Owen Brunette

There seems to have been so much hot air as people struggle to understand Freeconomics. The idea that data will be free. Hopefully we are getting to the end of that debate.

Newspapers discovering they can’t charge for their web sites, or for that matter any service now finding itself in data form, is similar to shopping malls discovering they can’t charge an entrance fee for their splendid walled garden. So they make money in other ways. If shopping malls can’t make ends meet they aren’t going to be able to cover their financing with billboard fees so they had better suddenly develop one splendid food court or sell up to somebody with other ideas and move down to Florida.

Likewise the Music industry is discover that their consumers consider charging for copies of music a greater crime than the copying and are refocusing on convenient video delivery and concert performances.

While the incumbents are bound to try to protect their positions increasingly they need to just get on with adapting or cannibalizing themselves into new businesses because there are few people left who believe the arguments of artificial scarcity and want to listen to the sulking about how profitable their business use to be.

IP, Management, Technology freeconomics, freemium

One of the topics that came up in this week’s Thursday Morning Coffee Meetup was the extent to which companies should be following social rather than financial objectives. Most people want to do their bit for society and it seems that possibly the majority of people in the startup community are wanting to adopt a primarily social or charitable focus to their activities. I can’t help worrying that this is not a realistic path for most of the people following it. If one is generating cash then diverting a potentially significant proportion to charity definitely helps us all but trying to factor in social objectives to every business decision leads to some very difficult decision making.

One can barely travel to a client or deliver a product and present it as ecologically sustainable. Even the much heralded virtues of the ingredients of some chunky ice creams are really greening of a product which clogs arteries and even kills off customers. Trying to be truly consistent could lead to some very long office meetings. The effect would tend to be a weight on the ecologically and socially conscious businesses. The more equitable way forward, I would argue, is for people to be better informed to be able to make the decisions they need to make and to be less shy about regulation so that businesses are on a level playing field that takes account of wider social impact. For each company to try to decide this for itself is a less practical solution than the regulation adopted in Europe, Japan and increasingly in China.

The prevailing wish in the discussion this week to have corporations manage the decision is probably in large part an effect of being in US culture where there is minimal regulation, little supervision and a lack of any notion that government should have a more active social role. Or even be effective in general. Corporations seem to be looked to to solve all problems. Our national government spends less than 0.5% of spending on education, less than 1.5% on social programs and a total of 48% of non overhead spending on the military. So the idea that the national government should be taking care of social expenditure, taxing carbon emissions and other destruction often seems foreign. It does seem though that at least the need is being identified, which is a cultural change for the US, if the solution being discussed is still a very different one.

Governance, Management, Society, Technology, Toys, Travels, Uncategorized

With all the chatter, twitter, email and popping up nonsense on our screens what we crave is silence, simplicity, blankness. Space for a thought to get executed upon.

We need silence, minimalism, space.

Nothing new here. This is why people craved vacations or libraries before our hyper connected days.  With all the thought candy out there, just a google search away, every momentary pondering has the potential to loose another twenty minutes. Self discipline can prevent that but the elimination of every email, message arrival announcement, anti virus update, weather alert and even network disconnect notice has to be fought for in order to keep focus.

Hopefully product managers can take this on board and start defaulting some of these notifications to off for us, and potentially those of us plagued by Vista will be returned to a more productive life with Windows 7. Or is that just another hope.

Technology gui, notifications, productivity, ui

Why have you joined twitter when you are already on facebook?

Judging by the often overlooked question on the Twitter page, “What are you doing?” the original intention when twitter’s layout was designed was to resolve the presence problem. That is the problem that we want to know what somebody is doing, before we interrupt them. It is why we don’t call people on their cell phone when they are away from their desk in an office environment and is a major barrier to the flow of effective business communication.

Status indication, even from your phone, is already available on facebook but in practice that isn’t what Twitter is being used for. Twitter is being used for water cooler conversation. It is a business social environment with minimal profile information. Like linkedIn it has no photo sharing or cluttered graphics resulting in a more business acceptable presence. As a result it has attracted a more professionally chattering classes demographic.

Lifeblogging, the logging in diary fashion of what you are doing,  is uncompelling for others and the popular accounts are in reality supplying a little relationship building chatter such as Jeff Pulver’s discussions of the Miami sunrise, together with short form URLs which push their or other’s material. So maybe this is the long awaited push media. Maybe we accept push media from a friend or somebody we chose to follow.

