As many of you know, I was recently off in Tokyo, then Singapore and Malaysia for business reasons. At some point, I'd like to post some broader observations. At this point, just a couple of things.

First and obviously foremost: A week after my departure, Japan was hit with the terrible combination of earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear catastrophe. Like many, I am challenged to understand the scale of the disaster, made especially poignant by my recent visit and my appreciation of the kindness and talents of my new friends in the Japan team. Please forgive my not making those reflections a further part of this post: the right words have not yet been found, not here and not by me. Fortunately, those friends old and new and their families and colleagues are all safe. Many, of course, continue to face challenging circumstances.

Second: while its of dramatically lessened import compared to the above, I wanted to reflect slightly further on the subject of my last post, about groups of individuals using "social business" to re-organize in a more open/democratic fashion, about essentially moving from using their org chart as their primary information processing tool to using more advanced techniques like filters, recommenders, activity streams and the like - approaches pioneered in the consumer realm by Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and others. It was an open question whether this would be a useful message in cultures as different as Japan, Singapore, and Malaysia. The initial feedback I had was that at least among some in the audience, there was great openness to the approach. It will as ever be intriguing to see how culture and technology connect and evolve here. Lengthier thoughts coming soon.

Third: I had the privilege of trying out prezi as a keynoting tool, and of meeting the CEO and Founder, Peter Arvai. I'm certainly a rank amateur at the use of the approach, but the groups I worked with found it an enjoyable alternative, and Peter was patiently encouraging :). I'm looking forward to playing around more, and open of course to pointers to other such innovative re-thinks on how to engage an audience in what can so often seem like a rote pushing of information. For those interested in seeing what I presented, you'll find the presentations on Prezi at the following links: my Tokyo keynote, my Singapore keynote, and my Malaysia keynote (all pretty much the same), along with a more business audience spin that I gave to a CHRO (HR exec) audience in Singapore. Its a long way from clear that these presentations stand alone without my verbose explanations!!! Anyway, I enjoyed the chance to experiment with communicating in a new way, and I think you can actually grab them and copy/mod/play around yourself with the presentations using prezi. All part of the social business experiment!

Well, for the first time in a long time (I think over ten years?), I'm down at Lotusphere where all the talk promises to be about "social business". I'm actually quite interested in social business, so I thought I'd write about it periodically here, usually tagged "innovation" and/or "technology". The views here on this (or any!) subject are mine and not necessarily those of the IBM company, and my intent is to explore thoughts in this area, as in other areas on this blog, rather than shill for my employer. Its a new line for me to walk, so if I stray the course, please advise.

Anyway, I think the Quora definition of social business is quite good in its reductionist sense (and since the market is still evolving here a reductionist definition is probably a good one). At its root, social business looks at the way people have "improved" their personal lives using social tools - insert your favorite technique here - and says "Why can't we do the same in a business context?". In other words, if you like hanging out on Facebook and find its a good way to keep up with what large groups of people are doing and stay in touch, you might ask yourself when you're in a work setting why you can't do things the same (well, perhaps slightly modified…) way. The same could be said of other consumer social business tools (Facebook, but also Twitter, Foursquare, Wikipedia, Youtube, Flickr, etc). It turns out you can do business this way, and IBM and others sell stuff to do this. I wanted to focus more in this blog however about how people generically think about this stuff and where it might go, rather than who has the best way to implement it.

The most difficult thing I've noticed in discussing "social business" with people is getting them to grasp the power of it, and whats required to get the power. Its quite difficult, as the benefit is most easily realized through experience, and the benefit grows the more the people that you work with are part of the experience. Its a huge bootstrapping problem to get from "zero" to the experiental result. In this experiential regard, its not unlike some consumer devices (what makes, say, the iPhone a cool thing is a lot harder to describe than it is to experience by playing around… Hence the Apple Stores…. but I digress). The difference though is that experiencing the benefit of an iPhone doesn't require you to get some critical mass of friends on the iPhone. In the social realm, it does. This was a huge barrier at the beginning of what we used to call "Web 2.0", and one that the best companies accidentally or on purpose broke through with groups of early adopters until there was sufficient network value for it to be likely that mainstream users could quickly realize the benefit.

So far, so good.

In businesses, however, I think there is a further hurdle. I think that those business that get to the full benefits of social business will ultimately wind up overhauling their cultures in as fundamental of a way as the changes that human societies went through in the transition from subject to citizen. At the endpoint of this journey, a whole set of expectations about how ideas progress through the corporation and how people shepherd them will change, to a large degree to ways the polar opposite of the way they are today. Why?

Well, business (or human society…) has always been about relationships, cultivating the right people to sell to or get investment from or get promoted by or whatever. This is nothing new. In a closed society, however - for example, the monarchical cultures present in what we might broadly call the medieval period of many cultures - the nature of these relationships is fairly straightforward. People have an explicit rank in society, the rank flows from the sovereign, and sucess has to do with answering the interests of the sovereign and forming relationships with the sovereign and those whom the sovereign deems important. The broader set of ideas and interests of "We, The People" are part of the equation only in so far as the sovereign and gang need to avoid revolution and motivate, say, the army to defend the nation or grab another fiefdom.

This frankly worked well for much of human history, if you gauge well as meaning "assembling empires" at least. Ie if the British Empire or the Roman Empire had a stock price, you certainly could have played buy and hold for quite a long time based on the successes that their closed society management models delivered.

Over time, though, it started to break, perhaps beginning with the Enlightenment. To grossly oversimplify, what started to come out in the Enlightenment is that it was really important to get the best ideas, and the closed society model stifled the best ideas too much (either because the people couldn't get enough food and education to have ideas, or because the people with the best ideas couldn't get heard (best case) or got thrown into a volcano for threatening the perceived wisdom (not even unfortunately worst case)). Societies that loosened the reins started to surge forward.

This wasn't all sweetness and light, though. There are probably lots of reasons, but for the purposes of this essay I'll claim that the collapse of closed Empires coincided with the growth of heavy industry and industrialization. These societies did need good ideas, but they also needed lots of capital. A crappy idea about how to make steel, along with huge amounts of capital that a steel factory needed, made more steel, and hence advanced the society, more than a great idea with no capital. Ironically, the society that most triumphed in its ideology the need for labor to overcome the despotic desires of capital, the Soviet Union, may well have been kept alive by the fact that the greatest growth periods in its history (the first industrialization wave in the twenties and thirties, then the rebuilding and "Sputnik" wave in the fifties and sixties, when the USSR was one of the fastest growing economies on earth) coincided with times when the demands of the society required capital more than labor (or a least more than the innovation aspect of labor).

Eventually, however, the innovation/labor drumbeat started to drown out the capital/heavy industry drumbeat in advanced societies. The "easy part" of industrialization was done, and now societies needed to find the best ideas in order to continue to generate wealth. This becomes visible in the latter part of the Cold War, when western societies, the US in the vanguard, really started to increase the productivity gap between them and closed societies at an increasing rate. Innovation came into its own, the Soviet Union crumbled, and some great ideas started to bubble over that way as well.

What does this have to do with business and specifically social business? Well, I think we're on the cusp of the same thing. Business leaders in many advanced economies and even in developing economies where the "winners" have started to emerge have outstripped the "heavy industry" phase, where having lots of capital was a greater determinant of success than having lots of great ideas. Silicon Valley is an obvious ground zero of this revolution, but it spread. Innovation has become a primary determinant of survival, not just victory.

The challenge? Many businesses look much more like closed societies than open ones. Knowledge is siloed, hierarchies manage the flow of information (even in the best flattened hierarchies), task forces pop up periodic great thoughts whose "radicalness" is limited a priori by the selection of the participants. Things may not fall apart, but, hey, this approach ain't gonna put a man on the moon. They need to find a better way to get the best ideas, and the better way is to shift the culture, from a closed society to open society.

This is, however, a radical thing. Its certainly not simply the technology of what I've heard disparaged as "blogsnwikisnthings" (blogs and wikis and things). It is however a major change in behavior encompassing the use of blogs and wikis and things that will let these ideas get out. If you want to allow the best talent to hit the best ideas and influence them in the best ways, its a prerequisite to implement an open culture where the people and ideas can actually find each other. If we tell everyone to blog, but never read the blogs or comment on them; if we put our ideas in wikis, but lock down the wiki, prevent changes, or treat the wiki as a technique for "the owner" to publish his or her internal website, we certainly didn't get a culture of innovation. We got, merely, blogsnwikisnthings.

The analogy, from a society standpoint, might be newspapers and elections. The Soviet Union had newspapers and elections. It just didn't have the ability for anyone to make a newspaper, express any (well, longer story, but pretend "any") idea they like, and allow any idiot to run for election to see which idea would win. This is kind of like having blogsnwikisnthings that are locked now: thanks for printing the party newspaper, as I needed something to wrap the fish in. The secret locked down idea has the same value, perhaps even the same future, as fish wrap, bird cage liner, and other noble roles.

This, in my view, is the payoff but also at its heart the challenge of social business. To gain the benefit, a business needs to begin to chart a course where the "closed society" model gets overtaken by the "open society" model. To do so, the business needs to gain new skills, and start behaving in new ways where the techniques that were often the most successful in the old model are now at best useless, and at worst harmful. To implement the new skills and culture, businesses need the technology support. Its not about blogsnwikisnthings, but if you're looking around and not seeing those things implemented and used as fundamental cornerstones of an increasing number of business processes, you're probably not yet on the road to social business.

