Practices
New Zealand Diary: The Future Is for the Young Entrepreneur
Twenty-two hours after leaving my driveway, I landed in Spring.
New Zealand, in late September – and perhaps anytime -- is a beautiful country, but especially beautiful in the “Garden City,” Christchurch where I am attending and speaking at Electronics South Connectivity 05.
The conference is a showcase of electronics and software companies that call Canterbury home. A quick walk through the exhibition area reveals a tremendous degree of engineering talent, if not also entrepreneurial prowess. I visited with a number of companies that have developed world-class applications – but they are hard pressed to explain them.
A case in point: Visual Footprints. The company had developed intelligent video surveillance system that combines sensor technology to detect security events with license plate detection. Designed to detect and prevent “drive offs” at the gasoline pumps, the software most certainly has applications in traffic management, homeland security, border control, among others. The market for this application ranges far from the shores of New Zealand, and with luck the engineers who have developed this technology will get the good help they need to find these opportunities.
This engineering, rather than entrepreneuring, mentality isn’t unique to New Zealand by any measure, but it creates a particularly difficult situation in a country where startup technology ventures have little choice but to address global markets.
The good news seems to be that both private and public initiatives are in place and most surely will pay off in the long run.
One such initiative is “Bright Sparks,” a program that teaches school children best practices in engineering and entrepreneurship. Bright Sparks celebrated their annual awards on Friday, September 30, with a showcase of some phenomenal young talent.
Among these was an energetic and intelligent young woman, Allison Blanchard, who had invented an interactive learning toy to encourage hand-eye coordination in developmentally disabled children. The project brief, Allison told me, was to create a developmental toy, and it was she who determined, after initial market research, that the unaddressed market was physically disadvantaged children. The 16-year old visited a local hospital to observe her target market. She developed and tested prototypes with a young boy with Cerebral Palsy. This direct customer interaction drove changes to both the physical design and the feedback functions in the electronics.
The result is an elegant toy that most certainly has commercial implications.
When I asked Allison whether she intended to market the product, she smiled and shrugged. This was a school project, she said. She really loves accounting and hopes to pursue that career. Let’s hope that at the very least, she applies her bookkeeping skills to an early stage venture; she’s as sophisticated a market-driven project developer as I’ve seen in some people twice her age.
Posted by Chris Shipley at 06:47 PM | TrackBack
New Zealand Diary: The Future Is for the Young Entrepreneur
Twenty-two hours after leaving my driveway, I landed in Spring.
New Zealand, in late September – and perhaps anytime -- is a beautiful country, but especially beautiful in the “Garden City,” Christchurch where I am attending and speaking at Electronics South Connectivity 05.
The conference is a showcase of electronics and software companies that call Canterbury home. A quick walk through the exhibition area reveals a tremendous degree of engineering talent, if not also entrepreneurial prowess. I visited with a number of companies that have developed world-class applications – but they are hard pressed to explain them.
A case in point: Visual Footprints. The company had developed intelligent video surveillance system that combines sensor technology to detect security events with license plate detection. Designed to detect and prevent “drive offs” at the gasoline pumps, the software most certainly has applications in traffic management, homeland security, border control, among others. The market for this application ranges far from the shores of New Zealand, and with luck the engineers who have developed this technology will get the good help they need to find these opportunities.
This engineering, rather than entrepreneuring, mentality isn’t unique to New Zealand by any measure, but it creates a particularly difficult situation in a country where startup technology ventures have little choice but to address global markets.
The good news seems to be that both private and public initiatives are in place and most surely will pay off in the long run.
One such initiative is “Bright Sparks,” a program that teaches school children best practices in engineering and entrepreneurship. Bright Sparks celebrated their annual awards on Friday, September 30, with a showcase of some phenomenal young talent.
Among these was an energetic and intelligent young woman, Allison Blanchard, who had invented an interactive learning toy to encourage hand-eye coordination in developmentally disabled children. The project brief, Allison told me, was to create a developmental toy, and it was she who determined, after initial market research, that the unaddressed market was physically disadvantaged children. The 16-year old visited a local hospital to observe her target market. She developed and tested prototypes with a young boy with Cerebral Palsy. This direct customer interaction drove changes to both the physical design and the feedback functions in the electronics.
The result is an elegant toy that most certainly has commercial implications.
