Tag: Google

two-step back

A laid-off Coca Cola delivery man gave a bank teller a note, demanding one dollar so he could go to jail and get healthcare.

A Florida retiree robbed a bank to pay his mortgage.

New York sex workers told investigative reporters they went on-call to pay back college tuition.

Something is not right with our time: those who are entitled don’t get entitlement, and those who aren’t do. Government grew in size, while big businesses shrunk or off-shorred. One could wait for ever in voice-mail jail hearing occasional “someone will be right with you” (yesterday’s prospect is today’s customer, hence, a lower priority).

What happened to Moore’s law (speed of processing double every 18 months)?

We can’t see the forest for the tree because we did not step back far enough.

Years of instant noodle, fast food drive-in, personalized search and pizza on delivery have lulled our sense and slow down our reaction.

Wind came from the Southwest, but we keep looking into our GPS (which might fail us).

First, the elephant (IBM) can’t walk. Then, it’s voted most innovative company, on the same Dean list with Apple, which had been rejected by investors just a decade ago.

Nokia and Motorola fell behind while RIM couldn’t keept its field advantage.  Google, who got tired of Search and Social, also got into phone, glasses and unmanned vehicles

We now need the Audacity of Austerity, not of Hope.

And please, don’t blame technology for London burning .

(It’s like blaming the Rodney King riot in LA on black and white video footage ).

This blog is my first from a children’s library. I am surrounded by school children playing games. Will they grow up learning how to connect the dots in this vast data-driven world?

Will they be able to step back to see the bubbles coming their ways?

Or many will fall through the cracks, with  few options such as bank robbery and escort service.

These are rhetorical questions which seek solutions to inflationary measures not inspirational messages. We all can see for ourselves, which is the tree, and which is a forest. We have stepped back at least two-steps in the last four years. Now it’s decision makers’ turn to see the forest for themselves.

Buddha was purported to do just that, with his first walk among the commoners. It’s called reality check. It’s called enlightenment.

creatures of information

“We are ‘creatures of information'”, “in the library of Babel, seeking information past and future”, says James Gleick in the Information.

We might look in hardback and paperback, print books and e-books, newspaper and news broadcast, but we are still after the information. It reminds me of a line by St Paul “though now we see through a glass darkly…”

Never enough, or soon enough, from tweets to tabloids. So we hacked into phones, into computers, even broke into hotel  and hospital, (Colson ‘s Watergate) and (Coulson’s phonegate).

Watching trial-by-jury and inquiry-by-committee.

We want to know. The tree of knowledge.

Yet we succumbed easily to “bubbles” (every five years or so).

We lock away older people behind “secure”  doors, so we can “own” our own mistakes.

Mrs Ford embodied the ERA generation, while the congress woman from Arizona, NRA‘s.

Interesting data points: Japan women soccer team won the World Cup this afternoon (Mrs Ford couldn’t have been prouder: slim, Asian, women and soccer, given her starting point in early days with breast cancer awareness).

We seek and send information at nano level while debt ceiling reaches Trillion-dollar level.

The result: Chinese consumers and travelers are here in NYC, to buy Made-in-China I-phones and hand-carry them home (suitcase entrepreneurs).

It’s been a long journey, being expelled from the Garden of Eden.

We asked for the Tree of knowledge. Now we know: knowledge without the ability to act is crippling and demoralising.

So we tuned out (having been over-exposed to repeated news from hot spots around the globe e.g. Syria, N Korea etc…)

like the character in “Being There”. We seek information past (history), and future (horoscope), we want to know from palm reading and Palm Pilot. What’s the latest tweet? (Explosion at Boston Marathon finish line?)

200 Million registered accounts constitute an Information-rich but compassion-fatigue society. In the beginning…was the Word. And that Logos must not be decoupled from Pathos.

Information-rich society should bear more responsibilities for the privilege it was endowed, or risk dumbing down, while the machine grows smarter. That “library of Babel” will reach the sky, way pass the cloud, sooner than we thought. Robust information flow, on steroid, racing across all channels: print, online, push and pull media, without BORDERS (the bookstore).

Fallible leadership

Former Google CEO, in a recent interview, admitted that he was too busy to see Social Network coming.

Former Microsoft CEO, at the turn of the century, admitted he too missed the significance of the Internet.

The Vatican, after years of floundering, decided to settle sexual abuse cases ( as of this edit, Pope Francis now personifies simplicity and humility).

