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29
Sep
Microsoft to back jQuery library – InfoWorld
29
Sep
 SYS-CON Media | Microsoft to back jQuery library InfoWorld - 4 hours ago By Paul Krill Microsoft plans to incorporate the jQuery JavaScript library into its Visual Studio platform, according to several blogs published on Sunday. Microsoft JQuery adoption is an open source tipping point ZDNet Microsoft taps JQuery for Visual Studio CNET News eWeek - IT Business Edge - InformationWeek - DaniWeb all 18 news articles |
Shareholder value creates a recession, passion creates revenues
29
Sep
Alexander van Elsas via Alexander van Elsas's Weblog on new media & technologies and their effect on social behavior
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The past week I’ve been in Silicon Valley to meet a lot of people and to launch a new service. I talked to people working at the big companies there, but also with guys that were literally starting a new business out of a garage (haven’t we heard that before 
). The contrast could not have been bigger.
In the big companies the usual pattern appears. A recession is about to hit, revenues are dropping and the pressure on shareholder value is increasing fast. Shareholder value has quickly become the best excuse for companies to stop thinking ahead and stick their heads into the sand. Shareholders must be complete idiots if their short term value is maximized to a level that it endangers the long term sustainability of the company. And yet we see this pattern recurring time after time. In order to maximize shareholder value companies stop innovation, cut down costs, maximize revenues and become financially driven organizations.
Managing finance becomes the most important asset. Excessive rewarding plans for top managers govern the direction of the company, and the devastating effect of that is something we can now see with the current financial crisis. Companies that once generated revenue and were able to innovate at the same time turn into a efficiency maximizing process killing off anything remotely creative as that negatively influences the short term bottom line. So we can prepare for lay offs and forget about exiting new stuff coming out of those companies for quite a while. Needless to say that in any business this is usually devastating in the long run.
With the exit of innovation comes the exodus of those that could start change. Don’t get me wrong on this. I think financials are important for a company. But they should be seen as a byproduct. Run the company with passion for your customers and in most cases revenues are generated as a side effect. Rolf Skyberg has written an excellent post on a similar theme, called “Leadership doesn’t mean optimizing ROIâ€. Read the article, it’s excellent. Here is an excerpt.
Choosing projects based on projected ROI is a dangerously simplistic way of running your business.
If you take a look at the actual acronym: “ROI†return on investment, it seems like a perfectly logical way of directing your business activity. After all, who wouldn’t want to invest in the things that bring them the greatest returns?The unfortunate simplification in action is that “return†is generally taken to mean revenue or cashflow, which is but one of the important aspects of running a business.
The problem here is that while revenue can be easily counted, recorded, multiplied and divided; other intangible dimensions cannot be. How do you quantify “trust� How do you measure “excitement�
What would an ROI of 20% on trust actually mean? Because the intangibles cannot easily be typed into Excel, they can’t be utilized on pivot charts, or factored into equations.
And because MBA’s live and die by Excel, anything you can’t count, doesn’t count.
A few miles away the world seems quite different. In Palo Alto the air is filled with creativity and entrepreneurship. Talented people get together, think out new ideas and start new companies on the fly. With or without funding, in small offices, homes or even garages. These people think and breath opportunity. They are passionate about an idea, and nothing is holding them back. Not even a recession in the makings. For them raising funding is a side effect for the fact that they are building a business.
If you think about it, Palo Alto seems in some ways a bit like Florence around 1500. Florence was a meeting place for the most talented people known. Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Machiavelli, Dante, Donatello, the list goes on and on. They were all there at one time or another, challenging each other, taking science, art, poetry, and culture to an unprecedented level. Surrounding them were rich families, the Medici being the most important, that accelerated this cultural process by financing it, gaining both power and respect.
I don’t know if the Silicon valley of today contains the same brilliant people as Florence did then, time will have to tell. The environment can trigger great things. But there may be differences too. Where the cultural revolution of Florence had huge impact on the world, it remains to be seen if the Valley can pull of something similar. And it seems to me that passion in Silicon valley is sometimes traded for shares, option plans and new gigs. I heard of several startups having to deal with experienced developers leaving at critical stages for something else. Experience is hard to find and those that have it can get a job anywhere. It results in less attachment and less passion in my opinion.
