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May, 2007:

Apprentice, Donald Trump vs. Mark Cuban

May 22nd, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
4 comments

Yes, I know this one is a bit off topic. However, I find it to be such a good idea. I admit, I stopped watching The Apprentice a few years ago as the quality dropped. And from a business perspective, it makes complete sense to cancel. The show would have held my interest if the producers would have provided the contestants with more fundamental business tasks (I fully realize this would have been a challenge and run the risk to be fundamentally boring outside of a core audience). But, alas, there may be reason to keep the show on for another season and it comes from Mark Cuban.

In his post, Donald – Need a Job?, in addition to some witty top-10 style commentary, Mark comes up with quite an interesting idea:

…you can go back to NBC and ask for one more season of The Apprentice. Me against You. We let the audience pick the tasks and our teams and we let Rosie O’Donnell and Melania be in the boardroom and decide who wins or loses.

Now for those who like reality television shows, that would be good television. And there has to be something valuable you can do on the web with it. Only way to top it would be Donald Trump vs. Mark Cuban in Survivor.

The Context of Search

May 16th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
2 comments

I was at FAST‘s Future of Media meeting in NYC today.  It was a very interesting panel discussion and un-conference which included the following speakers:

Perry Solomon, VP within FAST’s Media practice (and fellow Sloanie)
Tom Smith, Director of Applications Development at Hearst (and fellow Primedia colleague)
Benjamin Rudolph who manages search for Comcast
Benjamin Ropke, enterprise architect for digital asset management at NBC Universal

All of the discussions that took place were interesting including but certainly not limited to meta data, user generated content, search-based product development and multimedia search.  Each of the topics may make for interesting future posts but the one topic that jumped out as a great post topic was something Benjamin Rudolph brought to the fore called “the context of search”.

The basic premise is that search is not just the technology that finds the correct result set based on what the user types in.  There is an “art” to search and that “art” of search is bringing to the user’s attention the results that are most contextual to the site itself.  This means the result sets should have context to the type of information you would think the user is coming to your particular site for.  Yes, a fairly obvious point but one that is lost in the noise often.  And it sounds quite inline with what was discussed in a prior post regarding role-based search applications.

To bring the point home, let’s use an an example or two that were discussed at the event this afternoon:

A user searches for “Tiger”.  Are they looking for Tiger Woods, Tiger (the version of OS X) or Tiger, the animal.  Well, with a large enough archive, all types of results from the same search index would be correct.  When you search for the term “Tiger” at Google, it provides you with results that match each of these.  In fact, all three types of “tiger” comes to you in the first eight links. But the art of the context of search is to align it with the context of the site.  If you are at a sports site, then Tiger Woods is probably the most appropriate.  And if you are at the National Geographic site, the user is probably looking for the big cat.

Another example that was closer to the Comcast business was searching for “24″.  Here context becomes even more interesting.  If you are a user that searches for “24″ at Amazon, the context governs that the user is probably looking for the season-by-season DVD box set.  At Comcast, however, the user is probably looking for the on-air schedule and even the online video collection for the show.  All related to the show “24″ but each site provides information to the user with a lot more contextual sensitivity.

Again, seems fairly obvious but I found it made an interesting enough point to bring it up here for discussion.

Is there such a thing as too much connectivity?

May 16th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
6 comments

This is the question I asked myself after reading Andrew Keen‘s post entitled “The message is the master” at The Great Seduction.  And if you ask my wife or some family members, you would get an answer of an emphatic ‘yes’.  It is more the norm lately where I hear some variant of “wow, you are always online” or “is that computer attached to your hands?”  So maybe there is something to be said for being too connected.

It used to be that you had to be conscious of maintaining a good work/life balance.  Now, more often it seems like there is a shift to online/life balance.  And this becomes exceedingly difficult as more aspects of life and managing one’s life move to the online medium.  Not necessarily Second Life online life but other variants like email, FreeCycle, craigslist, eBay, networking sites, news, video, the list goes on and on.

And it becomes even more pervasive with the continuing emergence of mobility.  Take a look at Fred Wilson‘s post, Life Without My Laptop where he feels he can do everything now including blogging directly from his blackberry.  And after all, it is a point within itself for the simple fact that I’m writing this post on the train as I head into NYC for FAST‘s Future of Media meeting and as my Treo buzzes incessantly as new email hits my inbox.

