I recently heard the Venture Voice episode with Fabrice Grinda, recently of Zingy.
Here are his 9 rules for selecting new business opportunities.
Worth checking out – Fabrice is an extremely clueful and business-savvy entrepreneur.
Tag - business
There’s something interesting about most “web 2.0” services.
Most of them, like Basecamp and delicious are not about more options/features/capabilities. They’re actually about less. And that’s exactly why they’re successful.
I was reminded of that when I saw this article by Blackfriars (a branding firm) about Too Much Stuff™.
How much? Too much:
Need proof? Let’s just look at the statistics around that trip to the grocery store. In The Paradox Of Choice, sociology professor Barry Schwartz takes his readers on a trip to a small supermarket and finds that shoppers there must select from 285 varieties of cookies, 85 flavors and brands of juices, and 95 varieties of chips. They face 230 soup offerings, 120 different pasta sauces, 275 varieties of cereal, and 175 types of tea bags. Supermarkets today carry more than 30,000 items, and 20,000 new products are introduced each year — and almost all of them fail.
And yet this plethora of choice doesn’t make us any happier. In fact, exactly the opposite:
In one experiment, when researchers asked subjects to compare chocolate chip cookies from a jar of 10 cookies and a jar of two cookies, the subjects rated the cookie from the smaller jar better than the one from the larger jar. And the cookie wasn’t just better. It was rated more valuable, more desirable to eat in the future, and more attractive as a consumer item, despite the fact the cookies were identical. More choice made the subjects feel that their sample was less desirable.
The authors of the article go on to talk about radical simplicity being the solution. They’re approaching it from the perspective of marketers and brand managers.
I’m wondering about it from the point of view of my own life. The only problem? Simplicity is hard!
Macsurfer recently carried a link to a recent study published by a TV industry publishing company which poo-poos the whole buy-video-content-for-your-iPod thing:
When asked if they missed their favourite TV show and could watch it online or order it through cable or satellite, 62% of the 800 respondents contacted by phone in November said they would prefer getting it for free with commercials. Just 17% would choose to pay US$1.99 to avoid commercials, although 21% were undecided, researchers Points North Group and Horowitz Associates revealed.
“Video downloads for US$1.99 will have limited appeal. Consumers will grow tired of having their credit cards charged US$1.99 every time they download a rerun of CSI,” said Craig Leddy, a Points North Group analyst.
In the coveted demographic of consumers aged 18 to 34, 68% chose free, ad-supported shows, against 26% who favoured paying, and only 5% were undecided.
If you read between the lines and perform a simple calculation, you’ll find that what they’re actually saying is that there are 75-85 million people in North America who are willing to pay for commercial-free downloadable and saveable TV.
Interesting! That sounds like a pretty large market to me.
The question is, who sponsored this research? And why?
Seems obvious, doesn’t it … old media dinosaurs, or hangers-on of those dinosaurs, who are seeing another comfortable niche start to get eaten away.
I recently updated my resume. I’m not looking for a new job or anything like that, but the missing last 9 months of my career experience was starting to bother me.
So I happened to notice this CNN story on words that kill your resume. Apparently the top 5 nonsense words are:
Aggressive
Ambitious
Competent
Creative
Detail-oriented
What a shock – they’ve been so over-used that they’re virtually meaningless to hiring managers.
Give it your blog address; it’ll go and spider the site (gently), and present you with a tag cloud that you can put on a T-shirt and buy.
Even better would be the ability to save that T-shirt design and publish it in a store, and make it available for lots of people to buy.
Happened to drive beside a truck from CopySource today in Bellingham, WA.
The biggest thing on the truck was the name: CopySource. Immediately above that was the corporate slogan: “Imagination. Creation. Print Solutions.”
OK.
The first two parts of your slogan are “imagination” and “creation.” But your name is CopySource. CopySource.
Now I know we all want to have aspirational slogans that make us feel like we’re doing wonderful amazing things, as opposed to picking belly-lint or moving rocks or pumping gas. And that’s great.