You may, of course, prefer the old, closed, model. In this case, you certainly don't need blogsnwikisnthings. A few propaganda posters ought to do. After all, isn't it true, as the Stalin-era propaganda poster said, that LIFE IS BECOMING EVER MORE JOYFUL?

Working with a number of different people around different aspects of "innovation" (essentially, either bringing a new thing into the market or changing an existing thing), one of the things we've been honing in on is the relationship between innovation and product management. "Product management", I think, is something that has a fairly elastic definition in the tech world, depending on the nature of the company and product. In general, tech companies try and think about borrowing the consumer packaged goods (CPG) (especially Proctor and Gamble) model of managing products and bring it to the technology world, but the record of success here is uneven (especially on product introductions). "Innovation" has a similarly variable definition, generally reduced to meaning "having a new idea", though its meant to mean the process by which invention (the new idea) is transformed into something of utility. I'm going to sketch out some thoughts over a series of articles as to what I've seen happen in product management in tech companies, how product management is approached by different companies and in different situations, and some thoughts on when variant techniques can be applied.

First, what is product management? The CPG definition is something like "CEO of the product". In other words, the product manager is in charge of getting the product to market; dealing with product, pricing, positioning and promotion (or your other favorite "four P's"); and is held accountable for the P&L of the product. In CPG, the product manager can source "technology" from throughout the organization, or externally, and has a wide degree of discretion about which internal resources to use to do product development and fulfilment.

Technology organizations have a fairly variable set of views, but rarely have I seen product managers in technology with the scope of CPG product managers. For one, in technology startups, the source of ideas and customer needs is more or less the CEO. A start-up usually has one big idea, about making one simple thing better somehow, and that big idea is born of a collaboration between a technologist (the CTO) and a business person (the CEO). As they go about executing, the CTO finds inventions and technologists that can be brought to bear on producing the product, and the CEO finds funding and customers and partners with whom the original vision is fine-tuned until "product-market" fit is established. Or not, in which case the company closes or shifts direction.

Rightly or otherwise, as start-ups grow up, this model soaks into the organizational fabric. The clever new thoughts come from the CTO's organization (frequently, frankly, because the things that the company makes are quite technical so the people sitting outside R&D rarely have the depth to understand them fully, let alone figure out new things about them) or from the CEO's interaction with shareholders, customers, and partners. Especially if the CEO is the founding CEO, s/he often has the best "gut" for customers, simply from having interacted with them from before the company was born, and knowing many of the mistakes the company made along the way on its path to growth.

What happens once the founding CEO is gone? The new CEO will usually be some blend of sales and financial person, brought in to drive up revenue, cut costs, sell off pieces, do acquisitions, and/or sell the company. In other words, the replacement CEO will rarely be a product person. In this case, product innovation flows right back to the CTO's organization: either because the founding CTO is still there, or the products are too complex, or the R&D organization was calling the shots before and so continues to, and the new CEO is a bit out of his/her depth in product and so leaves it to R&D.

So if you follow the flow above, the stages go something like this: a startup has an invention (CTO) which is turned into something of utility (ie an innovation) through interacting with the market (CEO); the startup grows up by learning more about the market (CEO) and technology (CTO); the grown-up company focuses on operations (CEO) and incremental innovations (CTO). In other words, product management doesn't exist in the beginning as a discrete job, as its instead the CEO focusing on finding the product-market fit for the CTO's invention(s); product management then turns into a partnership between the CEO and CTO, and winds up being done by the CTO. Never having been created as a stand-alone department, product management is de facto in the hands of the R&D department in most tech companies, and there it remains.

Is this a problem? I'm not one who thinks the org chart is the cause or solution to all business issues, so at the level of this introductory article I'm simply going to say "sometimes". I think the real questions when looking at product management and introducing innovations into the market place concern which issues are confronting the organization at different points in time. From this, one can hone in on which issues are actually product management ones, and which techniques, therefore people, and therefore, lastly, organizational constructs, are appropriate to solve them. With that introduction, I'm going to stop for today, but promise that the next article in the series will look at the initial product management problem (one frequently performed by the startup CEO), which is "how do you find if anyone wants to buy what you're thinking of?". Certainly if I or anyone had a 100% hit rate at this, we'd be running, say, Apple (hey wait - Steve Jobs is running Apple, so I guess someone does have a 100% hit rate! :) ), but there are certainly a few techniques around exploring ideas and markets that help reduce the risk that I've observed, used, and failed to use, with the results most predictable in the last case. And that shall be the next post…

Last night, I had the good fortune to attend the New York Semantic Web meetup. The semantic web is a way of exposing information on the web that makes it simpler to extract meaning from the information. (A trivial example: I could use semantic web technologies to indicate that "Nigel Beck" is my name, making it simpler for a web service to realize that this web site and, say, my LinkedIn profile are related to one another. Of course, I could also indicate more useful things, like relationships with friends or clients or associations, etc). Tim Berners-Lee among others is hot about it - which, considering the last thing he got excited about became the web, is a pretty good reason to take a look. As a former boss of mine once said: "Here are the things I find interesting. If I, as your boss, find them interesting, you should find them fascinating"… Ok, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, our overall web boss, I'm fascinated :)

Anyway… it turned out the timing of the event was particularly propitious, as Facebook had just announced their open graph protocol at their F8 user group the day before. Since the pundits on the blogosphere went bananas about privacy, and the hoi polloi went bananas trying to figure out what everyone was really talking about, there was, shall we say, a fairly full room of curious people. They ranged from "how do you spell semantic web?" to "my friend invented it, he's on our board, and I know everything". Generally speaking, the less knowledgeable tried to ask good questions, and the better informed tried diligently and civilly to answer even (ahem) less-than-good questions, so a good time was had by all. A tea party, in other words, it wasn't.

The group didn't get all the way to debating what the Facebook announcements meant, but there certainly was general groaning and gnashing of teeth. Here's my view of what Facebook actually announced and what it means (with - full disclosure - an admission that I am intensely biased towards favoring open source, open data, open et cetera, but I shall try to stop the propeller from spinning while I consider this…).

A review of first principles: semantic web stuff, as I mentioned, allows you to annotate data so that it has meaning. This is important for computers because, while they are very good at stuff like computations and storing information, they are rather bad at inferring things and understanding language. A human reading this web page has no problem discerning that some of the words on the page are special - they mean things like "name" or "title of blog", for example. A computer, however, has no idea, and so applications that wanted to figure out those things (such as, say, OpenCalais) had to rely on various cunning techniques that are essentially statistical, and so require lots of data, lots of calculations, lots of computing power, and aren't 100% perfect.

If this sounds fairly abstract and meaningless for the average user, hold on a moment. Many of us - about 400 million of us - have our own web page(s) in the form of our Facebook profile. This specialized web page has some quite interesting things on it - like your name, or location, but also things like who all of your friends are. This data, however, lives inside Facebook only and isn't really connected to wherever else you go on the web or whatever else you do. The result from a user perspective can be kind of annoying: I have to teach every web site about me for it to do anything useful.

This is where Open Graph (and sort of Facebook Connect, to a degree, and some other technologies) come in. The idea is that web sites will annotate themselves in such a way as to indicate their relationships with other data, and additionally that you can connect your relationship with that web site to "you" - or at least you in the form of your Facebook page. So, for example, I ought to use some markup to indicate that this site is about me, that it is a blog, and that it related to the "me" on my Facebook page. I could then extend the page further, so that when you click on a "Like" button on the page, you indicate your relationship with my page. That is, there is a new relationship created between you and an article on my blog, where you say you like that article. (You could also hate it, but there is as yet no "hate" button).

Boring? Well, your Facebook activity stream could then show the various blogs (or whatever) that you've said you liked. You could also see when you're on that page whether your friend(s) liked it. Furthermore, Facebook (or someone) could use that information to propose other things you might like - either other blogs (which you might appreciate) or random things from their advertisers (which, maybe, you won't appreciate). This is kind of a big deal.

Why? Well, lets be three different people: you the web surfer, you Facebook, and you the web company that is not Facebook.

You the web surfer get something cool: you don't have to restate your friends and preferences everywhere, and you'll hopefully get better personalization out of the sites that you visit (either directly or because some other widget on the site provided by Facebook or whomever gives you recommendations of some sort). On the other hand, you lose something: privacy. So this is the first reason why people are annoyed. When you say "I like that purple giraffe site", its potentially exposed to your friends in your Facebook feed, and exposing your silly tastes to people you wanted to hide them from. Worse, these tastes are exposed by default to the world, not just your friends, so there is further potential for mischief and embarassment. Lastly (more of a web geek thing), its not too clear who "owns" those tastes and how you can delete them or move them elsewhere. Do you care? Maybe not, but you just told Facebook (and the world) a lot about you but you don't get to control that information.

From Facebook's point of view this is all quite lovely. They know more about you, they can monetize their advertising and their data more effectively, and they build themselves more deeply into the fabric of the web. Triple win. The only downside is the degree to which the end consumer feels threatened by the borg.

