Ross Mayfield's Weblog

Reflex Remote

My 5 year old, disappointed the plot of the movie didn't show him what he wants, says we should buy the Reflex Remote.  It has two arrow buttons.  One changes the movie to see what you want.  The other does the same.  He is absolutely right, especially for us old farts that have lost the plot.

Zack Lynch

One of the best friends I've ever had is Zack Lynch.  This is his story, and it is unfolding. If you want to understand a key part of the future, you'll pay heed to what he and Casey are working on.

Rebooting

This week I'm headed to Copenhagen, Land of existentialism, bikes and much more (we have all that here, but cars instead of bikes and not enough existentialism). 

Yes, I am finally finding my way to Reboot, to give a talk called Social.  What is astounding is how many blog friends I've known for years I will finally meet face-to-face.

Here's the closest thing to an abstract for my talk:

We evolved to work well in small groups. Within our natural structures we were never able to scale communication or memory. During the industrial era we developed tools and processes that scaled collaboration well in a static context, and when creativity was only required by a few. A market economy of negative reciprocity held that profits are taken out of transactions for re-investment, but it doesn't foster trust. Trust, of course, happens, despite our structures, because we have abundant desire to share. With gifts we add value in the act of giving beyond the good to the good itself, yielding positive reciprocity. In sharing, we find new structures that meet the needs of an information era. We find new tools that help us share control to create value, scale communication and memory.

Part of this is a new design. When you look at an enterprise as a large complex adaptive system, it is all too tempting to over-design it. The complexity has always resided in the social network, not in the assets of the firm. Traditional enterprise software tries to solve for complexity by taking it out of the social network and putting it into the software. Social software, however, keeps the complexity in the social network, and attempts to augment it with very simple rules to foster emergent behavior.

Denial Mobs & The Cyberwar on Estonia

The latest thread of the Cyberwar attack against Estonia, as covered in the NY Times, an interview in Cnet with an expert from Arbor Networks and a post Kim Cameron raise an interesting question.  It is unlikely that the Russian government can be directly linked to the massive coordinated and sophisticated denial of service attack on Estonia. It is also possible that such attack could self-organize with the right conditions.  Is a large part of our future dealing with hacktavists as denial mobs?

Given the right conditions that make a central resource a target, a decentralized attack could be decentralized in its coordination as well.  Estonia may be the first nation state to be attacked at the scale of war, but it isn't just nations at threat.  The largest bank in Estonia, in one of the top markets for e-banking, has losses in excess of $1M.  Small amount relatively, but the overall economic cost is far from known.

If a multinational corporation did something to spark widespread outrage, such an attack could emerge against it as a net-dependent institution.  Then we would be asking ourselves if the attack was economic warfare from a nation or terrorist organization.  But it also could be a lesser, and illegal, form of grassroots activism.  None of this is particularly new, but less in concept.

But what is new are tools, that cut both ways, for easy group forming and conversation. 

HealthCamp

HealthCamp is this weekend at the Socialtext office in Palo Alto, a Barcamp for health care and technology issues.

HealthCamp is an unconference focused on the growing innovation in health care delivery, outcomes and prevention driven by new technology and new ways of thinking. This growing revolution has been termed "Health2.0" and although it encompasses the use of Web2.0 technologies, it is a much broader transformation in health care and the role of the consumer.

Help Us Take Down Wikipedia!

Socialtext is a finalist in the Webware 100, in the Reference category for some reason.  So vote for us!  We all know that Wikipedia is unreliable, Google Maps is so 1.0 and IMDB doesn't have user-generated movies.

But seriously, these "people's choice" awards are based on who can draw short-attention or vote bots.  Can't we bring the industry back to the good old fashioned 100 awards? You know, the kind where you bribe someone?

That sucking sound

Mike Arrington: Times are good, money is flowing, and Silicon Valley sucks.

Hard to argue with it.  Except that a lot of us are still focused on technology, burgers and beer.  My read of Mike's post is not the insanity of valuations, marketing budgets and parties.  Maybe a bit of the pitchiness that bloggers and journalists deal with in frothy times.  But certainly the culture that existed here a short bit ago.  Back when I met Mike, actually, and a bit before.

Funny how I couldn't find an entrepreneur who blogged about this gut checking post, even when part of the point is the valley is flooded with itinerant entrepreneurs.  Except Eric Rice, who is from here, like me.  We're the idiots who didn't move out when it got too expensive, for some good reason we believe in.

