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A Seesmic Issue

Mar 17th, 2008
by Lou Paglia.
8 comments

Get it, Seesmic, Seismic, ah whatever. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Seesmic, there is a great explanation of it here at Cruchbase, here and here. My definition: video-based communication start-up founded by Loic Le Meur which could re-define personal communication to be more video-based and not just predominately email.

Anyway, over the past few days, I’ve been taking a look at Seesmic more closely, and using the new direct messaging capability which I believe was an absolute must (do not have much interest in contributing out in the public timeline like I do with Twitter). I must say that it is great to see Loic’s team innovating right into the customer feedback.

But there are a couple key issues that Seesmic must get out in front of before they turn into seismic ones. Let’s face it, as cool as video emailing is, using it is flying in the face of years of email com. I’m not sure what the active user number is but I would be shocked if it was very high. There are a couple of reasons for it in my opinion:

- Where is the viral network effect for it? The most successful of start-ups have a key viral play as part of their strategy. If Seesmic has one, it is alluding me. I need a way to invite folks in my network into the conversation.

- As everyone jumps from network play to network play, none of my connections are out of Seesmic. I do not know why this is but it is the case. So unless I want to talk to strangers in the public timeline (which is great way to meet others), it has low utility for me personally.

- Tell me when I have a message waiting in my inbox. This is an absolute must-have feature. Someone direct messaged and I do not get notified in my inbox that I have a message waiting ala Facebook and I cannot subscribe to an inbox RSS feed. Big issue.

- Facilitate growth. Let me direct message a non-member and that will facilitate usage, memberships and traffic. If I direct message someone and they are notified, in most cases, they are going to click through and register to see the message. And some of them will stay continue to video message, participate and invite other friends to partake.

Just some thoughts and perhaps some of these are addressed, and I’m missing them. And perhaps Seesmic is trying to control growth to get their infrastructure footing. But until the above is clearly available, I don’t see the high-flyer tool it has the promise to be.

NOTE (10 p.m. EST): Just made online contact with Cathy from Seesmic. She was extremely responsive both on Seesmic and then tried to come here to comment as well. Just made some comment system changes so hopefully she’ll come back and do so. Looking forward to it! Thanks Cathy and great meeting you.

Enjoying the Surf in the Wave of Disruption

Feb 15th, 2008
by Lou Paglia.
1 comment

Was reading the essay “You Don’t Understand Our Audience,” by John Hockenberry in the latest edition of the MIT Technology Review. Very interesting piece about the shift in the views of the audience from his time at NBC and discusses the nature of realizing that the shift is occurring. A piece of the text from the piece that really struck me:

I knew it was pretty much over for television news when I discovered in 2003 that the heads of NBC’s news division and entertainment division, the president of the network, and the chairman all owned Tivos, which enabled them to zip past the commercials that paid their salaries. “It’s such a great gadget. It changed my life,” one of them said at a corporate affair in the Saturday Night Live studio. It was neither the first not the last time that a television executive mistook a fundamental technology change for a new gadget.

It makes me think of the Technology Strategy course I took a technology strategy course with Professor Rebecca Henderson, one of my favorite courses. We focused a lot of the disruption curve, what it does to industries and to mature businesses in that industry. But what about the human factor, the people in those industries and in those established firms.

Do they often not even realize the disruption is upon them and “enjoy the surf” as a consumer of the “new thing” themselves? The NBC execs and Tivo is an example. Did Barnes & Noble execs go and buy books on Amazon.com during the holiday rush because it was easier than going to the store? (at least before they got it together and launched their own site) Executives at AT&T using Skype at home to call their children in college or to friends internationally? At what point did someone at Polaroid (who just closed down shop their instant film division) rave about their shiny, new digital camera not realizing it was the beginning of the end for a 60-year run.

There must be tons of examples…

Drivers for Corporate Innovation

Sep 16th, 2007
by Lou Paglia.
No comments yet

What drives company innovation? Innovation is one of those words that ever company aspires to have as a company pillar. Well, maybe not every company. You don’t hear any CEOs saying publicly “our goal is to maintain status quo, derive all possible shareholder value from prior investments and keep this gravy train going until we are disrupted by someone else’s technology”…again, at least not publicly.

For the most part, most companies claim to be innovative, want to be looked at as innovative in their respective space and want it to be an implicit or explicit part of their value proposition. Larry Yu covers some factors in his article, Measuring the Culture of Innovation, in the MIT Sloan Managemet Review.

The quick point is that company culture above all else is the major driver for innovation. I buy this. Makes complete sense when you look at a company like Google, 3M, Apple and Genentech. The article points more specifically:

“researchers found that a future market orientation, a willingness to cannibalize and a tolerance for risk are three cultural elements that have a particularly strong relationship with radical innovation”

Very interesting points since the traditional view is innovation can be judged by a company’s rate of product release, technology enhancements and patent filings. Those are often results, apparently not the drivers.

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