After Zoho, Google. Now we're talking: System Status Dashboard, Quota Details Page, and a Billing Sneak Preview. These quotas and billings make me think Google must have hired someone who used to work in the mainframe business at IBM. There's a pretty decent roadmap and feature release log too.
Someone knows what they're doing in this Google department. If they manage to stay aligned with Salesforce.com, the Google Apps/Force.com combo could really threaten Microsoft and Oracle a few years from now.
Google Apps + App Engine + Gears + Chrome + Native Client + network investments, they're not toying around. There's a deliberate web application strategy at work here with more chances to succeed than Netscape ever had in the 90's. This is a much, much better direction for Google than weak wiki-based offerings or pondering whether to buy Digg.com. I'm starting to be excited again by a refocused Google that seems to gain from the pressure brought by the recession. It helps that Yahoo and Microsoft have been more inept at search marketing than I thought was possible, but Google is starting to show fresh vision and good execution outside of Adwords.
Kudos to Zoho for introducing a detailed dashboard monitoring the health of their online applications. I'm very pleased to see more and more web app vendors delivering on transparency I advocated as early as 2001 for online apps and services.
At Watershed we have our own mini health portal with tabs for our internal and external apps. Most of our vendors now at least have some sort of blog keeping track of scheduled downtime and unforeseen issues. We're lobbying those who still don't so they get on board. And this is part of my default checklist each time I'm considering potential online software vendors.
Off-topic notice to the non-existent readers mourning the long-gone days when I used to blog more often. You can get more frequent Olivier fixes on Twitter. One liners work well for me as I rarely find the time to research and write longer blog posts anymore. Speaking of micro-blogging, we're also satisfied Yammer users, which is really filling a gap for distributed teams.
Jon Udell just experienced some of the practical limitations getting in the way of sharing and representing structured data easily that I've been running into myself. To produce an entry about Circuit City's store closures, I had to spend a lot of time massaging the source data (coming from a PDF) in Excel so that it was properly mappable and chartable. Tasks that add little value and should take 5 minutes easily balloon into hours of menial work to renormalize and restructure data that should have been published as csv or xml in the first place. "Fake" digital content is going to get in the way of publishers for the foreseeable future. The challenge is to optimize workflow to get a decent production cost/time for enhanced news coverage. It's all about making things replicable.
I've looked at online databases and spreadsheets rather extensively a couple of months ago, and DabbleDB had hands down the most powerful yet usable user interface of the bunch, significantly ahead of what Zoho or Google (among others) have to offer. Too bad DabbleDB is right now heavily focused on private use. Its dynamic features cannot be embedded in a high-volume public site though it's on their roadmap to support such scenarios. All you can share publicly are static snapshots which don't reflect the added value of what their UI does in the backend. Their pivot table-like functionality and mapping integration not only show the way of what modern intranets should embed - this is also what professional online news publishing should be about.
Now, look at their snapshot archive. It's a calendar-based interface (no doubt inspired by Windows Restore) that lets you roll back to older versions of your online database. This is, again, a level of control that most web app vendors don't even think of, let alone execute properly. Go go DabbleDB, you stand above the crowd!
I'm thinking of buying an unlocked Nokia E71 (about $400 at Newegg, the Blackberry Bold isn't really available unlocked yet at decent prices, and the iPhone has half a dozen dealbreakers for me). I want a device for use in various countries in South America, North America and Europe to have easy voice, email and web access while traveling without constantly needing my laptop. From what reviews report, the E71 can run Skype among other VOIP options, has a real keyboard, isn't a brick, is a decent email client, mp3 player and GPS, and an OK web browser and camera. I want to avoid at all costs the total rip-off that are overpriced contracts and international roaming, and I just want to own by own damn device without bending backwards to keep it unlocked.
So right now I'm trying to figure out what's available in the US, and let me tell you, Sprint, T-Online, Verizon and Sprint are competing to win the Most Useless Website award. So I'm begging you, dear reader, to email me with info on how to get 3/3.5G access in the US (most importantly, New England) without a damn yearly contract (ideally, without any sort of contract at all, as sometimes I just spend three days in, say, New York and don't go back to the US for six months so even a month-to-month PAYG contract is overkill).
Any help appreciated (email, twitter or IM, comments here are broken). Progress, if any, in my quest, will be updated here.
