Lubor On Tech

Why Has The Internet Failed Us Here?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Thu, 31 May 2012 03:19:00 +0000

Back in the 90s, we were promised that the Internet would change everything. It did. Many articles have been written about what our children will never encounter because of the Internet: CD players, copiers, modems, diskettes, plane tickets, encyclopedias, classified ads etc. Yet there are things that should have been made obsolete by now and they are not. Here is where the Internet has failed us:

Checks
In North America, checks (or cheques) are still used everywhere. To pay bills, to pay in a store, or to pay money to a friend. While most banks allow online payments, there are still plenty of utility companies, county tax collectors, and newspapers that only accept checks. And while we all think that European banking is about to go back to the Neanderthal era any day now, most Europeans have not written a check in a decade as online payments and even mobile payments are quite common.

Back in my German days in the 90s, when you needed to send me money, I’d give you my account number and the bank routing number and you’d just do it online via a free instant transfer. That was possible long before the Web by using services such as the French Minitel or the German BTX. Don’t believe that the expensive wire transfers that require a 2 page form with a $35 fee are the same thing. They might be when the Buffetts transfer money to the Gates but most American bank customers have never used a wire transfer. They write checks. Frankly, I am shocked that the banks have left the door wide open for services such as Paypal and Square.

Signatures
“We need the signed original mailed back to us...” - how many more times will I hear this request? Signatures are still required for many transactions, including many credit card purchases. As if the “wet” signature made the transaction somehow magically secure.

While a fax is generally regarded as a legally binding transaction, sending the same signed document via email is usually not acceptable. Why a fax is more legal than an email attachment, I don’t understand. Why a wet signature is considered more secure than any form of electronic authentication is completely beyond me. Any transaction conducted online should be faster, more secure and convenient and yet the Internet has failed to eradicate the paper-based, wet signature dependant transactions used today.

Car dealers
I get it why we need a showroom where I can test drive a car I want to check out. I also know why we - unfortunately - still need a car service center (to replace the tail light bulbs once every 4 years, right?). But why do I need to negotiate with a car salesman who knows that I know the exact invoice price of the car? And please, don’t try that “I have to talk to my manager” routine on me. I want to select, configure and buy my car online and have it delivered to my house. Delivering a washing machine costs $50 which covers the removal of the old one. The $500 you are charging for a vehicle delivery should easily cover your parking the car in my garage and registering it on the way.

Cable TV
Cable and satellite based TV entertainment with preset programming uses a completely obsolete model in the era of on-demand entertainment. Yet, they continue to exist, making viewers pay twice - once for a monthly subscription fee and then again through endlessly annoying commercials. This has to change and I am confident it will. Entertainment delivered on-demand over the Internet is becoming a more and more viable alternative and the ranks of cordcutters are on the rise. Yet still, I would have expected cable to be dead for at least 5 years by now.

Realtors
Buying a house is a ridiculous experience. Pages and pages of meaningless reports, statements and disclosures complemented by mysterious fees for pro-forma inspections and mysterious services like ‘title insurance’. The realtors get up to 6% for ...what exactly? Driving me around to a bunch of lame houses only to make sure I have no choice but to put an offer in for the most expensive one? In the age of Google Earth, Zillow, and Craigslist, who needs a realtor? Both, the seller and the buyer would be better off closing the transaction directly with the title company still acting as the secure clearing house. Yes, the Internet has failed us here.

Borders
The Internet was expected to obliterate country borders. After all, I can access any web site in the world from my iPhone, right? Well, sort of. Web sites providing entertainment content from NBC to Netflix and from Pandora to Amazon are restricting the access to their content from abroad. Even when I pay for a monthly subscription, I am precluded from accessing the content as soon as I cross the border. These are artificial frontiers that have been set up to enforce the country-based content distribution rights - a rather obsolete concept in the age of the Internet. As a frequent traveler, the Internet has failed me big time on this one.

Smart appliances
The smart refrigerator that would automatically re-order milk when I’m running low might indeed not be that useful. But smart appliances would make a lot of sense and yet they are nowhere. Part of the reason why Apple killed off the entire industry of home entertainment devices is the fact that all those amplifiers, decks, equalizers, and tuners were pretty dumb - the manufacturers never considered connecting them to the Internet. How about remotely setting my thermostat to warm up the place before I arrive at home? Makes sense, doesn’t it? I cannot fathom why Honeywell and GE have not thought of that. Today, there are rumors about the perhaps-soon-to-be-announced Apple TV. If it comes, you can bet that it will be a smart, Internet appliance that will change the way we watch TV.

These are a few examples of everyday items and activities that I would have expected to be completely changed by the Internet by now. Yet it didn’t happen so far - the Internet has failed us here. There are probably many more examples you can think of - please do share them in the comments below.

Does Windows Phone Stand A Chance?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Mon, 21 May 2012 03:59:00 +0000

I must say, I am pretty impressed by the Windows Phone operating system. Unlike the Google Android which is, let’s face it, a poor copy of the the Apple iOS, Microsoft created a truly original user experience. The notion of having the same OS that spans the desktop, laptop, tablet, and the smartphone is a very compelling idea. Even Apple didn’t quite make that happen as their Mac OS is still distinct from iOS.

I have also been impressed by some of the strategic moves Microsoft has been making with their Windows Phone. The partnership with Nokia is a strong endorsement - no matter how long and painful Nokia’s recovery might be. Microsoft also recruited many other vendors including Samsung, LG, HTC, Dell, and others.

Since Google acquired Motorola, there is more and more doubt about Google’s innocence when it gets down to the openness of the Android operating system. That fact alone makes the Windows Phone operating system a rather compelling alternative for the hardware vendors. While none of them have publicly switched their allegiances yet, I’m sure they all are talking to Microsoft.

Also, the recently announced deal with Barnes & Noble and their Nook ebook reader could be a major coup for Microsoft. Sure, Nook runs on Android today but I would bet many chips that the next release will run the Windows Phone OS. Not a bad move for Microsoft if you ask me!

With all of these strategic moves going in Microsoft’s favor, it is surprising that the Windows Phone market share continues sliding down. According to the latest ComScore market share report, Windows Phone has merely 3.9% of the US market - compared with 4.7% three months ago. The trend has been heading south over the last 18 months and frankly, any player in the single digits is questionable...

So what should Microsoft do to reverse this trend? Well, releasing a truly differentiated and innovative operating system is a good start. Windows 8 with all its bells and whistles and particularly with the Metro-style user interface is very promising. The Metro-style apps that Microsoft is going to release next look awesome. But one thing is still missing...

A mobile operating system is supposed to be a platform. And a platform requires applications. This is where Microsoft is not doing so well. When I try to find my favorite iPhone apps on the Windows Phone, I am striking out more often than not. Yet Microsoft understands how to cater to developers. Their tools and developer programs are second to none in the software industry. But there is more to that.

Microsoft should be actively recruiting developers to port their apps to Windows Phone. That is not a slam dunk for most developers as Windows Phone is currently their number 4 platform of choice after Apple, Google and RIM. Yeah sure, RIM has some problems but the BlackBerry OS still has more than double the market share than Windows Phone. Today, building an app for Windows OS is a major gamble with uncertain payoff.

This is where Microsoft could and should use its market power. Instead of billboards, Microsoft could be paying a few thousand dollars to the developers of the key apps to port their apps to Windows Phone. Microsoft should just go aggressively after all these developers and entice them to make it happen.

Particularly in the enterprise market , Microsoft should aggresively solicit the vendors’ support. Right now, Windows Phone OS is the number 4 priority on the list for any enterprise software vendor - after Apple, Google, and RIM. Number 4 rarely makes it into a released product. Everybody’s budget is tight and the money is barely enough for priorities 1 and 2...

Developing apps for a platform that has 3.9% market share with a declining trend is a tough business case to make. This is the top problem Microsoft has to focus on to make Windows Phone a success and without addressing this issue, the platform will likely fail.

Content Analytics - Crossing the Chasm?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Mon, 07 May 2012 02:48:00 +0000

The overabundance of information is one of the greatest challenges today. Things have sure changed a bit since the days of the 90s when Microsoft used to promise us a PC on every desk and information at our fingertips. Today, we have plenty of information at our fingertips. In fact, we have so much information coming at us from all sides that making sense of it became one of the key information management challenges.

That’s where information analytics come in with all their applications such as semantics and auto-classification. Simply put, these technologies are analyzing the actual content of information, deriving insights, meanings, and understanding. It is done by applying powerful algorithms that analyse the content and complete complex tasks such as concept and entity extraction, similarities, trend identification, and sentiment analysis.

Therein lies the problem with the technology. The greater the volume of information, the more content analytics are useful - if the volume is small, humans can do it themselves. But to apply analytics on a large volume of information, one needs a significant computing power.

That’s the reason why the actual use of analytics was confined to very few scenarios where money was not an issue. The US intelligence agencies used supercomputers with analytics to weed through millions of intercepted messages from suspected terrorists. Similarly, IBM’s Watson, the Jeopardy winning machine, was a supercomputer. It was fed with encyclopedic knowledge and optimized for a single task: winning Jeopardy. Even though content analytics have been around for well over a decade, most organizations simply could not afford the computing power required.

That may be changing now, thanks to a couple of market shifts. First, Moore’s Law is helping - computing power is becoming more and more affordable and the algorithms are becoming more powerful and efficient.

The other improvement comes from our understanding of what the technology is expected to accomplish. The early requirements for analytics and classification asked for ultra-accuracy. One of the key objections used to be the lack of dependability on automatic classification - if it isn't 100% accurate, it is no good. But today, we understand that the alternative is not perfect by any stretch. The alternative is to rely on humans who are actually pretty pathetic at analyzing and classifying content. In fact, humans are notoriously poor and inconsistent at the job. Getting to 60% accuracy is a typical result of human classification.

That means that a technology that can get us to 80% or even 90% of accuracy is actually much more accurate than any humans and this kind of approach doesn’t require as much computing power as the attempt to reach 99.9% accuracy.