Deep within me I fear that the region that learns too much about, instead of from its failures, becomes Detroit.

Cyber-war on Estonia

I noted last month the cyber-war against Estonian government sites.  As expected, it got worse running up to the symbolic day of the May 9th.  At this point, the mainstream media is carrying the story, and recognizing this is an unprecedented attack on a sovereign nation.

From the Washington Post:

"The nature of the latest attacks is very different," said Linnar Viik, a government IT consultant, "and it's no longer a bunch of zombie computers, but things you can't buy from the black market," he said. "This is something that will be very deeply analyzed, because it's a new level of risk. In the 21st century, the understanding of a state is no longer only its territory and its airspace, but it's also its electronic infrastructure."

"This is not some virtual world," Viik added. "This is part of our independence. And these attacks were an attempt to take one country back to the cave, back to the Stone Age."

NY Times:

“We can’t say we have seen the biggest attack yet,” he [Hillar Aarelaid] said, “because each wave is bigger than the one before.”

Vacation Email

I'm on vacation in Hawaii, and while not totally unplugged, I have an increasing fear of my inbox upon my formal return.  Dick Kaser shares a similar email story:

...I made the mistake a couple of weeks ago of retaliating against my computer. I switched it off for 3 entire days, wrote longhand in a journal again, and told my boss that I felt like a new man. Of course, that was until the day of reckoning came as several hundreds of emails rolled off the server into my laptop client...

Now, since I suddenly had 300 pending messages in my inbox, I could not get past the new messages pouring in marked "Urgent" to clear the backlog. It took a turbulent plane ride with my laptop jostling on a tray table and a long night in a hotel room to clean out the stack of incoming emails. And though I can say I am back on top of it again, I am not proud that the new man I had become was bombarded again...

I set up a Vacation Page in my company wiki, sort of a public inbox.  The theory is if it is really that important it can be transparent.  Or if it was important on the first day of my vacation, it may not be on the last one so they can edit it out. 

The outside world is getting a vacation auto-responder email, a crude instrument for those who don't know my presence is on Jaiku and Twitter, or otherwise aggregated as a Lifestream where someone might see a vacation picture.

That was, until, I learned how sand may have enabled consumer electronics, but it hates moving parts like telephoto lenses.

Anyway, taking a real vacation either requires falling off the grid, rudely to others, or lots of cooperation with begotten collaborators until presence is richer and messaging more passive.

CIO Panel with Disney, FedEx, Motorola and Unilever

After a bunch of big vendor stuff, we finally got to the keynote panel of CIOs at Software 2007.  In an earlier session, a WebEx executive pointed out that 80% of some IT budgets is people.  That's my part of it, if I was to plug.  But instead, sat and listened to take impressionistic notes:

Moderated by Ernest von Simson, Senior Partner, Ostriker von Simson
    Panelists: Neil Cameron, CIO, Unilever; Rob Carter, CIO, FedEx; Patricia Morrison, CIO, Motorola; Tony Scott, CIO, The Walt Disney Company

What are the most innovative things you done lately?

FedEx: The wave of RFID that came and went was passive, now we are using active RFID.  A smart sensor you install into the package: location, temperature, vibration, light (if detected the package might be open).  Interfaces with broadly available services like Google Earth, or Geofencing for when something moves in and out of a perimeter and notifys you.  Lots of innovation, most coming out of the Valley, at a price point that ultimately will be broadly distributed (today the financial vertical with high value data tapes {sneakernet} is the main use case).

Motorola: Speed in which we can repeatably deploy allocations, like in the Supply Chain.  We have lots of partners and suppliers to orchestrate.  Built an application library for each partner to reduce their integration from 4-6 months to 4-6 weeks.  Worked hard on these integration platforms.  Vendors we work with are incorporating this capability into their packages.  The flexibility to change your sourcing models in our industry where manufacturing costs and other things are variable is needed to constantly evolve your business.  Otherwise, lot of the changes are IT-related lead times.

Unilever: I'm a bit of a rose among thorns here.  We we are bifurcated, have the traditional side which is relevation, not innovation, where we want to simplify and standardize.  The other space, how we collaborate, is where we see innovation within our business.  The Hot Chili program (named by one of our marketeers, we have lots of them), where we take all the new technologies, social or enabling, to change how we work and make decisions.  Had to pay less attention to standards, longevity.  Not looking at the unit costs that much as they don't matter for return.  To get different Asian cultures to talk over a service in English isn't easy because they are very careful about how they are presented (how to be less formally).  Challenges cross culturally, cross language and timezones.

