by Rob Paterson
October 31, 2007 at 10:12 am · Filed under
Emergency, Enterprise 2.0, Mobile Messaging 2.0, Mobile Phones, Robert Scoble, Social Computing, Twitter, Twittergram, University, mobile
I think now that the point is made - Twitter is currently THE BEST TOOL for communicating widely in an emergency
(ParisLemon) Another day, another show of Twitter’s true power. Barely a week after the Southern California fires began and Twitter helped get out important messages to people, a 5.6 magnitude earthquake hits the Bay Area and info about is posted numerous times on Twitter before the ground is even done shaking. It’s barely been 30 minutes and already I have 4 solid pages of earthquake news and insight.
Ariel Waldman posted the first tweet about it (that I saw) and from there nearly ever blogger/tech geek/person in the entirity of the Bay Area has posted in on the quake - and many of the multiple times. I knew the exact location and magnitude before the story had even hit the news.
I say again, this is the power of Twitter.
Not only does it get your message out - but it uses very small amounts of the cell network and so can often get through when an overload crashes the system. Robert Scoble sent out a Twittergram to his list including Maryam his wife. With a Twittergram you can use voice. So you can in effect use the cell phone system without overloading it.
I think that the ubiquity of cell phones means that any organization now can have a Twitter Emergency Strategy - you can of course link this to a complementing Facebook strategy too.
So imagine a fire in your office - or an epidemic in the school - or a shooter at your university - a flood in your region - with Twitter, you can reach most people affected and then you can keep them updated - all it requires is that you have a plan and get them following as a precaution. Not hard!
by Dana Gardner
July 27, 2007 at 9:11 am · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Microsoft, SaaS, Social Computing, Social Media, Web 2.0, mobile
Looking over the reports from the Microsoft financial analysts gathering this week in Redmond, Wash., I’m reminded of baseball … modern ballparks in particular.
Far as I know, most major league baseball teams have been profitable for many years, many decades. Most of the teams in large cities are doing better than ever, in spanking new stadiums.
What’s different now is the explosion of advertisements, endorsements, sponsorships, hucksterism and crass visual commercialism. Whether you attend a game or watch one on television, there isn’t a time or place where you are not treated to literally dozens of commercial pitches while you try and figure out the real pitches.
Why on Earth would people who love baseball, or even just tolerate baseball, allow such a plastering of advertisements across their consciousness (and perhaps unconsciousness)? Well, because they don’t have a choice, of course.
Baseball, like Microsoft (and soon, Google?), is a monopoly. There are few if any real choices for most anyone who wants to watch a major league game but to incur the ad wrath.
And that’s why it’s only a matter of time before Microsoft starts injecting scads of ads through their “software plus services” portfolio. That’s right, when you open your online (or offline or hybrid-line) applications for a spreadsheet, word processor, email, calendar, ERP interface — just like you’re now thoroughly accustomed to on Web pages and services — there will be ads. Lots of them. Targeted right to you as an individual or business (or both) with your pre-analyzed budget to spend in anticipation
Local, state, regional, mobile, location-based, keyword-oriented, and fuzzy-warm branding types of ads. All over your visual perimeter — just like at the ballpark — you’ll be served up ads, ads, ads while you toil away to offer more cookie crumbs of insight into what the next ad should be that you see. Attention!
The implications for this, of course, are enormous. If Microsoft and the other services providers — for they will all have to follow suit, just like each ballpark followed the other — can better target these ads to you based on your relationship with them and the technology cauldron that forms from your use of “software plus services,” then all the other providers of platforms for online ads will be sunk.
We used to have the division of church and state between media editorial and advertising, but what of the division between technology and advertising? There isn’t one. You may think you own your PC (vendors would differ) but you don’t own the servers that toss up your “software plus services.” You want to play ball? You gotta look at the ads. You gotta see the craplets.
Reminds me of the line from fictional Southie strongman Frank Costello in The Departed: “I don’t want to be a product of my environment, I want my environment to be a product of me.” You, dear readers, will be a product of the environment that your “software plus services” provider wants for you, based on what’s good for their investors.