For example, one of the common applications for analytics is legal discovery - the need to quickly produce any electronic evidence requested by a court subpoena. Here the goal today is to produce all the relevant documents and emails with a defensible level of accuracy. Of course we don’t want to pay the expensive lawyers for manual review of thousands of documents. They are paid by the hour - and paid rather well. But we also don’t want to stand accused of failing to produce an important piece of evidence. Until recently, the fear was that unless we can prove that we have electronically discovered all the pertaining documents, the approach would not be defensible in a court of law. And only humans (ehm, lawyers) can guarantee such accuracy - for a hefty fee...

Today, that has changed. The courts increasingly understand the futility of aiming for 100% accuracy and instead accept statistical sampling as a way to confirm accuracy at a reasonable level. After all, both both opposing parties - the plaintiff and the defendant - are in the same boat when it comes down to reviewing a mountain of electronic evidence. That means that the lawyers no longer have to review every document. Instead, statistical evidence of accuracy is considered defensible.

As a result, auto-classification no longer has to aim for 100% accuracy. Instead, a more reasonable level of accuracy backed by statistical sampling has become acceptable - because it is still much better than what humans could ever do manually. And cheaper, of course. That makes analytics much more effective and affordable. With that, analytics are no longer confined to the world of super-computers and finding real-world use cases. Analytics may indeed have crossed the chasm.

An OpenText History Lesson

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:56:00 +0000

We had an interesting event at OpenText on Friday. It was the celebration of OpenText’s 20 year anniversary combined with the official unveiling of our new building. All kinds of important folks showed up - from the early founders and key managers to local, provincial and even federal politicians. The part that I enjoyed most was the panel discussion with the founders when they reminded us about the early milestones of the company.

Not many people know today that OpenText got started as a search company. The origins go back to a University of Waterloo research project led by Professor Frank Tompa - yes, as in 275 Frank Tompa Drive which is the company’s address in Waterloo today. The students under Prof. Tompa developed software to digitize the Oxford English Dictionary which led to the development of one of the first search technologies. Since the team recognized early on the commercial application of this technology, a new company was incorporated in 1991, named OpenText.

Profesor Frank Tompa, OpenText founder, and myself, 2012

The founders of OpenText included Prof. Tompa, who’s still a professor at UW, Tim Bray, the co-author of the XML spec, and Gaston Gonnet who is today a professor at the ETH University in Switzerland. The team came up early on with the breakthrough idea to separate the search index from the content, which they referred to as “text” back then because, well, it was all about text in the pre-Web era. That allowed them to keep the index open to any type of “text” and - voila - that’s how the name “OpenText” came up. The decision to separate the index from the content is something we take for granted today but back then, it was groundbreaking.
Being able to index any content in any repository paved the path towards the then nascent document management systems. It was not a surprise, that OpenText soon got its own document management system by acquiring Odesta with its flagship product Livelink. At the same time, OpenText made a decisive move to the Web and built a Web crawler that enabled indexing HTML pages on the World Wide Web. One of the milestones became a deal when the red-hot startup Yahoo! licensed the OpenText search engine.

Tom Jenkins & Jerry Yang, 1995

Eventually, OpenText had to decide between the consumer-oriented Web and the enterprise, and chose to pursue the enterprise. Many new products and acquisitions followed but the search engine is still at the heart of most OpenText products including the Content Server which is the modern-day-incarnation of Livelink. The rest is history and OpenText is a billion dollar company today.

It was great to hear this story from some of the original founders, such as Prof. Tompa, Saman Far who was employee number 4 and Daniel Cheifetz, the founder of Odesta. As Tom Jenkins likes to say, knowing the history helps to understand the vendor’s strengths and weaknesses. Tom would know - he’s the OpenText chairman and Chief Strategy Officer and he’s been with the company from the very early days.

The Millennials' Challenge

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 03:03:00 +0000

I have been asked to speak at the Canada 3.0 Conference in Stratford, Ontario next week. Canada 3.0 is a unique type of conference that annually brings together participants from industry, government, and academia to discuss the country’s digital future.

My panel at the conference will be focused on the topic of millennials which is a topic that I am very interested in. The generally accepted way of thinking about the millennials is that they are about to join the workforce with their freshly minted college degrees and that they will take over the world with their digital hipness.

Indeed, the millennials have a lot going for them. They have been born and raised surrounded by all the digital technology. They have no fear of technology and they have a new way to handle information - in fact, often an implicit entitlement to information. They have discovered new ways of collaborating and communicating with each other. They don't use email anymore, relying on Facebook and SMS to communicate instead. And, what’s most important:

They will not put up with your old ways of doing business!

Especially, they will not put up with the old clunky applications your business forces them to use. They would rather go work somewhere else!

This could be very concerning for many organizations who are faced with an aging workforce and who are struggling to attract young talent. Just think about the government, for example. Such organizations need to seriously think about how to make their work environment more attractive for the millennials. Such considerations must include the productivity tools - from BYOD (bring your own device) to social media and gamification, the millennials will want it all!

At the same time, the world of business is not all about Facebook, Twitter and SMS. In the enterprise, some serious concerns will always exist about data security, intellectual property protection, regulatory compliance, and legal risk and liability. The existing IT infrastructure has been put in place to address these requirements. So, if you [young] people want a job here, forget about Facebook and get in line! After all, your generation of young university graduates is facing the greatest unemployment rate today...

As you can see, this can easily become a pretty emotional debate. That usually makes for an interesting panel discussion. That’s why I look forward to my Canada 3.0 session. It’s titled “The millennials’ role in the consumerization of IT”. I hope to see you there!

Mobile Security Conundrum

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 02:12:00 +0000

Typing a password on your mobile device can be a pain. The keyboard is tiny and the password gets in the way of convenience and productivity which are the reasons to use a smartphone in the first place. Chances are you only have a short password that consists of 4 or 5 characters. Your password is probably a string of easy to type numbers like “1-2-3-4” or a simple word. Strong passwords consisting of a combination of lowercase and uppercase letters, numbers, special characters and at least 8-10 characters in length are not very useful on a mobile device.

The problem is that mobile devices are easy to lose and when they fall into the wrong hands, the simple passwords are just too easy to hack. On top of that, it is quite likely that many of your important files have been copied onto your device via synchronization.

With device-to-device data synchronization via cloud based synchronization tools ranging from the consumer-oriented ones like Dropbox to the enterprise-focused OpenText Tempo, security is becoming increasingly a concern. For a minute, let’s not worry about the security of the actual repository and the private cloud vs public cloud debate. Let’s talk about the security of the data stored on the device.

The synchronization ensures that there is a current copy of your files on each mobile device which is tremendously convenient, especially if you are switching between devices throughout the day like I do - iPhone, iPad, work PC and home iMac. But the convenience comes at a price - you have to trust that each device is secure and the security starts with a good password. But good, strong passwords are just too impractical on a mobile device and most users don’t use them.

How do we solve this conundrum?

Well, there's not much you can do in the short term other than educating the users or perhaps imposing draconian password rules if the device connects to your corporate network. The draconian approach may work but it will likely result in undesired behavior - the users will find ways around your network security.

In the long term, the device manufacturers will need to step up. The devices will need to be secured via a typing-free authentication method. One such method involved biometrics. Fingerprint scanner, face recognition or retina scan could solve the problem. Some of us frequent travelers have signed up for easy border crossing services such as Nexus or GlobalEntry which use the retina scan technology. It works! In fact, these technologies are available for our smartphones today, albeit they are not quite the mainstream yet. Scanning is still relatively slow if I want to make a quick phone call but probably faster and easier than typing a strong password. And much more secure!

Voice print based passwords are another possibility. Combining the pass phrase with the color and intonation of your voice is faster and more convenient than typing on a small screen. But the ambient noise might represent a challenge. Besides, I don’t want to sit on a plane next to someone repeating his password once every five minutes...

Another possibility is the use of NFC technology (near field communication) which uses an RFID chip. This chip could be carried on the user’s body in the form of an ID card, bracelet or ring (remember Scott McNealy’s Java ring from the 1998 JavaOne conference?). Such loosely attached chips could still be lost or stolen but even with that risk, the security might be stronger than a “1-2-3-4” password. The chip could be also implanted into the person’s body which would make things much more secure and much more convenient. Imagine if your device could verify your identity several times per minute without ever interrupting your work!

OK, OK, I can hear your screams about Big Brother and the government’s invasion into your privacy. But what privacy? If you move around a city, your image is captured on hundreds of security cameras. To get a driver’s license or a passport, you’ve surrendered your picture and fingerprints. Consciously or unconsciously, you pass through multiple security checkpoints every day - from transportation security, public building entrances, hotel check-ins to in-store purchases. Oh, and your mobile phone includes a GPS chip that can be tracked by law enforcement even if the phone is switched off.

Alright, implanted RFID chips may be still a bit of a stretch. But somehow, we will need to solve the conundrum with strong security on mobile devices...

The Social Divide

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Wed, 04 Apr 2012 02:23:00 +0000

We live in a new world today. We are hanging out on Facebook, sharing our wisdom on Twitter, posting links on Google+ and building our professional networks on LinkedIn. The new world of social communities is great - it allows us to keep in touch with our friends and network with people who share our interests. We can hardly imagine the world before social media - it has become a part of our lives. Right?

Well, not so fast! I am again and again reminded that there are many of my friends, colleagues and acquaintances who don’t participate in any of this. They are not on Facebook, they don’t tweet, if they don’t work at Google, they are certainly not on Google+. If these folks happen to have an account on any of these networks, it usually doesn’t include a profile picture and no activity has been posted in well over a year. Social networks have clearly no appeal for this crowd.

This is not a generational issue. It is not a demographic issue - at least not by the traditional ways of defining demographics such as age, gender, race, or income. It is also not that these folks aren’t social. In fact, many of them are very sociable and have a strong network of contacts and friends.