Update: bitching on my blog unlocked the right google query which led me to this, which looks like a winner. Update: or not as it looks like a loophole, but hey AT&T don't bother even listing PAYG data plans in your GoPhone pages, right? Medianet Unlimited is "unlimited" only if you use a phone without a full-fledged keyboard. Jokers/crooks. But then you have iPhone 3G users doing it. Seems worth a try buying one of the $10 GoPhone.
Update about the E71, it works in Europe and the US because it's quad band GSM, but 3G is an either/or proposition:
- Europe: E71-1 RM-346 = GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 900/2100 HSDPA
- US: E71-2 RM-357 = GSM 850/900/1800/1900; WCDMA 850/1900 HSDPA
Well at least Chile is running HSDPA 1900 too, and I don't go back to Europe much these days. Can't have it all I guess, but what a headache.
For your entertainment: the Hollywood overwhelming leftist bias in numbers. To be taken with a grain of salt given PoliticalBase's elusiveness about how it collects the data and where it's coming from. It makes it hard to know how thorough or accurate this representation is. But it matches my expectations (did you say right-wing bias?) so it must be right!
The full drumset is not really a central instrument in Latin music (as opposed to a bunch of percussion instruments), nonetheless many Latin grooves are playable on a drumkit, especially if you add a couple cowbells and woodblocks. Since I play on electronic drums, I can just add whatever sample I want on any of my pads, cymbals or pedals. I'm just getting started with Latin rhythms so here are some useful pointers:
Sometimes it feels like we're swimming in an endless sea of digital content, and to the extent I for instance have more than a terabyte of media on my own local network (currently 16 IP devices!), we are. But once you dive in, you realize that a lot of it is digital only on the surface, but analog underneath. From mp3 files that are just a compressed sound wave rather than the original digital tracks to scanned PDF files that you can't search or index. Consider that Wal-mart PDF annual reports from as early as the mid nineties are images, not text. Similarly, many government documents released after FOIA requests are just scans. What you see happening is digital sources dumbed down into digitized analog content. A lot of structure, meta data and meaning are lost in the process, and "print to PDF" as opposed to "save as PDF" makes a world of difference. I'm impressed by a number of ongoing efforts, from the Show Us a Better Way initiative in the UK to what sites such as Freebase are trying to accomplish, but we're still a long way away from the universal data cube!
As a publisher we're starting to work on adding our very modest contribution towards that elusive vision. An enormous amount of time goes wasted within companies to just gather and aggregate market or industry data. You haven't even started analyzing the data that you're already exhausted by all the scrape-copy-paste-clean-massage-normalize work involved. This makes it hard to reach conclusive insights because the waters often remain muddled in apples mixed with oranges, and it's not any better when companies are dealing with their own internal data.
We're not going to go after this pain by trying to boil the semantic ocean (good luck with that to the start-ups in that field). Rather, we intend to put together tight data packages in our selected verticals. Trade publishing is stuck in the 80's for the most part, which helps explain the turmoil currently seen in companies such as Reed Elsevier, Penton or Cygnus. The print and events legacy is really hard to shake off for these guys. There's a lot of value locked there that's just not delivered to business audiences in convenient ways. Data products tend to be published behind the firewall through expensive and complicated offerings. I'm not saying we have the answer, but I do think we "have the question" better than most.
Hopefully we'll start fleshing out these ideas into actual products within the next 12 months. It's been baking for a while, from our Focus Article format at Defense Industry Daily to pretty much what MarketingCharts.com is all about. Now we intend to turn our sites into application/news hybrids (let's face it, publishing charts in gif format is just a stopgap), and that's going to be a tough but fun ride. Now let me go back to shutting up and working on execution!
Interesting interview with Southwest Airlines CEO Gary Kelly.
10/16/08 update: Southwest Airlines posts 1st loss in 17 years.
I used to really like this magazine. A couple years ago they changed their Editor in Chief. Seems the new guy's goal is to turn it into another wishy washy leftist vehicle. Look, there's Newsweek, Michael Moore movies and countless others for the reality-challenged masses. Suddenly The Economist was publishing articles blaming Estonia for daring to move a statue erected to praise their Russian invaders. Now there's routinely similar nonsense such as this on corporal punishment citing the indisputable authority of the UN or some semi-literate social "scientist" no doubt confusing correlation with causation. Seems the government is superior to parental judgment on educational matters. Yeah, Sweden for everyone! Confusing a regular spanking with abuse is about as dumb as it gets. I'll spank whenever I feel it's the only option left to get some sense into my kids. (As an aside and just to get it off my chest, on such issues my view on the opinions of childless people is, shut the fuck up, have kids of your own and show us what a great parent you are.)
