Tag: Facebook

The tough gets going

Steelers‘ number 33 and 34. Back to basics. One yard at a time to Super Bowl.

On the field or off it, we have to retrench and defragment. USA Today cover story features “the faces of today’s unemployed”, showing a nuclear family, sitting in the back of  the family pick-up truck, with two beautiful young daughters, a wife and a Dad who couldn’t turn to face the camera.

What have we done to ourselves?

Instead, we managed to distract ourselves with I-pod and I-pad, scrapbook and Facebook. User-generated content but not corporate-generated income.

World leaders are heading to Davos on private jets, while world factory workers take a nap on the last train home (Chinese New Year).

Instead of  having another Sputnik moment, we can barely have a picnic moment in the park, whose benches often serve as home for the homeless.

Each demographic cluster has its own “medium” of expression. In this case, card-board signs that say “anything helps”.

The longer the red light, the more time for guilt to build up (they should be in Davos street corners this week holding those card-board signs. Better donor pool).

I have noticed that:

– Star Wars and Apocalypse Now re-release (Blu Ray), the former made it as memorabilia for future generations.

– Men grooming sector surges with the rise of unemployment (first in Japan and now in the West).

– Virtual funerals, instead of “the Big Chill” reunion (In traditional China, they even hired mourners to jazz it up).

– McDonald did well during the Recession, so they can afford to raise the price, while Arby’s is up for sale.

– The life cycle of tech companies (or their CEO’s) is shortened as compared to brick-and-mortars’

– Starbucks’ new logo is not the answer to boost sales. Another bubble is.

– Facebook photos, men in long shots, while women in close-ups

– Amazon keeps plugging away, under the radar, to position itself for virtualization and cloud computing

(while letting Google, Facebook and Apple steal the headlines).

– Yahoo, AOL and My Space already look like dinosaurs from Web 1.0

– China is leading in solar panel manufacturing. This plays to their strength (very similar to India’s momentum post-Y2K).

So, we are content with old institutions e.g. Larry King Show (whose guests feel like they are on America Got Talent), Regis Show and Tonight Show while Boomers seek familiar routine and route (35 miles an hour speed limit, same channel on TV, same store for breakfast. No wonder they can afford to raise the price. No place else to go!).

Some old tricks still work, as the case with the Steelers’ that got them to the Super Bowl. Makes one wonder if we should bring back Reagan-Thatcher’s strong-handedness (whose inflationary consequences are still felt today). This time, it is going to be without Mr Stockman.

Green Fields are gone

The camera panned jerkily (watch You Tube) as the Four Brothers sang away their classic hit, Green Fields.

The comments section was led by “I miss my papa, this was one of his favorites”.

The Greatest Generation, and now the Boomer Generation, are slowly but surely fading away. Gone with them are the many lessons and exhibition A-Z on leadership (WW’s), on innovation (Elvis), and on ethics (Woodward-Bernstein). Next Gen, however, gives us new platforms (digital) and new media (text and tweet). They are more racially tolerant (geek is geek), and digital media perhaps contribute to present declining crime rate and growing  gaming industry.

Mecca to them is CES now underway in Las Vegas. Everybody’s an Inspector Gadget. In “From Russia with Love“, Sean Connery was shown a high-tech brief case after receiving his mission to Istanbul. It was a concealed Swiss knife. To open the case, he needs to turn the two knobs half way (quite laughable even by those days’ standards).

Green Fields may sound like farm boys’ ballad, Yellow Submarine , an Industrial utopia, but Digital Generation has yet given us a defining theme (Detroit 2.0?). With User Generated Content (from 1 Billion and counting Facebook fans) and Earth growing population (7 Billion), Next Gen needs its theme song.

I understand the need to stand out, hence personal branding.

I understand the need to be relevant and collaborative .

And most of all, the need to innovate before Green Fields are gone. “I only know, there’s nothing here for me……”  Well, there have been floods in Chile, Haiti, and Australia.

Watch out world! There is nothing Buddhistic about living in harmony with living things. Or else, with biblical-size flooding, the Noah’s Ark in a Kentucky theme park might be real specie-saving act.

Facebook prosumerism

We have put in long hours, uploading, editing, “friending”, texting, in-mailing, posting, commenting, searching and even reading up on and seeing a movie about Facebook.

A recession distraction? or tip of the iceberg in what is finally Personal Computing and Networking? At least, computer finally “think” out of its “computing” box.

Now, it’s about lifestyle exchange (what he had for breakfast, what photo compelled her to share etc…).

I still remember the post cards, send between North and South Vietnam. It is today’s equivalence of  “Status” on Facebook. Except that those post cards traveled across the DMZ, much like North and South Korea today.

