Pete’s View

I’ve been watching the growth of Iotum’s Free Conference calling service because conferencing is the perfect voice service for social media. So it was that last Friday I sat in on Alec Saunders Voice Mash-up conference call (download podcast) to learn where he, and a number of voice evangelists (Thomas Howe, Jim Courtney, Andy Abramson)  think drives voice web integration.  

It was an interesting discussion that got me thinking more about voice as an interface, and mash-ups as a business model.

First voice as an interface is overlooked. The phone is ubiquitous. Everyone knows how to use them – and how to interact with automated voice applications. As well applications like speech recognition (ASR) and Text to Speech (TTS) are robust enough to make voice a reliable option for both control and data delivery for any application. Combine this with web development approaches, which have proven architectures to deliver a seamless user experience by coordinated multiple services and opportunity for new voice applications is apparent.

Still all development depends on having both users and a business case. By using data from multiple sources, delivering them through existing services and by focusing on a relatively small feature set mash-ups make it easy to solve issues that might be ignored with other paradigms.

In a business environment this means it’s possible to eliminate delays, increase efficiency and customer satisfaction by connecting people and information all without worrying about breaching the firewall. It’s meant delivery companies can confirm you’re home even before the truck rolls – saving you the inconvenience of a missed parcel and them the cost. It also means that subjects in a drug trial you can phone information in anytime making reporting both easier and cheaper.

These same approaches can be applied to social sites – linking users anonymously to explore common interests – such as on shopping, dating and fan sites. These services raise the forum (often associated with these sites) to a whole new level because voice adds emotional content that can be misconstrued otherwise.

In all these cases the number of users required to justify deployment are relatively small – because most of the cost of development is the professional services to understand and architect the services that need to be connected. And that gets to the core rub with voice mash-ups – they may provide a lot of business value but no-one is going to get rich developing them.

In large part that’s because mash-up are in my mind the component phase for a new type of voice development. Every technology moves through phases from componentization which flourishes during times of experimentation to vertical integration when costs, reliability or long term ownership issues override. Right now companies and sites need to understand the competitive advantages of using these services, and will not alter their processes much to implement them. That means a component and professional services business model. As soon as the value is proven – and the feature set across an industry understood look for vertically integrated products and services to emerge.

That said now is the ideal time to jump in and experiment because you’ll get a level of service and application exactly tailored to your needs. It’s only the ability to imagine how these services can affect your bottom line that stand between you and a new class of customer engagement tools.

If you’d like to see what people are doing with voice mash-ups drop by Ottawa’s next DemoCamp (http://www.barcamp.org/DemoCampOttawa7) as two of the demos are voice mash-ups, or drop me a line.

This post is about time.

First my time away. What started as slow posting because of poor internet connectivity while attending a trade show morphed into pre-holiday festivities, then time at the cottage (and more poor internet connectivity) and then a little bit of new years reflection (on time and goals). Each in their own just a short period of non-posting but strung together …..  an eternity – or so it seems.

That’s the thing with time – it’s the perceiver that gives meaning to its passage, and decide what events are important.

What got me interested in time is that I’ve been teaching myself stop motion animation for a project I’m developing. It’s an interesting Art. Single shots taken over a protracted period are strung together to create the perception of movement over a much shorter time scale. 15 shots which may take an hour to compose – are seen as 1 second of animation. 

It’s the minds ability to connect some things (like a sequence of images) while holding others at bay (such as the fact that clay cannot move or talk) that gives the resulting animation meaning.

That same process is all around us. Over the holidays a friend said when we were talking about the rise of new media said:

“Everyone enamored with the technology overestimates the speed at which it will be adopted while those affected by it underestimate the profound changes it will make to the industry.”

We see the world the way we believe it should be. That’s why profound insights come from people at the edges of, or new to, an industry. Their vision isn’t framed by the same core beliefs so their observations and insights can be broader – and occasionally more basic.

What’s more the beliefs that shape our understanding are constantly, but slowly, evolving. The more the belief is core the more resistant it is to change (Work as self definition etc.)

It’s mapping these slow changes in underlying collective belief that lead us to new opportunity.

Sometimes time off for reflection is a good thing. Only time will tell if this was.

Just in time for Christmas there is exciting news from Ian Graham – the Code Factory is a go.

If you’re not already familiar with the CodeFactory think shared facility offices meet BarCamp. It’s this mix of private office space, open work space and community events that set the CodeFatory apart.