Even, over the next 3 to 10 years, as the newspaper business thinks it can reinvent its paper-based revenue streams from the Internet, in comes the IT vendors. These “software plus services” providers will — from start-up of the first craplets when you turn the thing on until the last mouse click before you die — have you pegged. They will know what you want before you do. No other entity can better match ads to users than a combined IT platform provider and online services provider whose business is based on advertising revenue. The marketers will finally have the tools they’ve always wanted.
And so those other media company web sites that dish up the highest-quality content, that provide top-line fourth-estate journalism will do okay (we hope), but the largest ad dollars growth will go to those “software plus services” providers that can give the advertisers the best on-target and metrics-based match-up between buyers and sellers. And then the IT companies buy the media companies, and then they buy the telecos and cable and mobile providers. Nice and tidy. On stop shopping to get inside of your head/wallet.
Who to blame? No one. It’s inevitable. Government regulators could scarcely keep up, even if they will and budgets existed. If Google and Microsoft don’t do it someone else will. Mark Cuban thinks those alternatives could well be the local broadband providers, and he’s right … but only for a time. Once the total online ad monopoly kicks in, it will be a digital Standard Oil on steroids with no Sherman Antitrust Act.
Is Google the white knight and Microsoft the evil empire? Nope. Just like in any good vs evil saga (Star Wars?) both sides need each other desperately. For the better that Google does in making ad-based online applications and services work acceptably, the easier it is for Microsoft to inject that model into its current stable of software, and present it as … services.
And the more successful (could they be any more successful?) that Microsoft is at providing PC applications and services locally, online or both, the easier it is for Google to make its SaaS alternatives look good enough. These two massively and globally influential companies will ratchet each other up to the level of the modern-day ballpark. It’s not either-or, it’s both Microsoft and Google propelling the shifts in the market to ad-based everything online, including your business applications, including your high school yearbook.
We are all just going along for the ride. For many of us, we think we get the functional services cheaply because the ads pay for the “software plus services.” But when was the last time you saw the price of admission tickets to a ball game fall as they hoisted yet another billboard up over left field?
It won’t be ad-based revenue or subscription. No, it will be ad-based revenue and subscription. Has to be. We have no choice.
by Dana Gardner
July 4, 2007 at 8:10 pm · Filed under
Microsoft, SOA, SaaS, enterprise software, mobile
Martin LaMonica at CNET has a blog on a new Evans Data survey that shows erosion on developer allegiance to Windows client ports.
This makes for some interesting reading, along with the comments. I wonder who sponsored, if anyone, the survey.
[Addendum: SAP seems to be reaching the same conclusion, blogs Phil Wainewright.]
I can’t vouch for the survey integrity, but the findings jibe with what I’m seeing and hearing — only I think the erosion trend is understated in this survey, especially if global markets are factored.
I think too that this represents more than a tug away from Windows purely by Linux clients, and may mask the larger influence of open source more generally, as well as virtualization, RIAs, Citrix, OS X, and SaaS.
The impact of SaaS in particular bears watching as more ISVs adopt on-demand approaches as their next best growth opportunity, even though they will still have a Windows port. SaaS, not Linux, is the slippery slope that will affect Microsoft most negatively over time. Go to SaaS fully and forget the client beneath the browser.
Those ISVs that remain exclusive to rich Windows clients alone for deployment won’t for much longer, even as they continue to use Microsoft tools and servers. I wonder what the percentage of ISVs that ONLY go to market via Windows rich clients is, and how that has tracked over the past five years.
If ISV developers can satisfy the need for being on those Windows clients via the browser or RIAs alone, and as more users look to browsers as the primary means for applications access, the need to use Windows on the development and deployment side could sizably slide, too. It’s the same threat Netscape represented more than 10 years ago … it just took some time. Pull the finger from the dike … and the gusher begins to promote the flood.
SOA has an influence here too. When any back-end platform can be used just as well to support the services that can be best integrated, orchestrated, and extended into business processes — watch out. Choices on deployment for consolidation and virtualized environments moves swiftly to a pure cost-benefit analysis — not based on interdependencies. Windows on the server will have to compete with some pretty formidable deployment options.