And from the standpoint of other web developers? Well, certain things are going to be harder to make if you're not Facebook. There are a litany of start ups that provide recommendations, for example (I love recommendations, and I had a start up in that area), and their business models may have to change. If Facebook has information on 400 million peoples' preferences, they're likely going to do a better job on recommendations than your smaller site. How open Facebook is going to be with this "social graph" data is an open question - and, of course, we've seen that various large players, including but not limited to Facebook, have capriciously changed their terms from time to time, wiping out whole cottage industries as they change direction. Not a good place to be left as a start up.

The next step? Well, a bunch of people (probably including me!) are going to go and put some semantic stuff into their sites and see what happens. A bunch of others are going to push harder at creating open standards (like OpenLike and GnuSocial), and they're going to support corporate initiatives like the Data Liberation Front at Google, perhaps expanding their scope. And a really large bunch of actual non-geek people are going to have to figure out another set of Facebook privacy settings to avoid embarassment.

Personally I'm going to leave the data public for now, click on a bunch of "like" buttons, and see what happens.

The other day I wrote a short post about the what seemed to me promising approach that OneWire was taking to the recruiting industry. It seemed to me that this is a kind of problem - seeking matches for rare, high value events (like also, say, weddings, funerals, IPOs, home sales) - where intermediaries are paid a lot, there is a limited transparency, and too much reliance on nebulous signals (resumes and font selection, for example, rather than some deeper means of ferreting out a candidate's virtues). Interestingly, I had a chance to chat with Jake from The Ladders about this the other day at the Evernote meetup here in New York.

Without going into all the puts and takes, the discussion boiled down to what some elements of the commentary on my last post: its difficult to distil the human element into something that a machine can do a better match of. Because of that, The Ladders focuses a lot on thinking about how to maximize presenting humans to recruiters in a format that recruiters are used to: resumes. Why present to recruiters? Again, its a human element problem: companies develop relationships with recruiters and trust them to understand some of the "soft" elements that are critical in a corporations hiring practices. In particular, companies are often not particularly good at writing job ads that describe their requirements, and recruiters, acting as skilled intermediaries, can consider the vagaries of resumes against the vagaries of job descriptions, and thus complete a better match than a fully automated approach.

This is a fair point, and one I had likely underconsidered in thinking about the OneWire approach (which, in fairness to my earlier analysis, doesn't eliminate recruiters, but rather tries to narrow the flood of information to perform better matches).

As I thought about it further, I wondered still whether there would be a possibility to blend the approach somewhat more. Perhaps, in fact, its a faceted search problem, where a structured interrogative (like, perhaps, on hunch), might be more revealing. In other words, if we thought about a job-seeker as a set of answers, and a job as a set of questions, would it be possible for a site to "interview" a candidate, much as Hunch does, based on a set of questions derived from and strictly relevant to the jobs currently listed? As the available positions morphed, the job seeker could be "re-interviewed". A side benefit of this approach from a site approach would be repeat engagement in a positive fashion, as the job-seeker is called upon at some frequency (say, weekly) to update the answers to various questions.

This is more of a thought experiment than an answer at present, of course. There would need to be some means of deriving questions and evaluating answers meaningfully, which for broader questions is non-trivial: "How many years have you programmed in C++" has a narrow answer that is simple for a machine to evaluate in a way that "Demonstrated success selling to large enterprises" doesn't.

Perhaps some kind of ontology, maybe informed by the HR-XML work, mated with some human intervention, like Amazon Mechanical Turk stuff or even the application of some game techniques would flesh this out?

I'm sure real researchers have taken this further than I. It is indeed interesting though to think of how far tools like Google Search have taken us in a decade or so in terms of our understanding of the world of information, and yet how early we are on that path when the variety of even seemingly simple "match" problems are considered.

I know it appears unlikely to some, but, based on last Thursday's announcement of further restrictions in the Apple Developer's program, I've finally realized what the problem is: Steve Jobs hates me. Personally. I know the rest of you think its all about Apple's strategy, and Steve's personality, and stuff like that, but all that stuff is naive. I know the truth. Steve has a dart board, and its got my photo on it.

Let me explain. Way back, when Steve was a young multimillionaire, and I was a wee lad, I didn't use the Apple II. I learned to program on a strange machine, but I tried to have Steve and Steve's hacker ethos. I even told people that the Apple II was a stupid thing to buy, a trivial games machine for kids. This, its clear to me now, is when the persecution began. How I wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then!

Flash forward a few years. I'd honed my technical expertise on device drivers and lisp interpreters, and moved on to dead languages. Dead human languages. One dark and stormy night, however, in the midst of acquainting myself with the mysteries of the optative mood in ancient Greek, I was called upon by a local businessman in Toronto to follow the Steve-wa and go to NeXT came, to learn to program Steve's newest thing.

I must admit, I thought the NeXT was cool. But I also thought it was a stupid idea for the local businessman to pursue. Steve undoubtedly simmered and plotted, and finally came back as head of Apple, eventually launching the iPod.

"Do you think the halo effect will work?" a friend of mine asked me.

"No, never" I replied confidently. Having been in the tech industry for years, and having the aforementioned deep relationship with Steve, I could easily predict this one: the iPod would have no effect on reviving Apple's stock. I even received an iPod as a gift, after the first millions of units had sold. The iPod was hard to use, and iTunes integration sucked. It was, sadly, time to sell Apple stock.

Nefariously, Steve persisted and fought back. Macs came out in fancy different shapes, slim, and with Intel chips, offering the ability to dual boot Windows and assuage the concerns of Mac-curious Windows users. The IBM PowerPC chip (which I was, among other things, in charge of marketing) was unceremoniously dumped, in the dark of night, with assassins dressed in black like ninjas, distinguished only by a pale grey glowing Apple logo in the center of their chests, delivering the news to the IBM fabs in the dark of night.

Of course, I knew it wouldn't last. The rising stock since my last prediction had been an anomaly, brought on, no doubt, by cheap credit and collateralized debt obligations and the like. Steve was doing lines of crushed financial weapons of mass destruction, all while standing inside a pentagram and calling on the powers of Satan to buoy the stock. When that failed, he back dated a few options from time to time. It would soon all be over.

Sure enough, in a fit of hubris, Apple released the iPhone. Closed. No removal battery. No 3G. No GPS. Locked to one carrier.

"Hah!" I laughed. "Many have tried to open up the crappy sealed world of the mobile phone industry in the past. No way Apple will make a difference!"

The gullible bought the crappy thing in droves. It was hacked. Accelerated. 3G and GPS were added. The App Store came out.

"30%!" I exclaimed. "What fool developer would give Apple 30% AND give them veto rights without recourse over their revenue stream?! I'll stay clear of that crappy thing".

180,000 morons wrote apps for it. Some hackers unlocked it and provided an alternative app store. Finally, I bought one.

Sure, it made phone calls, occasionally even holding the signal for the entire call. At times I was even able to use the cut and paste to capture some thought. I even browsed, though Steve would thoughtfully close the browser windows at random for me if I opened more than eight, to make sure I wouldn't get confused. He even made sure I wouldn't get distracted by multitasking, or low quality applications that competed with Apple's native apps, by banning such things. It was kind, and considerate, but somehow I felt it was directly targeted at aggravating me.

Generally speaking, it was starting to seem like Steve might be on to something. Apple was looking at buying a few small countries for the developer talent. I thought perhaps I should consider working with some mobile app projects.

"But wait!" I thought. "Any reasonable client will want not just iPhone, but also Android and Blackberry. Maybe even some of those other crappy phone OSes, like the one from that Finnish rubber boot company. Let's use some portability stuff!"

We looked carefully. We sniffed. We kicked the tires. Finally, we made a selection, and various projects began to run around showing off their apps, chortling and filled with glee. Steve had hated me for years, but it seemed at last that he might bury the hatchet.

And then…just when you thought it was safe to go into the water: Steve bans writing apps, unless the Apple tools themselves are originally used. You probably need to get your color palette approved. I think he might even make sure you indent the code the way they do at Apple.

The blogosphere reacted like courtiers before Louis the Sun King: "Excellent choice, sire! Exactly as I would've done it myself!".

"Its for quality control" the sheep meekly apologized, whilst pulling up all those "Software wants to be free" photos they'd had made of themselves in the "Open Systems Forever" days and rushing over the to airbrushers. Spin doctors working to un-maverick John McCain worked overtime at rewriting the Internet wayback machine's archives, making sure no trace remained of anyone ever suggesting that software wanted to be free.

Software, it turns out, wants to be enchained.

That way, it will have high quality user interfaces. Run swiftly. Multitask like lightning. Allow micropayments. Without abundant and capricious restrictions, applied retroactively, this can never occur.

"L'AppStore, c'est moi" Steve proclaimed.

I, of course, know better. The company that wins over developers wins in the end. As he has been so many times in the past, Steve's finished.

Recruiting ("search" if you're dignified, "headhunting" if you're not…) is a hopelessly broken industry. Recruiters, especially executive recruiters, extract large fees from companies then proceed to place only people already in their network. They ask for referrals, but more or less do nothing with them. Legendarily, recruiters (and, sadly, some employers and company advisers) retain a prejudice against candidates who are currently out of work by noting that a position is available to "passive candidates only" - that is, those who are not looking for a job. I mean, why actually hire someone who wants a job? So it was with interest that I read recently this profile of OneWire.

OneWire is a New York based start up trying to invert the "fit candidate and job together" problem. They have a specific structured data approach (I presume essentially a semantic web approach) to register candidates, then they charge recruiters to subscribe to this information. If recruiters can't fill the position, they can put a bounty on the position and turn prospective candidates into "recruiter's assistants". I didn't see any detail on the bounty size, but if its sufficient this can indeed motivate people to mobilize their social network and refer candidates.