Of course productivity is at the core of any shared office facility, and the CodeFactory provides this in spades. First the shared facility offices are all about concentrating on your business - without having to think about your office. Teams can start and grow without once having to worry about outfitting their offices or finding new facilities as they grow.

If that was all the CodeFactory did it would be useful – but it does the same thing for individuals and for groups providing an environment for permanent and occasional work and group meetings. It’s hard not to think that connections and knowledge will flow helping the entire community at the same time as it provides members  unique insights and opportunities.

It’s a new approach that recognizes that while business was always about relationships it increasingly will be from the quality of your network – because that connects you to people, ideas and opportunities outside your personal knowledge. The CodeFactory builds the network of every person involved benifiting the entire community.

If this sounds interesting to you contact Ian at ian . thecodefactory at gmail dot com. 

A – Advertising – is their any other business model?
B – Beta – a permanent state 
C – Conversions – moving users to the next phase in a web relationship
D - Digg – thousands of voices saying “hey that’s cool” 
E – Engaging – connecting personally – social media’s goal 
F – FaceBook Applications – hanging around with a popular kid hoping it rubs off on you
G –Search (Actually Google - no one else really matters)
H – Hits – don’t count – but page views, time on site, and links do
I – Invitations - as in building hype by making services exclusive (at least for a time)
J – Just Friends – friendship has stages but that’s unknown in social software
K – Karma – your deeds really last forever – especially on the web 
L – Links – the glue that holds the web, and people, together
M – Mobility – all the connections and a sense of place
N – Network – it’s the social kind that matters
O – Optimization – the process of fixing that’s most broke 
P – Page rank – See Search
Q – Queries – Investors or databases it’s the right answer that counts
R – Record Industry Association – proving suing users is a business model
S – Subscription – the quaint idea users would actually pay for a service
T – Technorati – tracking who cares about you and how important you are
U – User generated content – letting users enrich your site and their lives
V – VoIP, video and viral – two hot trends and how they got there 
W – WiFi – making coffee shops offices
X -  cross connections - the proof that there really are very few words wih X
Y – YouTube – proving 320x 240 pixels is the new television (ads and all)
Z – zzzzzzz where you should be if you got this far

On Monday I attended Joseph Thornley’s Ottawa Third Tuesday Social Media Meet-up. As usual it did not disappoint.

Richard Binhammer, Dell’s Senior Manager of Public Affairs took us through the process that took Dell from ‘Dell Hell’ to ’Dell Swell’ and everything in between.. Along the way he provided remarkable insight into the way that social media could change corporate America.

First the background way back in July of 2005 Jeff Jarvis took Dell to task for its customer service – and most importantly not paying attention to what their customers were saying (on blogs)  about their products. 

Now as I’ve commented elsewhere Jeff’s comment was a perfect storm for Dell. An influential and highly media savvy blogger takes the company to task, taps into an underlying sentiment that is accentuated by Google’s page rank algorithm at the time (which favoured blogs) and press coverage of the emerging blog medium which connected with the broader public.  It was impossible to miss – and damaging to Dell.

Fast forward to Mr. Binhammer’s presentation and you’d be forgiven for thinking the pendulum had swung the other way.

Dell now scans blogs for any mention of Dell and swoops in with support if the customer is dissatisfied. It’s got a team of top tier customer support and technical specialists to deal with nothing but blogger complaints. In a sense it’s a re-architected customer support strategy that recognizes the importance of influence on the buying habits of others.

What was most interesting to me is where Dell is taking this. Mr. Binhammer outlined an experimental concierge program to take customer service to a whole new level (for some customers) helping them expand their use of the product and answering all manner of questions related to use (how to up load pictures, choosing photo manipulation software etc). He also talked about Idea Storm – Dells Digg like service to uncover product desires and rank and validate them. He also hinted at custom applications they are developing to better understand how these direct media influence each other and overall buying patterns.

In the end one couldn’t help but come to the conclusion that while Dell misses the importance of social media initially they are at their heart innovators and that these initial forays are part of a larger process that will see a re-alignment of advertising, customer support and market research budgets – with a large proportion shifted to social media interaction and relationship building with thought leaders in targeted segments. 

Possibly this was Jeff’s intention all along – because if anyone was going to lead corporate America into social media it would be Dell.