When such a tipping point would occur — whereby the browser or standards-based approach to clients/mobile/services grows such that the back-end choices shift to low-cost, best-of-breed alone — remains an open question. When you break the bond to client, however, how far off can the server choices shift fully to what’s most economically attractive?
by Dana Gardner
June 21, 2007 at 2:34 pm · Filed under
Social Computing, Web 2.0, innovator interviews, mobile, podcasts
Read a full transcript of the discussion. Sponsor: UPS
As wireless communications technology becomes embedded in the lifestyles of consumers — led by the younger generations that have always known it — small businesses are seeking ways to catch the mobile wave.
Gaining an advantage with younger shoppers online and off can be daunting to small businesses that would rather not manage technology — but instead exploit it. I recently moderated a sponsored podcast that tells the story of how UPS extended its global package delivery tracking and Quantum View services to the wireless domain, and reached out in whole new ways via Short Message Service (SMS) texting to mobile devices.
One small retail business in Michigan, Moosejaw, uses UPS as its technology and logistics source to wirelessly aid its clients — to help them stay in touch, provide a strong sense of community, and to give them access to whatever information they may want on how to get their purchases quickly and easily. Some even got some lessons in dating. Go figure.
It turns out that weaving the use of SMS into B2C and B2B conversations has some unintended and auspicious viral consequences. Hear or read more about how UPS and and Moosejaw teamed up to let mobile users get their delivery data their way. We’re joined by Jeff Reid, UPS’s Director of Customer Technology Marketing, and Robert Wolfe, the Co-Founder of Moosejaw.
Here are some excerpts:
I started the company when I was 21, and had absolutely no clue what I was doing. So when customers would come in the store we were playing Nintendo or whiffle ball, and we asked them to join us. And that ended up turning into our marketing theory. So we really try to connect with the customer on a level that’s not just about the product.
So far it seems to be working. We definitely have more high school and college students, not only as our customers but also as our staff. And that’s really how we ended up being so proactive about wireless technology. Because when I look around and see everyone at Moosejaw, they don’t even talk to the people three seats away from them — they SMS text them. And half of them don’t even use their computers anymore; they just use their mobile phones and personal digital assistants.
When we began seeing that internally, we knew that we have to be first-to-market with all of that kind of wireless technology — and UPS has helped a ton, and not only with traditional tracking. I call it “traditional” even though it’s still pretty new. UPS began helping us all the way to getting tracking numbers tested, which we just started very recently. And it’s already been hugely successful. And when I say, “hugely successful,” we have had a lot of people sign up — but more importantly, the people who have signed up have loved it.
It sounds funny. You really don’t need to find out where your stuff is at that very movement, but it’s just that the whole idea of being able to use your phone for everything — our customers expect it. If we are not texting information to them, then we are yesterday’s news. We have to be able to embrace that kind of technology.
If it so happens that we sell products that our demographic loves — and it wouldn’t really matter if that product were coffee mugs — the fact that we are sending tracking information through a mobile phone is what’s important. Our customers are more likely to tell their friends that they just got their tracking number to their phone telling them when their new sunglasses are coming.
Our customers have become more mobile as their businesses have grown, and their lives converge with their day-to-day work activities. So we find a lot of customers are using our mobile capabilities to extend their flexibility and productivity outside of work.
Small businesses and individual users are the primary users of our wireless capabilities. So it is meeting our expectations of who would use the wireless capabilities. Yet it’s amazing how wireless services and our tracking information has made it even onto the golf course nowadays, where people are using it in all facets of their life — to check on that birthday gift to all the way down to managing their global supply chain. … The majority of the usage for wireless tracking comes from individuals in small businesses.
Some of our customers have large-scale service engagements where they have delivery vans out making calls. They require that a part be at a house before they can actually fix an item that they are going to service. So these large companies leverage our wireless capabilities to track a package within the van, so that they can determine whether or not that call will be effective — if the part has arrived or not. That’s an example of where efficiency throughout the supply chain is being introduced, and wireless tracking is certainly a large component of that efficiency equation.
We have wireless capabilities in over nine Asia-Pacific countries. It’s available in 24 European countries. Of course it’s here in the United States and Canada. It’s also available in five Middle East countries, and also in South Africa. So as long as you have a connection in any of those areas, UPS certainly has information that you can consume.
Read a full transcript of the podcast. Sponsor: UPS.
The story of how UPS extended its global package delivery tracking and Quantum View services to the wireless domain. [27:44m]:
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