When I asked Allison whether she intended to market the product, she smiled and shrugged. This was a school project, she said. She really loves accounting and hopes to pursue that career. Let’s hope that at the very least, she applies her bookkeeping skills to an early stage venture; she’s as sophisticated a market-driven project developer as I’ve seen in some people twice her age.
Posted by Chris Shipley at 06:47 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Virtual Trust
Business notice: I have officially formed a company, Still River Research, to deliver consulting and analysis services. The website (www.stillriverresearch.com) is now out of beta after generous suggestions from several newsletter readers. I am now booking projects for the fall; please notify me if I can be of service.
Security stories currently dominate much of the news. Between London, the Patriot Act, data thefts and losses, and renewed efforts to mandate identity cards for immigrants, it's difficult to help but feel that the world is a scary, dangerous place. My focus here, however, is on a near neighbor to security: trust, and how it can be both reinforced and undermined in new ways via digital networks.
It doesn't take long to see how various online efforts attempt to prove their trustworthiness:
- eBay relies on collated word-of-mouth to label bad apples and reassure good citizens. The company's institutionalized reputational currency ("view my 100% positive feedback!") is not patentable yet constitutes an enormous barrier to competitive entry.
- Some social network and dating sites use acquaintances as proxies: "you don't know me, but you know Mike, and Mike knows me, so I'm probably OK." As the Spokes and Friendsters of the world have discovered, trying to scale friend-of-a-friend trust is neither obvious nor cheap. When was the last time you used one of these services and could honestly say it was overwhelmingly positive?
- Other dating sites rely on the objective authority of social science. At eHarmony, potential daters are greeted by "relationship expert" Dr. Neil Clark Warren, who has built a "detailed questionnaire measur[ing] the intricate facets of a person, including the 29 dimensions that are most important in relationship success." Not only that, an American Psychological Association conference included a paper that suggests that eHarmony marriages are happier than marriages built on other matchmaking techniques.
- Some entities have had a difficult time recreating the trust they built offline in new media. According to Lawrence Baxter, chief e-commerce officer at Wachovia quoted in the July 21 Boston Globe, the bank can no longer use e-mail to communicate with customers because phishing attacks so skillfully recreate the look and feel of official correspondence that customers routinely delete real messages. Cost structures used in the online bank's business case, meanwhile, almost certainly are rendered obsolete by the need to revert to physical mail.
- Amidst all of the 10-year celebrations of e-commerce sites eBay, Amazon, c|net), some longtime readers may recall our discussion of Encyclopedia Britannica, which was nearly wiped off the map after over 225 years of operation. The company still exists, still publishes multi-volume hard-copy products, and recently announced it had re-formed and upgraded its panel of experts. That body, once home primarily to white males, now includes four Nobel laureates, two Pulitzer Prize winners, and a much more representative cultural makeup. Significantly, the last meeting of the board was ten years ago.
Several conclusions emerge:
1) Trust pays: eHarmony says they get 10,000-15,000 new members a day, each of whom has spent between $50 and $250.
2) Trust is expensive to build. As I searched for a new cell phone, Staples referred me to an outside vendor, but the vendor's site retains a Staples logo at the top, with the reminder that Staples will stand behind any transactions. The vendor's own site, with no such guarantee, sells the exact same service plan and phone for $50 less. Given the failure rate and overall dissatisfaction with U.S. wireless carriers, that $50 insurance looks very appealing.
3) There's a fallacy that identification can routinize trust: TSA screenings assume that someone with a driver's license that matches her face won't try to do anything bad to the aircraft. Conversely, someone who doesn't provide ID is kept off the plane: former Sun Microsystems employee John Gilmore is in federal court challenging the unwritten and/or secret law (nobody has yet produced it) that states that an "internal passport," as he calls it, is a condition for public transportation. (Here's the Gilmore site: http://www.papersplease.org/gilmore/index.html)
4) The Britannica case, in its contrast with Wikipedia, highlights a particular dynamic on the Net, that of open vs. closed credibility, or trust if you will. Much as "many eyes make bugs shallow," as Eric Raymond argued in The Cathedral and the Bazaar in reference to open-source software, Wikipedia establishes trust in the volume of researcher-reader-editors who will spot and fix errors. Unlike the Staples model, money is less effective than reputational currency - the same stock of "funds" that makes eBay work.