I suspect that anyone who has not embraced social media yet is not likely going to do so anytime soon. They can’t be forced. For every rational argument pro social networking, they have a rational argument against it. They usually state security and privacy concerns, they say that it is all a waste of time or that it is all about self-promotion. But I suspect that they simply are not interested because it is not “their thing”. There are simply people out there who are choosing not to participate in social media.

Whatever it may be, we might be witnessing the emergence of a new social divide. It just may happen, that our future society will consist of a social media class and the anti-social media class. This is not the first time this happened. We have presumably left behind a few people in the past. When Gutenberg invented the press and popularized books, not everyone started reading them. In fact, literacy is an issue to this date. When email replaced letters, not everyone embraced this trend and there is a portion of the population keeping the postal service on life support today. The same thing might be happening to social media.

The next time we use sweeping generalizations about how the nature of work has changed due to social media and how social software revolutionized customer engagement, we should remember that there is a group of people choosing not to participate. Perhaps they will be forced to join in eventually. Or maybe, the social networks need to step it up and provide services compelling enough to attract these folks.

The Future of Content Management

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 27 Mar 2012 04:09:00 +0000

Last week, I had the privilege to participate in a panel at the new AIIM 2012 Conference in San Francisco. The conference was a smashing success for AIIM, selling out weeks in advance and attracting the who-is-who in the content management industry. My panel was titled the Future of Content Management and my fellow panelists were Roland Benedetti, VP of Products at Nuxeo and Robin Daniels, Head of Enterprise Product Marketing at Box who was standing in for Whitney Tidmarsh Bouck, the head of enterprise business at Box. The session was moderated by Laurence Hart, the CIO of AIIM and Cheryl McKinnon, AIIM’s CMO - both of whom were an essential element to the success of the session.

The goal of the session was to debate the future of Content Management and sure enough, all of the panelists had an opinion about SoLoMo and also cloud, big data and other trends. Prior to the conference, we stated our views in writing which Laurence has published on his blog. But while everyone kept talking about the of cloud, mobility, and user experience, the selection of panelists alone suggested that a different question was hanging in the air.

The panelists represented a traditional vendor (OpenText), a cloud vendor (Box) and an open source vendor (Nuxeo). The elephant in the room was not the technologies of the future but rather the business models.

As for the technologies, everyone agrees on the key trends. What’s important to mention though is that the given 3-5 year time frame for the future was relatively short. At OpenText, we have roadmaps and business plans that go at least 3 years out - we have a pretty good idea what capabilities we plan to deliver in our software. At the same time, anyone who tries to predict the future 5-10 years out and whose name is not Steve Jobs or Bill Gates is probably just making things up. After all, the smartphone didn’t exist 5 years ago, not to mention the iPad.

But back to the business models. The big question hanging in the air was what will the future bring in terms of a business model. Is every piece of software going to be replaced by the cloud? Will all software go open source? Are the on-premise (aka traditional) software vendors going to even exist a few year from now?

Well, my answer was very simple. I have met many enterprise customers and the one thing that I have learned is that almost no customer has ever managed to adopt a single stack or single vendor environment. The reality is that most enterprises have EVERYTHING. I’m not talking about the small or medium sized companies. I’m talking about enterprises with over $1 bln in revenue. They almost always have a mix of different environments, systems, architectures, and applications. It may be not the most efficient solution or the cleanest architecture, but it is the reality. Most enterprises have a lot of software in different stages of maturity and these past investments have to be leveraged.

My answer to the question which business model would prevail in the next 3-5 years was: all of them. Our customers have to find their place of comfort on the scale between all-in-the-cloud and all-on-premise. Most of them are already somewhere in between. Today, many companies in the US use ADP for their payroll which is a cloud-based offering. Many companies use cloud-based talent management or document sharing offerings today. But most enterprises have many on-premise applications today and they will have many 3-5 years from now. There will be a few extreme cases on each end of that scale but most enterprises will find their comfort zone somewhere in between.

As for open source vs. well, “closed source”, I think a similar scale exists. I have explained before that customers fall into different categories in their desire to customize and enhance on their own vs deploy out of the box solutions. There are other similar scales, by the way. For example, customers will find their comfort zone on the social media scale between conservative and controlling vs. open and engaging.

The bottom line is that the future is not going to be black or white. The last few decades dominated by the Wintel architecture were an anomaly. It is not likely that we will see such dominant monopoly ever again - and that was just the desktops. No doubts about it, more and more services will move into the cloud because it just makes sense. Some services will only become available through the cloud and rest assured that vendors like OpenText are busy innovating their offerings to take advantage of the cloud. But real customers will have plenty of on-premise software to deal with. In the future of content management, we will deal with customers who each have a very different mix of requirements and the successful vendors will be able to cater to them all.

Many thanks to Laurence and Cheryl for inviting me to participate on this panel. It has been a great fun and AIIM put on an awesome conference. I hope to be there again next year, on March 20-22 in New Orleans!

On Running, Technology, and Good Causes

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 04:38:00 +0000

I have recently become a runner - what started as a way to get back into shape after some injuries has now developed into a full-on midlife crisis. Since I am training to run the Ottawa Marathon and raising money for a charity along the way, I wanted to write something about the technology related to running.

Boxing Day 10Miler, Hamilton

First, there are the fancy shoes and clothes which have evolved dramatically in the last years. Yes, that stuff is pretty high-tech and expensive too. Basically, nobody runs in a t-shirt anymore - you need the latest and greatest dry-fit moisture whisk-away clothes and a pair of running shoes with extra support. That’s not to mention the fuel belts with high-tech nutrition from Gatorade to energy gels and recovery drinks.

But for us tech people, the gadgets are far more interesting. I run with a Garmin Forerunner 210 watch with a GPS receiver that also collects data from my foot chip and heart monitor. The foot pod measures my cadence, speed and distance when running indoors. Combined with the GPS based pace, speed, distance, elevation, and route and with the pulse data from my heart monitor, I am collecting more data on my watch than what Formula 1 cars were capable of just a few decades ago. Just check out the data from my recent race for the level of detail I get.

When training, I also run with my iPhone to listen to something that keeps my mind away from the miles. I usually listen to books from Audible.com which I like better than some peppy music, although that’s a matter of personal preference. I use wireless earphones that connect to the iPhone via a Bluetooth connection. I tried regular ear-buds for a while but the cable was always getting tangled.

The next level of technology is available online. From plentiful training advice, race registration, pace calculators, and training plans, the Web is full of useful info. But what I find particularly motivating is the mutual sharing of training data on social media. Most of the running software such as Endomondo, MapMyRun, NikePlus, and Garmin Connect not only display and analyze the data but also enable sharing it via Facebook and Twitter.

Seeing my Facebook friends post info about their training runs is very motivating - knowing that they will see my own results makes me run harder. I know that the frequent posts might annoy and sometimes even demoralize the non-runners but please forgive us. It’s not like we are tweeting what we’ve had for dinner... Mutual encouragement for sport enthusiasts is a great use of social media!

Finally, the technology managed to transform another aspect of running - fund-raising. Running and other amateur sports have long been connected to fund-raising efforts for various charities. Today, services such as Razoo or Kintera make it very easy to set up a fundraiser for one’s favorite charity and take care of all the payment processing. They even send the donors a receipt for their tax deduction.

I am now in the middle of my training program for the Ottawa Marathon on May 27th. For this occasion, I have set up a fundraiser for the American Heart Association and the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation (trying to accommodate either tax jurisdiction for the bulk of my friends). Please check it out and donate to support my cause. Your contribution goes to a great charitable organization that helps fight heart disease. Your donations are the greatest motivation for me as I am getting ready for the big race. And, the technology enthusiast in you will appreciate how technology transformed even this part of our life...

Donate online to Running with Heart at Razoo

Thank you!

The Need for Privacy

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 03:23:00 +0000

The marketing guru Seth Godin wrote a blog post recently in which he claimed that the notion of privacy is an illusion and that we don’t really have any privacy today. He’s argues that people don’t really care about privacy - the only thing they care about is being surprised.

I’ve been thinking about this post and it has been bugging me. Yes, I do agree that we have less privacy than we often realize. I know that my bank knows how much I earn, my credit card company knows my spending habits, my doctor knows my health status, my mobile phone company knows where I travel, Facebook knows all my friends [who are on Facebook], and Google knows pretty much everything I’m up to.

But that information is compartmentalized. My bank doesn’t know my spending habits. My mobile plan provider doesn’t know what I am searching for online and my insurance company doesn’t know my exact health status. It is important that it remains that way. The triangulation of information is the real danger. If my mortgage company gets access to my health records, that’s bad. If my mobile plan provider got access to my friends, that’s not cool.

I accept that my physician knows my health and I accept that my credit card company knows where I shop for clothes. I trust that they will treat my data with confidentiality because their survival as a business depends on that. Whether regulated by law or by market forces, every business has to treat its customers’ data with confidentiality. A doctor who doesn’t keep patients’ privacy confidential, breaks the law and won't be a doctor for much longer. A cell phone company that discloses whom I am calling without a court order breaks the law and has to be punished.

It is the triangulation of data that makes me really worried. When a harmless-looking iPhone app starts collecting info from other apps, that’s not a surprise as Seth Godin calls it. That’s a criminal activity. Just as if my doctor started sharing my medical records with my life insurance provider would be.

We do care about privacy. There is a different degree of privacy awareness among different demographics, likely depending on their culture, education, and other factors. Forrester Research recently published a global heat map on Privacy and Data Protection by Country which clearly shows that the US is below-par compared to many other countries - although still ahead of China and Nigeria. Clearly, some countries take privacy much more seriously than the US. But even in the US, we care about privacy and we want it really bad.

Forrester Research: Privacy and Data Protection by Country

Having companies provide me with service and collecting detailed information about certain parts of my life along the way is OK. But swapping that info with other companies is unacceptable.

I Declare Email Bankruptcy!