But when your slogan and your name are moving in two different directions, you’ve got a problem. The company probably started out as just another a copy shop, and now it’s breaking out of that niche … just another example of how difficult growing beyond an established brand can be.
The same dichotomy is obvious in the company’s mission statement on their website (which, by the way, is on the first page of their website):
Copy Source is in business to bring imagination into print solutions. Our passion is to work with clients to enhance their professional image in the global neighbourhood by using our digital and offset printing, desktop publishing and IT solutions to help them realize their mission and accomplish their goals.
Notice that both in the slogan and the mission statement they’ve got the real business dead last.
I have to think that sometimes it’s a much better solution to break off a new business to enter a new market – or at least a new brand – and keep each brand that you’ve got both focused and authentic … two things that suffer when you try to bridge categories.
Why I think about these things when I just happen to see a truck driving beside me, I have no idea …
I presume everyone’s heard about the Boston Globe story – they wrapped their clients’ newspapers in paper that had credit card numbers and information on them.
Credit and bank card numbers of as many as 240,000 subscribers of The Boston Globe and Worcester Telegram & Gazette were inadvertently distributed with bundles of T&G newspapers on Sunday, officials of the newspapers said yesterday.
The confidential information was on the back of paper used in wrapping newspaper bundles for distribution to carriers and retailers. As many as 9,000 bundles of the T&G, wrapped in paper containing subscribers’ names and their confidential information, were distributed Sunday to 2,000 retailers and 390 carriers in the Worcester area, said Alfred S. Larkin Jr., spokesman for the Globe.
I’m not saying I haven’t done a lot of dumb things in my time, and probably am due for more than my fair share in the future, but … how could you possibly be that dumb?
Was interesting to google my name and see a link to this page on egoSurf just 5-6 items down.
Looks like egoSurf is making all past searches part of their website content, probably in static spider-able pages. Very, very smart. Now amazingly, incredibly, their site’s content from a search engine’s point of view is growing by leaps and bounds, amazingly quickly.
Which makes egoSurf more discoverable, which increases their traffic, which …
You get the point: virtuous circle in action. And in fact, their home page is mostly exactly that: history of searches.
Like it!
I just found out via drupal.org that there’s an open source content management system summit in Vancouver, BC, February 9-10.
Very cool!
They’ll be talking about WordPress and Drupal (see my recent article comparing them on a very shallow level) among other things.
And it looks like Rasmus Lerdorf is going to be there. Rasmus, of course, is the original creator of PHP … probably the most common website development platform in existence right now.
They’ll also be talking about online identity, and Sxip will be presenting. Hopefully they get Dick Hardt, as he’s a great presenter.
I’ll have to put this on my calendar, as there should be some interesting people in town.
I ran across this quote recently:
“Value innovation is about making the competition irrelevant by creating uncontested market space. Beating the competition within the confines of the existing industry is not the way to create profitable growth.”
It’s from this book: Blue Ocean Strategy
Welcome to web 2.0 – a funky phenomena occurs, it gets named, a cool website gets built, and a new business is born, all in 48 seconds or less.
OK, so ego surfing has been around a little longer than that. Still, egoSurf is fairly quick to market. And fairly cool.
Bloggers are nosy ego-driven people, always conscious of popularity and status while at the same time righteously and sniffily disdaining such bourgeois sentiment. In other words, they’re exactly like everyone else. So egoSurf is a cool tool to make that easier.
From the about page:
egoSurf finds your blogs ranking in google
Actually it doesn’t have to be your blog, and it ain’t just google.
Simple. You enter your name and your blogs web address. We search google and find links to your blog. We calculate your ego ranking.
We show you where your blogs appear in the search engines. Did we mention that we can search in Yahoo, MSN, del.icio.us and Technorati too? Got more than one blog or site? No problem, we can look for lots.
We also keep track of your rankings over time, so you can see how your site moves through the blogosphere. How’s that for stroking?
Why do I need to egoSurf?
egoSurf helps massage the web publishers ego, and thereby maintain the cool equilibrium of the net itself.