Is it just an inefficient version of Digg? Possibly. Or maybe the network building features on delicious. As such, Twitter is very inefficient. I can’t quickly see a list of Scoble’s links for the day. Or a ranking of links from CES this week. So, if it is so inefficient, why are people using it?

While for most people spending too much time at the water cooler is an indication that they need a different role, for some it is an important element of their work. Journalists want to know what the current topics of chatter are and PR people need to create awareness and chatter in a forum where journalists spend time. But what about the general users of Twitter?

I think the answer may be in the prominence given to the number of followers. It is feeding into the need for social affirmation by giving people a ranking. Telling people they are influential or even that they have authority.  It has in many ways become a game where people compete to have the highest number of followers or the highest ranking on Twitter ranking sites. The high score seeking is a driving attraction. We are told when every new follower begins following and bad news is overlooked as they leave without any direct indication on the site.

That isn’t the end to the bad news. Many of the accounts are silent, but worse, many people subscribed to a large group, were overwhelmed, and never logged in again.  If you read the 2000th page of Scoble’s followers exactly 50% haven’t published in the last month and half of those haven’t published in the last six months. The unanswered question is how many of the silent accounts are inactive. Significantly there is no last login date shown.

The other issue is that many may not be reading those they follow. Anybody following more than 200 people isn’t reading the content. The accounts with large numbers of followers inevitably make up a large proportion of the following. Could it be that other than the PR world and journalists others are not really reading twitter? That they are self selecting out and that is why we see so many bloggers and marketing people left. Well, there are readers. With some of the short link sites used on twitter it is possible to track the number of clicks on the short URL and the click through ratio of these links is often as much as 10% of followers.

One possible benefit of Twitter is that people are more effectively selecting who they follow based on the chatter and as a result getting more effective results than on Digg or delicious. This is difficult to judge. A lot of focus around Twitter is on the most followed accounts. It is noticeable that the most followed accounts, not driven by external fame, have extremely short bios. This is probably because the short bio does not cause anybody to self select out and a high proportion follow. Some of the most followed such as the Digg Nation team have acquired their followers as a fun club ranking tool rather than for, or as, a result of any tweets they have communicated over the site.

Twitter needs to become more compelling to read. A user interface where the regular columnists are in sections as they would be in print. A ranking can be included and preferably driven by ones self selected network. Then twitter becomes an index to the short form, shall I call them headlines? which lead one to occasional reading of links into more in depth discussion on a blog or at an established media site.

I was struck by a recent tweet in response to another: “Was that really a necessary tweet?”. Well I’m not sure I have ever seen a necessary tweet. Or rather, I haven’t seen an important tweet but I have enjoyed many frivolous tweets. It is indeed more entertaining than delicious. It is water cooler conversation and occasionally one needs to turn away from ones work and have some social context. The clicks generated by the 10% of followers have a value but readers with things to do will only spend occasional time at the water cooler and if that time is too occasional they won’t play this game.  For that reason the site needs to continue to evolve to be more readable or be replaced.

The real question is “How should it evolve or where should we go?“

Marketing, Technology digg, presence, twitter

I’m glad to see a bit more variety in the ventures wanting to present at this month’s NY Tech. We still have over half the ventures being related to the social web which I think is representative of the software related startups in town at the moment. Of course most software ventures are more general. Everything from stock control to trading software and it would be good to see a broader range getting in front of the VCs who attend. I was particularly heartened to see TrialX wanting to present. They are “a healthcare information technology startup that is developing a groundbreaking technology to automatically match patients to clinical trials of new treatments.”

I care about this, not because there is anything wrong with social media, but because there are opportunities for technology startups which New York is uniquely positioned to take advantage of. This is not so much in the technologies which are created in relative business isolation purely from an idea but those which are created by lighting fires under elements of the major industries of New York: advertising, publishing, pharma, health and financial services. There are many ventures in these fields which require expertise or integration into business relationships and a New York venture is in a better position to realize success than a startup in the pure technology space of The Bay Area.

In many cases these ventures also have clearer real business models even if they can’t achieve the same number of eyeballs by next Monday. At the moment I would take a plan leading to cash rather than eyeballs every time.

New York, Technology newyork startups nytech ventures

There is an interesting description of Googles browser internals here. Each tab uses a seperate process to make the browser far more resiliant to bugs and there are some interesting comments on their testing environment which allows them to run the browser against a million web pages programatically and assess the outcomes.

Technology cartoon, chrome, google, testing