Crucially, it seems OneWire is free to candidates. I like this approach. TheLadders, for example and by contrast, seems to me to have little incentive to ever place anyone as it charges fairly large monthly fees. In this economy, its unclear why any company would bother to post on TheLadders and get thousands of unfiltered applicants all of whom are paying high monthly fees (and perhaps purchasing add-on services like their resume writing service) to get out of their current role.

I'm obviously writing about this company from a standpoint of near total ignorance, in that I haven't spoken with the company, or acted as a recruiter or a candidate! But I like the thought that a well funded start up is going after this space even in this economy. The traditional recruiters are not getting people back to work. Job sites that are out there make lots of money off of the monthly fees they charge candidates, but unleash thousands of resumes on the company that posts. Applying some semantic smarts to the "fit" problem sounds like a promising way to go.

I was pursuing a few thoughts over the last few days about visualization techniques and "understanding" data. Specifically I was thinking about a comment a friend of mine made that a recruiter that he knows gets 800 resumes a day. Conversely, I was speaking to a friend who has four recruiters working for him to find staff, but still cannot get staffed quickly enough. This felt like a "can computers sort better?" kind of problem. A quick bit of research concluded that this is a very hard problem that lots of people are working on. So I wondered: what if you could just turn yourself into a picture faster? The idea being that human's can match pictures faster than words, so perhaps this would help with the noise.

A little perusing and I came across wordle, a really cool (and, unfortunately, not easy to reuse) site that makes a cloud for you. I fed my resume in (directly from my linkedin profile - apologies if you see the abbreviated version, but the full version, including recommendations, minus punctuation, and all in lower case, is what I fed in), and came up with this:

This looked pretty good! I was surprised how much information actually "came out" in this representation. Perhaps not always 100% the emphasis that I want, but that may be a clue to toy with one's resume more than a fault in the methodology.

That said, I wondered if this contained enough "information". In other words, this worked more or less on straight word frequency, which would mean that creative use of phraseology and synonyms (which, arguably, makes a resume easier to read) would in fact obscure some details.

So, I dug around a little and came up with zemanta, which among other things can eat some text and turn out terms. I signed up for an API key and fed it my resume via one of their example scripts (I picked the Ruby one, as I had recently endured some Ruby pain).

The results were a bit middling. It boils the whole thing to seven to ten words, which seemed slightly reductionist and a bit off target. When I fed it section by section, however, the results per section were very very good. You basically get seven phrases and a confidence factor - so, for example, you might get "Marketing - 25%" - meaning that Zemanta was 25% confident (or had a 25% confidence factor, which might not be the same thing) that the paragraph had something to do with Marketing.

This looked like a good start.

To turn it into a tag cloud, I took each section and fed the Zemanta words into a script. The script combined multiple words - like say "Marketing and advertising" - into a single word - eg "MarketingAndAdvertising". It then repeated the word a bunch of times depending on the confidence factor. Confidence of 25% = 25 times, 7% = 7 times, etc. (Can you deduce my tricky algorithm?). This came up with this tag cloud:

Not bad! Comments on which version is better, or what should change, would be welcome.

For the masochists, here is the ruby script I used. Replace "whatever" with your text, paragraph by paragraph, and obviously replace 'Oh My Key Is Very Secret' with the key you get from Zemanta.

text = "whatever"

gateway = 'http://api.zemanta.com/services/rest/0.0/'
res = Net::HTTP.post_form(URI.parse(gateway),
                         {
                         'method'=>'zemanta.suggest',
                         'api_key'=> 'Oh My Key Is Very Secret',
                         'text'=> text,
                         'format' => 'xml'
                         })

data = XmlSimple.xml_in(res.body)
answer = ""
data['keywords'][0]['keyword'].each { |v|
   term = ""
   v['name'][0].split(/ /).each{|word|
       term = term + word.capitalize }
   1.upto((v['confidence'][0].to_f() * 100).round) { |i|
       answer = answer + term + " "
       puts term + " " }
}
answer

I read a book review recently where the reviewer highlighted a statement of the author's that Churchill was "a minor figure making speeches in a war won with American money and Soviet troops" (unfortunately, I cannot find the link, but I'm looking for it!).

I loved this statement as it was three controversial (to some…) points in one short statement that challenged conventional views: Was Churchill an unimportant figure? Did the Americans primarily use their economic power and not their military power? Did Soviet troops win the war?

Obviously in a short blog entry I'm not going to prove or disprove these three points, each of which alone could be the subject of a PhD dissertation. But lets take a quick look at the possible truths behind each one.

First, Churchill. There is pretty good evidence that between, say, at least 1922 and 1940 he was indeed a minor figure, dumped from government and considered a windbag (or, as Goering put it, a garrulous drunk. And Goering had, unfortunately, mainly sympathizers outside Germany, including in Britain and America). History rewards him for his prescience in describing the Nazi menace, though he was prone to describing menaces and, like Nouriel Roubini calling the market crash, if you call a disaster often enough and long enough, you're bound to be right eventually.

In 5 Days in London, May 1940, John Lukacs argues that Churchill's decision to fight "till Hitler is beat or we cease to be a state" and defy well known appeasers like Chamberlain and Lord Halifax at a time when the British public was apathetic and British troops were trapped at Dunkirk, turned the tide of the war… for "democracy". Militarily, though, its unclear that Britain's defiance mattered to the defeat of Germany. There is some argument that the British aid to Greece delayed German preparations long enough to ensure that the Wehrmacht encountered winter, and thence, defeat, during Operation Barbarossa. There is also discussion about whether Britain's "unsinkable aircraft carrier" and its navy, particularly in the North Sea, provided a base for harassment of Germany, and, ultimately, the D-Day landings. But some quick stats here…

In No Simple Victory, Norman Davies looks at the war in a series of slices. One is troop commitments and casualties. 88% of German casualties came from fighting the Soviets. The Germans lost more men in January 1945 fighting the Russians than Britain and America combined did in the entire war. Seventy thousand cities and towns were destroyed in Soviet territory by the end of the war. The Soviets lost nine million soldiers (and the Germans lost four million fighting them) along with civilian deaths estimated at eighteen million (higher in some numbers, but never lower than sixteen million). These numbers are not widely discussed in the West, and at times dampened by views about such acts as Zhukov marching soldiers over mine fields, the use of penal battalions (battalions of prisoners, often political prisoners, sent into quasi-suicidal attacks with casualties in the 90% range) and NKVD "blocking battalions" (battalions of secret police positioned behind the fighting battalions to gun down anyone who retreated) - the "Soviets had high casualties as they were careless with the lives of their people" view - but even the most cynical historian would be hard pressed to argue that the Soviets had more than twenty times the military losses of the US because they were "careless". Nine of the top ten deadliest battles in history took place in World War Two in eastern Europe between the Germans and the Soviets (D-Day is 23rd, and the first World War Two battle involving the US in Europe in the list). The Soviets, quite simply, did the bulk of the fighting.

Which brings us to the US. In 1938, the US army was smaller and less well prepared than the Czechs. America, like Britain, faced divided public opinion about the German threat. At least these two reasons kept America out of the war for almost 50% of its duration (yes, it started in Sept 1939, not Dec 1941, and ended, in Europe, in May 1945: 55 months of which America was neutral for 26 of them, until attacked - as were the Soviets, to be fair). FDR implemented "Lend Lease" not just to help out Britain and the Soviets, but also to create markets for America products and extend American economic control. There are those who argue that the terms of Lend Lease were deliberately contrived to increase the economic burden on Britain and hasten decolonialisation. It took until 2006 for Britain to pay back the debt. In this view, America lent - not gave - Britain and the Soviets equipment, which they used to fight a war that defended America, and then America asked for the money back, breaking the economies of their allies and extending America's hegemony. (As an aside - this view of American participation would make FDR one of the most brilliant statesmen in history. Saving the lives of your people and winning and extending your economic dominion is strategy that would make Macchiavelli proud. But we're probably a hundred years from that version of history being written!)

There are plenty of counterarguments to the above, of course, as the war continues to generate much interest from historians. But its interesting that our narrative in the Anglo-Saxon West is dominated by Churchillian defiance and joint heroics at D-Day, with little discussion of the battles in eastern Europe other than the quasi-equating of Stalin with Hitler based on a view that the war's outcome enslaved eastern Europe under Soviet power for fifty more years. By contrast, the Russian view is that no one but them did anything to defeat the Nazis, Churchill was the only Westerner with any balls, and that the West did nothing to relieve pressure on the Soviets when they could have. An exploration of the reasons why they bore the brunt of the fighting (geopolitically), and the degree to which the savagery on the Eastern Front was at times more than bilateral, has no role in this view.

Why do these views predominate? They're historically useful. "Our" nations won as we were bold and brave, and "our" great Shakespearian orator out-spoke the evil German orator. True or not, its simpler to call Churchill the Man of the Millenium, who saved the world for democracy, than a windbag "in a war won with American money and Soviet troops".

It may also be true. But great truths can withstand counterargument, inspection, and debate. My limited experience in the US, Britain, and Russia hasn't encountered much of that on this subject.

I mentioned yesterday I'd endured the tortures of the damned and undertook the labors of Hercules to improve my own ability to post. I thought I might mention a few reader tools: ease of use for the iPhone, RSS feeds by tag, email subscription and instapaper's "read later" button.