Britannica, on the other hand, seeks the credibility of the few: the Encyclopedia's editor stated that, "At a time when vast quantities of questionable information are available on the Internet and elsewhere, rigorous and reliable reference works are more important than ever." They are, but Britannica has a lot to answer for: the BBC reported that a 12-year old boy in London found five errors in two entries. Add to the errors the cost to fix paper editions, and the lag between error detection and correction - how many readers will propagate errors in the interval?
5) In the physical world, institutions can convey cues that reassure patrons of their solidity and presumably good intentions: marble pillars on a bank, brightly lit colorful plastic in a strip mall, even flight attendants' and pilots' uniforms. Online, Wells Fargo, Target, or Delta can't convey the same kind of authority in pixels, so the task becomes twofold: connecting to the existing credibility through branding, and capturing various kinds of word of mouth.
In the coming months, several trust stories will bear watching:
- Pharmaceutical companies, particularly in the COX-2 (Vioxx) neighborhood, have suffered major reputational damage, much of it related to online behavior, and the legal proceedings will be only one element of a fight to regain public trust.
- The 2008 presidential race will begin heating up, particularly the early-stage fundraising. Watch for the lessons various candidates learned from the Howard Dean experience.
- After the golden age of the CEO as hero, the past few years have reversed the public perception of business leaders. Huge severance packages following poor shareholder results, lawsuits, guilty verdicts, and general tarnish on the aura make for a tough time to be a leader. Will Mark Hurd fare better at HP than did Carly Fiorina? Can Ford and GM rise to the challenge of viability and profitability? Will Boeing build a lead on Airbus? In each case, much will hinge on how much trust the leader can generate in his or her own company, the market, and the financial community. So far, by the way, it appears that Hurd understands the power of e-mail better than Harry Stonecipher at Boeing, who apparently let it become his undoing.
--John Jordan
Founder, Still River Research
Posted by John Jordan at 07:24 AM | TrackBack
Let’s go orienteering!
Last week I spent three fascinating days in Zaragoza, Spain at Guidewire’s Innovate!Europe 2005, where I learned a ton about what works and what doesn’t for tech start-ups across the European markets. Mårten Mickos’ talk was a terrific distillation of the cultural drivers that help and hurt innovation in embryo. The event was a fiesta of opportunities to observe cultural drivers - a big part of orienteering.
To crib from thesaurus.com, to “orient” means to:
· Familiarize, adapt, locate
· Inform, advise, edify, enlighten, initiate, instruct, prepare
· Affect, apply, connect, refer, unite
· Or, if one is of a sinister mind: distort, angle, bias, influence, point, twist, warp
In my first Guidewire post I talked about how important it is for companies to understand their blogosphere (in my opinion everybody’s blogosphere is a bit different). While I was in Europe, I stopped by Burson’s offices in Paris and Madrid to share what I’ve distilled about corporations and blogging over the last year or so.
My standard advice these days is for companies to take the blogosphere in three steps – evaluate, participate, and create. Some companies should never do more than simply evaluate and monitor their blogosphere. Some may choose to participate via existing blogs, and still fewer may choose to create their own blogs. Many corporations have it backwards though - they want to jump in to creating first. This can backfire; some prominent companies have jumped into the deep end headfirst and suffered for it.
Evaluation – the essential step every corporation must take - is all about orienteering. Companies need to familiarize themselves with their blogosphere. They need to adapt themselves to using an RSS reader and checking it as often as they check their other news sources. They need to locate the key bloggers. They need to map their blogosphere or hire a company, like us or one of several others, to do it for them!
Once they establish the basic lay of the land, companies can be informed, edified, enlightened and instructed by what they find, and in turn they can instruct their peers inside the organization about what they find and where they find it. A great example of this is Andrew Carton, creator of treonauts.com, who I met at Innovate! last week. His site is an invaluable resource not just for Palm, but for anyone who makes or wants to make handhelds.
If the company is shrewd, they will then apply what they learn and see. What they learn from their blogosphere can affect every aspect of their interactions with the public – customer service, sales, public relations, etc. If they’re really shrewd, they’ll establish valuable connections with bloggers as well.
Corporations who have been foolish enough to try to bias, influence or twist have – at least so far - failed, thank heavens.
While there aren’t well-defined maps that companies can easily pick up and apply to the blogosphere, the time and effort to truly orienteer within it is vital. Those who make the effort will find resources for their own businesses that will be truly enlightening.
