Bruce MacVarish Notes

Adjacent Growth Strategies for Adobe

Adobe continues to push into adjacent markets for growth.  After the $1.8B acquisition of Omniture, Adobe announced it is working with Gigya - a social media authentication and distribution platform - to create a new service that helps advertisers and developers make web and mobile applications more social, collaborative and monetizable.    

"During an IAB MIXX keynote, Adobe Systems Inc. announced the launch of a new service that lets advertisers and publishers promote, measure and monetize applications across social networks and mobile devices.

Called Adobe Flash Platform Services for Distribution, it consists of online, hosted services that let developers add capabilities to Web applications with a predictable deployment model. Targeting developers, advertisers and publishers, Adobe Flash Platform Services are designed to help clients make Web applications sharable, social, collaborative and monetizable."

Adobe is creating a centralized dashboard that helps developers and advertisers promote, track, optimize and monetize adoption of their web apps and promotional media across multiple social networks and mobile platforms.  

Both the Omniture acquisition and this new Distribution platform highlight Adobe's push for growth by entering near adjacencies with new products for their existing customers.

Recognizing Winners vs. Losers

" When you see something that's taking advantage of new technology to give people something they want that they couldn't have before, you're probably looking at a winner. And when you see something that's merely reacting to new technology in an attempt to preserve some existing source of revenue, you're probably looking at a loser."

Paul Graham on Post Medium Publishing

Humanizing the Enterprise: Unlocking Value of Real-time Conversations & Relationships

Once a month, I look back a year to see what I posted 12 months earlier as a way to see how things have evolved and to gauge what was interesting to me at the time.  The concept of creating new value for users by unlocking real-time conversations and providing insight into the reach and expertise of a user's true social graph based on interactions remains very relevant one year later.

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In 1999, Doc Searls, David Weinberger and Chris Locke released The Cluetrain Manifesto outlining a number of insights on the rise of the internet, its ability to empower individuals and the impact it would have on business.  The subtitle to the book declared "the end of business as usual".  

The introduction to the book includes a description of how "a powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing new ways to share relevant knowledge with blinding speed. As a direct result, markets are getting smarter—and getting smarter faster than most companies". 

Ten years later, companies are trying to get smarter faster by embracing many of the opportunities and implications of networked markets, customers and employees as outlined in the Cluetrain.   Following the lead and lessons of consumer centric Web 2.0 applications, the enterprise software industry is realizing there is significant opportunity for differentiation and new growth. Whether you call it the "Consumerization of IT", Web 2.0 in the Enterprise or Enterprise 2.0, it is clear that consumer innovations are inspiring enterprise innovations and transforming the workplace for all of us.  

 

An Enterprise is the sum of its Transactions, Conversations and Relationships

The first of the 95 Cluetrain theses stated "Markets are Conversations".  

If "Markets are Conversations", paraphrasing Doc, then "the Enterprise is the sum of its Transactions, Conversations and Relationships" supporting and interacting with markets.  Transactional activity from processing new orders, to inventory requests to billing and field service reports represents structured processes and structured information generated at each step of the enterprise value chain.  In addition, as these transactions are executed, there are numerous conversations that occur within the enterprise, across collaboration teams, within functions and externally with customers, suppliers and partners.  These conversations come in the form of meetings, phone calls, conference calls, web conferences, emails, instant messages and increasingly wikis or blogs.  These transactions and conversations are supported and complemented by the various levels of strong and loose relationships between colleagues, customers and communities across the business.

 
 

The Soul of Enterprise Software will be found in User Conversations and Relationships

In May 2006,  Google's GM Enterprise, Dave Girouard referred to the current state of enterprise software as being "bereft of soul" saying:

"This is Darwinism. In the world of consumer technology you either meet the end user's needs or you're finished very quickly.  Innovation is happening in the consumer world. Enterprise software is entirely bereft of soul. It is designed for business not for humans."

Thinking about the enterprise as the flow of all the transactions, conversations and relationships focused on the development, delivery and support of products and services to customers provides an interesting framework for how the enterprise software industry will evolve with the adoption of Enterprise 2.0 innovations. 

For the last 15+ years, the enterprise software industry has focused on organizing and optimizing the value of transactions.   The emergence of ERP, SCM and CRM software markets worth billions of dollars annually have, for the most part, focused on innovations that structure and track enterprise transactions across numerous business processes.  Improvements in the scale and reliability of business process software, database infrastructure and transaction reporting and analytics have helped drive process efficiency gains across the enterprise.

