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The Problem of Wanna

Scott Karp is a famous blogger. I am not. But, his post on the struggles of the newspaper industry, and how this relates to GM's last ditch effort to innovate with their Volt project, is very good reading.

That's a long sentence. I'm not a good general writer, I'm more of a technical marketing and research type. The article, however, grabbed me, because I once worked in the electric vehicle industry. My experiences at a small, secretive Israeli EV startup, were very similar to my misadventures in trying to raise capital in Sillyclone Valley for a faltering independent mobile dispatch venture called ThruDispatch.

Mr. Karp conjoins GM's monumental myopia (ignoring anything having to do with advanced drive trains) with the newspaper business' total lack of a new media game plan. I see the common thread - It's called, "Wanna".

Over the past 10 years, a parade of inventors and young alternative drive train companies signed NDA's with GM, hoping to get a foothold. They came from all sectors of the component, engine, and fuels industry, with patents galore, and some of them were indeed astounding; hopefully one day a book will be written. One company had a a fully tested AC drive train that could also power your house or sell back excess power to the utility grid. But we never heard about them, because GM didn't wanna.

In the midst of the Web20 semi-bubble of 2005-06, I wrapped up a six month contract at a Sillyclone Valley R&D lab, and took to the road to pitch a plan for a really innovative, user driven, mobile dispatch venture for independent automotive servicers. Thousands of potential Nextel subscribers were surveyed, all had agreed to pay a decent monthly fee, and a prototype had been in place for a while.

But, if the business plan or pitch didn't have the words "social network, video, or Facebook App", there was no getting past the gates of Sandhill road. They didn't wanna.

Now that we are on the threshold of what will surely be a blood bath of failed, ad-supported YAVSS and YASN ventures, in the midst of an IPO desert, will the equity come around to wanna?

Will they wanna invest in services that working people of the middle class will pay to use, rather than the chimera of free and ad supported services that are doomed?

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Twitter Downtime is semi intentional

I have it on flimsy authority that some of the problems facing Twitter's technical architecture were addressed long ago, and that somehow, the madcap idea was to let the problems linger as test of the community's loyalty, or rather, its "index of need".

By letting the problems fester while keeping the lion's share of what needs repairing in a back pocket, the management at Twitter has divined what few can answer via surveys, i.e., how much do people really want and need this service.

I have often said, (mostly to myself as I have no industry profile or juice), that the problem with most social networks is that they have no mission critical use case; well, now we know, what with all the articles and posts on nothing but Twitter downage, Twitter Architecture, Twitter Monetization, that Twitter does have a mission critical use case - whatever that is to each user.

Keeping the repairs in abeyance is a stroke of genius. A good friend of mine who writes messaging applications for BIG distributed finance systems says that, "This Twitter thing could just be done right as a ground up restart, we carry much more traffic with a far more complex transaction and message profile."

The Demon Bride of Twitter

"I am eating"

"I am Going here..."

"I have Come from there"

"I have baked a cake"

"I am happy"

"I am sad"

"I am a Gentile, I am a Jew"

"I am at XYZ place;anyone here want to meet up?"

Phew....I worry about the Demon bride of Twitter - a swinging hip chick with a modern job in the crossover laced techno-branding sphere. Profiles on Flickr, Facebook, Myspace, and umpteen other presence services.

She is, by anyone's  measure, riding the new wave of social media. I'm sure she has a Second Life, if even only as a professional dalliance.

I worry about the Demon bride of Twitter. I worry about the industry as a whole the way I worry about family members. Maybe I need to worry more about my consulting practice?

(This conversation has been re-dramatized in a kind of Shakespearean  or Edwardian dramatic language, to make things interesting, but the intent of all dialog remains faithful,  and perhaps even more understandable if rendered in this fashion:

Check out this exchange in a presentation I was making at a large, established Silicon Peninsula Tech Giant:

"So consultant, impressive portfolio, no?, What have you for this hungry, hungry VP; something enticing, no? Something satisfying, current and smelling of the blood sacrifice?', thus spake the VP of Product Development. My answer, as in all times considered, was crafted in its structure from the times immemorial and has served me well:

Bedrock Needs, Social Network Fluff

This is a story of un-served and under served markets. This is also a tale of saturated  markets that also happen to be speculative in their very nature. Lately, Venture Capital has been flowing into a considerable number of ventures piloted by a dubious mix of characters. There is an oft heard adage quoted many times in the cannon of startup literature, "the team is more important than the product - rather a great team with a  'meh' product than a brilliant product with a 'meh' team. How can you argue with that?

