Can you innovate like google?

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July 17, 2011

Quentin Hardy over at Forbes has a very good piece on Google- where he looks to the company for the new rules of innovation.
Here are some of the key points I took away from the piece.
1. It’s very tough to plan ahead
For a company with so much intelligence, on the surface it comes as a surprise to hear that they can’t plan ahead, but in reflection, it’s an honest and realistic assessment of the times.
“We don’t have a two year plan. We have a next week and a next quarter plan. Most of our successful products were built by small teams reacting quickly.”
Eric Schmidt- Google 
2. Keeping teams small helps
Google+ is only a 500 person team total, but it’s made up of dozens of 5-10 person units and one overall design head.
3. Don’t over-promise
The beta philosophy is very important because it’s important to continue to iterate at evolve the product. It’s not about a mass market ad campaign that over-promises, but instead “inviting” and introducing people to the experience and letting them play, but importantly learning and iterating from this.
4. Today’s innovation needs agile systems
You need a flow of data, a way of co-operating internally understand and interpret and a system to test ideas. So you basically need to built a lot of stuff and learn from your experiences.
5. Failure is an option
When you are developing so much, you’ve got to accept that much of it isn’t going to work and you are going to have failures. You have to accept this and move on.

A Teaching Moment on Numeracy

This is food for thought for our presentations:)

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JUSTIN WOLFERS
07/19/2011 | 12:02 pm

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(Photo: John Foxx)

It’s an embarrassing episode.  The opening sentence of James B. Stewart’s Tangled Webs: How False Statements Are Undermining America is:

“We know how many murders are committed each year — 1,318,398 in 2009.”

But this is false.  As Jeffrey Rosen notes in a savage New York Times review, there were 15,241 murders in 2009.  The cited number isn’t just wrong, it’s wrong by two orders of magnitude.  Where did the 1,318,398 come from?  It’s the number of violent crimes, which includes robbery, rape and assault.  And only a small proportion of all violent crimes — a little more than 1 in 100 — are murders.

And so this provides a useful teaching moment for thinking about numeracy. How can you avoid such errors?

1. Don’t use numbers when words will do. The rhetorical point that Stewart was trying to make is simply that there are a lot of murders.  Too many.  You don’t need numbers to say this.
2. Don’t use numbers that are hard to comprehend.  We have everyday experience in thinking in dozens.  But we’re hopeless when it comes to millions, billions, or at the other extreme, tiny fractions.  For instance, no one ever made the mistake of saying there are 12,000 eggs in a typical carton. But plenty of journalists confused the $700 billion TARP bailout, describing it as a $700 million plan.
3. Scale matters: Big (and small) numbers only make sense relative to something else.  Is 15,241 murders a lot for a country the size of the U.S.?  Find a scaling that gives this some meaning (and avoids the artificial precision of 5 significant figures).  Perhaps: Last year around 1 in 20,000 people were murdered.  But how can you get your reader to picture 20,000 people?  Easy, it’s roughly the number of people who attend a typical MLB game.To over-simplify: Look around an average NBA basketball stadium.  If the crowd is representative of the streets, someone in this crowd will be killed this year.
4. The laugh test: When you really think about your number, does it seem plausible, or is it laughably wrong?  My basketball stadium analogy conveys the true extent of the U.S. homicide problem.  If Stewart had followed this advice, he would have seen that his wrong number implied that 1 in 230 people is killed each year.  Straight away he would realize that he isn’t grieving the murder of one of his Facebook friends every year or two.

Top 10 Mobile App Trends and Opportunities

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By Alan S. Knitowski
E-Commerce Times
07/19/11 5:00 AM PT

Mobile applications are destined to become competitive weapons. Arm the consumer, arm the channel and arm the employee base -- or else. Engaging the anytime, anywhere audience will be a requirement for every business. Those providing their Internet, extranet and intranet audiences with value, utility and engagement will easily damage their competitors and more consistently differentiate their offerings.