Posted by Lisa Poulson at 08:41 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Who Are the Masses? What Do They Want To Hear?
Every day the impact of blogs on corporate communications and corporate reputation becomes clearer. Fortune’s cover in January and BusinessWeek’s cover this week aren’t about the fact that blogs exist; they’re about the impact of blogs on corporate reputation about a paradigm shift that we’re only beginning to understand.
Why are blogs so powerful? Because real people write them and real people read them. As BusinessWeek says in their tips, “PR Truly Means Public Relations.” It means talking to the public, not in a Norma Desmond, “I’m ready for my close up” way, to be sure, but in a way that each corporation must define.
Talking to regular people means saying things that regular people want to hear. This, unfortunately, is a challenge for those of us in the technology business. (If you disagree just think about leveraging paradigmatic shifts to achieve platform independence blah blah blah. . . )
“Disciplined” may not be the first word that comes to mind when you think about a politician, but people in this business know that, in order to succeed in communicating with voters, the message must be very simple, and must be said over and over and over again. This is pure torture for technologists. No matter how in love our CEO, CTO, product manager or even head of sales is with an idea, some other idea comes along and it’s “Hey look, there’s something shiny over there.” And the message is lost.
We have to learn how to tell a story that regular people will understand. And to tell it enough times that it makes sense. Why? Because everyone (consumers, voters, your parents) now knows who we are and where we live –we’re the ones who lost so much of their money back in 2001 and they use all of the stuff we make much more than they did ten years ago. So they’re watching us – and having feelings and opinions about what we do. And many of them are connecting to each other online and sharing those feelings and opinions. (See above.)
In the new world of true “public” relations, only the multilingual will survive. We have to talk to all of our audiences – business partners, regulators, shareholders, end users, CIOs, with the same message and the same story – but translated in a way that they’ll understand.
When I worked at Sun we were lucky enough to have a former USA Today reporter on our staff (here’s a shout out to Mary Smaragdis!). Mary edited every single press release about the Java technology according to USA Today’s rules. No acronyms, no industry buzz words, no technology described in a way that someone’s grandmother wouldn’t understand. This worked. The truth is, just because we understand our own messages doesn’t mean they’re good.
And while we’re at it, let’s cut out the inside baseball. Well, not all of it because it’s fun, but let’s change the ratio. I love a good architecture war as much as the next person, but let’s realize what the rhetoric is, understand its function in our business, and put it in its proper place.
Let’s not try our audiences’ patience so much anymore. If we don’t, we’ll pay for it eventually. Much of what we say and do is incomprehensible to our newly empowered constituents, and we often don’t pay attention to or understand how they perceive our way of doing business. It seems that most Valley leaders didn’t think for a moment that Enron’s egregious abuse of stock options would ever come home to roost here. That was an avoidable mess if there ever was one.
Finally, as I say to every person I media train, “Your audiences do not find you, your company, your products nearly as interesting as you find yourself, your company, your products.” If we can keep this essential truth in mind as we figure out how to describe what matters to us to the people who matter to us, we’ll make a lot of progress!
--Lisa Poulson
Managing Director, Technology Practice
Burson-Marsteller San Francisco
Lisa Poulson is a member of the Guidewire Group Sounding Board.
Posted by Lisa Poulson at 10:40 AM | TrackBack
The DEMO@15! Opening Remarks
Welcome to DEMO@15! Fifteen years! It’s almost hard to believe. . .
In that time, we’ve produced twenty DEMO and DEMOmobile Conferences. In fact, this is the21st DEMO event in 15 years. Over the years, nearly fifteen hundred products have been introduced on the DEMO Stage.
DEMO has tremendous reach, and tremendous staying power –through good economic times and terrible ones – because of the great community that has grown up around this event. DEMO really is about the people, and, of course, it is about the products -- products that become the lens through which we get a better glimpse into the trends and ideas that will shape the technology market in the coming months.
Long before these 73 companies came together in the DEMO Class of 2005, the DEMO marketing team was talking about “technology in Bloom.” That idea became the central theme of the marketing. And I have to confess that while I liked the artwork, the colors, and the design, I really didn’t pay close attention to the campaign. I was busy narrowing a field of some 450 companies to 160 finalist, and then down to the 73 that are at DEMO@15!
I’ve often said that in planning DEMO, I don’t begin with an concept of the market and find products to fit it. Rather, I find the best companies and suss out the market trends those products reveal and amplify.