So, we have evolved, from tin cans to tablets, from post card to Facebook.

The Tofflers were right. Today’s Revolutionary Wealth takes on new forms, the principal one is prosumerism (whereby we take part in the making of the products and services we consume e.g. Stuff a bear, or submit your T-shirt design).

Facebook not only provides the platform for sharing, advertising, but also, a chance to jump-start this economy.

Let the game begin, again.

The rush, the drive. There will be blood.

Facebook’s own status: Alive and well. Still with the CEO in T-shirt and jeans.

Coding away or traveling to China.

I can’t wait to see what happens at the Oscars. Will they come on stage on roller blades? Tuxedo with T-shirt inside? Meanwhile, I have to log on to my Facebook.

It’s a daily ritual  borderline addiction. And I am glad Tina Tequila’s fans don’t follow her over to Facebook  from  MySpace. There was too much prosumerism in her eroticism. Mam, just the Face, Mam.

 

I want my Skype call!

By now, we all know about our right to make a phone call when being arrested.

That phone call usually is placed from a pay phone (soon to be a museum piece).

Skype has been down (and slowly back up to full speed), and 26 million users worldwide felt the pinch.

VoIP. Conversation chopped into tiny pieces to be reassembled at the other end (with some help from the listeners to “guess” and fill in the gaps).

The process is called quantization which creates a digital graph of an otherwise analog waves used in landline telephony.

Skype helped sell a bunch of headsets for sure.

And it has been disruptive to incumbent Penny-talk services (Skype could be called Zero-cent talk).

With Facebook founder visiting China, we can expect more E commerce apps. How about Facetalk, with caller’s profile and friending list.

People communicate in whatever way they deem convenient.

Skype and Twitter just happened to be King of the Hill at the moment.

Until the next innovation comes along. No wonder there are titles such as “First, break all the rules”. Who would have thought that which was intended for Data transmission (Internet protocol) can be used for voice and video. Even Google which already “got it” more than Microsoft, seemed to have missed the boat when it comes to Web 2.0. If only they paid attention to the human side of users, who are made up to be social animals (hence, the rise of home networking, which caught the attention of Cisco, now Linksys-Cisco).

Sometimes, the market trickles down (IBM mainframe to Texas Instrument, to Xerox then Atari/Apple computers). Other times, it’s the reverse (Social Media and Mobile apps for the work place, business casual attire etc..).

Whatever the case, I admire the distribution channel: they always make sure we have new stuffs to buy for Christmas e.g. Susan Boyle CD, Wall Street DVD (first, it cheated investors out of their money, then the fictional film version is taking Main Street pocket change), Ipad and Blu-Ray. It’s not a new century at all. It just happens to be the most crowded one. Translation: lots of gift wrapping: toys for tots, text for teens. Skype for all..

 

A Face w/ a name

A few years ago, TIME’s Person of the year got a face with a name. In fact, he manages to drag in a billion faces and names with him. The last time someone wearing pajamas in public yet got that much publicity was John Lennon (who invited the press into his honeymoon suite).

Mark was told to attend one of the VC meetings in pajamas (talking about sabotage).

Facebook personalises the impersonal Web. Between Facebook and YouTube, we see a bottom-up movement that gets endorsed by enterprises (latest McKinsey research shows enterprises who adopted social media came out ahead).

To make media “social” we first need to put a name to a face.

Then, slowly, we learn about that person through his/her social graph (evolving profile). It  is another message altogether i.e. with subtext like “I am cool”, “I am with it”, “I am in the know” albeit starting out as a medium.

Change agent. Thought and opinion leader. Votes of confidence. Hot topics.

When Hollywood got into the act, you know it’s in (The book, the movie and now TIME cover).

Almost a billion and counting might not mean a lot, but in sheer number, it is a force to be reckoned with.

It has not been without some controversies (privacy) as well promises (in-mail).

In the hierarchy of snappy content, Facebook delivers creme de la creme (tweeting is by far a data burst while yahoo chat and G-mail, yesterday’s tools).

Inside Facebook, you interact with peers, your Web Ivy League. Think of the Web as a huge city, and Facebook as Cheers, where everybody knows your name (and face).

In an age of globalization (7 billion) and ubiquitous technology (mobile), we have carved out for ourselves a virtual community, discussing and gossiping about topic du jour. That beats “bowling alone” and bingo hall. No wonder a few  days ago, one of the topics was getting hooked on Facebook.

By naming Facebook’s founder Person of the Year, TIME was posting its own eulogy, acknowledging this many-to-many medium is here to stay and grow in influence.

TIME Person of the Year = Chief Influencer

Filter builder

Building up our filtering capacity does not mean firming up our prejudice. But no matter what we do, we can only watch an average of 4 hours of TV and a few hours on the Web, mobile or stationary.