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 01:17:00 +0000

“I Declare Email Bankruptcy”. This is a line that I have borrowed from the latest book by Neil Stephenson titled Reamde which I have just finished reading. The quote is not particularly central to the plot of the book but it immediately resonated with me. How many times do we all feel that there is just no hope to cope with all the incoming email and want nothing more than to throw in the towel and start all over? What we want is to declare email bankruptcy.

Some people suggested that this is the fault of the email application itself and that we can perhaps solve the problem by adopting different types of tools. There has been some news recently about different tools that improve dealing with the email torrent. For example, Fluent recently drew some attention with ideas on how to redesign email. Also, Social Media has been heralded as a solution to the email problem but in reality, you can get just as overwhelmed on your company’s internal social software. Sure, all of these tools can help but the problem of drowning in email cannot be solved with tools alone.

The root cause of the problem is our behavior, our discipline and our way of communicating with each other. Communication has to be taught. Professions that depend on clear and precise communication put their workers through often very rigorous training. Just think about the type of training required in any radio communication for air traffic control, law enforcement, or the military. Similarly, marketing people and corporate executives get trained on presentation skills, messaging, and talking to the press. In each case, communication requires a specific protocol, precision, and discipline.

The problem with email is that we take the skill for granted. Using Microsoft Office has become part of basic literacy and we expect every employee to know how to use email. But we shouldn’t confuse the skill to use the software with the skill to communicate. Those are not one and the same!

Let me give you an example that is all to frequent. When my manager delegates a task to me by forwarding an email request to me, I should not engage with the originator of the request while continuing to copy my manager on every single message. This often leads to a flurry of messages that just clog up his inbox and he is not likely paying any attention to. The correct protocol is to reply to my manager with a simple “I’ll take care of it” message and leave him out of the subsequent discussion. If I feel that it is needed, I can send him a status update later.

Continuing to copy my manager on every one of the subsequent emails says that I either feel insecure and want him to watch my every move or that I am completely ignorant of his own workload and time. Neither scenario helps my career aspirations.

Of course, some business processes may require a different communication protocol. I get involved a lot in various reviews and approvals of press releases, pricing proposals, product lifecycle reviews etc. Each one of them uses email and has to be done in a certain way. What I observe is that when we use email in a structured business process, it works reasonably well. But as soon as it gets outside the structured process, communication often becomes freewheeling.

This is the type of training that we don’t get today. And boy is it needed! The next time you complain about your overflowing inbox, ask yourself if it really is the fault of the tool.

Pinterest is Growing - What Will Big Media Do?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 05:05:00 +0000

My Pinterest board

I have been hearing a lot about Pinterest lately - the supposedly fastest growing online service ever. Of course, I had to check it out. I have created my Pinterest account using my Facebook profile (and immediately severed that connection on Facebook, just in case). After a bit of looking around I thought I got the hang of it and created my first online scrapbook. I’ve opted for a collection of vintage images of Jaroslav Drobny, one of the most remarkable athletes of all times. I know that you have probably never heard of him but check out my Pinterest board or his Wikipedia entry which I have authored mostly myself. Yes, I am not just a fan but a self-proclaimed authority on Drobny ;-)

Anyway, back to Pinterest - I can see the potential of this new service. Creating a collection of online pictures can be very useful for projects, as a collection of visual ideas, or as a fan page of any kind. But here comes the challenge. I am pretty sure that Pinterest is copying the pictures on its site which is probably a copyright infringement. It does preserve the link to the picture source which would probably placate image sources such as Flickr that essentially want to be pretty open and are content with sharing as long as the attribution is made.

But take my example of Drobny. There are probably no more than 20 of his pictures in existence online and most of the good ones are on sites such as Getty Images and Corbis. Of course I have included those images in my Pinterest board which I am pretty sure violates some copyrights or distribution rights. Unlike Flickr, Getty and Corbis are in the business of selling pictures for hefty prices and their customers are usually not individuals but businesses that purchase or license the pictures primarily for promotional purposes.

The big question is, what will Big Media do - Getty, Corbis but also most magazine publishers? On one hand, this is clearly violating their fundamental business principles. After all, if you want to publish a Getty picture on your site, you have to pay for it. Sure, you could also argue that Getty and Corbis only allow me to post a thumbnail of the images but I suspect that’s just a technical detail. The main principle - I am posting their content on my page is no doubt raising some bushy Big Media eyebrows.

On the other hand, my online scrapbook hasn’t really harmed Getty, Corbis or any of the other sources. On Pinterest, I have no way to monetize the traffic from all the Jaroslav Drobny fans around the world. At least not yet. If anything, I have advertised the paid content. You could argue that I have created for free an online catalog for Getty - a catalog that can take advantage of the social powers of Pinterest since the Pinterest boards can have multiple contributors. That’s actually a pretty good resource for Getty if you ask me.

But I am not sure which tactic the Big Media companies will use. What I do know is that they are faced with yet another possible disruption. Something new that came out of nowhere and that is becoming hugely popular. There are the first signs that indicate Big Media is noticing and their initial reaction is - yet again - an attempt to squash the intruder. Under media pressure, Pinterest just started allowing sites to opt out of their service. Well, I’m not sure that’s the best course of action for Big Media but I am not surprised as this has been their usual modus operandi ever since the World Wide Web has emerged.

What to do, what to do?

Government Conspiracy

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 03:14:00 +0000

Something’s up. The secret must have leaked. The vultures of power are all conspiring to take over. Let’s put the Genie back into the bottle! Or at least let us control it. It has been without any supervision for too long and now that we understand how important it is, how strategic it is, we cannot let it continue. Let the kids move aside and let the grown-ups take over!

What am I talking about? The Internet! In the last few months, the attempts of governments around the world to control the Internet have notably intensified. The governments want to control it.

There is the Patriot Act which gives the US government sweeping rights to search your data on the Internet by ignoring any individual or organizational privacy rights.

How about Internet Neutrality? Shouldn’t we make sure that important business gets the preferential treatment while the gamers and file swappers get less bandwidth? There has been many calls to enact a law for that.

Then, there is the content piracy issue with its series of failed attempts to assert controls over the digital universe - most recently culminating in SOPA. But as we have put SOPA and PIPA to rest in the US, the Europeans are stirring emotions with the ACTA agreement just as I am typing these words.

Let us also not forget the “three strikes” law that has been adopted in countries such as France and the UK. This law allows the government to cut off individuals from Internet access for repeated content piracy violations. These laws have been actually condemned by the UN Human Rights Council in a special report. Yet they exist.

Next, there is the question of censorship. A couple of weeks ago, Twitter made the headlines by allowing censorship in various countries, presumably under pressure from such countries. A few years ago, RIM went through a similar experience with having to bow to the will of countries such as Saudi Arabia, UAE and India when their governments demanded control over their citizen’s email. Even before that, various countries have been asking for the master key for any encryption technology used in their virtual airspace.

So what’s happening? Are the governments waking up to the significance of the Internet and the degree to which it dominates their economy? YOU BET! Governments around the world are used to full control of their countries’ infrastructure - from transportation, communication, commerce, to entertainment, education, and politics. But to date, the Internet has evolved with very little government supervision and as one industry after another is being completely transformed by the Internet, governments are worried about losing control completely. After all, if everything moves to the unregulated virtual universe, what’s there going to be left for government to regulate?

So it is not a surprise that the governments are trying to fight back. Their allies are the very same industries that have been under the threat of extinction because they failed to adapt in the age of the Internet: entertainment, telecom, retail, publishing, etc. The good old ally called national security comes in very handy too.

What governments fail to realize is the amount of business that happens on the Internet because it is free and unregulated. Sure, revenue streams have moved from one company to another and new industries have grown where others have declined. Internet companies have exploited legal loopholes such as avoiding to charge sales tax. But the Internet is essential for the economy today. Free Internet, that is. Because only thanks to the fact that the Internet is free and open to everyone, has it gained the kind of adoption that is propelling a big portion of any nation’s GDP today.

I am not advocating for any criminal activity on the Internet. Laws are laws and they should apply to the Internet the same way as they do anywhere else. But artificial protectionism and tampering with the Internet’s fundamental principle is dangerous - possibly disastrous to the economy of a given nation or even to the entire world. The governments have to be very careful tempting such powers. And we, the people, have to remain vigilant and continue reminding our governments that we want to keep the Internet free.

The State of the Mobile Market

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 02:16:00 +0000

The latest marketshare data for the mobile devices market has been released recently and I thought that it might be a good time to take a look at the mobile market today and tomorrow. First, lets take a look at the data that comes from comScore, combined with the latest Nielsen report and with data from iSuppli and a few other sources. The most widely reported information is the smartphone market share which looks as follows (comScore):

Basically, there are three vendors left today - Google, Apple, and RIM - with RIM losing market share while Google and Apple are growing. A forth vendor, Microsoft is fighting what seems to be a loosing battle to connect with the leading group. According to many analysts including Gartner and IDC, we will see some massive changes in the near future. The research firm iSuppli recently published a report that suggests that the Windows Phone will not only knock off the fast-fading RIM from its 3rd spot but it will even steal the 2nd spot away from Apple:

So why are all the analyst so bullish on Windows Phone when Microsoft has been losing marketshare so far? Well, the next data point may suggest an explanation:

As we can see, the smartphone penetration is still relatively low but growing very quickly. The overall market growth for mobile devices is at 10.8% according to iSuppli and both Nielsen and iSuppli expect that 60% of devices sold in 2015 will be smartphones. That means that there is plenty of marketshare to grab amid the double digit device growth, the rapid growth of smartphone penetration and the decline of other vendors.