We, the publishers of this here internet thing, need the occasional massage, the odd stroke. We aren’t paid. We aren’t recognised. Our sites hit count used to be enough, but no longer.
We need to be no 1. in Google. Do we really need to say more? Get surfing.
The site looks like it is very new, so now is the time to do your little ego surf before it gets way too busy and goes the way of Technorati: cool tool but often unavailable.
I couldn’t resist, and here’s my current scoring:
As you can see, I’m OK in Google, Yahoo!, weak on MSN (who cares), and nonexistent on delicious. But I’m a star on Technorati.
🙂
Reminds me of the bumper sticker: famous online, loser off.
Somone at Virtual Karma has posted a “complete” list of web 2.0 apps. The community is already adding to it in the comments, of course.
It’s a little amusing that this comes out just a day or so after Jeffrey Zeldman has posted a great article about his annoyance at the whole Web 2.0 meme.
Later I gnawed my knuckles. At some point, in a kind of fever, I may have moaned.
I feel for Jeffrey. I really do. It’s incredibly annoying when people co-opt something that they don’t grok and get orgasmic about it.
But one thing I’d like to say in defense of the web 2.0 moniker: it’s a label. And at the very least, what it does is serve to communicate something in a couple of seconds that otherwise might take you half a paragraph:
You know, the websites that are really quick to respond, and, um, use Ajax, and sort of look cool and encourage people to interact with them and not just read them … and … and …
The problem with labels, of course, is their definition is determined by the crowd using the label. But having one is kind of nice.
Wouldn’t it be nice to get paid twice for doing the same work?
Dirty cops know the feeling, and politicians on the take. So, apparently, do large telephony companies that own a lot of internet backbone. Or, at least, they want to.
I’m talking particularly about Bellsouth, whose CTO Bill Smith wants to start charging large web companies for “their” use of Bellsouth’s pipes. The same pipes, of course, that Bellsouth’s customers – dial-up and broadband subscribers – are already paying for.
I wrote about this previously with regard to HP’s new videoconferencing product, and it hasn’t gotten any less pungent with the passage of a few weeks.
Had an interesting email conversation with Rastin Mehr today.
He had shot me a link to Nature.com’s article about web design. A writer is reporting on a Canadian study that suggests that users make snap decisions about websites they visit. In addition to this stunning scientific advance, the article offers some conclusions about site structure and design.
Me to Rastin:
Take a look at the content area on the website this article is published on … I think it violates almost all the rules it advocates!
Rastin’s reply:
True! I guess they wouldn’t consider redesigning the whole site because of a submitted article.
:- )
Which motivated me to say … because I couldn’t state the above sentiment on the website …
You know it’s interesting, but articles without a place to comment on them, and see others’ comments, are just less and less interesting to me.
To which Rastin wrote in heavily sarcastic shock:
You mean to take the control from the site owner and handing it to the users? But what if users write stuff that the author didn’t like?
My turn:
Could be bad. Tell you what’s worse: they lose interest and go away.
Rastin:
Good let’s do that then.
:- )
Me:
🙂
There’s gotta be a lesson in there somewhere. If you don’t want to allow full client interaction with your site, at least put a blog on there somewhere. You’ll be smarter for it.
Saw this in our Langley office the other day. Made me laugh:
Saw this on an article about how HDTV is still too complicated and difficult for the average person:
In a fall 2004 study, her company found that about 10 percent of consumers planned to buy an HDTV in the following six months. In such a study, researchers would normally expect about 7 percent to actually make a purchase. Only about 3 percent did, she said.
The reason: people are overwhelmed by options, choices, resolutions, technologies, and hookups. Here’s the story.
This confirms a few things I’ve been thinking lately.
But the more interesting thing is this: the survey/reality quotient sound bit from Frank Magid Associates, a public opinion, research, and consulting outfit in NY, LA, London and, improbably, Marion, Iowa.
