an online game where people can compete for best performance over a given route.
I'm looking for an iPhone app that does this for starters.
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Using bit.ly with MovableType
I've been using the mt-twitter plugin to automatically publish blog articles to Twitter. I find that I get more readers that way than RSS or my newsletter at this point. One problem is that you don't get any good stats that way. I've modified the mt-twitter plugin to use bit.ly now to solve that problem. With bit.ly you can click on the "info" link and get good stats about who clicked from where.
This is the code I added to the _update_twitter function:
my $bitly = LWP::UserAgent->new;
my $url_response =
$bitly->get("http://bit.ly/api?url=" . $obj->permalink);
my $small_url;
if($url_response->is_success) {
$small_url = $url_response->content;
} else {
$small_url = $obj->permalink;
}
Of course, you also have to change the line that creates the twitter message to use the new shortened URL ($small_url) instead of the permalink directly.
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July 14, 2008
Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for June
Here's the top ten shows on IT Conversations for June:
- Episode Nine - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.28)
Joel and Jeff discuss Apple's WWDC (and the correct pronunciation of OS X), the use of JavaScript on modern web sites, affiliate programs, and much more.
- Episode Ten - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.43)
Joel and Jeff discuss the fine art of listening, source control, the risks of being an internal IT developer, and the state of current mobile platforms. Oh, and how to clean the toilet.
- Episode Eleven - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.28)
Joel and Jeff try to avoid talking over each other while discussing data generation, full text searching, cross-site scripting, Markdown, Microsoft's Silverlight, and how to get a job at Fog Creek software.
- Scott Ambler - Are You Agile or Are You Fragile? (Rating: 3.72)
A presentation by Scott Ambler at the SDForum Distinguished Speaker Series in 2003 entitled "Are You Agile or Are You Fragile?" The software industry is shifting from large-scale, prescriptive processes that mandate rigorous procedures and policies to lighter, more agile methodologies. Are these agile processes appropriate for your organization? If so, which should you consider adopting? What challenges can you expect and how can you overcome them? (Audio from IT Conversations. This is a long one: nearly two hours.)
- Episode 8 - StackOverflow (Rating: 3.35)
In the first episode hosted by the IT Conversations, Joel and Jeff discuss Joel's keynote address at the recent Rails conference, the attitudes of some of those who don't use Macs, and Clay Shirky's recent book, "Here Comes Everybody".
- Stuart Kauffman - Reinventing the Sacred (Rating: 3.44)
Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with biologist and author Stuart Kauffman, about his latest book "Reinventing the Sacred," which discusses a new way to look at science, the universe, and the mystery of life.
- Ken Ledeen & Harry Lewis - Blown to Bits (Rating: 3.50)
Ken Ledeen and Harry Lewis are co-authors (with Hal Abelson) of the forthcoming book "Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion." All three authors are veteran information technologists. On this edition of Interviews with Innovators, host Jon Udell speaks to Ledeen and Lewis to reflect on the rapid and sweeping changes these technologies bring.
- Connected Innovators Showcase - New Business Ideas (Rating: 3.21)
The Connected Innovators program showcases emerging technologies and new business ideas likely to make an impact on the networked future. After a competitive application process, Supernova's Kevin Werbach and TechCrunch's Michael Arrington invite a dozen top company leaders on stage to present their best, quick pitch. Then, a panel of start-up experts analyzes the offerings, judging their potential in the marketplace, and their meaning for the tech industry.
- Ken Schwaber - Wrestling Gold from Today's Software Projects (Rating: 3.79)
"You Thought it was Easy: Wrestling Gold from Today's Software Projects." The benefits of Agile are many, the implementation is easy, and the problems are daunting. Ken Schwaber, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium & Chairman of the Agile Alliance, discusses the obstacles to wresting the gold from today's software projects. (IT Conversations audio from SDForum Agile Summit.)
- Mark Shuttleworth, Tim O'Reilly - Talking Ubuntu (Rating: 2.71)
Mark Shuttleworth began Ubuntu in 2004 with a dedicated group of developers intent on creating a revolutionary new Linux desktop. Now, many in the Linux community are calling it the Linux desktop for real people. After three years of phenomenal growth, Shuttleworth sat down with Tim O'Reilly at the first ever O'Reilly Media sponsored Ubuntu Live Conference. During the interview, Tim asks Mark for insight into Ubuntu's meteoric rise and about key challenges for Ubuntu going forward.
Interestingly the Ambler and Scwaber shows are not recent, but getting a lot of play and quite a few ratings (in the hundreds). Stack Overflow is doing well, as you'd expect given the audience both Jeff and Joel bring to the podcast.
Since Doug put up the new ratings system, the overall number of ratings per show are up considerably--all of these ratings numbers have enough behind them to make them credible.
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CTO Breakfast on Friday
We're doing the July CTO breakfast a little early this month because
of Pioneer day. For those of you not familiar with Utah,
Pioneer day is a state holiday on the 24th of July and it's a pretty
big deal. Celebrates the day the first pioneers entered the Salt Lake
Valley in 18481847.