So we rely on thought leaders. Two-step information flow. Except this time, information flow through a social network i.e. multiple gate-keepers. We essentially recreate what early radio stations did when they strung together broadcast relay stations (to deliver a larger audience to advertisers) with their affiliates.

To be prejudice-free (reaching out only to friends and reading only their posts), I try to connect with a diverse pool, from left, center to right, black white and yellow, male female and gay and straight.

While we die alone, we don’t have to be isolated in our thought life.

In fact, we should recalibrate our filter, to let in more

data of different shapes and sizes. Ours is a post-Columbus Google era and each of us, our own press agent. Some even venture to suggest Social Media profile to replace credit history.

http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/26/why-your-social-media-profile-might-be-your-next-credit-score/

In 2010 the year in review, they posted a picture showing a naked Haitian woman who contracted cholera, lying and dying on the streets. No one stopped to cover her up (I hope the photographer would, after taking that picture that stirred our conscience).

And remember Nida, dying in front of our Twitter eyes during post Iranian election?

When I was in International Journalism class, we touched briefly on information flow, and how it had always been from North to South, from information-rich countries to information poor ones. Well, that was before YouTube and Twitter.

Now, anyone with a clip or tweet can share. New Dean of Columbia Journalism school, Steve Coll, will have to start a Twitter account to  stay relevant.

I have yet learned how to build a twitter filter. So what harm can it do me, reading unsolicit 140 characters. It would be an equivalence of hearing an elevator pitch from an aggressive salesman, whose odd of success is quite small (because he skips over the discovery phase). But some tweets stick and I learn something new every day. Technology is just a tool to deliver content.  Just don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Do you hear what I hear.

Act 2

At the gym, I couldn’t help notice two guys with Mountain-Dew T-shirt. We can still have “black swan” scenario in our life time e.g. the US rises again from the depth of deficit (muscle memory), or someday a Hispanic president will seek a M&A with Mexico (will not be the first time the US offer to buy more territory).

When we went through Y2K (getting plenty of water and batteries) we anticipated worst case scenario. People said this has been a Lost Decade. Now, that the worst has been behind us, let’s buy some champagne and balloons.

The challenges of the past decade have steeled our resilience but at the same time diminished our faith in institutions.

While tragedy comes in pairs (two recessions, twin towers, two disasters in Louisiana), luck will also come in pairs. Look at what Web 2.0 has given us: friends from Facebook, free videos from YouTube and millions of Who’s who on LinkedIn. The list goes on and on, as one tweet begets another in this 4-G, 3-D, 24/7 always-on world.

As we defy gravity by going to the “cloud”, our experience will grow much richer

All of our investment in hardware finally pay back with an abundance of software options albeit cases like Iridium, Concorde etc…

Our global village will show case Best of the Best. Stay tuned. The next decade will unleash apps from 20 years old’s who are now in Middle School (Yahoo just bought  Tumblr, and now eying Hulu). The sooner they are bored with texting the better. New toys for tots will spill over as Act 2 for the rest of us (Act 1 being the Ipod, Ipad, mobile apps like Twitter, Social Network such as Facebook). With an audience of 7 billion, any content will be devoured in an instant.

Build it and they will come. Level 3 must have looked deep into the crystal ball. Without the likes, we wouldn’t have Netflix as is. Clusters of innovation all converged in our time while adoption rate has never been quicker.

Instead of shopping for batteries, I will go for balloons and instead of water, champagne.

 

Time to read

There is a time to listen and a time to read.

That time is now. At lunch or in line.

The WSJ runs a a picture of an “early adopter” (old lady wrapped herself in a good book, digital that is).

For her, what a lifetime that was: out of the house to go to work (with sandwich bread), maybe as a telephone dispatcher, then came home to TV dinners with a Chevy in the driveway. Meanwhile, the Maytag man took care of her laundry and her husband the lawn.

Now she has retired, reading a book which is resided in the cloud, while keeping in touch with relatives on Facebook.

(I should mention the Pill).

Reading time has always been hard to come by. It’s at the top of the pyramid of chores (shopping, cooking, cleaning etc…). Now, reading is readily available as the headline news you see everywhere (when I was hooked on “the girl with a dragon tatoo”, I wished I had a comparable service so I could access my bookmark anywhere).

It’s interesting to see if readership increases as a result of better access.

Or it’s more profitable just to sell picks and pans for another Gold Rush.

One thing is for sure. Those so-called Independent Book Stores will join the fate of Independent Telephone companies of last century i.e. giving ways to an oligarchy of heavy weights. Too bad Google ebooks couldn’t be renamed with an “A”, as in Apple, Amazon and ATT.