The stat sounds similar to what I’ve been told: about 70% of people who say they’ll buy something in a survey actually will. But the reality (in this case) sounds close to what I’ve actually experienced: 30%.
This is hugely important, of course, when you’re launching a new product and spend $30,000 on market research.
How do you interpret your results? Do you have to research the research? What multiplier do you put on the percentage of people who say they’ll buy your widget?
Tough questions.
Lowest is fiscally safe, but not necessarily smartest.
Saw this story about an outsourced techie who took some minor revenge.
After Aventis outsourced its computer security operations to IBM in late 2000, Millot found himself out of a job.
But he kept an administrator-level SecureID card with him and used it to enter the network nine times. During one of those intrusions, Millot deleted the account for his former colleague Jeff Jernigan, Aventis’ manager of technical services.
IBM employees eventually tracked down what happened and restored Jernigan’s access. IBM billed Aventis for its investigators’ time at $50 an hour, for a total cost of $20,350.
The poor guy got 3 months in prison, a $5000 fine, and $20,000 in restitution that he had to repay his old employer … all for a really, really stupid (and yes, illegal) act. He shouldn’t have done it, obviously.
The real story here though, is that the higher up the food chain you go, the more crime pays. And the less you pay for committing it.
I mean, he deletes one user account and IBM spends 407 hours finding out what happened and creating a new account? Bill the the client $20 K to do that has got to be a more criminal act that deleting the user account in the first place.
Scott McNealy once had a comment about IBM Global Services being a giant Hoover sucking up all their clients’ money. Case in point, I guess.
Unbelievable.
I’m reading My golden rule, a compilation of words of wisdom from business giants.
This one reallyresonates with me. Love it:
I always have an eye on the competition, but it’s not to do what they’re doing. It’s to see where the holes are.
That’s from Geraldine Laybourne, the “Chairman” (at least according to Biz 2.0) and CEO of Oxygen Media.
That’s one of the smartest things I’ve ever heard about why you maintain competitive intelligence.
If you thought you’d never live to see the day … well, so did a lot of other people. APPL is now worth more than DELL.
And even though it’s probably more a factor of multiples and stock trends, maybe a little bit of bearishness on the commodity-type of business that Dell runs, and is probably not going to be a permanent state of affairs, it’s still pretty cool.
But if Apple can sustain its product momentum, and not get tied up in legal battles, politics, and distracting battles, it has a decent chance of going from man-bites-dog news to yesterday’s news.
(Kudos to MacDailyNews for the link.)
I’m engaged in a fairly major research effort right now. We’re trying to understand some business conditions a little better, and are using a variety of tools to try get a handle on it.
Oddly enough, I also happen to be taking a graduate course in research at the moment.
And I’m wondering about research methods, mostly because I’m investigating something that I don’t want to assume that I know anything about. And when you’re doing that, the standard survey will not work.
Think about it: a standard survey has questions and lists of potential answers. To create that, you need to know (or think you know) at least a large fraction of the possible universe of answers. In my case, I don’t want to assume any of the answers.
So I’ve constructed three one-page “surveys.” They’re basically short-answer questions. And I’m wondering if I can apply a sort of fuzzy analysis to the answers that I get.
My inspiration comes from tagging. Tagging is the opposite of taxonomy. Taxonomy is a science of classification: phylae, categories, rows, matrices. Slots that you create and slots that you fill. A place for everything and everything in its place.
To me, tagging is a much more organic beast. It grows exponentially. It accepts that fact that something things don’t fit into just one category. In fact, many things fit into many categories. It’s an inherently scalable way of dealing with complexity – because in the tagging world, you don’t have to manage that complexity. You don’t have to beat it into intellectual submission, understand it, categorize it, or make it all make sense.
You just do it … and “it” builds “itself.”
I’m wondering if we need to develop new ways of analyzing and modelling datasets that are (self)organized by tags. Maybe they already exist. Maybe a hundred postdocs are already hot on the case.
I hope so, because I’m going to be getting a lot of fuzzy data. And I’m planning on tagging it and putting it in a shaker and seeing what comes out.