Why is it that when companies start they are full of entrepreneurial spirit, but when they reach their success it becomes “corporate†and quickly loses its entrepreneurial nature? At some point shareholder value becomes more important than passion. That’s when the company changes from a leader into a follower. At that time managers become more important than employees. Thousands of management books are written about how to get big companies more innovative and flexible. It really isn’t that hard. Make sure there are more passionate people on board than managers and you will do just fine. When that balance is disturbed shareholder value takes over and the financial manager seizes the company. Passion is replaced by predictability.
With the current financial crisis in the USA reaching a new high it will likely have effect on both large companies and small entrepreneurs. There will be less money to invest, less risks to be taken. But I think Howard Lindzon is right when he says:
Unlike Jason who started a bad business (Mahalo.ugh) at the top and now is scared and panicking to his e-mail list, use this recession to build the business of your dreams off the panicked and overleveraged. Don’t feel guilty. Don’t go to the mall and piss your money away. Buy a laptop, tune in to some great VC’s and stock market blogs, roll up your sleeves and take your best shot.
If you are thinking of building a new startup, be sure that you do it with passion. It will be the difference between a good and a great company.
Posted in Florence, Howard Lindzon, passion, recession, Shareholder value, Silicon Valley   Tagged: Florence, Howard Lindzon, passion, recession, Shareholder value, Silicon Valley   Why The Flow Of Innovation Has Reversed
29
Sep
brad via Union Square Ventures: A New York Venture Capital Fund Focused on Early Stage & Startup Investing
shared by 4 people
I had a beer recently with Dave McClure of 500 Hats. As is always the case when I get together with Dave, we had a long, rambling and enjoyable conversation about how the Web is changing the way businesses get built.
At some point, I said that the vector of innovation has changed. It used to be that innovation started with NASA, flowed to the military, then to the enterprise, and finally to the consumer. Today, it is the reverse. All of the most interesting stuff is being built first for consumers and is tricking back to the enterprise. I suggested that one reason this is happening is that the success of a web service is more often determined by its social engineering than its electrical engineering.
Dave immediately said he’d give me three months to blog that before he did. I thought that was generous even for me who doesn’t blog easily or often. But just to be sure I make the deadline, here is the post.
The basic insight that the flow of innovation has reversed has been out there as a meme for a while. Fred wrote about it and referenced Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 article. I took a shot at why it was happening; I focused on changes in the way services are built and their complexity. The conversation that Dave and I had was more about how critical the user interface is in consumer facing web services and how that might influence the flow of innovation.
We have marveled more than once on this blog about the remarkable efficiency of Craigslist. That service is essentially a very lightweight governance system that manages an enormous collection of users who contribute all of the content and much of the oversight that makes the service work. It is because Craig and Jim focus on managing the efforts of their users instead of doing the work of those users that Craigslist is so phenomenally efficient. Many of the most interesting web services are like Craigslist, at their core, lightweight governance systems. Facebook and Twitter come to mind.
Even services that do more than mediate communications among their users often depend on users contributing data through their engagement with the service before they can provide value back to those users. Wesabe can only help users understand their spending and suggest ways to do more with less because users share their spending data with the service. Del.icio.us depends on users tagging the Web in order to be able to help users discover sites, services and memes on the web. Last.fm only works because users share their listening behavior with the service.
In the old days, electrical engineers focused on getting computers to work not on getting people to engage with the systems built on top of those computers. The folks that built enterprise software were vaguely aware that their systems had to be accessible to the humans that used them but they had a huge advantage. The people who used them did so as part of their job, they were trained to use them and fired if they could not figure them out.
Today, no one tells you to use Facebook. There are no employer sponsored training sessions on the use of del.icio.us. The burden is on the designer of the system to meet a need, entertain, or inform their users. They also have to seduce those users, hiding complexity, revealing one layer at time, always enticing, never intimidating, until the user one day finds they are intimately familiar with power and the pleasures of the service.
Designing a system that does that is not an electrical engineering problem. It is a social engineering problem. The best social engineers are working today on consumer facing web services. They understand that there is enormous potential leverage in those services. The creators of these services recognize that services like theirs will ultimately disrupt the economics of many, if not most, parts of the global economy in much the same way that Craigslist collapsed the multi-billion dollar classified industry into a fabulously profitable multi-million dollar web service.
So that, it seems to me, is one more reason the flow of innovation has reversed.