It would be ok to leave the story there – but it would be wrong because you’re all thinking – well Dell can do it but my company never could because we don’t have those resources’.  Look no further than Alec Saunders excellent post on how he, and his small company, track and influence the issues in their world.

 It’s an inspiration – and an argument to look at how you allocate those budgets.

With apologies to Buggles – whose 1979 hit remembers the golden era of radio while celebrating the unrelenting force of technology to re-shape media.

It’s TV’s turn now.  Web & Social video are set to reshape both media. 

Locally stealth start-ups Overlay.tv and FaveQuest are playing in this area, as are local content producers like RaceDV. What’s happening locally is echoed elsewhere with video producers and aggregators/sharing sites opening daily it seems.  Each of them focused at different areas of the video sharing stack.

As everyone who’s looked at this area knows, viewer ship is exploding and with it ad revenue, and influnce.

In fact some commentators believe that the web will overtake TV as the major source of ad spend. For that to happen the web has to attract brand and product positioning advertising – not just transactional advertising.

Video presents some particular problems though – even for transactional ads. For ads to be effective they need to be embedded with the video – not on the same page as it. That’s why Viddler’s ad tagging technology is so promising – it puts the ads right in the video stream. Its potential impact on TV is nicely reviewed on Philadelphian Mel Taylor’s site (Philadelphia is home to Viddler and a city that is turning it’s self into an interactive media hub)

Viddler’s original  technology – in video commenting is incredibly powerful because it allows community to develop even as the video spreads from site to site through viral embedding. The ad technology is a logical extension of that.

What also isn’t clear to me is the business model – because I believe they are focusing at the wrong point in the stack. As I see it they believe these features will drive people to their site both to publish and consume video. I’m not so sure. I believe that web video will, like blogging before it, will move from individual user generated content to pro-am and organizations dominating niches.

These sites will be in direct competition for advertisers and viewers – not just with other web based services but with TV as well.

As Viddler demonstrates for ad delivery, and RaceDV does for niche user generated content, the advantage the web services have is that they innovate on numerous levels that TV doesn’t stand chance – because, as the Buggle’s sang “we can’t rewind we’ve gone too far”.

We are at a tipping point – technology has enabled us to shift our focus to organizational processes as the source of improvements for our corporate, regional and national competitive goals.

What’s happening is that online tools from social networks, to blogs, wikis and presence tools like Skype and IM are erasing geographic and temporal boundaries. At the same time these tools are enabling physical events like BarCamp to be easily and cheaply organized, making it possible for people to meet and discover shared interests and opportunities.

Inevitably what happens is new visions of what is possible takes hold. Look no further than the Leeds UK tech sector that is being redefined from the ground up. Here’s what Imran Ali had to say after their latest camp:

We had people from as far as Dundee and Brighton, but the greatest concentration came from Leeds, Manchester, Sheffield and the North East; right along the M62 corridor, home to 15m Brits, a quarter of our country. Could we make this Supercity the next Highway 101…the Pennine Parallel? … We think we can …

That’s a pretty bold claim – except that it’s entirely possible – because vision, connection, and self-interest all combine to provide a powerful incentive and platform that encourages experimentation and growth.

Here in Canada we could use these tools as a basis for international competition, because our geography won’t allow tight physical connection that Leeds can, with 15M people within 2 hour of each other. The inklings of that are already with us as Alec Saunders points out when he contrasts US and Canadian adoption of FaceBook.

As individuals we are quick to jump on these tools and as Alec’s post shows that adoption is leading to organizational adoption in places like CATA. We need accelerate this – because these tools will alter the way organizations are structured and how information flows within and between them.

Our opportunity is to discover the organizational processes that let people develop a sense of group identity at distance and make them part of our legal and cultural framework. Initially this enables our companies and innovators to find, and work, with the local people, partners and technologies to create competitive technologies. Over time it enables more of our companies to do this throughout the world. A powerful strategic tool for a multi-cultural country as technology is making the world very flat.

In the mean time the opportunity is for BarCamp’s to connect and create opportunities that give participating companies a competitive advantage - because they already understand the social base of competition.

One of the tenents of social media is that it fills an unmet need – the desire of people to connect in communities and explore common interests.

It’s no surprise then that the BarCamp community – an international movement of tech enthusiasts who connect locally discuss to technology and trends – would want to use collaborative platforms to connect multiple BarCamps together into one big event.