In Japan, the advisor to the Prime Minister on nuclear issues resigned, saying “there is no reason for me to be here”.

Leadership fails too, as we do.  It’s just harder to publicly acknowledge it.

(yet in NY and S Carolina, politicians are trying to give their career a second life, with Clinton as role model).

There are forces at work, no matter who is in charge: innovator’s dilemma, creative destruction, perfect storm.  Mike Malone speaks about a new organizational model (core leadership team, and boundary-less around the edges) in ” The Future Arrived Yesterday”. Essentially, he speaks of being nimble, adaptive with a core group as curators of company experience and memories.

I would add to that: even within a core leadership team, I wouldn’t surround myself with a team of Yes men.

Look at Nixon. They had said Yes for a while, until they were asked to testify before Congress.

Then, we know what happened from there. Colson was conveniently born again while others went on to publish best sellers.

I’d rather agree to disagree, or went so far to appoint an office of “Devil’s advocate” within the organization.

Organization development often expounds the homogeneous unit principle (HUP) i.e. organizations grow best when members are ethnically alike. But when it comes to business, especially in current global climate, customers are found in every corner of the Earth 24/7. They are just a click away from your virtual doorstep. Who would you like to be your “receptionist” then? (SI model a few years back came from Russia, while Miss America a Muslim American).

Even Buddha himself , purported to be born in King’s Palace, walked among commoners to compare what’s on the ground vs what’s in the blueprint. Seeing so much “reality”, he turned inward, examined himself and found Enlightenment. Conversely, not everyone is on the path to Nirvana: dictators in the Middle East stay on and continue their personal enrichment.

Gaddafi not only surrounded himself with Yes men and his sons, he added an entourage of female bodyguards.

Talking about busy!

MCI taught me one lesson well: Reorganize even while the going is good.

I remembered management meetings on the East coast, right after I had just finished up a series of successful festival events on the West coast. No rest for the weary. And we discussed splitting up into three regions (instead of organizing along ethnic niche). Just to shake things up and cross-train our leadership team.

That same team now went on to do us proud: we were graced with meetings held all over the country, so all of us got exposed to the nuances of geography and zip code life styles. After all, we were a Mass Market organization: diversity, energy and can-do attitude.

I respect Eric Schmidt‘s forthrightness. Only it’s so ironic that I read his interview on LinkedIn Headlines, his competitor par excellence. Now only if LinkedIn Jeff Weiner would watch his rear view mirror. It’s not what you do that hurts you, it’s what you know you should do, but didn’t.

Tech buying spree

Even the President couldn’t help visiting Facebook campus in Palo Alto two weeks ago, and in Austin. California companies now talk of an Austin strategy, just like GE back in the 90’s with  India.

I finally realized the wisdom of Alex who made millions from his dollar-per-dot concept. Except this time, it will be the buttons (Like by Facebook, and +1 by Google). T for Twitter, I for LinkedIn and F for Facebook. No wonder MS needs the S button (for Skype). Companies stake out their turfs, online and on-screen to gain shares in this attention economy.

Speak succintly, and speak frequently. Retweet yourself after me.

“I, would like, to buy, a hamburger” (Pink Panthers).

Again.

I remember when companies would hire people to click on their websites so they can rise in Alexa’s ranking (if broadcasters could do the same to secure ratings).

Skype has been a tech marvel, and a business basket case. It had not made money, yet sold to E-bay, who lost money on the deal. And now, it earns a chunk of change passing on to Silver Lake.

Welcome to the 21st century. Members only. Multi-taskers only. Eat,pray and love.

Type, talk and think.

Tech topics cover M2M, which is the next big thing. Where does that leave us, human operators?

To preside on top of the food chain, we need to fight for our supremacy, not over each other, but over machines. Seek first SEO then all these things shall be added unto you. Establish your Web presence. And be relevant (unlike Bin Laden, who was rendered “irrelevant” by the 2011 Arab Spring).

It’s not a coincident that we are tackling, via crowdsourcing, the $300- house challenge for the bottom 2 billion.

Can I have Skype with that?

I just notice that Steve Balmer, during his announcement of MS’s biggest buy, did not even wear a suit.

MS, personified in Steve, is trying hard to stay relevant in this fast and forever young digital world. Time Warner was doing the same with AOL, who in turn, has just made a chess move with Huffington Post. Maybe Skype isn’t the end game for MS. Just its beginning to embrace Skype-type users (early adopters) in the hope that osmosis between MS and Skype will work miracle. If not, then “eat, pray and love”, as Time Warner and AOL once did.