Not a bad market to be in, is it? No wonder the vendors are so desperate to grab a piece of this pie. Today, Google and Apple have a clear lock on the top two positions while RIM keeps sliding and Microsoft is nowhere - at least so far. There are rumors about a Facebook phone and HP still has to make up or re-make up their mind about what to do with webOS. Here are some thoughts about the respective players:

Google
Google has grabbed a ton of market share thanks to all the Asian manufacturers such as Samsung, LG, HTC, Sony, etc. They all needed an operating system and since Google Android is free, the choice was easy. So far so good except that there are three big problems looming ahead. First, as a result of the open source model, the Google market has become massively fragmented and application developers struggle to support all the device types. Second, Google acquired Motorola which will make it difficult to keep the competition honest between its own devices and the other vendors. Third, Google is hardly making any money on Android - in fact they are paying hefty patent fees to Microsoft for each device - which makes it a hard business to sustain for a publicly traded company.

Apple
Apple may have lost the top market share spot to Google but honestly, Apple is running circles around everybody. Leveraging their unique value proposition of a tightly integrated system consisting of hardware, software and content, Apple is just piling up profits and making everyone else look bad. Make no mistake, the market share loss in units has nothing to do with market share in revenue and profits where Apple is standing head and shoulders above the rest of the industry combined. The decline in units market share is not a result of an inferior product or any systemic problem. It is more the result of the fact that many users are upgrading their feature phones and opting for the cheapest smartphone available without caring much about the operating system. Those users are clearly not Apple’s target customers. Apple is after the more affluent user who will not only shell out a premium price for a premium brand but who will also keep contributing to Apple’s profits through ongoing purchases on iTunes.

Microsoft
Unlike Google who’s Android is basically a less polished version of Apple’s iOS, Microsoft has built a very distinct and compelling mobile operating system. But adoption is so far eluding Microsoft for several reasons. The vendors selling Microsoft Phone devices are the same lot as those who sell Android. Android is free and Windows Phone is not and so guess who they push more? The second issue is that Microsoft has bet the farm on their Nokia partnership which was a smart move except that Nokia didn’t ship any Windows phones until the end of last year. The third and by far most important issue is the lack of developer support. Apple and Google have attracted many developers quickly leveraging superior tools, compelling business models and - in the case of Google - the open source effect. Microsoft has shown little love to developers so far. Unless Microsoft addresses these issues, they will always continue battling at best for the third place.

RIM
Well, it has been widely reported that RIM is in trouble and just replacing the CEOs is not going to fix that. RIM’s greatest problem is the lack of innovation. The good old BlackBerry may work fine and be more secure than iPhone but it is no longer hip enough even for the executives at stodgy brick-and-mortar companies. Today, RIM needs a purpose, a focus, and a compelling way to differentiate. Leaking pictures of phones that could ship in two years and be almost as cool as the iPhone is today is not going to do it. Even if those new RIM phones were available today, it would hardly make much difference. Besides needing some innovative and competitive products, RIM also has to address the developer support just like Microsoft.

HP
To be complete, I should also mention HP as the only other remaining MOS vendor. Or did they announced that they have killed webOS? Yeah, whatever. I will write another post when I meet a user with a webOS based smartphone.

A Tale of Two Worlds

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 04:07:00 +0000

Often, when I tune into my Twitter feed, I often get the impression that the world has already moved into a place where all human collaboration is done on mobile devices using social software, all software is delivered as a service, all data is Big Data and lives in the cloud. Often, I meet customers who fit into this category and I get very excited about how they push the barriers.

But then I look again and listen to customers who are different. I meet customers who still ban public social media such as Twitter and Facebook from their organization. Their only approved mobile device is an ancient model of BlackBerry with no built-in camera, and the idea of their data ever entering a cloud send shivers down their spines. While perhaps less exciting, these are often some of the largest customers I meet.

Do I suffer from a multiple personality disorder? Do I live in two parallel worlds that rarely connect?

Well, when we look at the big industry analyst firms in our space, it appears that they too have aligned themselves along these lines of demarcation. They have analysts who cover subjects such as compliance, records management, archiving, security, and e-discovery. Those analysts cannot be found on Twitter, they don’t write many blogs, and their email signature includes long disclaimers. Then, the same firms have analysts who cover collaboration, social software, web experience management, and digital asset management. These analysts are much more visible on social media and they are a little less paranoid about the fact that everything they say is a record and subject to legal discovery rules.

Yes, there are different worlds that co-exist. Sometimes, we marketers like to get ahead of ourselves. We start believing that everybody is on the leading edge. And some customers clearly are. There are many industries with low barriers to entry, comparable products, and high price pressures where it is the technology that allows companies to differentiate. Just think of the competitive pressures in manufacturing, retail or consumer packaged goods.

At the same time, there are heavily regulated industries that have developed a strong record-keeping discipline over the last few decades. Think pharmaceuticals, oil&gas, utilities, and increasingly financial services (Dodd-Frank anyone?). These customers are clearly much more conservative but that doesn’t make them any less demanding or any less attractive for a vendor. Their business requirements are simply different.

Successful vendors can operate on the entire spectrum of solutions - from those catering to the most conservative business needs all the way to those who will explore the very latest technology to get an inch of competitive advantage for the next couple of quarters. The most successful vendors can cater not only to the glamour of the one extreme or the dependability on the other end of the spectrum. They understand the business demands of the organization and can cater to all of them and to any combination in between.

Yes, there are multiple worlds out there which makes our business very exciting!

What Happened to Don't Be Evil?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 03:25:00 +0000

Don't be evil?

Google is changing. It was and still is one of the amazing success stories since they have built a highly profitable business based on their search service. In addition to making a boat load of money, Google attracted a lot of positive karma by providing fantastic service and by proclaiming their mantra “Don’t Be Evil”. Ten years ago, they even lived by it.

But, fast forward to January 2012. Google is now a publicly traded company with the typical Wall Street pressure of quarterly earnings. Search-based advertising is still a giant money-making machine and Google keeps innovating by coming up with new ways to make advertisers part with their budgets - i.e. local search, mobile search or map based search. But an important thing has changed since - Google now has competition!

Google’s mission, as stated on their Web site, is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. That’s a noble goal that benefits mankind while allowing Google to make a ton of money along the way. But Google is not true to their mission anymore. For instance, there is a lot of information on Facebook and Twitter and Google is deliberately not searching for it. Is the information on Twitter not part of the “world’s information” that should be universally accessible and useful?

A few days ago, Google escalated this game to another level when it changed its search ranking algorithm to prioritize the information found on its own social network, Google+. This prioritization has little to do with actual relevancy which is supposed to be at the heart of the search ranking algorithm. Instead, it artificially promotes Google’s own fledgling social network which represents another source of advertising revenue for Google. Information posted on Google+ ranks relatively high, often even higher than Web sites to which it points to. Information posted on Facebook and Twitter is not available at all.

This was when Google discovered it had competition.

Now, let’s consider advertising - Google’s primary revenue source. Advertisers who want their content to be visible in Google search will have no choice but to promote that content in Google+. As a result, Google+ will enjoy more traffic and more user interactions while fueling Google’s revenue engine. Pretty clever, actually. Well, diabolically clever if you ask me. By unjustly promoting its own content and suppressing content from its competitors, Google is double-dipping by cross-promoting two of its services. No, Google can’t claim that this is not evil.

This is very evil, indeed. Google has sold out its beliefs. Instead of providing customers with the best possible experience, Google delivers the experience that maximizes its revenue. What’s next? A YouTube video will rank higher than a more relevant video on the Discovery Channel’s web site? You bet! What Google’s doing to Twitter is no different from what Microsoft did to Netscape back in the 90s. Microsoft ended up as the target of a huge anti-trust lawsuit that has had a massive impact on Microsoft’s pace of innovation. Google is marching down the same path now and nobody will like the end of it.

Curiously enough, it is none other than Microsoft that provides Bing, the search engine that can stand up to Google. I’m not trying to portray Microsoft as the angel while calling Google the devil. But Bing can search information on Twitter and while it doesn’t appear to be searching Facebook today, it probably could since Microsoft has a stake in Facebook. Bing still has a relatively small market share compared to Google but that could change.

Because now, Google is evil.

Stop SOPA!!!

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 13:44:00 +0000

I am against SOPA. I am against PIPA. I am against censorship.
I admire and support Wikipedia, Reddit and other organizations that decided to stand up against the proposed legislation.

PLEASE KEEP THE INTERNET FREE FOR EVERYONE!

Why Acquire Companies?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 03:20:00 +0000

I’ve wanted to write this post for a while, but I was worried that you would read too much into it if it was published shortly after any particular acquisition by my employer, OpenText. Obviously, we know a thing or two about acquisitions at OpenText. They are an important part of our growth strategy. But this post is not about any particular acquisition or about OpenText per se, it is about the general reasons why companies buy other companies.

High-tech acquisitions tend to draw a lot of attention when they are announced and most of the coverage is focused on the perceived strategic fit. Or, what the technology pundits consider to be the strategic fit. Unfortunately, most of the time, everybody focuses on the technology and nothing else. Sure, the technical strategy is pretty fundamental for a technology company. Yet in reality, there are many possible reasons for high-tech companies to acquire:

1. Technology
This is what most people think of first and a technology driven acquisition is usually driven by vendor’s “build, buy, or partner” analysis - one of these strategies is the most economical given the cost, time to market, and account control.

2. Access to new markets
An acquisition can give the suitor quick access to new markets for the purposes of growth or diversification - for example to new geographies, new channels, new partners, new vertical markets, or access to exclusive government contracts. Buying a vendor who’s established itself in a given market can be an effective way to get there fast or cost-effectively.

3. Customer base
Buying a customer base can be extremely lucrative in the enterprise software market. Customers typically pay around 20% of the original license cost annually for maintenance - for support and upgrades. Given how sticky enterprise software can be, this is often a highly profitable business for many years to come.

4. Talent
You want to off-shore your development or quickly build a sales force specialized in a new vertical market? Buying a company with that kind of talent may be a quick way of getting there. Just make sure you keep them.

5. Assets
Acquiring a company can be an effective way to get their assets, i.e. a patent portfolio, production facilities or data centers.