It is extremely exciting to be in the middle of what is arguably the fastest growing segment of the largest growing market in the world right now -- the mobile application ecosystem. While this segment has many components and even more underlying noise and confusion, it is possible to see some patterns emerging.

Following are the top 10 trends and the top 10 opportunities that I see evolving over the coming quarters and years ahead.


Top 10 Trends


1. Metered Data Usage. Much like other countries, the United States will soon enter a brave new world. "All you can eat" data usage will soon be replaced with metered data usage, and user behavior will be materially impacted as a result. Expect to see immense battles between carriers, content owners, service providers and consumers with regard to who will pay for the right to consume data on an anytime, anywhere basis.


2. Android Fragmentation. While Google's (Nasdaq: GOOG) underlying mobile operating system is open source, free and significantly penetrating the global market for smartphones and tablets, many of the equipment vendors, carriers and service providers using it are adding their own special sauce to the underlying code base as a means of differentiation. These proprietary tweaks have already resulted in more than 15 screen sizes and resolutions and five memory specs -- and we have yet to scratch the surface of what's likely to come next.


3. App Store Proliferation. It appears that just about every major brand now wants to have its own app store. Whether for IPTVs, mobile devices, desktops, browsers, carrier networks or otherwise, there appears to be no end in sight for the expansion of consumer choice.


4. Enterprise Application Explosion.While the consumer app stores received all of the early attention, we are now seeing the early stages of the imminent explosion of the business process revolution on mobile. Enterprise applications will easily catch the size and scope of their consumer brethren and the aggregate consumer and enterprise market is forecast to grow to as much as US$100B by 2015.


5. The Race for a Viable No. 3. While Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL) and Google have taken the early lead of both mind share and market share, it now appears that we are going to see a battle between Samsung and Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) for who is potentially coming next.HP (NYSE: HPQ) and RIM may ultimately get webOS or QNX back in the mix, but it appears that a Missouri-like "show me" attitude may soon be adopted for all mobile platforms. Businesses and consumers appear to be taking a wait-and-see approach as the market unfolds before embracing new and evolving platforms with additional investment.


6. Great Expectations. Let's face it -- once you saw your first HD broadcast on TV, you simply had no desire to see a non-HD analog or digital TV signal. Similarly, once you experience great applications like "Angry Birds" or "MythBusters," which were designed up front to take full advantage of all the memory, resolution and processing power available, absolutely *nobody* will tolerate going backward again.


7. The Demise of Applications as Features (or Kids Rule the World). Anytime, anywhere experiences shall rule the Earth -- and you better make sure that mobile interfaces dictate your Web experiences rather than the other way around. Kids are now swiping and pinch zooming laptop screens, desktop screens and TVs -- and then asking their parents why the devices won't work. Everyone will expect all devices to behave just like their mobile devices.


8. The Epiphany of "You Get What You Pay For." The Age of Brand Embarrassment is now ending. In the early days of mobile development, two guys and a dog were viable partners for corporate America. Now, after the failures of checking the box on mobile have surfaced, brands are retrenching their mobile efforts and getting serious about their anytime, anywhere audiences. Unfortunately, the survival of their brands depend on it.


9. The Other IOS. We are all familiar with Apple's iOS operating system for iPhones and iPads. However, Cisco's (Nasdaq: CSCO) IOS, or Internet Operating System, is becoming paramount to both the network and the cloud. Knowing the edge, the client and the app is still critical -- but ignoring the core, the cloud and the infrastructure will prove fatal. And this IOS is the really hard stuff -- caching, streaming, switching, routing, failover, hyper-scalability, etc.


10. Mobile Internet Access Exceeding Wired Internet Access. The corollary of item No. 1 is the reality that something's got to give. Mobile Internet access now exceeds traditional Internet access, and this behavior will materially impact application usage characteristics and consumption behavior by consumers everywhere. However, because corporate America will follow the eyeballs as a top priority, the percentage allocation of the traditional marketing  and advertising spend will shift -- and shift dramatically.