But by its colorful logo, we already got the idea that the company is into creativity, colorful-ness and cloud-orientation. At least, it got an A as in Algorithm which suggests your next book, even before the title becomes available. It’s an age of “cognitive surplus”.

Everything is just the tip of the iceberg. 1 per cent visible, 99 percent invisible.

Time for reflection. A time to die, a time to live.

 

Contagious innovation

Last week, I installed a new Search engine (w/ a slash).

Today, there is a whole new browser altogether. Rockmelt.

It does improve Facebook quite a bit.

Steven Johnson calls this phenomenon (of one bright idea led to another), the adjacent possible.

It’s like my New Year resolution of hanging out with positive people to “catch” their enthusiasm.

Yes, we can.

It’s been more than a decade since Netscape. Now we got Rockmelt, built on Chrome.

Fast we browse.

One can go through life and not see at all.

Suddenly, bright light city (imagine driving from LA to Vegas at night through the desert).

Innovation city is full of creative people. Vibes.

Energy. Unbound.

Take a deep breath.

And be steady for what comes your way.

Life is full of surprises.

Yes, we can.

I like the interdisciplinary approach in Steve’s book  ( Where Good Ideas Come From).

No wonder former Netscape founder hangs out with Creative Artist Agency man.

His point: it took a long time to build relationships with creative people, who tend to clusterize.

While the speed of chip set increases every 18 months, it takes time for artists and writers to cross-pollinate.

Thus, science (and tech) needs to learn from the arts, and the art side certainly benefits from innovation by engineers.

Bloomberg series on Game Changers show us that even in down time, creative genius won’t sit still.

They keep innovating their way out of  chaos and crisis.

It was great to see people scan their bar codes stored in smart phones for airline check-in.

I am sure we won’t stop at just one “adjacent possible”.

May the best innovation win.

 

Against the tide of commoditization

In Selling Professional Services to the Fortune 500, Gary Luefschuetz warns against mix and match people and rates of various service tiers, which will compromise the rate structure. In short, swim against the tide. IBM got it. Cisco follows suit. And HP is moving in that direction.

The Economist takes an in-depth look at IT future. One dominant theme is ” smart” infra-structure e.g. buildings,water, electricity, appliances… even cows). First, we were glad to get our white bread sandwich neatly cut and refrigerated. Then we want it toasted. Finally, we want the toaster to beep like our microwave oven.

The key to all this is inter-connectedness. From blue-tooth to Blu-ray, RF to RFID, we are moving up the value chain.

Years ago I remember watching a demonstration of hologram at Penn State. Professor Roy Rustum was there among the observers. He later was quoted as saying “I felt the chill in my spine” when his crew at Material Sciences Lab discovered electricity conductivity in water. Now we got 3-D hologram to watch the re-release of Star Wars.

At the high-end of the OSI model is the application layer. This is where our imagination pays dividend.

The physical layer move their facilities off-shored to accommodate better rate structure.

Samsung is slated to be a strong contender in the tablet space against the I-pad with huge facility in North of Vietnam.

I also remember watching the young CNN news gathering crew (in black T-shirts) back in the early 80’s. CNN manages to stay above the fold in the cable news business. That business gets commoditized as well since we can now access hundreds of them.

For CNN, the secret sauce has been their first move advantage, and continuing risk-taking (Gulf war). David Brook of the NYT puts it simply “branding is an effort to decommoditize commodities”.

While companies are in a race to produce “smart” applications, schools and companies should retrain people. Smart people created smart appliances. And smart people take calculated risks. Leaders of India and Ireland saw the hand writing on the wall. They moved swiftly to retrofit their nations for the  21st century, not only in IT, but with new ways to solve existing problems e.g. micro lending, mobile banking, cheap automobiles etc…(see The Miracle).  I read the review of Chevy’s latest small car, the Cruz. It took GM, once the largest corporation under Alfred Sloan, 40 years to reduce its automobile size. May the best car win.

The temptation to compromise and mix the different tiers of services led to the downfall of many sectors, especially telecom.

(South Asian agents and resellers first question was normally, “what’s the rate”).

So I wasn’t surprised to read in Fortune magazine about Verizon’s soon-to-be-rolled out Android perfect phone. Can you hear me now.The old GTE has swam hard against the tide, to become the premier wireless company.

Choose your battle, pick your turf, and retrench at the highest service level.  Who wants to stand next to those robots who don’t get sweat or take smoking break.  And I am sure, after the next round of cost cutting, they still stay until robot 2.0 version displaces them.  At Twitter, those guys didn’t even use up the allotted 140 characters. They tweet simply “Be helpful”. I take that to mean swim against the tide, to offer relevant and helpful service to a market gluttered with commoditized services.