TagScanner Renames and Tags Your Digital Music [Featured Windows Download]
29
Sep
Gina Trapani via Lifehacker
shared by 13 people
Windows only: Rename the thousands of MP3 files in your digital music library and add or edit tags, lyrics, and album art in one fell swoop with free utility TagScanner. Not only can TagScanner clean up the artist, album, song title, and track number information for your digital music files, it can rename your songs based on a pattern you define (like %artist% - %title%), it can make music playlists, and search online databases like freedb and Amazon to automatically tag music missing information. It includes a built-in player as well so you can listen to tracks while you edit. We've recommended Media Monkey to whip your music's metadata into shape, but TagScanner looks like a solid alternative. TagScanner is a free download for Windows only.
TagScanner [via Download Blog]
Confederating Social Media
29
Sep
Geoff Livingston via The Buzz Bin
shared by 4 people
Lack of control on the local frontline
An engaged communicator who will use social tools, regardless of corporate communication activities
That same communicator will likely cooperate if they are free to communicate as they like
Corporate decides to build a framework of tools for local chapters
Tools include social network and blogging platforms, graphics, tagging guidelines, and social media best practice training and guidelines
A corresponding corporate initiative that embodies best practices
“Wayward†efforts are met with suggestions for betterment rather than enforcement
A continuing commitment by corporate to highlight great local case studies
A continuing commitment to enhance, better and promote the framework
Confederate: United in a league, alliance, or conspiracy (image by Geoff Livingston).
Creating social media strategies for large organizations can be unwieldy. Disparate divisions, brands, product launches, autonomous departments, budgets and line items can give corporate communicators a tough time as they bridge their companies into the social era.
Some organizations can manage their organizations well enough to federate their social media efforts under one roof. Now some very basic best practices are arising. According to the Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki, 62 of the country’s largest companies are already engaged. But others cannot, and they must look to create a different model, one we have started calling the confederate model.
There are many organizations that simply cannot get all of their parts to agree on a unified strategy. For example, consider national non-profits that have local autonomous chapters. Other corporate structures where this problem can arise include partnerships like large law firms, franchise models that feature local owners and undefined marketing structures, and automobile dealerships (Star Alliance image by Nergiz).
For all intents and purposes, these loosely organized bodies can do what they like. This creates enormous challenges online, in large part because of the disparate efforts can confuse customers, as well as fracture brand conversations. Indeed, a communicator needs to acknowledge that there will always be a healthy majority of internal stakeholders who will never engage in the larger social media stratey.
Building a Confederated Model
Instead of trying to control the social media effort under one roof, confederated models try to empower individual stakeholders in the larger organization. A confederated model for a company or non-profit assumes and includes the following:
In addition to building the actual framework, a great deal of the effort involves internal alliance building and communications. Local stakeholders need to be made aware of and convinced about the effectiveness of the social media tool sets.
Of course, what would a proposed stategic model be without a case study? One needs to go no further than the Obama campaign’s social media efforts. This is an ongoing effort.
Partisan politics aside, Obama’s campaign communications involves intense grassroots activities using social media tools. Tens of thousands of Obama campaigners, advocates and even casual voters are enabled to spread the message.
At the heart of the effort is activism on more than a dozen social networks, as well as the Obama campaign’s web site. Bloggers using the Obama platform have even posted negatively against policies or Obama actions.
Not your average political campaign, but one that does fit into the confederated model. The Obama campaign is less concerned about individual flare outs and control, and much more oriented towards word of mouth and viral grass roots activism. The results have been self-evident.
Persuade People with Subconscious Techniques [People Hacks]
28
Sep
Gina Trapani via Lifehacker
shared by 6 people
The power of persuasion can get you far in this world, even if you're not in sales, and a few simple communication techniques can go a long way to get someone to agree with you. Tutorial site wikiHow runs down "subconscious" actions for persuading others, like framing, mirroring, timing, or even touching the person on the arm or shoulder. This list is similar to our previously posted (and controversial!) top 10 conversation hacks. How do you convince someone to come on over to your side in conversation? Let us know in the comments. Photo by jurvetson.
Hyperwords.net
28
Sep
I'm interested in what people think of this browser approach and Firefox plugin, Hyperwords, now in version 5.0
There's both a user-driven version, demonstrated above, as well as a client-side version that turns every word on a website into a hotlink. The former seems like a great way to be carrying a little toolset with your cursor everywhere you go. The latter seems like a great way to build a giant hypertext community around a book Finnegans Wake or even the Torah.