To read from the iPhone, try http://j.mp/nigelbeck. This is just using a simple utility to convert my blog feed into a nicer iPhone summary. When you click through to an article, it takes you to the original, not-too-iPhone-y site. But its perhaps a little nicer. You can try it for your favorite feeds at iPhone RSS Builder.

In my blog, if you find you like, say "innovation" stuff, but don't like the rest, just click on "innovation" in the tag cloud. The RSS button on that page will be just for innovation stuff. Or, for geeks - the shortcut is http://www.nigelbeck.com/ + the tag + .xml. So the feed for innovation is http://www.nigelbeck.com/innovation.xml

I don't have the "subscribe here by email" directly on the blog, but try http://www.feedmyinbox.com if you like. If you put in http://www.nigelbeck.com/atom.xml (or the feed of your preference, like the innovation one above) into the box at FeedMyInbox, then you'll get it emailed to you. This is often more convenient that using RSS readers for many people.

If you find many things (my blog or others) in the "cool, I need to read that later when I have time", try http://www.instapaper.com/. They have a "read later" button you can install, so when you come to something interesting, you click on the "read later" button, it records it somewhere, and you can read it later when you have time. Handy.

Thats it for my productivity enhancement - or, "how to waste more time reading blogs" - missive of the day.

My last couple of posts have talked about the world as it, lamentably, is: backlash in Massachusetts and not enough experimentation in New York. I wasn't implying thats the way I like it, or the way I think it should be. For example, I live in New York, and, obviously, believe innovation can happen here. There are just some barriers that go with the benefits.

In the same spirit of looking at barriers, I thought its worth looking at what has characterized the big innovations of the past few years. Inhabiting a technology head space, I'm definitely biased here, but it seems to me that the last five to maybe almost ten years has been characterized by a set of technology "revolutions" that have focused on ease of use. Twitter is the poster child for a simple product that does just one thing and became popular, but Apple's remaking of the consumer landscape has focused around the same notion: a music player thats integrated with a store, a phone thats simple to add applications to, etc. Seth Godin, in a much re-blogged video of a speech he gave a few years ago at Google, makes the case that ease of use was what separated Google from Yahoo back in 1999 (see about minute four).

There's nothing wrong or surprising about these "ease of use" innovations being so powerful or generating so much wealth. As technology has moved from the geeks and ivory towers out into the hands of consumers and the mass market, making "one of those, but simple" could at times be conceived to be a breakthrough.

And yet…

At another level, this is somewhat depressing. As when I wrote earlier about our desire to sum up people in a bullet point, perhaps missing the Da Vincis, it feels that some potentially really cool innovations get thrown out with the bath water as we increasingly judge the new things that come up through this lense of simplicity to decide whether they are worth while. Certainly, for example, Unix is complicated - AND useful. And "Unix made simple" is the basis of Apple's resurgence, so Unix clearly retains utility in a "simple first" world.

But Unix couldn't have gotten out of the gate in this world. As Unix (and its derivatives/friends/flavors/brothers/whatever, the Linuxes and the BSDs) was growing, getting ironed out, being taught to be scalable and debuggable, etc, Unix was legendarily difficult to use. Even windowing systems in the Unix world were awesomely complex, requiring a three button mouse, combination key strokes, massive setup, and frequent reversion to arcane commands on the command line. You could indeed do anything - if only you could figure it out.

For a while, this retarded the growth of Unix in the marketplace (though, I'd argue that Unix had to wait until the hardware to run it was cheap enough, which took at least as long as the inventions that made Unix easy to use). It didn't, however, slow the rate of innovation in the Unix world, where the platforms and derivatives grew, were ported, stabilized, expanded, and made more useful in a variety of settings. Everyday Unix users (Mac users most notably, but certainly Linux and BSD users) now benefit enormously from those innovations: one Linux server I run in the Amazon cloud was just rebooted for the first time since November of 2008 last night (and that was, it seems, involuntary :)).

So what? Well, how many geeky complicated would-be Unixes are hiding in the heads of potential inventors and entrepreneurs, languishing in a world where investors and early customers will judge them first by sub-second installation times, or whether or not they need to read the manual? While, of course, direct-to-mass-market consumer innovations have tended to be in those categories, how much has that conditioned our evaluation criteria for new ideas to come? Furthermore, does the "ease of use" vein of innovation remain infinitely, or at least sufficiently, fertile to be the starting point for the next wave of innovations?

I'm no ease of use guru (and I use OpenBSD and Emacs and similar arcana daily), so perhaps this is sour grapes. It would be nice, though, if the next wave of cool startups got beyond "And THEN, you can add all your friends - AND SEND THEM A MESSAGE!"

I'm sure this wave will pass. But sometimes, economy aside, it all seems soooo 2007:

1

A few days ago (yep I'm slow) I was reading @fredwilson's remarks on why you should start a company in New York city. Fred covers a lot of ground in a limited amount of space. In the full text of the interview, he discusses the "bullshit factor", which I think is an important point:

Here in New York, when you go to your kid's soccer game on the weekends, I'm the only VC for sure and there might be one other person that works in the technology industry and everybody else works in lots of other industries. And so, there's a little bit of a groupthink that goes on out in the Bay Area –"social media is going to take over the world" or "mobile is going to take over the world"–or whatever the big thing is and everybody's focused on that and you get this kind of echo-chamber groupthink.

I think this is a very good point. Silicon Valley is indeed a kind of echo chamber, where everyone is marketing to each other and convinced that some things which no one has heard of outside the valley are fascinating and world changing. I remember Techcrunch going on and on about how great FriendFeed is, for example, or continually contrasting twitter and… Jaiku? No, plurg? No, identi.ca? No, it was another one… which sank like a stone and is no longer remembered. These things just had no traction in the public mind, and no one outside the valley thought they did. The data point of "indifference" can be a valuable one for entrepreneurs and investors - to avoid spending too much time in a cul-de-sac that they'll never get out of. (Yep, I've inhabited a few cul-de-sacs. Nice places - not much traffic though :)).

There is a flip side to this, though. In the early experimentation face of building an idea, it can be very difficult just to get people to play with it. That is, when you know that its early, its not right, and nobody yet wants it, but you're trying to get it to work and experiment with a goal to refining and achieving what Marc Andreessen memorably calls "the product-market fit".

The great advantage of Silicon Valley in this phase - or, probably, of being twenty and/or living in a dorm room - is that the community has a lot of people willing to play with a lot of early things, and search for the nugget hidden in the dross.

…and almost everything starts as dross.

One reason, for example, that fortysomething's "don't get" social media is that their friends don't get it. Its very hard to jump in to explore a product like, say, foursquare, (or its antecedent, dodgeball) and be able to find any sense of value in what is at its heart a social platform if you cannot convince some of your friends to try the social platform out. People in the dorm room have nothing better to do, so they'll join in and play with it - sometimes resulting in phenomenal growth (see Facebook). People working in law firms and investment banks in New York have a lot to do, and are used to shooting down finished, polished pitches for finished, polished products. They have little sense of the culture of "time wasting" experimentation with half finished products that characterizes Silicon Valley.

Of course, there are subgroups for which this is not true. There are people playing with technology in New York - and in Toronto, and London, and probably for that matter in Greenland. But there is much less of the mass of experimenters that help you get your product ironed out.

In a world where a one in a thousand adoption rate is phenomenal for a new idea, you need a lot of early tire kickers to figure things out. Unfortunately for New Yorkers (and Torontonians, Londoners, Greenlanders, etc), Silicon Valley still remains that place.

Ok, it was really five days ago. I couldn't resist the headline, though.

Five days ago, I was at an event here in New York that I mentioned when discussing texting 90999 to help Haiti. We all started playing with foursquare, the hot app du jour. I must say I was a little surprised how many people at the event were checked in on foursquare (and how few at the next day's event - none in fact…. Demographics, it appears, are the answer to everything).

foursquare is mobile local social networking with a kind of gaming twist. On foursquare, you "check in" to the venue you're at, and can immediately see a list of other's who are checked in. You can also "shout" out a message to the assembled multitudes. By visiting different places, you can get promotions (like a free coffee nearby) and you can collect points and badges to compete with your friends by seeing who checks in the most. Lastly, which is I suppose the app's primary utility, you can see where your other friends are (as long as they're members of foursquare).

The app has a few flaws. Its a little slow, and I, at least, constantly forget to check in. The promotions are a true Holy Grail of local apps, but will require a lot of partners or a large sales force to pull off. Also, as evinced by the differential usage in the back to back events I went to, there may be a thin demographic slice that is out running around and bouncing from venue to venue to chase down different friends.

All that aside, I think its a pretty cool idea, thats obviously both early enough and popular enough to grow considerably. As my friend Peter Propp has noted, there is a lot more in the concept that foursquare and/or other companies could do to grow the concept: we were all in the room on foursquare, but there was no opportunity for us to interact with each other or with, say, the sponsor's brand. We just looked at each other's pictures, collected some points and badges, and moved on.

There is a next step, though, that they're perhaps pointing the way towards: I think now that we're all on Facebook (our friends and family), LinkedIn (our business connections) and, to a degree, Twitter (our personal news channel, in my opinion), there still is room for a fourth kind of connecting: contextual connections.