6. Outflank competition
Sometimes, buying a company makes sure a competitor doesn’t get it. The company may have been a supplier, strategic partner, or a channel partner to your competitor and acquiring it may be a great way to disrupt the competitive balance of power.

7. Financial engineering
Sometimes, an acquisition makes sense for mostly financial reasons, such as tax loss carry-forwards, profits repatriation, or as a financial investment for the company’s venture arm.

As you can see, there can be many reasons for M&A activities (mergers and acquisitions) - and you might even come up with a couple more. So, the next time you hear about an acquisition, don’t just analyse the technology stacks before passing your judgment on the strategic fit.

Now, let’s get the 2012 M&A season started!

Content Management Predictions for 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 03:38:00 +0000

Another year over, and a new one just begun...yes, I’m quoting John Lennon. This is the time for resolutions and predictions. After I published my 2011 Content Management Predictions a year ago, I was rewarded by a lot of positive feedback and the article became the top post on my blog in 2011. I believe that every prediction has to be followed by a review and so I published my 2011 Predictions Scorecard just a few weeks ago. This year, let’s do it again! Here are my Content Management Predictions for 2012:

1. Big Data will be the hype of the year
If SoLoMo was the buzzword of 2011, I’m predicting that “big data” will be the hype in 2012. Sure, lots of companies are already talking about big data today but in 2012, everybody will be talking about it. There is no good definition of big data today which means that the marketers and pundits will have a field day. Just substitute the word “data” with “big data” and launch your marketing campaign!

2. “Social” becomes a feature
The year 2011 saw us shifting gears rapidly from social software to social media and finally to social business. That’s a sure sign that the social market hasn’t settled yet. In 2011, it was still unclear who were the legitimate stakeholders of social enterprise - consumer companies moving in, start-ups capitalizing on the hype, or the traditional enterprise software vendors? Well, I’m predicting that in 2012, it will become clear that social software is not a viable stand-alone business and that we will see it subsumed by enterprise software - from Opentext to SAP to Salesforce, but the big catalyst will be SharePoint 15.

3. SharePoint will solve every problem, again
Speaking of, the time has come to make a prediction about SharePoint. 2011 was surprisingly quiet on the SharePoint front with Microsoft focusing on other priorities. In fact, the pundits and wanna-be competitors started poking their heads out and proclaiming rebellious statements about SharePoint. Well, not so fast - the empire will strike again. I predict that SharePoint will make it on the list of Microsoft priorities by the end of 2012 and that just like the previous versions, the Redmond Marketing Machine will turn it into a universal solution for every problem. For a while, we will actually believe it but eventually, things will settle back into the right order. But this time, there may be a new twist in this familiar tune - the cloud!

4. Rise of the hybrid cloud
In 2011, it was impossible to have a conversation without mentioning the cloud which is what we started calling it when we could not tell SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS apart anymore. Clouds are hip and all of a sudden, everybody is a meteorologist! Well, I predicted for 2011 that enterprises will not be rushing to the cloud yet. In 2012, that might change. The cloud-based model makes a lot of sense and now, we have a way to say that we may consider selectively taking advantage of certain cloud-based offerings for some use cases: hybrid cloud. In 2012, we will start seeing hybrid cloud adoption of content management software.

5. Cloudy outlook for open source
Well, all that cloud business has gotta be bad news for open source. Sure, there will always be customers who will like to tinker with their deployments like I wrote about last February. But customers hoping to save money - or at least to reduce their capex - by embracing open source have to seriously consider the cloud-based offerings. Sure, Drupal will be still around and probably still growing but the Great Open Source Movement will hit the trough of disillusionment in 2012 - courtesy of the cloud.

6. Consumerization is here to stay
In my 2011 look back, I admitted that consumerization was one significant trend that I had missed in my predictions. In 2012, consumerization will continue. Particularly the trend of employees bringing their own devices to work will continue. Facing the rapid pace of innovation in consumer devices, companies will not be able to keep up and they will have to give in. People will simply buy the latest gadget and use it for work. OK, since this is too easy of a prediction, I am also predicting that the consequences of consumerization will be the number one topic for the records management and information governance crowd in 2012.

7. End of convergence
One of the consequences of consumerization will be the end of device convergence. Until now, I believed that all of the cool functionality would eventually be subsumed by a single mobile device - most likely sold to us by Apple. But that is not happening. I travel frequently with my laptop, iPad, iPhone, pocket camera, and even a GPS. Oh, and I’ve started wearing an iPod Nano as a watch and I bought a Kindle. That’s not convergence! The reason why I do this is simple - for specific tasks, an optimized device is far better than similar functionality in my smart phone. For example - data roaming fees are the reason for using a GPS while my tiny Canon takes pictures far better than the iPhone and the Kindle is a better reader. For 2012, I predict that we will see even more divergence like this. The device manufacturers have to differentiate and they will be bringing out devices that will be compelling enough to carry multiple ones. Is anybody at RIM reading this? There is a niche opening up for secure, enterprise grade devices, folks...

8. HTML5 won’t kill apps
Talking about mobility, 2011 marked the beginning of not just the post-PC era but also the post-Flash world. With Flash dead (yes, technically only ‘mobile Flash’ is dead but that really means that Flash is dead) and with Silverlight the likely next victim, all hopes are turning to HTML5 as the panacea for all mobility-related problems. The biggest of the problems being the fact that building native apps is getting costly with the number of mobile OS derivatives growing - particularly in the Android camp. Well, folks, I predict that HTML5 will not solve this issue anytime soon. Certainly not in 2012. In 2012, we will continue seeing native apps being built at a rapid pace. I have elaborated on my reasoning in my recent article. Those enterprise apps I have predicted for 2011 will keep coming in 2012.

9. Tipping point for analytics
There has been plenty of discussion about the need for content analytics in 2011 yet the adoption has been still fairly modest. Sure, the IBM Watson won on Jeopardy and lots of Web sites have added some analytical capabilities to increase their stickiness. But not many organizations use analytics to improve their productivity today - i.e. to help employees deal with the information overflow by applying automatic analytics and classification. I suspect that the price-performance ratio has been the problem so far - it takes way too much computing power to do anything meaningful with acceptable performance. After all, the Watson is a supercomputer! I predict that this will change in 2012. The technology is now good enough to derive significant benefits from analytics and that in 2012, we will start seeing a much broader adoption.

10. ECM, what’s next?
Lots has been said and written in 2011 about the end of the ECM era. Many vendors tried to distance themselves from Enterprise Content Management by trying to either coin new terms or by embracing broader alternatives. Not very successfully. Like it or not, the term ECM is still the one and only term that has been adopted to describe this space. In 2012, I predict that the search for the ECM replacement will continue and that at the end of 2012, we will be where we are today. Sure, there will be more consolidation and some vendors will be talking about subsuming their ECM acquisitions. There will also be vendors coining new terms like “Secure Social Experience” and “Content as a Service” and “ECM 3.0”. But none of that will stick. In December 2012, we will still call this space ECM. I hope I’m wrong on this one, by the way...

Well, here they are, my predictions. Please let me know where you agree and disagree. I sure hope that you disagree with at least some of them. Otherwise, my predictions would be safe and boring. After all, one of my favorite quotes comes from the great Mario Andretti:

“If everything seems under control, you are not driving fast enough!”

I wish you a great 2012. Start your engines and pedal to the metal!

Looking Back at My Most Popular Blog Posts in 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:32:00 +0000

As a technology veteran of twenty plus years, I cannot remember a time more exciting and turbulent than right now. Sure, when the Web first arrived in 1994/95, it was exciting except that there was not much to do on the Web back then. And the dotcom era was exciting except that the irrational exuberance was somehow making people think that Pets.com was a high tech company. The year 2011 has seen many interesting technology trends convert and deliver measurable benefits to our lives. Sure, we are probably in a bubble with LinkedIn, Groupon, and Zynga having gone public raising huge amounts of money. But have seen some massive changes that are probably real and permanent. Now, this is fun!

And as the year 2011 nears to end, the time has come to take a look at what happened - on this blog. The list below are the articles that have received the most hits in 2011. That alone is a wrong metric, of course, since the articles published in January had much more time to score hits than those published in December. But let’s not get stuck on technicalities - here are the top posts in 2011:

10. Struggles of a Professional iPhone User
Having switched to iPhone from a Blackberry in April, I have described many deficiencies related to business tasks in email, calendar, search, etc. Some of them are still valid but I love my iPhone.

9. BlackBerry PlayBook - The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
I got to test the new PlayBook back in May and I wrote a pretty positive review. Some folks apparently didn’t agree with me since PlayBook was not much of a hit in 2011.

8. OpenText Acquires Metastorm
I only rarely write about my employer but people are usually taking interest in acquisitions and my blog allows me to share some insights and so these posts usually score pretty well. This one was published in February.

7. Testing Samsung Omnia Running Windows Phone 7
I don’t consider myself a great tester but as these devices were coming out, people were really interested in the reviews. And so I tested and shared my opinions - which I am good at doing!

6. Practical Gamification Use Case
This is a customer success story, describing the gamification deployment at OpenText. Gamification was a big topic in general and I felt compelled to write about it as I was able to experience it first hand and talk to the developers.

5. Who Will Own Enterprise Social Media?
By March, it was clear that every software company had some sort of social media initiative (‘social media’ was what we used to call ‘social business’ back then). In this post, I argued that we won’t be able to participate in more than a couple and that some of the vendors probably don’t stand a chance.

4. Why Do We Rename Products
In May, I stood up on my virtual soap box and explained the rationale behind some of the marketing decision that follow acquisitions. Lots of folks were interested in the answers and Lee Dallas from EMC even disagreed with me in his counter-post Why Re-Branding Makes Us Crazy.

3. HTML5 vs Native Apps
In this post, I argued that while HTML5 is great and will gain significant adoption, it will not become the panacea that will save the world from the need to develop native apps for multiple operating systems. That was in September and in December I even got to argue this point at the Gilbane Conference in Boston. That was great fun!