Guy Kawasaki is good. I mean really, really, really good.
I started reading his blog almost as soon as he started writing it because … well, the Kawasaki chic, right? The ineffable aura of Apple coolness, even ex post facto. And the attractive seductiveness of a venture capitalist, one of those magical beings that bestow money on mere mortals.
Then, of course, my hard drive crashed, and I lost all my RSS feeds, bookmarks, etc., and I kind of forgot about Guy. (I sure hope he pronounces that as rhyming with bee, by the way. That’s the Only Right Way™.) That was a mistake.
He recently hit my radar screen again, just as I was starting a revisioning process in Premier home & family, my baby. And he’s not going to drop off it, this time.
Today I spent a chunk of time on his blog, and what really caught my eye this time was this article about intrapreneurship … being an entrepreneur within a large organization.
It’s not easy, you know. Those Aerons aren’t nearly as comfortable as they’re cracked up to be. (Umm … small joke. I only wish …)
Here’s his list of to-do’s for intrapreneurs:
- kill the cash cows
- reboot your brain
- find a separate building
- hire infected people
- put the company first
- stay under the radar
- collect and share data
- dismantle when done
Read his post for details – it’s worth your time.
The toughest one, of course, is killing the cash cows. This is the standard innovator’s dilemma: I’m making millions from buggy whips … how can I go to making thousands on automobile tires?
The reality is that somehow, most companies have to transition their mainline showcase products every decade or so as time and technology obsolete them. The hardest part is going from being the ultimately adapted lean mean king of your (diminishing but still very profitable) space to being just one of the contenders, not too well adapted, not lean, not mean, and probably not even as profitable – at least at first. The urge to protect is so strong and so (seemingly) natural that most companies never make it onto the next curve.
Intrapreneurship might just be the way for dinosaurs to evolve.
The alternative is Sony-fication. Walkman, anyone?
There are a number of spoof and joking rumors running around the internet about Apple’s plans in home entertainment: plasma displays, or all-in-one HDTV, etc., etc..
Well, it may just be a spoof right now, but Steve, we NEED Apple to make home theatre systems.
I recently bought a Harmon Kardon AVR 240 for home stereo, primarily. It’s for upstairs. But downstairs, our “home-theatre-in-a-box,” which is a JVC XV-THA5, is currently giving up the ghost. Or, not giving it up.
It simultaneously refuses to read DVDs and refuses to eject them until it’s read them. The result is predictable … and, for a unit that’s both the receiver and the DVD player, not good. Not good at all.
So I’m wondering if we need a new mini home theatre system as well.
But getting into that market again is horrific. The acronyms! The wires! The connections! The protocols! It seems almost impossible to put together a simple system. Interfacing the TV, the VCR, DVD player, satellite box, receiver, and the 6 or 7 speakers is a nightmare.
Apple could do amazing things with this market.
For instance, why are there 15 different types of connections? Optical connections, coaxial, speaker wire (15 different types right here), component cables, you name it. In fact, why on earth does a DVD player have to have separate cables for left audio, right audio, and video? I mean, what earthly reason, besides “that’s the way we’ve always done it,” is there?
Give me one kind of cable to connect everything. Make it smart, so it knows when stuff is connected – or when a piece is missing. Give me one device which is a PVR, digital cable (or satellite) receiver, HDTV tuner, DVD player, and possibly VCR (for legacy use) all in one.
Let me connect it to my TV with one cable. And let me connect my speakers to it with one cable, or wirelessly.
Make sure it tunes itself. It should know where its speakers are (just like Bose solutions) and adjust volume between the channels automatically. Give me one power button for the whole set-up.
Stick an Apple logo on it, and watch it fly off shelves.
[ update Jan. 10 ]Ummm … no matter what your clients contact you about, never, never, never, never, never, never, never, never have your pickle-up-the-@ss marketing department reply like this:
Hello:
Thank you for contacting Intel. We sincerely appreciate your taking time to provide your comments and feedback.