We'll do the usual thing on Friday. Anyone with an interest in technology products and companies it welcome to come. Hopefully Phil Burns will come and we can get into heated discussions about the iPhone. :-) If you've got other things you'd like to discuss, bring them up.
There's no breakfast in August. After that, here's the schedule:
- Sept 26 (Friday)
- Oct 30 (Thursday)
- Dec 5 (Friday) - Combined Nov and Dec breakfast
Here's a Google calendar for the breakfast.
We'll meet in the Novell Cafeteria (Building G) at 8am and go until 10am. I hope to see you there.
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July 11, 2008
Waiting for the iPhone--Again!
I've had mixed feelings about whether to upgrade my iPhone to the new 3G model. Ultimately, I get three things: 3G, GPS, and 8G more RAM than I have now. None of those alone were enough to tip me and together, they were marginal. Consequently I wasn't all in a tizzy over today's iPhone availability. Still, since I had a few friends who were excited to get one and were coming up to the Apple store in Salt Lake to get one, I figured I'd tag along and maybe pick on up. What I wasn't ready for was 7 or 8 hour lines.
I figured that iPhones would be plentiful. Beside, it wasn't the launch of a 1.0 product (and hence less excitement). On top of all that, after the doors opened last June the lines went so fast that I figured you'd be able to show up anytime today and waltz in and get one. Wrong.
What changed between last year and this one was the in-store activation. Last year, you bought your phone and took it home to activate it. Yeah! That was a heavenly experience. This year--to curb people buying phones so and then unlocking them--in-store activation is required. It's taking, according to some of the Apple Store employees working the line, 20-30 minutes.
That's when the activation system is working at all. There have been, according to reports, frequent break downs. Consequently, the line moves in fits and starts; lurching toward the door.
The whole experience, as a result, has been much more frustrating than last year. People waited in line last year and this year. But that's where the similarity ends. People aren't anxiously waiting for the doors to open and then rushing in to buy the product they've been lusting for. Instead, the doors have been open for 7 hours and hundreds of people are still lined up waiting for the machine to serve them because of IT problems. Big difference Apple.
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Success Factors for Saas Delivery
I'm at the Utah Technology Council's CTO P2P forum this morning. Nate Bowler, a former collegue at Excite@Home and CTO of @Task is speaking about SaaS, software as a service.
Nate says that his number one take-away from this talk is: Pick a market that is underserved or could benefit from the improved delivery model of a SaaS platform and serve it in a non-trivial manner. Emphasis on "non-trivial." Often companies dumb down their SaaS offering. Nate stresses the importance of using the same technology stack for on-premise and on-demand options.
In order to deliver SaaS, you have to be able to support billing, provisioning, and back office tools over and above the base level of software functionality. Beyond that you probably also need multi-tenancy.
And, of course, there's the scalability issue. A critical question is how scalability concerns line up with the business model. What are the hardware demands per customer? Per user? This information needs to be fed back into the product pricing.
Billing can be a big deal. Many people start out with home grown billing systems that limit their flexibility. Most companies start off with a single "this is how we're going to price things" plan, but clients have different ideas. Are you going to pass up a client because they want to pay in a way that you're billing system doesn't support? Instead you'll probably end up constantly hacking the billing system.
You need to be able to monitor every component of your application stack: systems, network, and processes; availability; application functionality; and user experience. In addition to monitoring these things, you need to be watching trends to avoid surprises.
Security is obviously a big deal. You need instrusion detecion systems, SAS70 compliance for business processes, and external auditing of security issues like XSS, data partitioning, and software patch levels to protect customer application data. Automated testing needs to be rigorous.
Some thoughts from Nate on pricing:
- You can't offer SaaS level service for traditional pricing (perpetual licensing) and survive. You can get by in the out years with just maintenance dollars (typically 20%).
- Price on-demand and on-premise the same and keep release cycles in lock step.
- You need the discipline to walk away from deals that won't accept a term license.
- Term pricing value to customer breaks down in 2 conditions: when the contract duration is greater than 3 years and when the user count grows beyond 200 users.
- Terpetual pricing is an option: customer pays 180% of annual price in first year and pays 35% in years two and three. The idea is that it's still cheaper than a perpetual license deal for the customer in year one, but is more inline with how they're used to buying software--big upfront fee followed by maintenance.
@Task has had good luck selling on-premise software with term licensing.
One of the ideas Nate brings up that's pretty interesting is implementing a Digg-like feature for your product roadmap and letting your customers vote for features that are important to them.
@Task has found that most customers opt for on-demand rather than on-premise contrary to conventional wisdom. Similarly, they haven't found that a self-sign up with free trial was an effective strategy for generating leads. This may be specific to @Task that has a fairly complex, group-oriented product. The enterprise nature of the activity means that free trials have to be carefully orchestrated.