2. Why We Acquired Global 360
In July, following the February acquisition of Metastorm, OpenText acquired another BPM vendor Global 360. The title alone compelled many readers to find out what the answer was, not to mention that this was a pretty big acquisition anyway.

1. Content Management Predictions for 2011
This post was a surprising winner by a huge margin. Even more interesting was the fact that it was getting hits throughout the year, sometimes becoming one of the top posts for a given month. Of course that can only mean one thing:

...I will start the year 2012 off with my Content Management Predictions for 2012. Stay tuned and thanks for reading my blog. Happy New Year and all the best in 2012!

Can Social Software Ever Replace Email?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Thu, 22 Dec 2011 04:42:00 +0000

According to Facebook’s COO Sheryl Sandberg, the year 2011 was supposed to be the year when email finally died. Or at least the year when email was taken over by social software. Yet it didn’t happen and we all still email today. Sure, there are kids out there sending each other messages via Facebook but nobody has given up their enterprise email in favor of Facebook yet. So, why is it that email isn’t dead?

Well, it is because email has our share of attention. Email offers one-to-one or one-to-many communication which is what enterprises need and we are all programmed to go to our email several times a day to check what’s happening. Our email inbox serves not only as a communication terminal but also as a reminder of what to do next, what to put on our task list, what meetings to prepare for, and what’s going on. Email is a go-to destination and it gets our share of attention.
Facebook is also a go-to destination. That’s one of the secrets behind Facebook’s success. We go to Facebook often several times a day to see what’s going on. Unfortunately, Facebook is a very consumer-oriented service and does not lend itself for enterprise use outside of marketing communications. In fact, many enterprises are rather paranoid about the possibility of their enterprise communication happening on Facebook.
Twitter too is a go-to destination which gets our share of attention and Twitter has established itself for business use. But due to it’s one-to-all type of communication, it lacks the core concept of security - communication to those I chose and not those who happen to be listening right now.
Is Google+ a go-to-destination? I’m not sure that’s happened yet and the jury seems to be still out. But given the growth in number of users, it is likely to happen. Is LinkedIn a go-to-destination? For some, perhaps. The LinkedIn features such as direct messages and private groups may even meet the one-to-one and one-to-many communication requirements of the enterprise but no company has switched off email in favor of LinkedIn yet. Or in favor of anything else, the recent PR coup by Atos notwithstanding.

Thierry Breton, Atos CEO, recently banned email in his company.

So, how about your enterprise deployment of social software? From what I am seeing, the adoption is very tribal today. There tend to be groups in the enterprise that embrace it and experience a high degree of adoption but also groups that ignore it. And herein lies the challenge of replacing email.
What we like about email and social software is the fact that it enables asynchronous communication. The beauty of asynchronous communication is the fact that it is not disruptive. The challenge with synchronous communication such as the telephone, Skype, or even instant messaging is its disruptive nature that automatically limits the number of conversations possible. When I’m in a meeting, I can’t be on the phone. Email, on the other hand, can wait for me to respond. That works!
For an asynchronous communication tool to be successful, it has to gain a share of our attention and significant adoption. Email not only has our attention, but it has reached a mind-blowing adoption that is nearly 100%. On top of that, email works the same across our professional and personal needs. We may use separate accounts but it works the same and when we make a mistake and cross the boundaries, it is usually forgiving. The share of attention and the high adoption make email a top go-to destination for all of us.
Social software has the possibilities to get there, but it is a long row to hoe. Email didn’t reach its adoption in a day and not even in a year. Not long ago, managers used to have assistants to handle their email. It took our parents or grand-parents years to embrace email. Even today, email is subject to a relatively formal protocol starting with “Hello …” and ending with “Kind regards”. For better of worth, we have established rules about who can email whom and with what degree of urgency. We had to develop pretty solid spam filters to avoid being eaten alive by unwanted email. It took years and we did all of that to get the email adoption where it is today.
On top of that, email has another useful feature. Since the mid 90s when email met the Internet, email addresses became universal identifiers. Your email address is usually a relatively simple derivative of your real name and yet uniquely and unambiguously identifies you. That’s why your email address is used as a login on a myriad of online services - from your bank to Facebook. All that has propelled email’s 100% adoption.
100% adoption, or even 80% adoption is not a small feat. Until any alternative communication technology gets there, we cannot talk about the death of email.

2011 Predictions Scorecard

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 04:28:00 +0000

At the beginning of this year, I published my 2011 Content Management Predictions. I received a lot of good feedback on this article, which has since become by far my most popular post this year. But now, the time has come to see how I did on my predictions. I do believe that it is the responsibility of anyone making predictions to openly review their results. So, here it comes:

1. Mobile devices as a primary interface
I predicted that in 2011, we would see people using their mobile devices as their primary way to access content applications and data. I found my first evidence of this just a few weeks later when I took a picture of my co-worker using his smartphone while sitting at his desk. This prediction has become a reality. Perhaps not as much for smartphones but certainly for the iPad. Many of us started bringing the iPad - and just the iPad - to meetings, conferences and business trips and this trend continues to grow with every additional iPad sold.

I have further predicted that the content management vendors will start building their apps with the “mobile first” principle. This too I see happening now. Many content management vendors now offer mobile apps and increasingly, I am seeing capabilities developed for mobile devices first. In fact many apps are only really valuable when used on mobile devices - file sharing, note-taking, social media, etc. OpenText Tempo is a good example of such an app - secure document sharing and synchronization between multiple devices built as “mobile first”.
Verdict: Hit, Score: 1/1

2. End of MS Office monopoly
Back in January, I predicted that in light of free alternatives, Microsoft would lose its dominance over the office productivity applications. In the course of the year, there has been a lot of Microsoft bashing in the media and indeed, Microsoft is increasingly seen playing defense rather than offence. Google Docs is probably the most tangible threat and I see increasingly people using Google Docs (BTW, I’m writing all my blog posts in Google Docs). However, it would be too soon to declare victory for Google Docs or any other Office alternative. In the enterprise, little has happened this year and Microsoft Office remains strong. I’d say that I was simply wrong on this one.
Verdict: Miss, Score: 1/2

3. eDiscovery has gone SOX
My prediction was that in 2011, the excitement around eDiscovery would fizzle away the same way the Sarbanes-Oxley problem has eventually dwindled after a lot of initial publicity a decade ago. Sure, the problem of presenting electronic evidence upon a subpoena isn’t going away. The Sarbanes-Oxley Act didn’t go away either, even if Senator Paul Sarbanes announced his retirement a few weeks ago. But time has taken the mystery out of the problem and most companies have figured out what they need to do and have moved on to solving the next set of problems. That was my prediction and I maintain that it happened. The problems of the year 2011 included anything from social business and mobility to analytics and big data. eDiscovery isn’t that hot anymore.
Verdict: Hit, Score: 2/3

4. Wikileaks would be the next SOX
My next prediction was related to content security which made headlines when Wikileaks published sensitive government information and pre-announced that the banks would be the next target. This issue has created plenty of concern and publicity, particularly in situations where the weak link wasn’t an external attack but an internal leak instead. In the course of 2011, Wikileaks itself has gone a bit quiet with Julian Assange busy fighting his extradition case instead of stirring up trouble. However, the insurgence of the Arab Spring of 2011 has been widely credited to some of the information Wikileaks published and the sheer consequences of Wikileaks support my prediction. Security is back in the spotlight particularly in the world of mobility, social media and cloud computing. I’m calling it a hit and I’m sure that Mr. Mubarak or the late Mr. Gaddafi would agree.
Verdict: Hit, Score: 3/4

5. Experience will go from browser to apps
In this prediction, I’ve argued that the content management vendors will follow in the footsteps of the consumer market where users have overwhelmingly embraced native apps in favor of web browser-based application. The vendors were expected to start developing apps and just like the consumer apps, the enterprise apps were expected to become more atomic - focused on a relatively narrow functionality or a single task. Well, most vendors started building apps and those apps are for the most part more narrowly focused but I have not seen the kind of atomic functionality yet I had in mind - apps focused on a specific task such as file travel expenses, or submit purchase requisition. I still believe that we are headed towards the “app-tastic” world as the OpenText CTO Eugene Roman likes to call it, but we are not quite there yet. I’d say this one is too soon to call and I give it half a point.
Verdict: Too soon to call, Score: 3.5/5

6. Social media will pass the peak [of inflated expectations]
This was a pretty straight forward prediction about social media following the Gartner hype-cycle model. As a result, we should have passed over the peak of inflated expectations towards the trough of disillusionment. This has happened in 2011. Not in the consumer world where Facebook and Twitter are still growing strong but it is happening in the enterprise. Many enterprises are learning that just because you’ve built a social site, it doesn’t mean that the employees are using it in ways that stimulate corporate effectiveness. The companies are learning that this is more about change management and corporate culture than about the technology. On the technology front, the vendors are not making any money on social software this year. Just check out the S1 filing from Jive which is supposedly the most successful of the social vendors. Sure, Jive has just gone public today and raised a ton of cash but their solution is already becoming obsolete. The customers who want on-premise social software can get it as a feature from their existing vendors (i.e. Salesforce or OpenText) and those who want it in the cloud get it for free from Yammer or Box.
Verdict: Hit, Score: 4.5/6

7. Case Management will catch on
This prediction was about the expected success of case management and how it will differentiate from business process management (BPM). This was probably my least controversial prediction since case management was already happening at the time. And it continues happening with some vendors delivering separate product lines for BPM and for case management. My employer OpenText was probably the best proofpoint for this prediction coming true when we acquired a BPM vendor Metastorm first and a case management vendor Global 360 a few months later. Case management is catching on - not much argument here, I suppose.
Verdict: Hit, Score 5.5/7

8. Web sites and portals need refurbishing
Next, I predicted a strong year for Web content management (WCM). The space has evolved in 2011 by changing its mission from just managing Web content to Web experience management (WEM), and most recently to customer experience management (CEM). I reasoned that this growth would be fueled by the pent up demand of marketing departments who didn’t have the budget for innovation during the recession. That’s very much what I have seen happening in 2011. Most WCM vendors in the space were doing well and even Oracle decided to jump in by acquiring FatWire. In addition, we have seen marketing departments emerge as a key buying audience for WCM software (and WEM and CEM) which is another proofpoint that I was right on this one.
Verdict: Hit, Score: 6.5/8

9. Enterprises won’t rush to public cloud
This prediction was arguing that while the cloud remains a hot trend and we will see a lot of adoption in the consumer space, enterprises won’t rush to the public cloud. Note that I was explicit about public cloud since I consider the adoption of a private cloud a no-brainer. Judging this prediction is a tough call. I believe that what happened in 2011 is that enterprise indeed didn’t rush to the public cloud but at the same time, enterprise users have done so. This is the effect of consumarisation and I see enterprises having to deal with this issue while accepting that you can’t stop the tidal wave.