Top 10 Opportunities

1. Application Discovery. An application launch does not equate to "done." It's bad enough to separate the noise of applications to find anything of use, but it's even worse when brands forget that their applications are products that require regular, ongoing care and support. The tools, services and techniques that get your applications found will separate the winners from the losers.


2. Near Field Communications (NFC). Mobile commerce and social/mobile/local enablement is clearly the direction of the future. Engagement, interaction and monetization will be core, and applications and experiences that leverage NFC most effectively will share in the spoils. Impulse actions shall be the new norm for all -- and it will equal money.


3. Consolidation. Anyone who witnessed the migration from circuit switching to packet switching just over a decade ago should realize that mobile will be extremely analogous to the underlying evolution of the Voice over IP (VoIP) market. While many will lose in the ultimate and inevitable shakeout that awaits, lots of large players will ultimately win. The wind is simply too strong at the back of the entire industry and ecosystem. Fallout and consolidation will breed the biggest and strongest survivors, and these survivors will catapult to become some of the largest companies in the world. Will you be a buyer or a seller, Mr. Darwin?


4. International Ad Networks (Or the Lack Thereof). While the domestic ad network market is beginning to blossom, it is far from mature; the underlying fill rates are challenging at best and absent at worse. In parallel, the quality of many ads is shameful and user expectations for banners, interstitials and video pre-rolls have risen with the quality of the underlying applications themselves. Much like Baidu is to Google and Mercadolibre is toeBay (Nasdaq: EBAY) outside the United States, there is a massive opportunity to create robust, rich and comprehensive ad networks in virtually every region worldwide.


5. Mobile Applications as Competitive Weapons. Arm the consumer, arm the channel and arm the employee base -- or else. Engaging the anytime, anywhere audience will be a requirement for every business. Those providing their Internet, extranet and intranet audiences with value, utility and engagement will easily damage their competitors and more consistently differentiate their offerings.


6. Business Intelligence/Analytics. Currently there is a distinct lack of a single integrated view into a mobile channel. As a result, those able to create a single login for content management, advertising, commerce, application usage data, app store download data and everything in between will solve the most complicated of problems. It's possible that you will continue to enjoy 20, 30 or even 40 separate systems or logins, but this one is a no-brainer for all parties that want to solve a real headache.


7. Global Real-Time Focus Groups. Forget knowing how many downloads you have. Who are the people actually using your applications, and how do they use them as part of their daily lives? Solutions providing visibility into the likes and dislikes of anytime, anywhere audiences in real-time will translate to dynamic promotion, marketing, advertising and sales modifications that will optimize yields, accelerate conversions and enhance monetization.


8. Non iTunes Affiliate Systems. Outside of the iTunes App Store and LinkShare, where are all the affiliate programs to ensure that consumers and businesses can find the applications and experiences they're looking for? It's time for the business side of app stores to collectively grow up and realize that the Internet masses are not going to feed the non-iTunes app stores for free (WANTED: Pay-2-Play). Most of these storefronts unfortunately remain horrifically challenging to run real application businesses with P&Ls, tax provisions and settlements, not to mention that the user experiences are generally lacking in comparison.


9. Agency and Strategic Consulting Displacement. It's not good enough to talk smartly about mobile when enterprises need partners that can talk authoritatively from real world experience. Product Managers and Brand Managers can take a page out of the Dell (Nasdaq: DELL) playbook and simply "go direct." Historically, corporate America leaned in one direction to get the strategic insight of McKinsey, Booz Allen, Deloitte and others -- or leaned in another direction to get the agency-of-record insight of Omnicom, WPP, Publicis and others. Those sitting in the middle as "mobile sherpas" can easily have flourishing careers in guiding the strategic and tactical direction of digital media and mobile distribution.