That’s what’s happening this weekend Ottawa and Leeds UK BarCamps are going to connect for a couple of hours of demo and discussion.

It was great fun working with Jim Courtney of Skype Journal and Dominic Hodgson of Leeds UK putting this together. Jim was instrumental in introducing us to Convenos a conferencing platform that lets us share desktops and applications.  Jim also connected us with HighSpeed Conferencing, a professional conference service that supports Skype calls - meaning even if the demos require a lot of processor cycles the audio quality will still be great. Thanks Jim!

It will be exciting to see  this in practice – and to see how people connect during and after the event.

If it’s successful I hope that we see more of it locally – given the strong Camp communities in Montreal, Ottawa and Toronto and the huge advantages of connecting these communities into a single entity – from a talent, funding and company partnership perspective.

In fact Mars seems to have this idea already, web broadcasting their multi-month entrepreneurship program Entrepreneurship 101 throughout the province (has anyone from Ottawa signed up?) and linking it to a FaceBook page for connecting far flung students. 

We could take this further though. Toronto is on their sixteenth DemoCamp, Montreal on their fifth. These are great events because they make it easy to identify companies doing interesting things – that may augment your own work.

Extend this through Canada’s central corridor, and link more events, and gradually we’ll develop into a single tech community of international scale.

Update: Things didn’t work as planned, but that hasn’t detered us. We learned wired connections help, we really liked the Leeds audio and the HighSpeed conferencing - which made both the speaker and audience clear.  After some testing locally and in Leeds, where we hope to try it again.

Back in the days of strut and bluster Ottawa called its self Silicon Valley North. That seems a little hollow now, as one more Ottawa tech company, its largest – Cognos - surrenders control of its destiny to IBM.

What this latest sale makes clear is just how little depth the Ottawa tech sector has. Unlike our perceived rivals we lack diversity in company size which provide the customers, partners and mentors that grow small companies into large ones. We also lack the head offices which train mangers into visionaries and leaders.

Scratch below the surface and something else become clear – the cities current OCRI focused economic development model isn’t working. 

Whether that is due to fuzzy vision at OCRI,  who’s mission statement is all things to all people, or equally fuzzy vision from the city which sole sources most of its economic development dollars to a “member-based … corporation” somehow believing that the memberships interest is synonymous  with civic interest. 

What ever the reason it’s time to try something else – because what we’ve been doing seem to be leading us to an economic destiny as a branch plant city – churning out code and research and shipping that, and value it creates, out of town.

The answer I believe is not more funding – but more diverse funding. What’s needed is more organizations vying with each other to develop more and better programs.

This democratization of economic development does several things – First it encourages groups to have clearly defined targets and measurable outcomes. But is it does more – buy spreading funding among a multitude of groups the city benefits by being able to test multiple approaches simultaneously – a tremendous competitive advantage during times of change such as is happening both in Ottawa and globally.

Unlike the current central planning approach diversity works best at discovering new models and approaches – in part because it organizes and leverages more relationships to build on broader strengths and connections within the community– and those very connections also spread to knowledge that helps everyone become slightly more competitive.

One needs to look no further than the tremendous resurgence in small software companies whose needs are largely met by volunteers – first through Venture Creation Group and latter through an evolving network of BarCamps and Meet-ups. These groups could be significantly more valuable as engines of economic development if they were able to implement more ambitious programs, using the same technology and enthusiasm that connects them to address systemic issue they face as companies and economic contributors to this city. 

My vote is for a new model.

Yesterday FaceBook announced Beacon – an ad widget for eCommerce sites that asks the purchaser if they want the purchase in their FaceBook feed. One click and you’ve promoted the site and product while linking it to the reputation of the purchaser.

What’s slick about this is it removes the last shred of doubt that content is needed to deliver advertising. As Google has shown with search and FaceBook hopes work for Beacon - Context works just fine.

Of course that’s obvious – except to media companies that systematically under invest in IT and technology innovation. It’s not as if they have to develop the services themselves – they can do what most of them do for content – which is typically buy and distribute – not make.

Even the internal processes are similar - match audience interests with content/service, and program distribution to keep audience within the network if possible – or provide hooks so they return frequently.

What’s missing is the deep understanding of IT infrastructure and evolution – and a belief that investing in it can produce revenue every bit as good as investing in, and protecting content.

Until that happens media companies will remain protective about content and worried about declining ad revenue as it shifts to companies that understand a new model is here.