In the next 15+ years, as Enterprise 2.0 emerges and matures, the enterprise software industry will be focused on organizing and optimizing the flow of conversations and relationships for enterprise users and customers.    While continuing to optimize transactions will be important, innovation and new value for users will come from the "humanizing" impact found in sensing, threading and sharing user conversations and relationships with and across the enterprise.  Today, much of the conversational and social content - and related metadata - generated by the volume of interactions with and across the enterprise has been locked away.  The value untapped.   

As Enterprise 2.0 innovations emerge, the soul of the enterprise will be found in enabling users to follow and filter the flow of their most important, most relevant conversations and relationships with colleagues, customers and communities.  

 

Microsoft Windows Live Activity Streams

Chris Messina points to Microsoft's support of the open standard Activity Streams as part of Windows Live:

"Seeing large players adopt the activity streams format is good for the open web ecosystem. It’s good for individual choice and for enabling market-based mechanisms that encourage competition and good behavior. It enables the decentralization of reading and publishing, and provides individuals with a record of both what their friends are doing as well as what they themselves have done. And these things are all good for the development of the people-centric social web."

Skype as a Service ... not a Client

From Michael Arrington's conversation with Skype CEO Jonathan Christensen:

"Eventually, we suspect, Skype will release a SDK that allows developers to integrate deep into Skype and make calls over the Skype service without opening the Skype client. In other words, people may start to think of Skype (voice, video, chat) as a service rather than a client that must be installed and used to communicate. Today’s tools, which include a public API and the now defunct Extras program, require developers to open the Skype client to make a call."

Augmented Reality + Communications

Nokia has created a short video clip providing a glimpse of what we could expect when augmented reality and communications ( what I've been calling augmented communications ) come together to create a new user experience.

Their vision combines AR glasses, 3D audio, haptic bracelet, sensors and mobile cloud services to create a seamless integration of "mixed reality" communications and media. 

In the last 6 months we've seen the introduction of augmented reality browsers (see wikitude and layar) and a number of AR enabled applications (see yelp) emerge.  While it is still early in the evolution of AR applications and network infrastructure, it is moving forward quickly.  Portions of Nokia's vision are not that far away. 

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb offered 5 barriers to an AR web that is everywhere.  His list provides great guidance for all AR applications.   If I narrow the focus to outline 5 hurdles critical to broad adoption of Augmented Communication applications, we get:  

1. Ensure Augmented Communications must be Secure and Spam-Free
2. Create Augmented Communications Apps that are Social and Real-time (not solitary and cached)
3. Deliver a compelling Augmented Communications User Experience (not just a cool UI)
4. Develop an Augmented Communications platform that interoperates with other AR apps
5. Enable developers to create new Augmented Communication apps from your Open platform

With these 5 guiding principles in mind, take a look at Nokia's video clip and think about the opportunity to create new value for users through Augmented Communications.

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Expertise Analysis & Ranking with the SPEAR Algorithm

Michael G. Noll a CS Ph.D. candidate at Hasso Plattner Institute, Germany and Ching-man Au Yeung a PhD candidate in CC at the University of Southampton, UK have developed the SPEAR algorithm.

 

The SPEAR (Spamming-resistant Expertise Analysis and Ranking) is a new technique to measure the expertise of users by analyzing their public activities on platforms like Delicious.

From their post on the Delicious blog:

A major problem of the Internet today is that finding high quality information is not easy nor fast.  The steady increase of spam and junk content on the Web further complicates this challenge. Another related issue is that finding knowledgeable and trustworthy users on social platforms like Delicious is much more difficult than it should be. Wouldn’t it be nice if Delicious recommended “good” users with similar interests?

To tackle this problem, we created the SPEAR algorithm that analyzes the timeline of the bookmarking and tagging activities of users. The focus of SPEAR is on the ability of users to find new, high quality information on the Internet. A great benefit of SPEAR is that it returns two very useful sets of results: first, a list of users ranked by their expertise; and second, a list of websites ranked by their quality.

Technically, SPEAR is based on the well-known information retrieval algorithm HITS, a technique presented in 1999 that is used by search engines to rank Web pages. We came up with SPEAR by modifying HITS so that it fits to the characteristics of open and shared systems like Delicious and extended it with a new component that integrates the timeline of user activities into its analysis. This resulted in further performance improvements of the algorithm.

The two main elements of the new SPEAR algorithm are:

1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user’s expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.

2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers – they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents. In other words, “the early bird catches the worm”. SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.

The combination of both these elements has the effect that SPEAR favors quality over quantity of user actions, and that the algorithm is quite resistant to today’s spamming attacks.

We believe SPEAR is very useful in the context of open systems, particularly, social networks. That said, we are already researching the next version of the algorithm – the popularity of online services like Delicious is rising, and so is the spam threat. Whether we want to improve the user experience on Delicious or win the arms race against spammers, there’s still a lot of work left to do!