10. Reverse Outsourcing/Offshoring. In what can only be described as a reversal of fortunes, many emerging markets are now coming to the United States for delivery support on mobile application development. With a cheaper dollar and a mobile ecosystem 18-24 months ahead of what will ultimately emerge elsewhere, foreign firms are coming to America to find the skill sets needed to get ahead in their core home markets.
Virtually every one of these items could be the subject of its own article, but these highlights are meant to jump-start your thinking about where we're at now, as well as expectations of where we'll soon be going. Enjoy and good luck! 

Sucharita Mulpuru shares inside scoop on the latest SORO findings

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By FIONA SWERDLOW, HEAD OF RESEARCH, SHOP.ORG | Published: JULY 25, 2011

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We recently concluded our second State of Retailing Online 2011 survey, conducted with our partnerForrester Research. While we don’t usually give a sneak peek into the results (and you’ll have to wait until the Shop.org Annual Summit to see the complete aggregated results), we were happy to see that most retailers are seeing continued year-over-year online sales growth. Approximately three-quarters of sixty retailers surveyed in mid-2011 noted that they have experienced more than 10% year-over-year growth in their online channel revenue. This news is encouraging as retailers plunge into the back-to-school shopping season and then holiday shortly thereafter.

I asked Sucharita Mulpuru, Vice President and Principal Analyst (and all around online retail guru) at Forrester for some perspective on these specific results.

What are retailers telling you about online channel revenue growth?

Web growth is still significantly outpacing store growth, which means that the web channel continues to take share. This has been a consistent story since eCommerce even started, but is at a point now where more store executives seem to be taking notice.

What do you think is driving this growth?

The core value proposition hasn’t really changed that much in the last decade—people shop online for convenience, selection and price/value. It’s just really hard for physical stores to compete with that. But probably the biggest difference is the burgeoning of lots of small pure play web companies that actually stand a chance now because they are able to cost-effectively target niches like organic produce or replacement parts. In the future, we may see tablets actually being a driver of online revenue. Why? They’re fundamentally a different online experience which is much more interactive, engaging and discovery-oriented. Our data suggests that consumers end up spending more time online altogether when they have tablets but that they prefer to shop online more with their tablets when they have multiple devices as choices.

Any differences in growth between multichannel and online only retailers?

The web divisions of multichannel retailers are the growth engines for their companies for the most part. And every year, there are holdouts that come online—like Zara in the US. Probably the big difference now is in how different companies are approaching the mobile conundrum—multichannel retailers are trying to support the store experience but pure plays are trying to ensure that they win on price and are pushing their product feeds to the biggest mobile shopping comparison apps.

What are two things you’d recommend that a retailer do in the next 6 – 12 months to keep this growth momentum going?

Make sure you don’t run out of cash, and don’t ignore search and email—they’re still incredibly effective.

For more of Sucharita’s observations about our industry, check out her blog, including a very funny imaginary conversation she has with (not so imaginary?) venture capitalists.

The Coming Age of Curation

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By Denis Pombriant
CRM Buyer
Part of the ECT News Network
07/20/11 5:00 AM PT

Now that we have social media and analytics to turn it into information, the next logical step is curation -- organizing the information to do useful work. We're not that far along in social media, but curation is making a bid for importance, and there are some tools on the market that begin to make the process approachable.

We tend to think of social media  as a property of CRM, and it is, but the story hardly stops there.

Social media is changing the world beyond CRM too, and that's what makes it valuable. If being social were strictly about commerce, it might not be worth writing about.
This week's Economist has a cover story and special section on social media and its impact on the news business. The article's contention is that technology has ironically taken us back to a time before there was much technology in the news business at all -- the 18th century coffee house, more or less. I think there are some parallels with CRM too.

The point for good and bad is that the coffeehouse era represents a time when citizens were the journalists and objectivity was an odd term. Everyone had a point of view, and few were reticent about expressing theirs. According to the article, objectivity was a necessary expedient that developed in the 19th century as a way for papers to appeal to larger audiences. By stringently trying not to offend anyone (through objectivity), a paper could assure itself of the largest audience possible, and with that maximize revenues.