Oil and Water

Oil price backed down as tsunami water gushed up to Japanese shores.

The two shall never mix.

Middle East rising. Pacific falling.

News of a thousand deaths abroad eclipsed news of petty thefts at home.

Statistically, street crime is down while cyber-crime up.

I admire Net Gen’s speed to mobilize relief efforts e.g. People Finder by Google,

Gaga’s wrist bands.

Celebrities should leverage their popularity, from being trend setters to thought leaders. Jet Li has been outspoken about one’s mission in life (has been sighted to give blood etc…), Angelina Jolie as UN Ambassador and Robert Redford pushed the Green button.

It turns out that while Oil and Water don’t mix, celebrities can take up a cause without damaging their brand. Charity actually can deepen their personal growth, give them more satisfaction as human being, and stretch their empathic fibers.

We are “born this way” i.e. to feel others’ burden.

I saw a photo of an old Japanese lady (the graying demographic) in front of her house-turn-rubble due to Earthquake, and I couldn’t continue with the evening news.

9/11 and Katrina added together.

Ocean view turned nightmares.

Beautiful water gushing in the wrong place.

CNN kept reporting that on that only road leading up North, they couldn’t spot military or emergency vehicles. Perhaps they cut down on first responders,

or they used choppers more than four-wheels.

Whatever the case, there is no play book when it comes to disaster-handling.

A nation can only go so far in emergency preparation.

Just like our personal act of locking our doors at night.

Mostly for assurance. When hit with 8.9 magnitude that, according to an eye-witness ” buildings stray back and forth like trees in the wind”- people froze.

Video footage from the 2004 tsunami showed people ran away from gushing water. Japan was on the verge of building world’s tallest cell tower.

I am not sure this catastrophe will cause them to reevaluate earlier stress estimates.

In my earlier blog, I referred to the warmth of human comfort and bonding through crisis.

I hope nature-causing suffering be relieved in part by human relief efforts.

I hope world rally to rescue won’t turn too soon to compassion fatigue.

Strike when the iron is hot. But don’t burn it out.

And you don’t have to wait until you have fame to start sharing a piece of yourself. In “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” we find the Native American character offers his bunkmate some chewing gum.

(Jack turned mischievous when discovering that that supposedly deaf and dumb man could actually talk).

I understood now that while the taste lasts much longer than the gum, it’s the first step that counts. And the comfort of strangers often times warms the other-wise hardened heart. Soft healing power of shared empathy in random disaster. Oil and Water don’t mix, but can co-exist. As close as the elements are allowed to.

Gone are these jobs!

I read today about 10 jobs that did not exist a decade ago. http://finance.yahoo.com/career-work/article/111973/jobs-that-didnt-exist-10-years-ago

It quickly came to mind jobs that are now gone, for good:

Telephone switchboard operators

Gas station attendants (who used to wipe our windshields and check the oil)

One-hour photo clerk (Remember Robin Williams?)

Milkman, mailman, newspaper boy (fewer jobs)

Typist – (transcription)

Watch repairman

Shoe-shine boys (still working in Hanoi two years ago when I was there)

Answering service operator

Borders bookstore owner

Shoe repairman or tailor

Toll collector (some States still have them)

Translator (gone soon)

Tutor (moving online)

English teacher (robot is taking over the classroom in S Korea)

Jeopardy player (Watson won)

The time, they are a changin!  The press made a note that he wasn’t on top of his performance in Las Vegas (I did not see it at the Grammys).

Again, everything is “blowing in the wind”, including jobs from a pre-digital bygone era. Photo copy clerks should learn Search Engine Optimizing skills to get jobs in the 21st century. But then, watch out for Google algorithm.

Found this in WSJ Opinion page, which went much more in depth about the disappearance of traditional jobs.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703439504576116340050218236.html?mod=ITP_opinion_0

Perpetual obsolescence

After Moore’s Law came Android’s Law (open-source software allows for faster deploy of smart phone apps – between six to nine months).

http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/111990/your-new-smartphone-is-already-a-dinosaur

Smart phone turns dumb phone pretty quick.

(conversely, studies showed a steady rise of IQ as digital natives  spent more time playing games).

I call this “smart and smarter” generation.