Disney: Digitization of our business process.  Across all of our businesses.  In our media business putting TV shows on the web for free the day after the broadcast is a new business model, digitizing something previously well known.  On Internet TV, we now say how long a commercial is and when it is coming, but the commercial is longer and more people actually watch it.  People remember the commercials more than on TV, but ad willingness to pay is catching up.  The next Pirates is coming out with live action and motion capture technology that is more than visually interesting, it changes how we make movies. 

You haven't talked about traditional applications yet.  How are your roles changing?

FedEx: Nothing happens in isolation, has to be integrated with the traditional apps.  Looking for the next wave or layer but it isn't a complete departure from the core systems.

Motorola: How do you think about how your customers want.  Living our own brand of seamless mobility.  We have a major role in the expectation and understanding about how we can impact customers.

Disney: SarBox and how we are embedding so much technology in our processes -- we have the need for creativity but also protecting the brand from harm.  One of my roles is adjudicating this battle.  In our customer base, with children, we need to be extra-sensitive, a tension that gets harder all the time.

Unilever: All the traditional activities you had to do, but now I have to look at new territories like digital marketing.  We missed it the first time around, but this time we shouldn't.  HR is now about what role they will have, efficiency and working differently.  Trying to help the rest of the organization think about how to move into new spaces without abandoning the good old things.

Disney: We did an infrastructure outsouring move two years ago, but it really is collaborating with more people, dependent upon non-Disney folks, collaborating across boundaries. Challenging with issues of IP.

FedEx:  What we have to deal with internally is so different than the outside world which is so much more interconnected.  Silos inside that competes with outside that moves across boundaries so quickly. I find my organization is challenged with making that transaction although we are a company that has been working with connected networks for some time.

Motorola: How you partner in your business, where you are engaged in problem solving. Need to shift from order taking sequential requirements gathering, to a highly interactive process with accountability in creating the solution before there is a problem to solve.

Audience question from an IBM guy: SaaS as disintermediating as the PC was?

Disney: Embracing it.  Using Salesforce and AppExchange.  We have transitions of our people inside and we have to ask if we want to be stuck maintaining things.  Might be willing to pay more on this than if we were maintaining it internally because I want to focus on things that are more strategic.  There are lots of things we are not going to be good at and the SaaS ideas will help us get to market faster with what we want to do.

Motorola: We are an advocate, but it is good for some things and not others.  The flexibility to move back and forth across different models is a real value.  The ability to scale, the speed of scale when you can't predict demand. 

FedEx: We haven't embraced services as much as we have provided them.  The fastest growing segment of software customers that we support are people who are shifting from FedEx.com to connections with us that need to be built into their processes and workflows.  Today, in the shipment world alone is 3/4 of the total volume of all web s

Unilever: It's here and we need to embrace it, but it isn't a panacea.  There are opportunities in entry level activities.  Deployments in Africa and other far flung locations.  Scaling matters, but not my challenge right now.  The question is if we will run a hybrid, Hasso from SAP was talking about hybrids this morning, we will have to see.

How are you organizing for these changes?

Motorola: We use core groups to work though decisions. Small groups of 10 with deep expertise that I protect in almost an R&D-like environment and need shielding from some financial pressure. Our blogs and wikis are exciting.  Get it architectures in the center, but then you need to train in the periphery.  What does this new portal environment mean to me? Starting to build business case examples and then getting into an evangelical mode across the organization.

Unilever: Don't have an answer, we are challenged by this.  We change the nature of career structure within our business, how do we recruit and train. Some say do the old way in house.  Some say employ the least as we can so we don't employ the wrong skills if things change quickly.

Disney: I have the opposite problem as people in Burbank are unsuccessful screenwriters and actors that like to keep up to date with the latest stuff.

Advice to vendors?

Disney: Drop this "we are the greatest in the world" thing and give me an implementation strategy so I can bring this across my company.

Motorola: 12k engineers and we have tons of software that isn't warrantied and indemnified.  My plea to the industry is quality.  The amount of time we put down bugs.

Unilever: Fantastic. Absolutely.

FedEx: Every time we add something new, we get more cost an complexity. This is a relationship oriented business and you have to cut through the noise, provide technology migration strategies.  We just don't have time for all the opportunities that come at us.