But we are seeing a flood of money being poured into ventures that, in all honesty, can't be called serious. If it was merely the duplication of existing and unproven models, then you might argue that the cadre of privileged VC fund partners who are responsible for the Pilate-like 'thumbs-up-down", then maybe the funds are just playing the odds. They feel the need to play in the space, and dare not be left out of the madness.

Obviously, I wasted much time as a lone wolf trying to pitch ThruDispatch to these funds; I'm not even sure I want to be the CEO, CFO, CTO amalgam that the grant of such benevolent dilution confers.

But again, what can you say when the attributes of a real, recession-proof, service-based venture is proffered and rejected so...summarily. Here we have an under served market, a real business, even a modest one, that is based on real, preexisting client constituency who has been well surveyed and who are eager to pay subscriber fees to use such a system.

  It must be ....me? Fine. No academic credentials, bootstrap career through the trades, and now, very modestly self-employed. I have a few nice recommendations and one or two marquee clients. Im not VC material.

And as of now, I don't want it anymore. They don't want me, I don't want them. Lesson learned.

So if it only took me since 2005 to learn this, and there is still absolutely no competition in the hosted mobile dispatch for independent automotive services space?

I will persevere by seeking partners in the conventional mobile workforce management space, and keep trying to find a small development team that might take this on the cuff for equity, while I work the marketing and field build-out.

Social Networks: New Age Solution to Problems of the Old Economy

I'm a curmudgeon, a hard headed analyst. I compete with much larger agencies to help companies find alternative product strategies when first efforts are running out of steam. I point out weaknesses and overlooked opportunities, find partners, and debunk shoddy market volume figures proffered by staff in order to keep projects funded, or to justify their existence of such. My advice is often ignored -  until much later after my contract is long over. That's when they dredge up my reports and presentations and go over them with a highlighter.

Strategies for Social Media, in particular, have been a challenge when soft pedaling my services in the outreach phase. Companies want to just jump in and create systems from whole cloth, offer white box services, or create Facebook apps - all without a thought as to what interactions they are trying to foster, who they are endeavoring to connect or enable, or what model they are trying to exploit. Forget any reality checks for monetization, even in the soft sense of labor savings or process streamlining.

No, when an organization has made up its mind, the strategic issues are often put aside, and the project proceeds apace to implementation. Bad for me, good for the latest crop of Social Media systems designers; all power to them. We will see how it shakes out, long term.

But I am a staunch advocate of applying New Age solutions to Old Economy problems.

Jerry Yang, Do NOT buy Facebook

Jerry, do not buy Facebook. Do not squander billions on a platform that has not yet delivered its mission critical use case.

Mr. Yang, you have one of the most talented developer corps in North America. Please redirect the billions that would otherwise be squandered in the acquisition toward the creation of a superior competitive product.. This is to say nothing of the potentially horrible management entanglements.

Social networking, as it is today embodied by very immature platforms, including Facebook, have a long way to go in providing bedrock value, especially in the B2B applications area.  There is much good work to be done in creating a credible, useful, and enduring model for social networks, beyond the buzz.

I know that work done to date by Facebook and MySpace is worthy of much applause, and is a potential horizontal advertising and market bonanza, yet I implore you to take a fresh look at the space and innovate with that special Yahoo Voodoo sauce that has, in the past, executed so well.

Here is a chance to do things right, to set a new agenda, and exceed the state of the art.

Just ask H. Hoffman, the shadow CEO of Yahoo, what she thinks....

Open Bid to the Brand Monitoring Industry

Image via Wikipedia

What causes the wholesale mis targeting of an entire emerging technical discipline?
Who Knows!