The new corporate logo signals that the Intel® brand, and what it stands for, is evolving. It is the most visible representation of our company, and the new logo serves a powerful tool that strikes the right balance between building on our heritage and signaling the evolution to platforms. This emphasis on the corporate logo aligns with how people buy their technology today-in a complex marketplace with many devices, people look to the source brand first. Overall the strategy is tightly aligned with our business strategy, and our approach to the specific markets where we are playing-mobile, home, health, and enterprise. This change in brand identity does not affect the Intel Inside® program.
Intel does have one of the most valuable brands in the world, but we want to increase the value and make it even stronger. We believe this brand evolution will allow Intel to be better recognized for our platform vision and contributions (beyond the microprocessor), establish a stronger emotional connection with our audiences, and strengthen our overall brand value and position in the marketplace.
Again, thank you for your interest in Intel.
Sincerely, Intel Customer Support
I saw this on BoingBoing today.
The email, from Intel customer support, was in response to someone who submitted a don’t-contact-us form on Intel’s website, basically telling them that he felt their new logo sucks.
The answer is corp-speak blah blah blah blah blah blah. No-one cares. No one cares about your heritage and emotional connection and evolution and alignment.
Even inside Intel, no-one cares. Not even the poor dweeb who wrote this cares. He’s just trying to keep a job, make bosses feel good about themselves, and pay his mortgage.
Why on earth would the world care?
(OK, about fifteen people care. The branding people, some of the marketing people, and the C-level execs, except the COO, who, because he has to deal with real things and real problems and real solutions, is too level-headed to get caught up in nonsense like this.)
Some people will catch the Cluetrain. To others, it’s the light in the tunnel that keeps getting closer and closer and clo- …
This is the third (what was your first clue) in an oft-interrupted series of articles on project management.
(The first cardinal sin is starting before you’re ready. The second cardinal sin is doing the right things at the wrong time.)
It’s a truism in military matters that no plan survives contact with the enemy. Well, almost no plan. It should also be a truism in project management that no plan survives contact with reality.
Reality is hard. It has sharp edges. It comes fast. From above you, or behind. It comes when you least expect it. It will mangle your plan – and mangle you – unless you’re prepared.
As you manage and run a project, you need to have a continuous grasp of what is happening in all aspects of the plan. Not at the micro level – you’ll be overwhelmed. But certainly at the macro level, and in many cases much deeper than that.
Generals and military historians call this grip. It’s having your fingers on all the strings – knowing what’s going on in all areas of the project.
You know you have grip when you can answer questions without referring to your notes. If you have to look up an email to answer a quick question about a vital part of your project, you don’t have grip. If your answer is “I’ll get back to you on that” when your boss wonders what’s happening with the production facilities for Newfangled Widget Number 9, no grip.
Grip means that you’re closely in touch with co-workers and associates who have roles to play in the successful completion of your project. Grip means that you are collecting and analyzing at least some metrics about the progress of your project. And grip means that you are maintaining a fairly detailed situational awareness of every major aspect of your project – even (or especially) those that you’ve entrusted to others.
Losing grip is the the third cardinal error of project management, and losing grip means that you are in danger of losing your grip, which has entirely different (and not at all positive) connotations.
. . .
. . .
In the spirit of Guy Kawasaki’s blog motto (“Blogger. n. Someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do”) I should add the following …
I am the ultimate expert on project management since I’ve managed well over 3524 projects, all wildly successful, on time, under budget, and above minimum spec.
Yeah right!
Realistically, I’ve had my share of setbacks. Real boats rock.
Hopefully, I’ve learned from my failures, as well as my successes. That’s all that anyone can ask of you, too.
I am just now going through an exercise of visioning what the next phase of Premier home & family is going to look like. And I’ve been wanted to find the 2-5 words that will really describe us.
Talk about good timing: Guy Kawasaki, the former Apple evangelist, is now blogging, and wrote about mantras versus missions.