We are inundated with more information in one year than the entire life of a Medieval person. (During the Reformation, Luther even had the time to nail 95 theses on the Church’s door. If it were now, all he has to do is “wikileak” it).

A MIT scientist even proposed a not-so-smart computer so it can process information faster (just guesstimate and not calculate).

If and when that comes about, we will have a perpetual Beta of both soft and hardware much like when VoIP was first experimented (we had to fill in the auditory “gaps”, since multiplexing wasn’t yet perfected – remember Skype in its early days?).

Back to Android. Ship it (beta) and send updates later.

When software completely resided in the cloud, smart phones will turn “dumb” (virtualized). Hardware is now playing catch-up with software.

It’s not the hardware. It’s SaaS . Think it and we will build it. Say it and we will ship it (Amazon).

Amazon will stream video to your screen any time, anywhere. It took a few pages from business books it has shipped over the years; titles such as “Customer For Life”. Amazon and the likes are in a race on NASDAQ chart at NASCAR speed.

Content, conduit, contrarian

The creator of Million-Dollar Homepage cashed out, and did nothing for five years.

I have waited for the other shoe to drop. It just did. Do Nothing for 2 Minutes.

http://www.donothingfor2minutes.com/

The high school graduate does put his thinking cap on every so often, and knows how to create buzz.

He either sells ad dots (as opposed to ad banners), or do nothing.

Still he needs to reach us, this time, via Comcast or Time Warner (conduit).

The pipe owners just lay cable while others hold the Master Switch i.e. providing content as well. So they risked everything, first through a disastrous merger with AOL, and of late, with NBC (I like the forced PSA on Missing Child Report.)

So, the current $99 (or less) Triple Play promotion (envisioned a decade ago after the Telecommunications Act of 1996) locks in a healthy base.

On the Web front, we have barely scratched the surface. Google has another round of reorg (deemed Google 3.0) while continues on its long journey of “organizing the world’s information” and “not being evil”. It has recruited enough staff for Google Adsense in Vietnam.

Young entrepreneurs think  contrarian. CEO’s of tech companies addressed the troop wearing wireless mic, free to move about or on skateboard. The internet charged out of the gate at such a furious rate that it’s still a guessing game for many. Eventually, stake holders will influence the outcome (as well as market’s force). We will perhaps have an oligarchical web world.

For now, we suspend our disbelief.  Art is imitating life in the Social Network.

If I were Alex, my next web page would be a million faces (dead or alive) all in dots. Or Do Nothing for 3 minutes (add one minute of silence for victims of recent wars). But then, Maya Lin already beat me to the punch. Hers is called the Vietnam Memorial Wall.

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.

 

message in the bottle

Cast away. Sending an SOS. an SMS. I hope that someone will get my message.

We are born to connect (our belly button testifies to this) with nature and others.

Yet marketers are telling us that in Retirement Ville, cruise ship (with sauna sound that reminds us of incubator) and virtual existence can substitute for the real thing.

In Japan, a generation grows up with comic characters and robots ( Miku, a 3-D virtual rock star got

her star treatment not unlike The Beatles).

Children in the West and BRIC nations will follow suit with what Neil Postman coins “amusing ourselves to death”.

If you look at the statistics on how we spend our time, TV and the Web are at third spot after sleep and work.

We in mail, g-mail, dropbox, chat, text, store, tweet, Like, blog, comment, delete spam, mass e mail etc….

As of this edit, Salesforce is buying another cloud-based marketing company at the tune of 2+ Billion.

To be social. To connect. To be human. It will be the first time in our human history that one can connect more than the optimal 120 (The Tipping Point).  This revolutionary change is the most significant since the 60’s.

Music is to be shared (Woodstock), the Earth is to be shared (Whole Earth Catalog), ideas are to be shared (Google), courses are to be shared (Coursera) and ride is to be shared (San Francisco). It’s not by mistake that San Francisco and adjacent Silicon Valley come out ahead in thought leadership.

It’s been a while since campus coffee-house (our 70’s version of karaoke, except you have to bring your own guitar).

Now we got Facebook to share a clip (ironically from Youtube, which is own by rival Google), a photo or an article.

All of a sudden, it’s like play time, share time. Everyone is an artist i.e. to let the world know we once exist.

Adults, retirees, and yes, even x’s, “friending” each other. Amusing Ourselves to Death.

The Genie is finally out of the bottle.

I send an SOS to the world…….I hope that someone, I hope that someone, read my message in the bottle…….