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July 9, 2008
The 50-50 Rule in Retail: Capturing Customer Conversations
Ross Mayfield notes that in an Apple retails store "50% of the space is for retail sales and 50% for service and support." He goes on to contrast that with places like Fry's or Best Buy. I'm always amazed when I go into an Apple store: they're happening places. If you're in retail, visit an Apple store and then go back to your place. Seem kinda quiet and dead. Yeah, I thought so.
Ross goes on:
What Best Buy is missing is the fact that they provide no after market value add with their retail -- in comparison to buying and servicing with an e-commerce vendor. If I buy something in person I expect a person to be able to help me when things go wrong. At least during the manufactures warranty, and I might pay to extend that period with the retailer.
But I think Apple gets something more than the value of customer experience. According to the Consortium of Service Innovation, there is an iceberg effect for product knowledge. 90% of conversations about supporting products never touch the company. Only 10% touch the call center. And 1% of this service and product quality knowledge are assimilated.
In other words, Apple's trying to capture more of the product knowledge conversations. That goes beyond mere "customer experience" and gets to building relationship.
Finally Ross gets to the key question for online retailers:
For your business online, what porportion is dedicated to retail vs. support? When not constricted by the boundaries of physical space, and can be empowered through community, where do you draw that line? What crosses that line is a process not unlike osmosis, where energy is released with the right balance.
When I was at Internet Retailer it was clear that one of the hot features for ecommerce Web sites was customer reviews. More and more places are following Amazon's lead and adding places for customers to talk to other customers (and inform the retailer in the process). This is a great way to capture more of the customer product conversation and capitalize on it in order to keep shoppers coming back for more.
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Understanding the Net
Doc Searls must have spent some of his convalescence deep in thought. His recent essay Saving the Net III: Understanding its Frames is a great piece on how we understand and don't understand the Net. This is a long essay. You'll actually have to do some reading if you want to get the meat of Doc's argument. But it's worth the time.
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July 3, 2008
Open Source and The Gap
David Eaves posted a piece overlaying the Firefox 3 Pledge Map and Thomas Barnett's map that divides the world into the "the functioning core" and the "non-integrated gap."
As you might expect, there's a high correlation. People in the gap aren't connected, so they have less access to computers, use the 'Net less, and participate in open source projects less. There are some exceptions--like Scandinavia on one side and Columbia and Turkey on the other.
David makes this comment:
Non-Integrated Gap countries with the most pledges are Iran, Turkey, Venezuela, Peru, and Indonesia -- interesting list. Seems to suggest that many of the countries the US tries to isolate are actually the most connected.
I too find this ironic. I think that the Bush administration has made a huge mistake in not pushing these countries to integrate more fully. Forget their governments, their citizens want to be connected and once they are, the policies of their governments will follow them into the functioning core. They have to.
As Tom points out, terrorism is "what's left" after the cold war and I see it as a reaction to connectivity. Terrorists, while exploiting the connectivity of the 'Net, would deny that connectivity to people because it leads them away from the fundamentalist societies that the terrorists promote.
David's analysis is just one more data point in the argument that some of the world's seemingly most dangerous countries have citizens who are ready to connect. The world (i.e. functioning core) needs to take advantage of that.
As an aside, I just pre-ordered Tom's new book 'Great Powers: America and the World After Bush' from Amazon. I'll schedule another IT Conversations interview with him after the book comes out. I had a great conversation with him a few years back.
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July 2, 2008
Browser Mix on Technometria
As long as we're on the subject of Technometria stats, here's the browser breakdown for last month on Technometria:
- FireFox - 41.80%
- Internet Explorer - 33.76%
- Safari - 12.65%
- Mozilla - 9.06%
- Opera - 1.79%
Roughly two-thirds of the visitors to Technometria were using something other than Internet Explorer. Granted, this is a pretty geeky crowd.
Of the Firefox users, roughly 30% were using version 3. Of the IE users, roughly 40% were using version 6. Only four visitors the entire month were using IE 5.5. I had a few IE 8 visitors.
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July 1, 2008
Top Ten Stories on Technometria Last Month
It's funny to me which stories and posts seem to take off and which don't. Sometimes when I'm writing a post I just know that it's going to get traction, but most of the time, it's hit or miss. Here's a list of the top ten posts on Technometria for June. Only two of them were written in June.
- Fixing MacBook Pro Sleep Problems 8.74% of all downloads for the month
- P2V: How To Make a Physical Linux Box Into a Virtual Machine 6.18%
- Top Ten IT Conversations Shows for May 2008 4.35%
- CIO vs. CT 4.23%
- Free Mobile Calls to Anywhere in the World 3.76%
- How to Start a Blog 2.37%
- Welcoming Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood to IT Conversations! 2.36%
- Dreams from My Father: My Attempts to Know Obama 1.46%
- Broken Scroll Ball on Mighty Mouse 1.34%
- Alan Kay: Is Computer Science an Oxymoron? 1.25%
The one that is the most amazing to me is the "free mobile calls" post. It's about how to use a family plan and an autodialer connected to Skype to get reduce mobile call bills. It's usually the number one hit on Google under free mobile calls, so it gets a lot of traffic. What waste of bandwidth. :-)