Is this a dimensional leap for web browsing, just another plug-in, or somewhere in-between?
10 tools for listening in social media.
28
Sep
Mike Fruchter via MichaelFruchter.com
shared by 12 people
This post highlights 10 tools for discovery and managing url and brand chatter. If you’re doing business online or offline, these tools are essential. As the saying goes, “keeping your ear to the street.â€
Google web search should be your obvious first choice for listening. Web search will sometimes drown you in thousands of pages of results, most of which is often not relevant or current to your search query. Web search is great for research and historical purposes. When you are listening for real time chatter about your brand, Google blog search is the tool you need to be using. Most chatter either positive or negative can track back to the source, bloggers, blog postings, and comments left on blogs.
Google Custom Search allows you to create a custom search engine that only searches the keywords and sites you specify. It’s basically a filtering layer over the main search engine. Custom Search can be used for an endless amount of purposes. It can be a very effective and a productive tool in your arsenal, and it just takes a few minutes to set up.
3) Google Alerts:
Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Creating an alert is as simple as the screen shot above shows. Input the keyword, sources to search, or leave it set at the default of comprehensive, this will search everything. Lastly set your email alert frequency.
4) Google Reader:
It’s simply not feasible to visit hundreds of websites/blogs a day looking for brand mentions, chatter. Google Reader makes it possible to stay on top of several hundred websites in one place.This is as close to real time as you will get courtesy of RSS feeds. As I mentioned earlier, there is a good chance that you will find chatter on blog postings and comments. Compile a relevant list of these blog RSS feeds and if possible their comment RSS feed as well. As you come across them, input them into Google Reader. If a source does not have RSS implemented, a custom search filter will do the trick. Google Reader should be your central hub for content discovery, digestion, redistribution and monitoring.
5) Twitter:
Twitter can be, if not as equally important as Google Blog search for discovery of mentions regarding your brand. Twitter needs to be paid special attention to. It’s no longer the shiny toy for early adopters, it’s gone mainstream. Consumers are voicing their frustrations in growing numbers on Twitter, and corporations are listening. If something is being mentioned on Twitter, it should be relativity easy to track it down using a basic Twitter search. You can also narrow your results down further using search operators or advanced search. Twitter search pages also gives you an RSS feed for the search term. You can add the RSS feeds to your watch lists in Google Reader.
6) Technorati:
Technorati is a good tool for searching a url or brand mentions. It searches a broad base of content sources. It’s built on blogs, so it’s a safe bet any mention of your brand on a blog will usually be picked up by Technorati. Use this in combination with Google Reader.
7) Yacktrack:
Yacktrack is a tool for anyone who wants to search for comments on the content they produce. It searches various sources such as Twitter and other blogs for chatter about your content. Yacktrack does a nice job of searching for those distributed comments and pooling them into one place. You can additionally search for comments by either url or keyword. Yacktrack search page results also gives you an RSS feed for the search term. I would recommend adding that to your Google Reader watch lists.
8 ) Filtrbox:
Filtrbox is for professional, persistent media monitoring. Filtrbox makes it easy to mashup all your content sources into one monitoring service. It offers a plethora of features and options. It’s “FiltrRank†technology scores content based on three dimensions: contextual relevance, popularity and feedback. In testing I was extremely impressed with the accuracy and relevancy of the test filters I set up. Some of the various added features are, email alerts, the ability to share articles found by Filtrbox via email, or post them to Facebook, Digg and del.icio.us. Filtrbox offers a free, and a pay to play membership offering.
9) Social Mention:
Social mention is a social media search engine. It searches various sources such as Google blog search, Twitter, Delicious, FriendFeed, Digg etc. The data looks to be very fresh, and as close to real time as possible. In addition, they state that they offer email alerts and personalized RSS feeds. I was unable to locate these features on the site.
10) FriendFeed Search:
FriendFeed search deserves a notable mention. FriendFeed, at its core is a social content aggregator, but it’s also a very powerful social media search engine. FriendFeed gives you the ability to search its entire user base for content that is being imported in from over 43 different social media sites and applications. FriendFeed also has a highly active and vocal community. Rest assured if it’s on a blog, it’s being posted, shared or commented on FriendFeed. FriendFeed recently also implemented the capability to search rooms.
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