An excerpt:
I give up trying to get people to create short, different, and meaningful mission statements, so go ahead and spend the $25,000 for the offsite, facilitator, and consultants to create one. However, you should also create a mantra for your organization. A mantra is three or four words long. Tops. Its purpose is to help employees truly understand why the organization exists.
If I were the CEO of Wendy’s, I would establish a corporate mantra of “healthy fast food.” End of story. Here are more examples of corporate mantras to inspire you:
Federal Express: “Peace of mind”
Nike: “Authentic athletic performance”
Target: “Democratize design”
Mary Kay “Enriching women’s lives”
Perfect!
My only problem: the one I have in mind (“educational products for families that support schools”) is three words too long, according to Guy.
Yikes. How can I reduce it?
. . .
. . .
Note, I’ve talked about some of our revisioning previously.
According to my company’s internal newsletter, confidence is “the feeling you have before you understand the situation.”
Uh-oh.
Step-by-step instructions for would-be wireless plutocrats:
Or just for those who want to spread some love.
Very good post on corporate blogging on Alan Gutierrez’ blog.
Here’s a key bit from the section I liked best:
Does your firm do anything that makes for good television? Anything that is steeped in technical lingo, particulars?
Give a blog to the team that crash tests your automobiles, or conducts the taste testing of your snack foods, or the people create and record the voices of your cartoon ducks. Set them up like English Cut, or the new Horse Bliss. Create a blog where your employees can regale readers with stories of the know-how and history that makes your firm special.
I’m leading a new business initiative for my company that has potential for huge and almost instant scale due to our massive installed base in education.
But only if we do it right.
And I’m wondering how/if we can do something like this: inviting our clients to be part of our product development department, marketing department: partners. The challenge that I’m facing is that we can only really do what we really are, and the reality is that we are a traditional company that makes stuff, markets stuff, and sells stuff.
We’re trying hard to bring customers into the product development loop, and that’s a good thing.
But my dream is to take that farther. Way farther.
The success of a Flickr, Delicious, Google Base, you name it, is that the company/service/product invites you to add to it, modify it, use it, adapt it. To make it yours.
Perhaps it’s the difference between making a platform and an application. An application is optimized for defined purposes. A platform is too, but to a much lesser degree. Rather, it’s optimized to enable all kinds of purposes, including, and perhaps especially, those that the developers haven’t even thought of yet.
Hence APIs. Hence customizable, flexible tools. Hence beta versions. Hence an adventurous, daring sense of what-the-heck, let’s try it.
That’s what I want. That would make our clients our developers. Our marketers. Our partners, in a sense.
But not in the sense that they would do our work for us, or that we would co-opt them, or somehow coerce their cooperation.
Rather, this would only happen if people in their own legitimate self-interest did things that benefited them however they wanted … and we provided tools, bases, platforms to enable that. But as individuals created value for themselves, they would contribute to the value of the ecosystem.
Which would build more value for them, more value for new clients, and more value for us.
OK. That’s the theory. Now … how to do that?
. . .
. . .
Hugh at gapingvoid gets this. The people behind the cluetrain get this. Can somewhat traditional companies get it?
A buddy of mine in Calgary, AB, just called and asked if I knew of some kind of solution for a web-accessible contact database. His church needs a simple, cheap way of creating shareable, maintainable records of those who contact them asking for resources or information.
I took a quick look at Google Base. It’s perfect for the job, with one caveat. Since it’s not private, it won’t do. (Not too many people would be happy with a church spreading their private contact information all over the world wide web!)
So I went looking for other solutions – an online “web 2.0” spreadsheet app built with Ajax would do the trick.
I ran across Num Sum. Bingo! Here’s a quick look at the editor – just like any other spreadsheet, but in your browser:
It needs Firefox to run, of course (if you’re on a Mac – on PCs it will also run on IE), but that’s no problem. Everyone has it, or can easily get it.
Frankly, creating a spreadsheet on Num Sum is easier than creating one in Excel. And the built-in shareability is unsurpassed, of course … just create a web page with a link to it:
Num Sum lets you do that in about 30 seconds flat! Wow.
Dead, dead, dead simple.