I now fully expect a glowing endorsement for Barack Obama. Hay for change and hope! Free rainbows and unicorns for all! Another publication goes the PC crap drain. Oh well. We're in a "stagflation/stop the war" mood these days so I guess it's not fashionable to be a right-winger, just like in the 70's. Big thumbs down to George Bush for screwing up the conservative cause so badly.
Here's a really excellent wrap-up of the staggering mediocrity at Microsoft for pretty much a decade. Detailed, informed, right on target.
I'm not going to trust my precious Excel pivot tables to a web app given how crappy the current generation of browsers is (I've lost count of how many times Firefox crashed on me) but this is impressive:
For people who don't see the value in pivot tables, I'll say this: do you really know where your revenue is coming from? We've met our revenue plan for the first four months of the year with uncanny precision (just a couple of grands above it) because we know how to split and dice our sales data in many, many ways. I don't know how you can be a business leader and not be a spreadsheet jedi. Not that everything happens in the spreadsheet of course, and without people skills you have nothing. But you need to be able to make the numbers tell you all their little but important stories. They show you the hidden weaknesses, point to potential for greatness.
Hilarious email from HP today:
"On Thursday, April 17th, HP suspended operation of the HP Upline Service. We fully anticipate that suspension of the Upline Service will be temporary and short in duration, and will notify you when the Upline Service is operational again.Please accept our sincere apology for this unanticipated interruption of your access to the Upline Service. We appreciate your patience as we launch this new service, and are working hard to minimize inconvenience caused by this service interruption.
If you are a resident of the United States, your subscription will remain in effect and you will be able to continue using the Upline Service for the duration of your subscription period once the Upline Service is operational again. Thank you for your patience, and we look forward to providing you with the HP Upline Service.
If you are not a resident of the United States, we regretfully must inform you that the initial launch of the HP Upline Service was intended for United States residents only. Unfortunately, our filtering tools did not adequately screen for subscribers residing outside of the United States. We thank you for your early adoption of the Upline Service, and look forward to being able to provide the HP Upline Service to you when we launch it in your country of residence. Since the HP Upline Service is presently offered for use within the United States only, we will be discontinuing your current subscription."
So let me get this straight. Any fledging start-up worth its salt goes global right out the door, but a behemoth like HP can't? FAIL. Memo to HP: stick to hardware and stop embarrassing yourself on the web. Too bad, I was considering subscribing.
If they really do have 2,000 Pro members at $49/mo or $399/year, that's around $1M/year provided there's not egregious churn and depending on the monthly vs. yearly mix (I suspect there's a majority of monthly subscriptions). Those are their self-reported numbers but the service seems well executed and I have no reason to doubt their data. Impressive in just a year (here's a post about their premium launch), as is the conversion rate out of their 70,000 member base. They do a good job at spelling out the value of their subscription product, in fact I might give it a shot. It's refreshing to see people who don't buy the hype about ad revenue trees growing to reach the sky. See also some notes on how they built up traffic those last couple of years.
The fine people at EllisLab have a quite interesting post on how they see feature requests. Generally speaking, I like their voice. Unlike many web 2.0 companies, they're not delivering the usual pandering bullshit: "it's all about you the users and the comm-you-nih-tee." Yeah right, like we can't figure out the part about UGC economies of scale in your pitch to VCs.
EllisLab is saying, look we do appreciate your feedback, but it's our job to maintain the product's sense of purpose, stay the course and deliver. It's refreshing, it's honest, and it's the right thing to do. You need the courage to say no to a lot of requests, whether externally or within a company with your internal users by the way. You also need to execute on some of those ideas, or people will just see the whole thing as an exercise in futility. Maintaining a transparent dialog about why feature requests make or don't make the cut is key. Easier said than done as sometimes you'd rather just sit down and ship product.
Salesforce is doing a great job with its IdeaExchange (here's their blog about it). There are ASPs (Oops, sorry for the 90's wording, surely it's more hip to say SaaS) such as BrightIdea too, and of course, a blog dedicated to idea management systems (what topic doesn't have its blog this days, carrot juice fetishism maybe?). If you can educate internal and external users about trade-offs and cost/benefit decision making, I think given enough scale (i.e. you need the manpower to handle the firehose) these systems have real potential.