So, journalists did their best to provide balanced reporting and papers were rewarded with ad revenues and near monopolies in their markets. Now all that seems to be coming undone. The Internet has enabled anyone to be a citizen reporter, and not just in print but in audio and video as well. More importantly, much of the lucrative ad revenue that papers had depended on has largely decamped for the Web. In other words, the newspaper business model fell apart, which is typical of a disruptive innovation like the Internet.

Torrent of Data
None of this is new, but one of the greatest sources of consternation in the social world is the vast quantity of information (data, really) that social media generates. For news people, the challenges are sifting out the truth then aggregating information in ways that make sense. These are the same challenges faced by a modern front-office team intent on developing value from all the miscellaneous data streams.

We take very different approaches to finding truth, though. In the front office, we're more automated because in many cases the truth of any situation is a mathematical quantity, and the ideas that get the most votes, or their rational equivalents, win. That's not so true in the news biz. There truth is truth, regardless of what any group might wish it to be.
Whether it's news or customer-facing business, we might use the same or similar tools to sift the load. One area where there is commonality is in the need for editors in news and curators in social media circles. In either case, someone has to be ultimately responsible for making sense of the stream of information and presenting it. Ironically, editing is something that the Web and citizen journalists pushed to the side, but lately it has seen elevated importance. I think curation is on the same upswing.

We're not that far along in social media, but curation is making a bid for importance, and there are some tools on the market that begin to make the process approachable. Three tools mentioned in the article, Storify, Keepstream and Storyful, aim to help curators to bring together information from the variety of streams, video and photo sources and blogs available today.
Rather than laboriously and manually checking the various social sites, a reader can begin to expect someone will collate topical material and make it available. For instance, rather than rely on a customer to sort through hash tags and other markers on Twitter and other sites, a vendor-curator might take on the job of putting it all together into a coherent story using curation software.

Use Case

I just went to the Sage Summit user meeting, and curation technology could be very useful in such a situation. A logical use of Storify, Keepstream or Storyful might be to collect everything told through Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and other social sites, mix in some video of the keynotes and other things and present them through the company blog.

Curated information might not be as objective as a 20th-century newspaper, but it doesn't have to be. In this new coffeehouse era, transparency is the new objectivity, according to theEconomist article. It's natural that we all have biases, and anyone should know that a company has a bias about presenting itself in its most favorable light. That said, your curated stream about your user group meeting, conference or sales meeting has to be understood for what it is. It won't be the last word on the subject, but it will stand as your company's position on its truth.

This approach might have a big future in conventional marketing  if users and community members are allowed to contribute content. Currently, a customer can have a say through blogs and social media, but nothing save a search engine can bring it all together -- and then there's still the issue of volume.

Perhaps serendipitously, CMO.com ran an interesting -- and for our purposes, related -- story last week under the headline, "Dell CMO: Social Media No Longer 'The Next Shiny Object.'"
Karen Quintos, CMO of Dell, speaking in New York City presented the results of a study byForrester Research that it commissioned titled, "Listening and Engaging in the Digital Marketing Age." According to the article, Quintos said, "That sweet spot in social media ... is in the integration of social media into the aspects of product development, customer support, engagemen t-- the integration of customer targeting with really great content, linked with really great analytics."

None of this should surprise you, but it raises the question of what's next. Now that we have social media to surface data and analytics to turn it into information, the next logical step is curation -- organizing the information to do useful work. To me, it also marks an interface between eras of sorts. Social media had its heyday in a down economy when companies were desperate to develop customer intimacy. The recovery may be sputtering, but organized curation suggests to me that we're beginning to play offense again. 

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Denis Pombriant is the managing principal of the Beagle Research Group, a CRM market research firm and consultancy. Pombriant's research concentrates on evolving product ideas and emerging companies in the sales, marketing and call center disciplines. His research is freely distributed through a blog and website. He is the author of Hello, Ladies! Dispatches from the Social CRM Frontier and can be reached at denis.pombriant@beagleresearch.com.