Andrew links to a fantastic Forbes article wittily entitled Can You Hear Me Now? which discusses quite well how connected we all are now and the effects such devices and non-stop connectivity has on us.  Perhaps we should think twice about the emergence of offline/online applications as I discussed in a previous post about Adobe Apollo.  Should we create yet another new place to be “almost online” or “almost connected”?

To close, as more of life (and life management) moves online, we should always remain conscious of the simple fact that for all the great things emerging on the web, just as much great life and experiences remain just as they did before the coming of the web.  Baseball, reading, simply sitting outside in the sun and relaxing are just a few.  Perhaps that is why I recently purchased the Belkin N1 Wireless router with such fantastic range that I can use the computer in the backyard! :)

Amazon Web Services…not obvious but “clear” strategic synergies

May 12th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
16 comments

Amazon S3 and Amazon EC2 are getting lots of coverage as of late. The former allows you to store/retrieve data out of the Amazon cloud “paying by the drink” while the latter allows you to computer in the Amazon “cloud”.

Amazon Web Services

At Web 2.0 Expo, Jeff Bezos made an interesting statement about a recent and early-stage offering, Amazon Mechanical Turk. This new venture will leverage “human intelligence” and their cloud via Amazon Web Services. The specific example Jeff mentioned was leveraging humans to process product pages to eliminate duplicates, as task often difficult where products that are identical but represented differently exist on an e-commerce site.  Another Amazon Web Services example was allowing customers to notify Amazon that a shipment is coming and Amazon would allocate the appropriate amount of warehouse space for the inventory. And then, almost obviously, customers can use the Amazon web services to process e-commerce transactions which would subsequently be managed through top-notch Amazon’s supply chain processes.

Aside from the impressive nature of all three web service initiatives, I am most impressed by Amazon’s approach to extend their business in non-obvious ways. Companies so often move from core competencies to drive future revenue which causes a lack of focus organizationally. I thought this initially about Amazon as well (what? Amazon sells books and goods…they sell books.) until reading further into it.

Here is some additional articles and coverage about Amazon Web Services:

Amazon moved swiftly beyond selling only books to being synonymous with e-commerce. Very similarly, Amazon is leveraging its strengths such as scalable architecture, e-commerce leadership and supply chain/warehouse capabilities to expand its business once again.

Amazon needs to build architectural transaction capacity to support high transaction volume; why not lease it out to the “cloud” in EC2 to offset expense and make money. Amazon needs to build large database systems to support its business and e-commerce product catalogs; why not lease it out to the “cloud” in S3 to offset expenses and make money. Finally, and arguably the most interesting scenario, is Amazon’s bridging of its off-line and online worlds. Amazon needs to build world-class warehouse capacity and supply chain system support; why not lease it out to the “cloud” (so to speak) and (you guessed it) offset these expenses and make money.

Many may say this is a strategic gamble. However, even if this becomes a break-even proposition to support their core business, it may be enough of a win. And in the long term, Amazon will be controlling a large cloud of information and transactions many other businesses. That is not a bad place to be as the web services model continues to expand and establish itself.

Enterprise 2.0 and Corporate Culture

May 9th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
No comments yet

Dion Hinchcliffe of ZDNet posted a very compelling read called Enterprise 2.0 as a corporate culture catalyst. It touches on all of the emerging technologies that are being adopted (to the chagrin or championing of CIOs) and also provided a great image visualizing all of the social elements of the Enterprise 2.0 movement. (See below)

Benefit of Enterprise 2.0

A key point in Dion’s post is that these enterprise 2.0 tools are currently being set-up and utilized whether organizations want them to or not. Often, they are being endorsed by innovative leaders in the largest of organizations. In other cases, they are taking place via grassroots movements (aka corporate renegades with corporate credit cards).

It does really shed light on a couple of key concepts. First, the centralized roll-out of tools and technology isn’t the only way people get tools that help them get their jobs done. Organizations are going to have to decide what their strategies will be to deal with this, enable 2.0 capabilities by providing them to the workforce or try to stop them. I’m not sure the latter is possible. Second, users will use the tools that are the easiest to use and assist them the most with their individual and collective productivity. And ultimately, that should be what organizations find important because that is where the corporate ROI will be.

Reverse mentoring is truly upon us…

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