These contextual connections are not really friends - they're just acquaintances for the duration of an event, or maybe a set of events. You and Bob to your left and Sally to your right at the ball game don't really want to "permanently" link up via Facebook; you just want to cheer together at the ball game, share the uplifting experience of the walk for breast cancer that you're doing together, get a free shot of vodka at a bar promotion, or get your name entered in a draw for visiting all four booths of a company or consortium at a trade show. You may decide to add each other to your permanent list, but your initial connection is more fragile: its a shared experience, a fleeting connection.

This is not quite what foursquare is doing. At the moment, at least, foursquare offers you really Yet Another place to create a list of friends, and, probably, one that will be narrower (and perhaps more transient) than the other three above as it consists of those friends to which you are always happy to broadcast your location.

Smarter investors that I are hot about foursquare. For my part, I'll look forward to the app with the contextual friends list, and all the exciting business constructs that can come out of it.

For some reason, capturing (and managing) todos seems to be a difficult problem for technology tools. Every once in a while, my brother and I wind up going on about this. I'm not sure if this is a technology problem or a people behavior problem, but for whatever reason, the right tool always seems elusive.

Years ago, I used a piece of paper. The top left was short term todos, the top right was people I needed to call, and the bottom was longer term projects I was focused on. I'd edit, scribble, and mark over, then when I could no longer read the page, I'd rewrite it, which was a good time to clear out junk. This system worked pretty well.

Then I got a Palm Pilot. One of the original ones, back in 1993 or something like that. (In fact, I re-tried it a few years ago and it still worked! Even the 13 year old software worked on Windows. Take that!, Microsoft-haters!). It was fine for calendar and contacts, but useless for todos as they took too long to enter.

Thats more or less been the history of it: RememberTheMilk, or ReQall, or (gasp!) even Org-Mode seem to be good for a kind of work, but not for all of it. Why?

Sometimes its that old data entry problem again. ReQall fixes this somewhat as you can enter items via speech, but I've found it seems to "forget" my todo status at times. If your todo program doesn't remember, um, what good is it?

But leaving that aside, I think the problem is one of definitions. There are todos we really intend to do ("Pay Mortgage"). In fact, some we're really wasting our time writing down as we won't forget them anyway ("Get downpayment for house"). Some are aspirational ("Go for a swim") - we might do it, or we might not, and there is no project that depends on them, so they tend to sit, accumulate, and clog up the todo list. So then we delete 'em. So much for those todos.

Other todos are transient - effectively they expire. "Build Snowman" doesn't work well once the snow has melted. We don't know when its going to melt, but, before it does, we want to build one. When the snow melts, the todo has expired. Can't it just go away and stop clogging up the todo list? (In fact, some bookmarks and contacts are like this: they're related to something we're doing near time, but after trying to find a plumber or research a todo tool, we no longer need the contact/bookmark: Can't they just go away? Has anyone invented one of these?)

Some todos are kind of floating ideas ("Install new todo software"). We do intend to do it, sometime, when we've got spare time. But not actually now. We're busy now. We don't want to delete them, because life would change somehow, if we ever did it. But….

These todos also clog up the todo list.

There are probably others. But I think this taxonomy of todos is the real problem, regardless of the product (or system, for GTD advocates).

Thats why a piece of paper works so well for all those unforgettable, or aspirational, or floating, or transient todos.

I was thinking a little about DaVinci lately.

Nope, not The DaVinci Code (a book with a stunning lack of literary talent, but thats another subject). The other DaVinci - the one who put the "man" in the phrase "renaissance man" - artist, inventor, scientist, perhaps the most talented man who ever lived.

He was renowned in his own lifetime for his many achievements. At his death, it was said that François I, the King of France, cradled him in his arms.

In 1499, at the age of 47, he fled to Venice from Milan, and was employed as an engineer constructing machines to protect the city from attack. At the time, other than in a letter to the Duke of Milan in 1482 about his capability to do things other than paint, Leonardo's reputation was solely based on his skill as a painter. But they let him try his hand at engineering.

This may have been wartime exigency, or Renaissance humanism at work (they tended not to see the gap between the arts and sciences that we do now). It made me, however, wonder how life would have worked for DaVinci if he were alive in our time, and out there, in this horrible economy, looking for work.

Imagine DaVinci, with a few drawings (perhaps, to modernize it, some web sites, showing good use of Photoshop and Flash) in his portfolio, show up at, say, GM, a company, like Venice in its day, under siege.

"So, you're applying to be a web designer?" says CEO Ed Whitacre.

"Not so much. I hear these electric vehicle things are going to be a big part of your future, and I have some thoughts on the matter," middle-aged, out of work DaVinci replies.

Imagine the ensuing conversation. Leonardo blows his meeting with Ed (not sure how he got it, but anyway…) and goes to an executive coach.

"Whats your personal leadership brand?" the coach asks. "You have a nice portfolio here, but you're trying to tell people you can do everything. Really you need to sit down and focus on one core strength that will be your brand. 'Coke adds life'. 'Ford builds tough trucks'. You know - that sort of thing. Maybe 'Leonard DaVinci makes great flash websites'?" the coach adds helpfully. "People are busy - they don't have time to try and sort through all the things you say you can do. Make it simple for them."

This is indeed the mantra of our age: "make it simple for people". In the attention economy, the supposition is that people don't have enough time, and everything must be made simple. A strong simple brand image describes products. No manuals or instructions should be needed for any web sites. Everything must be fabricated for the person in a hurry to consume in a hurry, like a cup of coffee they can slurp quickly on the road while doing other things. A minimum of thought and attention must be required.

Some of this information dieting is simple self protection, if you believe studies claiming things like the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of information a day. At the same time, if we're going to claim that innovation will be one of the ways that wealthy nations like America will claim, reclaim, or continue to claim leadership in the coming century, we're going to have to identify ways of getting ourselves to figure out how to pay attention, delve down, and digest complexity and ambiguity a little more regularly.

What's at stake? Well, innovation comes from people, most specifically from find the "best" people and empowering them. If we build a culture focused on not taking the time to consider people's whole range of talents, and instead simply focus on the leadership brand and the bullet points, we're missing the most talented, the DaVincis of our own age.

Of course, there's a reasonably good chance that you or I, or the people we're interviewing, are not DaVinci. However, we're probably pretty good at a couple of things. In fact, whatever "greatness" we have may be as a result of the combination of things we're good at, not the individual ones. It takes time to learn and understand this about a person. But this is the whole point of talent. After all, specialization is for insects.

It will surprise few who know me that, while assembling this blog, I decided to do it in kind of a weird way.

Yep, hard to believe, huh?

A little history sort of explains why. At liketribe, we experimented with using Vox first. It was an ok tool, but the privacy settings (for when we were in stealth mode) proved fairly difficult to manage. Once our site went live, we installed Wordpress on our server, along with a couple of plugins.

I found Wordpress a little annoying as its kind of a heavy install. You need an actual database installed. Posting, then testing the post, is also a little annoying, as you have to be web connected when writing, or cut and paste, then if you use multiple servers (say, one for testing and one for production), you need to cut and paste between them (so far as I know).

So when I put up mail2.im, I thought I'd go way simple and try tumblr. Tumblr works pretty well, and has a nice clean look, with options to post from many places. However, since its meant to be simple, its not that configurable. It also has the problem that if you're experimenting with the blog (say, its look and feel), you more or less have to do that "live". I must also confess that, notwithstanding tumblr's popularity, I wonder whether its really too similar to what people do on Facebook to really continue to matter.

Which brings up Facebook. I guess one can sort of blog there, but you really have little control over the look and feel, and have to play with weird privacy settings to get your blog world readable.

So what to do? I'd been intrigued by the idea of people using static blog generators, like jekyll. Jekyll is kind of "back to the future": they basically say "You have a site anyway, and it has pages anyway, so why are you managing the ones that happen to contain blog content differently?". With jekyll, you basically define a framework (essentially say "An empty post will look like this), then run the tools to generate the pages every time you post. Most people use a version control tool, like git, to move the content up to the server to publish.

This approach works well for me (though its gorpy and finicky to set up). You can write locally, when offline. You then generate the site and test it locally. When you're connected, you post it. Simple.

Except…

Except I'm too weird to just do that! For the better part of the past year, I've been increasingly using Org Mode to organize my thoughts. Org-mode is a bizarre tool in many ways (it runs in Emacs), but its amazingly flexible.

In Org-Mode, you just make a bunch of outlines. You then can tag headings in the outlines as todos. You can do elaborate tagging and workflows with todos, then when you want to see your todos, you can define different agenda views for them (eg "Everything this week" to as complex as "Everything concerning my client Bob for which I'm waiting on Cindy"). You can use the outlines as a memory tool (for example, to capture a quick note, or, using a bookmarklet, to remember a web page you're viewing, or even to create a to-do linked to the email that generated it). Whats really cool is that these outlines can be in many different files, and Org-Mode will pull the agenda views across the files. "Everything for today" can therefore pull from your main todo file, as well as twelve different outlines that are in various stages of completion as final documents and so contain todos. More recently: you can even view the todos including your different agenda views from your iPhone using MobileOrg!