The users - their employees - are using cloud based services from Dropbox and Skydrive to Yammer. The enterprises - the enterprise IT and legal departments - are not happy with that and are looking for alternatives. This is a volatile situation and the data suggests that the corporate world is divided about 50:50 on this issue. Half of the companies want to be draconian and put the end to this while the other half is looking for a peaceful way to let the users decide without compromising enterprise security and legal concerns. This is perhaps another prediction that is too soon to call.
Verdict: Too soon to call, Score 7/ 9

10. There will be more consolidation in ECM
Boy was I right on this one. Just consider some of the companies that were acquired in 2011: FatWire, Endeca, ATG, Iron Mountain (ECM assets), CA Technologies (ECM assets), Autonomy, Metastorm, Global 360, weComm, Operitel, Alterian, EchoSign, and many others. This was perhaps the busiest year the ECM market has ever seen.
Verdict: Hit, Score: 8/10

I wish I had predicted the power of consumerization back in January. That is the most glaring trend that happened in 2011 and I didn’t predict it. Consumerisation impacts mostly mobility which I had on my list but also includes the adoption of apps and cloud based services which I didn’t have on it.

But, 8 out of 10 hits isn’t bad even if two of them were too early to call. What do you think? Of course you may see some of the results differently but that’s the beauty of qualitative predictions. If you do, please do comment. In the mean time, I will write my Content Management Predictions for 2012.

Amazing Accessories for iPhone and iPad

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 02:48:00 +0000

The other day, I found myself in an electronic section of a department store and I noticed an entire shelf of accessories for the iPad and iPhone. Since we are in the middle of the Christmas shopping season, I have decided to devote my blog post to the lighter topic of amazing things you can use your iPad or iPhone for.

Most iPad and iPhone owners already have all kinds of chargers, docks, mounts, cases, speakers and keyboards and I will not be discussing those. Instead, I want to feature a bunch of interesting hardware add-ons that truly extend the use cases of the platform into previously unexpected applications.

Fitness
- Heart Monitor
Wahoo makes an ANT+ add-on (hardware) that communicates with the chest strap and monitors your heart rate while running. Wahoo also makes a similar monitor for biking.

- Blood Pressure Monitor
iHealth makes a blood pressure measuring system that keeps your history in an iPhone app.

- Scale
The scale from Withings gathers info such as weight, fat, muscle and body mass index and sends it to your iPhone via wi-fi network.

Photo
- Photo accessories
An amazing set of accessories from Photojojo can add filters and lenses to the iPhone camera and some of them can even turn it into an SLR camera.

- Microscope
This contraption by Brando feels like a square peg in a round hole but, it promises to turn your iPhone into a microscope at a very reasonable price.

Kids
- RC toys
The HELO TC helicopter by Griffin Technology uses the iPad as the remote control. Not bad, actually.

- Baby monitor
The baby monitor by iBaby allows you to see the baby on an iPad or iPhone.

- iPad toys
Disney produced a series of toys called AppMATes that interact with a iPad application. They look like the characters from Cars 2 which alone makes this game pretty cool.

Music
- iRig
This amazing gadget connects your electric guitar with an iPad and an amplifier and produces sound effects like a whole set of sound distortion pedals.

- Piano
The Piano Apprentice by ION turns your iPad into a pretty smart musical instrument.

- Scratch Mixer
Feeling like mixing some tunes for your next party? The Jensen DJ Scratch Mixer will help! I should perhaps also mention the Soulo karaoke system and the ION iCade at this time.

- Arcade
A gizmo that turns an iPad into an Arcade game machine? Atari!

Business
- Square
Credit card payments for everyone! Since receiving payments is still surprisingly difficult in the US, the Square solution s finally giving the little man a chance to solve this problem.

- Pico Projector
If you make your living by giving presentations to small groups of people - i.e. customer meetings - the combination of iPhone with Keynote and any of the pico projectors is something to consider!

- Radar detector
Cobra iRadar uses the iPhone as a display. Well, what can I say? Drive safely, folks!

You must admit these things are cool aren't they? What's amazing is that they all take the iPhone and iPad into new areas of applications which Apple has perhaps never envisioned. That's the sign of a true platform.

Merry Christmas!

Are You Ready for the Cloud?

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 04:14:00 +0000

Cloud computing has been the marketing topic of 2011. You could hardly attend a conference without being bombarded by predictions of how cloud computing is going to revolutionize our technology landscape. Indeed, having your data in the cloud is quickly becoming a necessity in the time when we are dividing our computer time among multiple devices.

Yet companies have been a bit more conscientious rushing to the cloud. Sure, there have been stories about many users and departments signing up for various cloud-based services such as collaboration, file-sharing, or project management. But not many enterprises have ripped out their existing on-premise solutions in favor of cloud-based offerings yet.

There are reasons why enterprises are careful. Security concerns are usually being mentioned as the top concern. The data in the cloud is not under your control and so it is less secure, right? Actually, I’m not sure I buy that argument. In fact, the cloud vendor most likely has better security in place than most enterprises could ever afford to deploy.

A much bigger issue is the data control and ownership. First, there is the issue with employee-owned devices that end up containing corporate data. In case of a device theft or employee departure, the company isn’t allowed to wipe the device and has no control over the data. That is a problem for corporate security and legal liability.

The second issue related to data ownership is the protection provided by the cloud service providers. Take Google Gmail, for instance, which is being used by many employees. The Section 11 of the Terms of Service contains the following paragraph:

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.”

That clause alone made me think really hard about how much am I willing to use Gmail for communication with my tax accountant or investment advisor.

And then there is the Patriot Act issue which forces US based companies to comply with law enforcement requests to hand over your data. Dropbox’s Privacy Policy, for example, includes the following passage:

“We may disclose to parties outside Dropbox files stored in your Dropbox and information about you that we collect when we have a good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary to (a) comply with a law, regulation or compulsory legal request; (b) protect the safety of any person from death or serious bodily injury; (c) prevent fraud or abuse of Dropbox or its users; or (d) to protect Dropbox’s property rights.”

“Good faith belief that disclosure is reasonably necessary” - that isn’t exactly the Swiss Banking Act, is it? While it may be the law in the US, it may also be beyond the tolerance threshold of many companies - particularly those from European countries that have a much less casual attitude towards data security and privacy.

As a result, companies are being very careful when taking advantage of cloud based services - particularly those that primarily cater to consumers. Such services will be likely supplemented by private-cloud based offerings that provide similar capabilities under the organization’s full control.

Also, a hybrid cloud approach might be used more often to address corporate concerns. One customer recently told me that they are moving their users to a cloud based email except for critical functions such as the financial and legal departments and their entire executive team.

This kind of approach may result in lower capital expenditures, but probably higher overall costs and complexity. Well, welcome to the Cloud Age!

When Algorithms Go Wrong

noreply@blogger.com (Lubor Ptacek) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 04:50:00 +0000

Earlier this year, PC World published an interesting article about the key algorithms that rule the World Wide Web. These algorithms include everything from the Google search and Facebook friends stories, to Amazon’s recommendations and even the eHarmony’s matchmaking algorithm. Very interesting stuff, particularly when you consider the economic impact of such Internet services today.

One of the algorithms is the algorithm that drives ad presentment - the idea is to present you with the most relevant ad based on your profile date. Or, actually, with the ad that you are most likely to click on. But a few weeks ago, I had an interesting experience with Facebook. First, Facebook decided, for no particular reason, to present me with ads all in German. My first reaction was actually positive. Among the few bits of information that I have volunteered to Facebook is the fact that I studied at an university in Germany and occasionally, I even respond to a friend’s post in German. And so I thought that Facebook is so smart that it is trying to appeal to the ‘international-man-of-mystery’ side of me.

But last week, all the ads turned into French. Well, I do happen to get by in French but I am pretty sure that I have not volunteered any info about my French connection to Facebook. Sure, I have friends all over the world, including France, but that’s not enough for even the smartest algorithm to label me as a target for French ads. Besides, I could hardly be expected to act on an ad offering me a skydiving experience in France next weekend. Clearly, something has been going wrong with the Facebook algorithm.

When an algorithm serving ads goes wrong, it is perhaps a laughable matter. After all, nobody gets hurt, right? Well, nobody, except for the companies that paid a ton of money for their ads to hit the right audiences. There have been plenty stories in the past about the innocent looking algorithm changes in Google that end up having a devastating effect on many businesses. If you build your online business that depends on the organic Google search driving your traffic, you can find yourself very quickly out of business when that stops working.

With their tremendous reach, it is perhaps time for the Web's Major League players to start realizing the economic power they have. With thousands and often millions of companies depending on them, Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. have to take their responsibility seriously.

This responsibility starts with the profile data integrity, customer privacy, information security and also the algorithm dependability. Algorithm changes can be very controversial as we've seen when Klout changed its algorithm a couple of weeks ago. It’ one thing to gamble with your own fortune, quite another thing to gamble with the fortunes of those who depend on you. Too many livelihoods are at stake. Abusing this responsibility may be perhaps the greatest risk Internet businesses face today.