I can guess, however that the dozen or so companies pitching brand monitoring are  making  brand owners their initial target, because there seems to be roughly equivalent services being offered by classical agencies.

The problem with the head to head comparison is that classical brand equity consultants are inherently a decision support and steering service, while new age text mining for brand monitoring falls far, far short of steering anything.

But take heart, all who invested equity in these young and promising companies, for there is a sector that has been completely overlooked - the brand intermediaries. How do we re target this badly gone astray brand monitoring via CGM sector and get them on track to a market that will grow and pay?

Why, my dear Watson, simply hire the author of this weblog to engage in a six month product redesign cycle  and most of the investment made in your text mining product for brand monitoring can be re targeted at incremental cost towards the brand intermediaries and multi-line retail dealer market!

Download intermed.pdf

There is nothing inherently wrong with text mining of the wild corpus, but the slow uptake and faltering of the sector must be addressed via a serious re targeting towards customers that care.

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Technical Product Service Demands Social Networks

Technical Product Service is a fancy name for anything that requires a skilled technician or engineer to effect a product repair. In the grand old days of consumer electronics, when the Hi-Fidelity system was the center of home entertainment, skilled, lab-coated technicians would troubleshoot your amplifier, receiver, or tape deck (!) to the component level. I was one such skilled technical servicer. I have come to the conclusion, based on my past experience as a professional trainer of technical specialists, and in my current experience as an IT industry product strategy sector analyst, that the current upheaval and innovation in Social Networking may be poised to have a huge impact on the way professionals get things fixed, how they apply their trade, and how laypeople get complex issues resolved.

In those days, as fast as technology was changing in the late 1970's, even the most advanced and innovative new technologies, such as the VCR, were based on  discreet components. Even the first, very expensive CD Audio players had only a modicum of customized integrated circuitry. It was very much the case that any repair one might effect, from that time in to the mid 1980's, was a case study of one's education and skill as a technical journeyman.

I used to teach national service classes for thousands of consumer and commercial electronic technicians; the stakes were high, as productivity depended on fast and accurate diagnostics. This was before the advent of the internet, and collective knowledge was typically dispensed via bulletins, national convocations, and the very nascent electronic pre=PC era BBS systems. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

All of my instruction during those years included  tracks on basic electronics, as revealed by the Horowitz and Hill reference book for electronic education, "The Art of Electronics". Many of my colleagues subtly berated me for wasting our limited time during regional and national trade events, in regards to my covering remedial ground. I always pointed out that I was not merely reviewing the standard syllabus, but I was gathering a body of collective mythology that often permeates complicated subjects, like electronics and its applied science, troubleshooting.

What does this have to do with today's sexy, topical issue, i.e., Social Media and Social Networking? If you will bear with me and read on for one more minute, please.

Social Networks Await a Renaissance in Real Applications

Facebook is a good example of a technology seeking its mission critical use case; true, such systems extend the interaction model between people in the online world, but would we all be that much worse off without a Facebook profile? Thousands of almost useless or inconsequential Facebook apps and  extensions only serve to underline this revelation.

But, there is an entirely untapped, mission critical application space that could showcase social media engines: technical service  applications that foster interactions and mutual support among users of complex products ranging from consumer electronics to industrial and professional equipments.

Currently, high-end durable goods  enthusiasts  (take motor sports for example) use  typical text-based user forums to communicate with one another; this has been a great boon for folks like me, (a scooter enthusiast), who can post technical issues and observations among my forum members. The kind of forums that I frequent allows for a (fairly inelegant) posting of images, links, etc. There is also the typical conversation threading, some have tags, etc. This is where the depth of information and interactivity stop.

So much more could be done through a Facebook paradigm. Users of technical equipment, whether HD video technicians or motorcyclists, could potentially avail themselves of a much deeper, richer, and interactive collaborative experience.

What would such an add-on Facebook app look like for a motor sports enthusiast interaction model? Well, I'll throw some things off the cuff without even thinking it through, and  towards the end of this article, I will try and  extrapolate the  lesson for more mission critical technical product support services that might make use of these social media engines.