Speaking of final documents: in Org-Mode, you create a final document by publishing your outline. You can do this in arbitrary and complex ways (for example, you can make a certain subsection publishable to a slide presentation, but the rest to HTML), but in the main I've found I tend to publish to a PDF (via LaTex), to HTML, or to a wiki (via translating the html to the wiki mode in question using html2wiki - very handy if you're dealing with multiple wikis using different back ends, which you might if you interact with different people on different projects where they've each picked their own wiki flavor). You can more or less back convert to PDF to Word using tools like this, if someone really demands a Word doc.

It therefore seemed reasonable to look at using Org-Mode to publish a particular file as a blog, rather than as a PDF or plain HTML or whatever. I discovered blorg had aspirations of doing this. Despite the author saying he'd shelved it intending to rewrite it, I thought I'd give it a shot.

How's it working? Well, the results are mixed. For some reason, blorg is indeed incredibly buggy. Sometimes it will not generate links correctly, for example, then moving a TODO within the file results in the next run generating a link. These are weirder problems that I've experienced with any other tool - even ones I've had to fix myself (like, in fact, blorg, which I've added some features to, which, ahem, might occasionally be the source of the bugs).

Leaving aside the bugs :), it works well. I can stay in Org-Mode, the "simple" tool I'm increasingly using for everything I do. I publish, run a simple command, and the blog is posted, everything is pinged (via Ping Fm), and I'm off to the races.

Would I recommend it? Well……… tell me how you like Org-Mode first, then lets talk about the rest :)

On a serious note: anyone with any interest in how to set up the above, let me know and I'll be happy to help.

Its Russian Christmas Eve (apparently) and I'm in Swindon, UK, with flight plans for 5pm today.

Who cares? Perhaps nobody but me! But they've got N inches of snow (where N keeps climbing, and seems essentially to be "greater than we're able to manage"), so I'm on pins and needles wondering if I'll actually make it out. Heathrow Airport is showing flights leaving, though some BA flights and particularly flights to Scotland seem cancelled. The traffic details for M4 seem to be improving. Of course, the last 1km could be blocked and I wouldn't be able to make it, but this is all a good sign.

Still, when not worrying about my flight, this all got me thinking about risk and rare events. Essentially, the attitude in the UK (and in Belgium when we were there) towards winter snowstorms seems to be: "We get a couple a year. Its cheaper to shut the country for a few days until it melts than buy snow equipment". When I was growing up in Saskatoon, in the bleak wintry expanses of the Canadian plains, the attitude was: "We never close anything. Ever".

Of course, there was a lot more snow in Saskatoon, so it wasn't a rare event, and make sense to try and budget for.

It nonetheless made me wonder if in our computerized age there isn't a midway point. For example, in the UK, they must have enough information by this point to be able to predict what load they can handle, given the limited snow equipment. Taking just the example of flights of out Heathrow, the constraint seems to be deicing equipment for the planes (which is run by the airlines). If any flights at all are moving, then it means that they're able to get snow off of the main runways. Perhaps there is a limitation of how many gates they can open too, but lets pretend there isn't for the moment.

Using my above example, British Airways for example might be able to predict with 90% confidence that they only have enough de-icing equipment for 50% of the planes to take off. Obviously, the triage could begin by removing from scheduling those planes flying to airports which they can predict will be closed (ie it appears Glasgow and Aberdeen are not open today).

The next step might be to predict which planes are the most reasonable to run. This is probably based on customer satisfaction, cost of rebookings, etc. Would it also be possible to send people emails or texts the day before saying "There's a very high probability of heavy snow tomorrow. Would you prefer us to book you for the next day (no cash from us or you), or you want to gamble on leaving when you planned?" This would give further information to rescheduling algorithms, and probably make people a little happier. For example, if you're two hours drive from the airport in good conditions, you might get realistic and simply rebook.

With all this data, they could then rerun the scheduling algorithm and decide which planes to cancel in advance, based on which customers would prefer to rebook, which can be rerouted, which planes won't go anyway given the destination airport's probable status, and so forth.

I wonder if anyone has done this? The real issue, of course, may be that its not worth doing from the airlines point of view. They may well view their customers' time as "free" and therefore prefer you sitting in the airport on the chance they can move you than have you reclining in comfort at home with beer and potato chips, watching the storm pass through. Like many businesses, they may have the marketing department spending millions on brand image and customer acquisition, but not look at operational improvements and day to day interactions with the company (and therefore the brand) as, effectively, part of "marketing".

So the question: is the problem unsolvable, or simply not worth solving?

I sympathize with "old media". I really do. I read several newspapers and weeklies, and periodically I even try to find them online.

And that would be the problem.

Because these people are in the content business and hire lots of skilled writers and researchers with budgets to fly around and see things first hand, we're able to get information about, say, a breakthrough at a lab in China, or a human rights issue in Darfur. This is great stuff, and an area where bloggers are unlikely to break through to make their mark soon.

However, everything else we read on the web is searchable and linkable. To protect their content, newspapers and magazines are often not linkable, and not searchable unless you go to their specific site. When I want to find, say, that interesting article I read somewhere about charter schools using video games to teach, I wound up ultimately finding it here.

Not on the original Economist site, because I thought I had read about it in the Times, and so searched there. And not on Google, because Google doesn't index these guys. If no other bloggers had written about this subject, I may never have found the article.

And when I include the link here, people can only read the article headline.

Whats the answer? I don't know, but once again I think traditional media is cutting their own throat. Being searchable and linkable is the currency of influence on the web. If these players can't find a way for us to find and refer to their articles, they'll decrease their own relevancy - which will bring about bankruptcy even more than their decaying business models.

One challenge anyone trying to create something new has is assessing its risks. I've heard it said (plausibly) by the electric car crowd, for example, that internal combustion engine vehicles would never be approved today. They're probably right. Imagine the warning:

Contains gasoline. May explode and burn you to death. Emits fumes that are poisonous. May poison the earth as well. Requires substance from far away places that are frequently politically unstable. Can be used to propel vehicle to speeds causing maiming or even death to vehicle occupants or bystanders. Requires extensive training to use. Must redo national road infrastructure, signage, and create a gasoline distribution network.

Wtf? Who would want one of those?

On the other hand, consider this warning:

Irritating to the skin and eyes on contact. Inhalation will cause irritation to the lungs and mucus membrane. Irritation to the eyes will cause watering and redness. Reddening, scaling, and itching are characteristics of skin inflammation. Follow safe industrial hygiene practices and always wear protective equipment when handling this compound.

This is, in fact, the MSDS warning for using sugar.

Good to know we're safe, though :)

Hmmm I was writing the other day about good vs crappy companies and realized I may have made my moral of the story a bit unclear. To clarify a bit: my point wasn't supposed to be that people prefer crappy companies. Rather it was that, given the implicit incentive structure, they should prefer crappy companies. And that people who understand money frequently do prefer crappy companies.

Since employees' own actions can make companies crappier, and potentially more lucrative, we've got a significant incentive for a slice of really good people to focus on finding the crappiest companies they can, and make them crappier, through taking outlandish risks and proposing highly lucrative compensation schemes.

By contrast, one of the things "well managed companies" do is manage compensation and stock price volatility. This benefits lifers and those who get to a very high level, but its a throwback to the "jobs for life" days. For most employees, since they have no job security and should have no belief in benefits contracted to be delivered in the future, they're better off taking the money now, and to hell with the company.

(I probably should've been clearer that I'm using "well managed" and "badly managed" here in the MBA/financial management sense. By this measure, IBM is well managed, and, say, Enron is badly managed. On more nebulous grounds, like people management or innovation or new product introduction or whatever, an entirely different list of firms might float to the top)

Again, what's the solution? Until owners get their eye on the ball, we should rationally all follow the bankers: when evaluating corporate alternatives, just take a crap.

Still getting lots of comments on yesterday's fine article - from "Did you really put that headline" to various furtive remarks about the crappy (and great…) companies people have worked for - so I thought I'd switch gears back to innovative stuff whilst those other thoughts simmer.

Speaking of slow simmering, in the spirit of innovation, I thought that I might mention one of the new cooking crazes around: cooking sous vide. This has been something avant guarde-ish chefs do to make their magic potions, but with some level of experiment has been brought into the realm of the home cook.

The concept works like this: rare steak (for example) is supposed to have an internal temperature of about 125F. To get this, we drop the meat on, say, an 800F grill, char the outside to 500F and hope the middle doesn't get about 125F. This creates a tasty experience, but, its not really a rare steak, and much of the meat has, technically, been ruined.

The sous vide cook overcomes this ghastly potentiality through the application of patience and technology. The steak is vacuum sealed in a plastic bag, and dropped in a water bath of about the temperature you want the food to get to - so, in this case, 125F. You then leave it there for as long as it takes for the whole steak to get to 125F.

After the requisite hours (yep, not minutes here), you pull out the flaccid meat, perfectly cooked to your liking, and eat away. Or, if the repulsive appearance overwhelms you, you sear the outside to make it look "right". You then serve to amazed guests, who openly admire your skill and secretly wonder why you were boiling the meat for hours.

I haven't tried this myself, but I've certainly eaten where sous vide is in fashion. For $90, you can get a timer to hook up to your trusty crock pot (you do have a crock pot, right?), allowing you to enjoy steak, poached eggs, steak and eggs, whatever, all sous vide for the holidays.

CookingSousVide.com appears to be a good resource here, with gizmos and cookbooks abounding.

Now I'll sit back and await my first invitation to a sous vide feast.

I wrote about pay a day or so ago (then got caught up in a long day with customers here in London so dropped the ball yesterday, for which I apologize). The comments (direct and offline) got me to thinking a little bit about pay in "well run" vs "badly run" companies. In the following, I'm really talking about medium to large companies, rather than startups or small businesses run for lifestyle or pure cash generation (vs large exits characteristic of the aim of start up companies).

I'll start with an assertion regarding large organizations: in general, people work to make money. Its true that people say things like "I love my job", or "I like what I do" (similar but not identical statements), but, in contrast to, say, leisure, I think few people even in the relatively higher ranks of large corporations are working for sheer joy. They're working for money. "Money, all things considered", perhaps (meaning "I need money and this is the best compromise I can find"), but money.

I know this is a bit heretical to say out loud, particularly in our culture of positivism. But I'm sticking with it.

So, given that you work for money, you're most likely to compare the job of Senior Vice President, Whiteboard and PowerPoint Productions, at Company A, with the job of Senior Vice President, Optimistic Internal Presentations and Meetings, at Company B, based on the probable return to you.

Company A says to you: "We pay double the industry average. And our stock is up 100% in the last year".

Company B says: "We're very well run. We're a hundred year old company and have never had any scandals or issues. We're cash rich. And we pay in the top quintile of our industry".

Company A's offer is $600K cash and 10000 shares, where the shares have to be held for three years. Company B offers $300K cash and 25000 shares, where the shares have to be held for six years. Both hold out the expectations of additional annual stock grants, on the same long term holding terms.

You research Company A. Its true their stock has doubled in the last year. But their stock is a roller coaster: it goes up 5x, then down 5x. Company B is solid: their stock varies about 10%.

Stories on "Excellence in Compensation" and "Excellence in Management" abound about Company B. Company A stories are all on "Company A: Disaster Again" or "The Reasons behind the recent stunning success of Company A" (depending where they were that day on the stock roller coaster).

The head hunter (you do use a head hunter don't you? Well, not if you're unemployed - see for example "Traditional search firms can take six months or more to fill a sudden vacancy, not least because they only look at people who already have jobs", but thats another story of absurdities) says to you "Company B is very very solid. Thats the play to make in the long run".

I say to you, my friend, "In the long run, we're all dead". You can pocket the cash from Company A today, and play the beta on their stock to make a lot more money. Company B will leave you with half the money, and few share gains.

This relates to my story on banker's pay how? Well, bankers work in the money business. They may be stupid, but they're not stupid about money. Running the company badly today pays them the most. If the company dies, so what? Even if their long term comp has shares at risk tied up, also so what? Some shares will have vested, a clever board room can announce bad news around share grant pricing day and good news around annual share vesting day, and everyone can make lots of money.

The sad story: the poor shareholder (unless the shares are in a bank. Then its "poor citizen", backstopping the losses of companies that are too big to fail).

The moral: until the normal employee (or even upper middle manager/exec as per the example above) is better rewarded at a well-run company than at a badly one run, people will should flock to the crappy ones for the cash.

I flew over to the UK last night. I flew on points, as when I researched ticket prices (a month ago) even economy fares were something like $1500. So I paid 50k points plus $130 fee. I expected a packed plane.

Interestingly enough, the plane was empty!

I was surprised, as it seems to me that the airlines were among the first to employ peak load pricing. That is, they price stuff based on the demand for it at that minute, not some generalized expression of demand.

This is an excellent way for consumers and producers to find the "right" price, particularly if prices are reasonably transparent (as they are on airlines - on delta, for example, you can pull up a grid of prices plus or minutes a few days in the future for departure and arrival, and so look at twenty five or more prices at the same time).

So how did the airline manage to jack up the prices (ie responding to high demand), and get an empty plane?

The only thing I can thing of is the implicit collusion that often seems to accompany pricing in markets with high barriers to entry (cf gas prices, health insurance prices). Somehow these "fierce competitors" manage to price within a few dollars of each other, all the way across the board.

Of course, this is by accident! Anything else would be price fixing… And thats illegal.

Anyway, for this flight at least, it seems consumers responded rationally: they stayed home.

Perhaps we'll see tickets sold on eBay in the future, to get the exact best price for a given seat. But that will only happen in a world where competitors don't manage to come, simultaneously, to the exact same conclusions on how to price for non-existent scarcity to defend perceived value, or some other nebulous intangible thats different than "maximal value for current inventory".

I'll be interested to see the overall holiday flight stats when they're out. If they're down, I'll at least have the beginnings of a theory.

One of the toughest things in coming up with a new product is succinctly describing its benefits. Its simple to say its features ("thirty seven gizmos per button push"), but benefits - the why anyone cares part - its often very different than what the inventor considered.

Early today, I came across a pretty funny example of a benefit statement for Geely Scooters: "They are much quieter than a motorbike, more sedate perhaps, and you are just as likely to be female as male if you are riding one."

Pretty cool! Right now I have a 100% chance of being male, but apparently if I ride a Geely scooter, that'll go to 50%. With those odds, on average I'd get to experience being female every second day!

This is something Tiresias could really appreciate.

Periodically, I'm going to take a look a different new ideas that are great, funny, bizarre, stupid, crazy or otherwise stand out. I'll let it be an exercise left for the reader which of the above categories the following falls into.

Recently in Fortune Small Busines (no link as they are apparently out of business… Is this a sign?), I read about a few different entrepreneurs and their successes and challenges. Try as I might, the one that I cannot get out of my memory is Batter Blaster, the spray-on pancake.

Yep. Spray on pancake.

The batter comes in a container like whipped cream, and you spray it into the pan and make your pancakes. Its $3.99 and Fortune Small Business reported their last full year revenue as $15M.

Not sure I want to comment on what selling millions of cans of sprayable pancakes during a recession means about society. (Remember, this product saves you the onerous task of mixing and egg and milk into some pancake batter). But it is an interesting example of a kind of innovation: repackaging something pre-existing in a way that makes it more accessible, convenient, fun, whatever is appealing to consumers.

Many high tech innovations follow this same curve. Usenet begat Compuserve begat Geocities, which begat Friendster, then Myspace, then Facebook. Functionally, these communities aren't that different from one another, but they're different enough in form (as well as, to be fair, the time and intent around their roll outs) to get dramatically different results.

Facebook: The Spray On Pancake of Our Time

Thats my story, and, presumably unlike non-stick spray-on pancakes, I'm sticking to it.

I've been using twitter (or more actually, a member of twitter) since the early days when it seemed nobody used it. I was certainly one of the "nobodies" - I didn't really get it, and was especially irked by how popular something so stupid seemed to be getting, at least among insiders, especially when it didn't even work very well.

A few years on, I must say I'm a convert. I like the way its asymmetrical (unlike, eg, Facebook), so we don't have to both be friends for one of us to follow what the other says. More than that, I like the way they've opened up the API so that I can access my stuff however I like, even if its differently that how you get yours. I prefer tweet.im, for example, as I'm an IM kinda guy. When I want noise, I can turn on IM and get a stream of twitter updates in real time, as well as other messages. Turn off IM = no noise. I don't need to consciously go to twitter and see whats up, I just get it.

Perhaps thats the summary. Maybe I'm a little slow, a little jealous. But, slowly, finally, I'm starting to get it…

I've been thinking a lot about electric vehicles these days. While the Tesla is incredibly exciting, news like this really caught my eye: almost 200 mile range for vehicles in the price range of "normal" people.

While this is still not the vehicle for a road trip, that kind of range obviates the infrastructure problems of charging almost completely for normal use. I spoke with a bunch of Tesla drivers at an event here in New York City, for example, and with their 244 mile range, none of the owners thought that charging or infrastructure was an issue at all. Admittedly a $100K+ sports car is for most a second car with different usage patterns, but most of the owners drove their cars year round, to work, to their country houses, etc and didn't have an issue.

Imagine: driving around in 200 mile range electrics, and taking trips by train (plus rental electric on the other end?). Oh yeah - charging by wind/solar/etc.

Some days I think we'll actually get there.

Welcome to the "new new" blog and "new new" website.

Its been a while coming, and in the interim I'd done a number of things, finally using Weebly for a while. While Weebly looks like a pretty good tool, I thought I wanted a little more flexibility, so finally put everything together and moved this blog (and this site) to a new server.

The primary subject I'll be writing about is, not surprisingly I guess, innovation. I'll be writing about how people innovate, things I find innovative, and innovations I'm pursuing. Frequently clients I'm working with will generate interesting insights on this subject, which I'll try to detail as best I can without revealing things that they'd prefer to keep under wraps for the moment.

For those who are into such things, I've chosen to use some static blogging tools rather than a more conventional approach to blogging. Time will tell if this is a good choice, but in the interim you should at least be able to see familiar ways to comment, get feeds, and such. One reason I chose to do it this way is that I can use org-mode and emacs, which is pretty the set of tools I use for everything else these days if I have any choice in the matter. The detailed reasons are likely subject for another post, but basically I can easily work offline in simple text documents, customize anything that irks me, then upload when I get it all looking right. Its indeed an acquired taste - but, I've acquired it!

You'll likely find a mix of subjects on the site, but you'll find everything tagged. If you only want "innovation" entries, for example, just click on that tag, grab that feed by clicking on the little RSS icon on the sidebar, and you'll have only the stuff you're interested in.

With that I'll close for today. Its Thanksgiving week, for those of the American persuasion, so I know its a short one for many people. To those celebrating, have a great holiday.