So there is some serendipity in the fact that the 73 products and companies -- in the longer context of the past 15 years – speak to this idea of “technology in bloom.” You see, if there is a unifying idea among these extremely diverse products, it is that of fruition and growth. Whether in the consumer segment or the enterprise market, these products speak to fulfillment of long-held promises.
Think back to the very first DEMO in 1991. Howard Elias, one of our innovator award winners – introduced the very first integrated multimedia PC. Two vendors were showing the PC as a platform for television. These were the harbingers of the digital media revolution. Fifteen years later, a half-dozen companies are here demonstrating that digital media is a powerful, everyday reality.
DEMO 94 was host to a shootout between Novell and Lotus over the desktop application that was then called Groupware. Today, collaboration is simple and accessible, and a part of dozens of applications, from collaborative blogs and wikis to business instant messaging.
Throughout the mid 90s, DEMO attendees saw the first digital cameras and photo editing software. Among our most memorable onstage demos was Kai Kraus’s demo of the photo morphing software called Soap. Now, digital cameras are everywhere, including our mobile phones, and we have companies here who are continue to push the bounds of digital photography.
In 1996, DEMO showed early work in Voice over IP. At DEMO, you’ll see companies that have embraced VoIP. They have tackled the hard problems of messaging and are bringing new sanity to business and consumer telephony.
At DEMO 97, a little company called Hot Office introduced what was arguably the first ASP software. A few attendees that year thought accessing server based software through a browser was a ridiculous idea. A few years later, we struggled to define .NET and Web services and to show meaningful examples of these then-new ideas at work. This week, service-based software is almost a given and Web services are opening new opportunities for businesses of all sizes, but especially smaller enterprises. Delivering enterprise-class functionality at small business prices is leveling the playing field of business in a manner that could profoundly affect how work is organized in the years ahead.
At DEMOmobile 99, Atheros unveiled its WiFi chipset. Two companies at DEMO are advancing the state of the art in WiFi connectivity. As importantly, the ubiquity of WiFi is having a profound affect on the consumer technology experience. Supported by this wireless networking technology and others, long-envisioned ideas around the complex problem of home monitoring and control are a simple reality, ready to implement now.
These are just a few of many examples where the seeds of technologies, planted across the years, that are coming to fruition in the products and services being launched here this week.
But make no mistake: these are not merely iterative products built on old ideas. Certainly, they are evidence that the personal technology market has reached a level of maturity and stability. Yet each of these products is innovative in its own right: innovative in creation of new technology, in the combining of components, in their approach to problems, and in the business models that take them to customers. The 73 products at DEMO this week are here because they move the market forward.
In fact, growth is clearly a theme in these products: The growth and maturity of the consumer market; a return to growth in the business market. Now to be clear: I’m not talking about hot-house growth spurred by artificial light and potent fertilizer – the conditions that allows for a spurt of energy without deep roots.
We are moving into a period of sustained growth because the tough soil and harsh conditions of the past four years have made today’s technology companies stronger. It is interesting to note that nearly half of the companies at DEMO this year – 32 to be precise -- are self- or angel-funded. These are companies that have accomplished the hard task of bringing products to market on the grit, passion and determination that they can create real change.
But no matter the size or funding, all of these companies know the challenges of innovating in a tough market and each has pushed through, developing great ideas, fueling new concepts, and creating real and sustainable value for their customers and themselves. These companies and these products are well-rooted for future success.
And these companies will play a role in the market growth that cuts across technology sectors – business and consumer. You’ve heard me talk before about the blending of work and personal lives. That line continues to blur, at least when it comes to technology. Today, business and consumer technology markets are tightly integrated.
Thre are so many entry points in the market that lead to the purchase of even more productivity enhancing, life-style enhancing products. And you know how quickly one purchase can lead to another, how products justified as a work expense are used as well for your personal enjoyment.
There are, simply put, great things to buy and they are offered in programs and packages and at prices that make them attractive to business and individual consumers. And they are coming to market at a time when consumers and IT Buyers are coming back to the table.
Indeed, I have said about this particular demonstrating class that it may well be the most expensive DEMO I have produced – expensive because there are a lot of products in this class that I simply have to have.
I invite you to visit the DEMO@15! Web site to learn more about these products.
Posted by Chris Shipley at 09:10 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack