Bruce MacVarish Notes

Real-time Flows and Ranking "Sentiments"

If Google is the database of "Intentions", is twitter (or something similar that captures real-time flow and thoughts) the database of "Sentiments".

From Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch:

"In order to truly mine that data, Twitter needs to figure out how to extract the common sentiments from the noise (something which Summize was originally designed to do, by the way, but it was putting the cart before the horse—you need to be able to do simple searches before you start looking for patterns). But what is the best way to rank real-time search results—by number of followers, retweets, some other variable? It is not exactly clear. But if Twitter doesn’t solve this problem, someone else will and they will make a lot of money if they do it right."

"Understand your Users" - Paul Graham

Paul Graham offers 13 sentences to guide start-ups and new ventures.

"One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy. I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be?

When I made the list there turned out to be 13:

1. Pick good cofounders.

2. Launch fast.

3. Let your idea evolve.

4. Understand your users.

5. Better to make a few users love you than have many that are ambivalent.

6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.

7. You make what you measure.

8. Spend little.

9. Get ramen profitable.

10. Avoid distractions.

11. Don't get demoralized.

12. Don't give up.

13. Deals fall through.

Having gotten it down to 13 sentences, I asked myself which I'd choose if I could only keep one.

Understand your users. That's the key. The essential task in a startup is to create wealth; the dimension of wealth you have most control over is how much you improve users' lives; and the hardest part of that is knowing what to make for them. Once you know what to make, it's mere effort to make it, and most decent hackers are capable of that.

Social Technographics of the Business User

From G. Oliver Young at Forrester Research:

The first full report from Forrester's recent survey of how business technology buyers use social media is now officially on the Forrester website. Its available to all Forrester clients, but if you are not a client here are some of the highlights:

The big takeaway: Technology buyers are highly socially active, the most active we have seen so far. Many technology vendors have been on the leading edge of social media marketing for some time (Dell and IBM come to top of mind) and for good reason. IT buyers — both in the IT department and within the line of business are highly engaged with social media, and use blogs, discussion forums, and rich media in many technology purchase processes.

It is good to see Forrester continue to assess the adoption and use of social technologies within the enterprise.  I like the break out between IT and Line of Business and the use of Charlene Li's framework.

I've been leading our own research into Business User behaviors and attitudes when it comes to communication, collaboration and social technologies.  By now, I think we all realize that consumer experiences are shaping Business User expectations.  Redefining enterprise communications based on Business User needs is uncovering a number of new opportunities in the UC and Collaboration space.  

Wire your brain for change

The picture is for the WeMedia 09 conference in Miami.  I liked the concept... 

Is your brain wired for change?

"Sensing" Voice

In my vision of future state for enterprise applications, the 6th element is "Sensing".   

I've used this term to capture how future applications will create new value for users by sensing relevance, context and personal preferences through analytics of voice, video, text, location, attention or other ambient and declarative data from the user.  The ability to capture, store, index, search and analyze voice recordings is fundamental to this future state vision.

Nuance, BBN, TellMe/Microsoft, Nexidia, CallMiner, Utopy, SER, IBM and others have invested to improve STT, TTS, ASR and Speech Analytics technologies that are all critical to this "sensing" end-state.

Recently, Microsoft announced at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona - Microsoft Recite -  a Voice capture and search application for Windows Mobile devices.

To get a sense of the UX and VUI, check out this video clip...

 

With Recite users can record voice messages and then, based on a voice interface, search for specific terms or phrases to find earlier messages... and I suspect with time... earlier conversations. 

It appears as if Recite uses some type of voice pattern matching or phonetic search engine.  There is not translation from speech to text and the accuracy improves with longer search phrases.  Both of these characteristics points to phonetic processing.  

You can download the app here.

What Business Users really want

Joseph Pine wrote the book "The Experience Economy" and covers his theory that consumer's wants have evolved to the search for authentic experiences.   I found it valuable to review his 2004 TED presentation on the topic. 

As our consumer experiences continue to shape our business user expectations for enterprise apps, I believe Joseph's recommendations apply to the development of business user driven solutions.  

Q) What do business users really want?  

A) A coherent, authentic experience that is true to the heritage and values of the provider.

A Springboard Year

"2009 is authentically frightening, but it also has great potential to be a springboard year

Leaders must engage with chaotic global future forces and figure out how to make a better future. Certainly, the focus for many people in 2009 must be on holding the fort and surviving. But in every organization, there should be at least a small band of leaders with license to think about and plan for the future. 2009 is threatening, but it is also an ideal time to be looking ahead—beyond the current crises... Those organizations that do nothing but hunker down in this crisis will be way behind when things start getting better."

                                            Bob Johansen, Distinguished Fellow, IFTF

The Enterprise 2.0 "Edge Matrix" - 2009

In January of 2008, I created what I called the "Enterprise Edge Matrix" that mapped players who were targeting emerging opportunities at the edge of the enterprise.   

My hypothesis at the time was that enterprise core vendors, emerging start-ups and enterprise edge visionaries were racing to create new value for enterprise users at the Enterprise Edge.   To capture these new revenue growth opportunities at the "edge of the enterprise" , players need to develop new viral adoption strategies and networked business models that create and monetize value from data found in networks, markets and communities of enterprise end users.

At the time, I thought one interesting question was:

Who will be able to drive and monetize a viral enterprise application first?  Today's enterprise "core" leaders or the emerging enterprise "edge" visionaries?

Since early 2008, I've also outlined my vision of the Future State of the Enterprise Applications that can be summarized as:

- Applications delivered by Hybrid Cloud delivery models, 

- Business User driven with a focus on user experience 

- Social enabling transactions, conversations and relationship

- Device Agnostic applications running across devices, web and premise platforms

- Flow-ready by aggregating, filtering and visualizing user information and activity

- Sensing-based by acting on user's ambient and declarative data

So, based on the above, and reflecting industry evolution, investments, acquisitions and product announcements, I spent some time updating my Enterprise Edge Matrix for 2009.  

While I realize it needs some refinement, I believe the updated edge map highlights at least 3 significant trends from the past 12 months.

• Enterprise Core Vendors ( e.g. IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and Nokia) have aggressively moved to capture edge opportunities by introducing and/or acquiring new social, collaborative and mobile applications that directly target and are adopted by enterprise end users.  These solutions are branded and packaged as extensions to existing products and revenue streams.       

• Enterprise Edge Visionaries continue to add users but have not moved to monetize. 

• Emerging players are moving to leapfrog competitors with applications representative of Future State characteristics.  

Even with current economic conditions in mind,  applications that target and deliver directly to enterprise business users will see increased viral adoption and monetization.   

It would be interesting to hear how you'd refine this year's Edge Matrix... and what you think it will look like in early 2010.

Extracting value from free and ubiquitous data

"I keep saying the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. People think I’m joking, but who would’ve guessed that computer engineers would’ve been the sexy job of the 1990s? The ability to take data—to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it—that’s going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades, not only at the professional level but even at the educational level for elementary school kids, for high school kids, for college kids. Because now we really do have essentially free and ubiquitous data. So the complimentary scarce factor is the ability to understand that data and extract value from it."

Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google